Witches Abroad

treat me as if I was a…a wet hen. I don’t see why I should have to put up with her sulking and snapping at me the whole time. What’s so special about her, anyway? She hardly ever does anything really magical, whatever Nanny says. She really does just shout a lot and bully people. And as for Nanny, she means well but she has no sense of responsibility. I thought I’d die when she started singing the Hedgehog Song in the inn, I just hope to goodness the people didn’t know what the words meant.
    I’m the fairy godmother around here. We’re not at home now. There’s got to be different ways of doing things, in foreign parts.

    She got up at first light. The other two were asleep, although “asleep” was too moderate a word for the sounds Granny Weatherwax was making.
    Magrat put on her best dress, the green silk one that was unfortunately now a mass of creases. She took out a bundle of tissue paper and slowly unwrapped her occult jewelry; Magrat bought occult jewelry as a sort of distraction from being Magrat. She had three large boxes of the stuff and was still exactly the same person.
    She did her best to remove the straw from her hair. Then she unpacked the magic wand.
    She wished she had a mirror to inspect herself in.
    “I’ve got the wand,” she said quietly. “I don’t see why I need any help. Desiderata said I was to tell them not to help.”
    It crossed her mind to reflect that Desiderata had been very lax on that point. The one thing you could be sure of, if you told Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg not to help, was that they would rush to help if only out of spite. It was quite surprising to Magrat that anyone as clever as Desiderata should have slipped up on that minor point. She’d probably got a psycholology too—whatever that was.
    Moving quietly, so as not to wake the other two, she opened the door and stepped lightly into the damp air. Wand at the ready, she was prepared to give the world whatever it wished for.
    It would help if this included pumpkins.
    Nanny Ogg opened one eye as the door creaked shut.
    She sat up and yawned and scratched herself. She fumbled in her hat and retrieved her pipe. She nudged Granny Weatherwax in the ribs.
    “I ain’t asleep,” said Granny.
    “Magrat’s gone off somewhere.”
    “Hah!”
    “And I’m going out to get something to eat,” muttered Nanny. There was no talking to Esme when she was in that kind of mood.
    As she stepped out Greebo dropped lightly off a beam and landed on her shoulder.
    Nanny Ogg, one of life’s great optimists, stepped out to take whatever the future had to offer.
    Preferably with rum and bananas in it.

    The house wasn’t hard to find. Desiderata had made very exact notes.
    Magrat’s gaze took in the high white walls and ornate metal balconies. She tried to straighten a few wrinkles in her dress, tugged some recalcitrant bits of hay from her hair, and then marched up the driveway and knocked on the door.
    The knocker broke off in her hand.
    Looking around anxiously lest someone should have noted this vandalism, Magrat tried to wedge it back. It fell off, knocking a lump out of the marble step.
    Finally she knocked gently with her knuckle. A fine cloud of paint dust lifted off the door and floated down to the ground. That was the only effect.
    Magrat considered her next move. She was pretty sure that fairy godmothers weren’t supposed to leave a little card pushed under the door saying something like “Called today but you were out, please contact the depot for a further appointment.” Anyway, this wasn’t the kind of house that got left empty; there would be a score of servants infesting a place like this.
    She crunched over the gravel and peered around the side of the house. Maybe the back door…witches were generally more at home around back doors…

 
    Nanny Ogg always was. She was heading for the one belonging to the palace. It was easy enough to get into; this wasn’t a castle like the ones back home, which expressed very clear ideas about inside and outside and were built to keep the two separate. This was, well, a fairy-tale castle, all icing-sugar battlements and tiny, towering turrets. Anyway, no one took much notice of little old ladies. Little old ladies were by definition harmless, although in a string of villages across several thousand miles of continent this definition was currently being updated.
    Castles, in Nanny Ogg’s experience, were like swans. They looked as if they were drifting