Witches Abroad

“like duck—”
    “I heard,” said Granny. She flailed at a fat bluebottle.
    “Anyway, you’d think there wouldn’t be flies in a royal bedroom,” muttered Nanny.
    “You’d think there’d be a bed, in fact,” said Granny.
    Which there wasn’t. What there was instead, and what was preying somewhat on their minds, was a big round wooden cover on the floor. It was about six feet across. There were convenient handles.
    They walked around it. Flies rose up and hummed away.
    “I’m thinking of a story,” said Granny.
    “Me too,” said Nanny Ogg, her tone slightly shriller than usual. “There was this girl who married this man and he said you can go anywhere you like in the palace but you mustn’t open that door and she did and she found he’d murdered all his other…”
    Her voice trailed off.
    Granny was staring hard at the cover, and scratching her chin.
    “Put it like this,” said Nanny, trying to be reasonable against all odds. “What could we possibly find under there that’s worse than we could imagine?”
    They each took a handle.

    Five minutes later Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg stepped outside the Duc’s bedroom. Granny closed the door very quietly.
    They stared at one another.
    “Cor,” said Nanny, her face still pale.
    “Yes,” said Granny. “Stories!”
    “I’d heard about…you know, people like him, but I never believed it. Yuk. I wonder what he looks like.”
    “You can’t tell just by lookin’,” said Granny.
    “It explains the flies, at any rate,” said Nanny Ogg.
    She raised a hand to her mouth in horror.
    “And our Magrat’s down there with him!” she said. “And you know what’s going to happen. They’re going to meet one another and—”
    “But there’s hundreds of other people,” said Granny. “It’s hardly what you’d call intimate .”
    “Yes…but even the thought of him, you know, even touching her…I mean, it’d be like holding a—”
    “Does Ella count as a princess, d’you think?” said Granny.
    “What? Oh. Yeah. Probably. For foreign parts. Why?”
    “Then that means there’s more than one story here. Lily’s letting several happen all at the same time,” said Granny. “Think about it. It’s not touching that’s the trick. It’s kissing .”
    “We’ve got to get down there!” said Nanny. “We’ve got to stop it! I mean, you know me, I’m no prude, but…yuk…”
    “I say! Old woman!”
    They turned. A small fat woman in a red dress and a towering white wig was peering haughtily at them from behind a fox mask.
    “Yes?” snapped Granny.
    “Yes, my lady ,” said the fat woman. “Where are your manners? I demand that you direct me to the powder room this instant! And what do you think you’re doing? ”
    This was to Nanny Ogg, who was walking around her and staring critically at her dress.
    “You’re a 20, maybe a 22?” said Nanny.
    “What? What is this impertinence? ”
    Nanny Ogg rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Well, I dunno,” she said, “red in a dress has never been me . You haven’t got anything in blue, have you?”
    The choleric woman turned to strike Nanny with her fan, but a skinny hand tapped her on the shoulder.
    She looked up into Granny Weatherwax’s face.
    As she passed out dreamily she was aware of a voice, a long way off, saying, “Well, that’s me fitted. But she’s never a size 20. And if I had a face like that I’d never wear red…”

    Lady Volentia D’Arrangement relaxed in the inner sanctum of the ladies’ rest room. She removed her mask and fished an errant beauty spot from the depths of her décolletage. Then she reached around and down to try and adjust her bustle, an exercise guaranteed to produce the most ridiculous female gymnastics on every world except those where the panty girdle had been invented.
    Apart from being as well-adapted a parasite as the oak bracket fungus Lady Volentia D’Arrangement was, by and large, a blameless sort of person. She always attended events for the better class of charity, and made a point of knowing the first names of nearly all her servants—the cleaner ones, at least. And she was, on the whole, kind to animals and even to children if they had been washed and didn’t make too much noise. All in all, she didn’t deserve what was about to happen to her, which was the fate Mother Nature had in store for any woman in this room on this night who happened to have approximately the same measurements as Granny Weatherwax.
    She was aware