Wintersmith

mustard, but however far wrong you couldn’t go with a ham roll, if that was all you were giving seventy or eighty hungry witches, you were going all the way past Wrong and were heading into Absolute Party Disaster. So barrows were arriving with loaves and roasts of beef, and jars of pickled cucumbers so big that they looked like drowned whales. Witches are very keen on pickles, as a rule, but the food they like best is free food. Yes, that’s the diet for your working witch: lots of food that someone else is paying for, and so much of it that there is enough to shove in your pockets for later.
    As it turned out, Miss Treason wasn’t paying for it either. No one would take any money. They wouldn’t leave, either, but hung about by the back door looking worried until they could have a word with Tiffany. The conversation, when she could spare the time from slicing and spreading, would go something like this:
    “She’s not really dying, is she?”
    “Yes. At around half past six tomorrow morning.”
    “But she’s very old!”
    “Yes. I think that’s sort of why, you see.”
    “But what will we do without her?”
    “I don’t know. What did you do before she was here?”
    “She was always here! She knew everything! Who’s going to tell us what to do now?”
    And then they’d say: “It’s not going to be you, is it?” and give her a Look that said: We hope not. You don’t even wear a black dress.
    After a while Tiffany got fed up with this and in a very sharp voice asked the next person, a woman delivering six cooked chickens: “What about all those stories about her slitting open bad people’s bellies with her thumbnail, then?”
    “Er, well, yes, but it was never anyone we knew,” said the woman virtuously.
    “And the demon in the cellar?”
    “So they say. O’ course, I never saw it pers’nally.” The woman gave Tiffany a worried look. “It is down there, isn’t it?”
    You want it to be, Tiffany thought. You actually want there to be a monster in the cellar!
    But as far as Tiffany knew, what was in the cellar this morning was a lot of snoring Feegles who had been boozin’. If you put a lot of Feegles in a desert, within twenty minutes they’d find a bottle of something dreadful to drink.
    “Believe me, madam, you wouldn’t want to wake what’s down there now,” she said, giving the woman a worried smile.
    The woman seemed satisfied with that but suddenly looked concerned again.
    “And the spiders? She really eats spiders?” she asked.
    “Well, there’s lots of webs,” said Tiffany, “but you never see a spider!”
    “Ah, right,” said the woman, as if she’d been let into a big secret. “Say what you like, Miss Treason’s been a real witch. With skulls! I expect you have to polish ’em, eh? Ha! She could spit your eye out as soon as look at you!”
    “She never did, though,” said a man delivering a huge tray of sausages. “Not to anyone local, anyway.”
    “That’s true,” the woman admitted reluctantly. “She was very gracious in that respect.”
    “Ah, she was a proper old-time witch, Miss Treason,” said the sausage man. “Many a man has widdled in his boots when she’s turned the sharp side of her tongue on him. You know that weaving she’s always doing? She weaves your name into the loom, that’s what she does! And if you tell her a lie, your thread breaks and you drop down dead on the spot!”
    “Yes, that happens all the time,” said Tiffany, thinking: This is amazing! Boffo has a life of its own!
    “Well, we don’t get witches like her these days,” said a man delivering four dozen eggs. “These days it’s all airy-fairy and dancin’ around without your drawers on.”
    They all looked inquiringly at Tiffany.
    “It’s wintertime,” she said coldly. “And I’ve got to get on with my work. The witches will be here soon. Thank you very much.”
    While they were putting the eggs on to boil, she told Petulia about it. It didn’t come as a surprise.
    “Um, they’re proud of her,” Petulia said. “I’ve heard them boasting about her up at the pig market in Lancre.”
    “They boast?”
    “Oh, yes. Like: You think old Mistress Weatherwax is tough? Ours has got skulls! And a demon! She’s gonna live forever ’cuz she’s got a clockwork heart she winds up every day! And she eats spiders, sure of it! How d’you like them poisoned apples, huh?”
    Boffo works all by itself, Tiffany thought, once you get it started. Our Baron is bigger