Witches Abroad

thinking he’d worked out her play, he’d called her out and run a decent flush right into the maw of a five-card Onion that the old bag must have been patiently constructing for ages. And then—his knuckles went white—and then the dreadful, terrible hag had said, “Have I won? With all these little cards? Gorsh—aren’t I the lucky one!”
    And then she started humming when she looked at her cards. Normally, the three of them would have welcomed this sort of thing. The teeth tappers, the eyebrow raisers, the ear rubbers—they were as good as money in the sock under the mattress, to a man who knew how to read such things. But the appalling old crone was as transparent as a lump of coal. And the humming was…insistent. You found yourself trying to follow the tune. It made your teeth tingle. Next thing you were glumly watching while she laid down a measly Broken Flush in front of your even more measly two-card Onion and said, “What, is it me again?”
    Mister Frank was desperately trying to remember how to play cards without his sleeve device, a handy mirror and a marked deck. In the teeth of a hum like a fingernail down a blackboard.
    It wasn’t as if the ghastly old creature even knew how to play properly.
    After an hour she was four dollars ahead and when she said, “I am a lucky girl!” Mister Frank bit through his tongue.
    And then he got a natural Great Onion. There was no realistic way to beat a Great Onion. It was something that happened to you once or twice in a lifetime.
    She folded! The old bitch folded! She abandoned one blasted dollar and she folded!

    Magrat peered through the window again.
    “What’s happening?” said Nanny.
    “They all look very angry.”
    Nanny took off her hat and removed her pipe. She lit it and tossed the match overboard. “Ah. She’ll be humming, you mark my words. She’s got a very annoying hum, has Esme.” Nanny looked satisfied. “Has she started cleaning out her ear yet?”
    “Don’t think so.”
    “No one cleans out her ear like Esme.”

    She was cleaning out her ear!
    It was done in a very ladylike way, and the daft old baggage probably wasn’t even aware she was doing it. She just kept inserting her little finger in her ear and swiveling it around. It made a noise like a small pool cue being chalked.
    It was displacement activity, that’s what it was. They all cracked in the end…
    She folded again! And it had taken him bloody five bloody minutes to put together a bloody Onion!

    “I remember,” said Nanny Ogg, “when she come over our house for the party when King Verence got crowned and we played Chase My Neighbor Up the Passage with the kiddies for ha’pennies. She accused Jason’s youngest of cheating and sulked for a week afterward.”
    “Was he cheating?”
    “I expect so,” said Nanny proudly. “The trouble with Esme is that she don’t know how to lose. She’s never had much practice.”
    “Lobsang Dibbler says sometimes you have to lose in order to win,” said Magrat.
    “Sounds daft to me,” said Nanny. “That’s Yen Buddhism, is it?”
    “No. They’re the ones who say you have to have lots of money to win,” said Magrat. * “In the Path of the Scorpion, the way to win is to lose every fight except the last one. You use the enemy’s strength against himself.”
    “What, you get him to hit himself, sort of thing?” said Nanny. “Sounds daft.”
    Magrat glowered.
    “What do you know about it?” she said, with uncharacteristic sharpness.
    “What?”
    “Well, I’m fed up!” said Magrat. “At least I’m making an effort to learn things! I don’t go around just bullying people and acting bad-tempered all the time!”
    Nanny took her pipe out of her mouth.
    “I’m not bad-tempered,” she said mildly.
    “I wasn’t talking about you!”
    “Well, Esme’s always been bad-tempered,” said Nanny. “It comes natural to her.”
    “And she hardly ever does real magic. What good is being a witch if you don’t do magic? Why doesn’t she use it to help people?”
    Nanny peered at her through the pipe smoke.
    “’Cos she knows how good she’d be at it, I suppose,” she said. “Anyway, I’ve known her a long time. Known the whole family. All the Weatherwaxes is good at magic, even the men. They’ve got this magical streak in ’em. Kind of a curse. Anyway…she thinks you can’t help people with magic. Not properly . It’s true, too.”
    “Then what good—?”
    Nanny prodded at the pipe with a