Equal Rites

on the snow. She didn’t care where she was going, but quiet terror gave her a burning determination to get there as fast as she could.

    Inside the cottage the crow landed heavily in the fireplace, surrounded by soot and muttering irritably to itself. It hopped into the shadows, and a moment later there was the bang of the latch of the stairway door and the sound of fluttering on the stairs.

    Esk reached up as high as she could and felt around the tree for the marker. This time she was lucky, but the pattern of dots and grooves told her she was over a mile from the village and had been running in the wrong direction.
    There was a cheese-rind moon and a sprinkling of stars, small and bright and pitiless. The forest around her was a pattern of black shadows and pale snow and, she was aware, not all the shadows were standing still.
    Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, because on some nights their howls echoed down from the high Tops, but they seldom came near the village—the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.
    But the weather was hard, and this pack was hungry enough to forget all about natural selection.
    Esk remembered what all the children were told. Climb a tree. Light a fire. When all else fails, find a stick and at least hurt them. Never try to outrun them.
    The tree behind her was a beech, smooth and unclimbable.
    Esk watched a long shadow detach itself from a pool of darkness in front of her, and move a little closer. She knelt down, tired, frightened, unable to think, and scrabbled under the burning-cold snow for a stick.

    Granny Weatherwax opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, which was cracked and bulged like a tent.
    She concentrated on remembering that she had arms, not wings, and didn’t need to hop. It was always wise to lie down for a bit after a borrow, to let one’s mind get used to one’s body, but she knew she didn’t have the time.
    “Drat the child,” she muttered, and tried to fly on to the bedrail. The crow, who had been through all this dozens of times before and who considered, insofar as birds can consider anything, which is a very short distance indeed, that a steady diet of bacon rinds and choice kitchen scraps and a warm roost for the night was well worth the occasional inconvenience of letting Granny share its head, watched her with mild interest.
    Granny found her boots and thumped down the stairs, sternly resisting the urge to glide. The door was wide open and there was already a drift of fine snow on the floor.
    “Oh, bugger,” she said. She wondered if it was worth trying to find Esk’s mind, but human minds were never so sharp and clear as animal minds and anyway the overmind of the forest itself made impromptu searching as hard as listening for a waterfall in a thunderstorm. But even without looking she could feel the packmind of the wolves, a sharp, rank feeling that filled the mouth with the taste of blood.
    She could just make out the small footprints in the crust, half filled with fresh snow. Cursing and muttering, Granny Weatherwax pulled her shawl around her and set out.

    The white cat awoke from its private ledge in the forge when it heard the sounds coming from the darkest corner. Smith had carefully shut the big doors behind him when he went off with the nearly hysterical boys, and the cat watched with interest as a thin shadow prodded at the lock and tested the hinges.
    The doors were oak, hardened by heat and time, but that didn’t prevent them being blown right across the street.
    Smith heard a sound in the sky as he hurried along the track. So did Granny. It was a determined whirring sound, like the flight of geese, and the snowclouds boiled and twisted as it passed.
    The wolves heard it, too, as it spun low over the treetops and hurtled down into the clearing. But they heard it far too late.
    Granny Weatherwax didn’t have to follow the footprints now. She aimed herself for the distant flashes of weird light, the strange swishing and thumping, and the howls of pain and terror. A couple of wolves bolted past her with their ears flattened in grim determination to have it away on their paws no matter what stood in their way.
    There was the crackle of breaking branches. Something big and heavy landed in a fir tree by Granny and crashed, whimpering, into the snow. Another wolf passed her in a flat trajectory at about head height and bounced off a