Wyrd Sisters

makeup table and slammed on a wart like an orange. The offending straw wig was rammed on its owner’s head, livestock and all, and the cauldron was very briefly inspected and pronounced full of just the right sort of yuk, nothing wrong with yuk like that.
    On stage a guard dropped his shield, bent down to pick it up, and dropped his spear. Hwel rolled his eyes and offered up a silent prayer to any gods that might be watching.
    It was already going wrong. The earlier rehearsals had their little teething troubles, it was true, but Hwel had known one or two monumental horrors in his time and this one was shaping up to be the worst. The company was more jittery than a potful of lobsters. Out of the corner of his ear he heard the on-stage dialogue falter, and scurried to the wings.
    “—avenge the terror of thy father’s death—” he hissed, and hurried back to the trembling witches. He groaned. Divers alarums. This lot were supposed to be terrorizing a kingdom. He had about a minute before the cue.
    “Right!” he said, pulling himself together. “Now, what are you? You’re evil hags, right?”
    “Yes, Hwel,” they said meekly.
    “Tell me what you are,” he commanded.
    “We’re evil hags, Hwel.”
    “Louder!”
    “We’ve Evil Hags!”
    Hwel stalked the length of the quaking line, then turned abruptly on his heel, “And what are you going to do?”
    The 2nd Witche scratched his crawling wig.
    “We’re going to curse people?” he ventured. “It says in the script—”
    “I-can’t-HEAR-you!”
    “We’re going to curse people!” they chorused, springing to attention and staring straight ahead to avoid his gaze.
    Hwel stumped back along the line.
    “What are you?”
    “We’re hags, Hwel!”
    “What kind of hags?”
    “We’re black and midnight hags!” they yelled, getting into the spirit.
    “What kind of black and midnight hags?”
    “ Evil black and midnight hags!”
    “Are you scheming?”
    “Yeah!”
    “Are you secret?”
    “ Yeah !”
    Hwel drew himself to his full height, such as it was.
    “What-are-you?” he screamed.
    “We’re scheming evil secret black and midnight hags!”
    “Right!” He pointed a vibrating finger toward the stage and lowered his voice and, at that moment, a dramatic inspiration dived through the atmosphere and slammed into his creative node, causing him to say, “Now I want you to get out there and give ’em hell. Not for me. Not for the goddam captain.” He shifted the butt of an imaginary cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, and pushed back a nonexistent tin helmet, and rasped, “But for Corporal Walkowski and his little dawg.”
    They stared at him in disbelief.
    On cue, someone shook a sheet of tin and broke the spell.
    Hwel rolled his eyes. He’d grown up in the mountains, where thunderstorms stalked from peak to peak on legs of lightning. He remembered thunderstorms that left mountains a different shape and flattened whole forests. Somehow, a sheet of tin wasn’t the same, no matter how enthusiastically it was shaken.
    Just once, he thought, just once. Let me get it right just once.
    He opened his eyes and glared at the witches.
    “What are you hanging around here for?” he yelled. “Get out there and curse them!”
    He watched them scamper onto the stage, and then Tomjon tapped him on the head.
    “Hwel, there’s no crown.”
    “Hmm?” said the dwarf, his mind wrestling with ways of building thunder-and-lightning machines.
    “There’s no crown, Hwel. I’ve got to wear a crown.”
    “Of course there’s a crown. The big one with the red glass, very impressive, we used it in that place with the big square—”
    “I think we left it there.”
    There was another tinny roll of thunder but, even so, the part of Hwel that was living the play heard a faltering voice on stage. He darted to the wings.
    “—I have smother’d many a babe—” he hissed, and sprinted back.
    “Well, just find another one, then,” he said vaguely. “In the props box. You’re the Evil King, you’ve got to have a crown. Get on with it, lad, you’re on in a few minutes. Improvise.”
    Tomjon wandered back to the box. He’d grown up among crowns, big golden crowns made of wood and plaster, studded with finest glass. He’d cut his teeth on the hat-brims of Authority. But most of them had been left in the Dysk now. He pulled out collapsible daggers and skulls and vases, the strata of the years and, right at the bottom, his fingers closed on