Carpe Jugulum

Mightily Oats stepped out on to the battlements. The sun was well up and a breeze was blowing in over the forests of Uberwald. A few magpies chattered in the trees nearest the castle.

Granny was leaning with her elbows on the wall, staring out over the thinning mists.

'It looks like it's going to be a fine day,' said Oats happily. And he did feel happy, to his amazement. There was sharpness to the air, and the sense of the future brimming with possibilities. He remembered the moment when he'd swung the axe, when both of him had swung it together. Perhaps there was a way...

'There's a storm coming down from the Hub later,' said Granny.

'Well... at least that'll be good for the crops, then,' said Oats.

Something flickered overhead. In the new daylight the wings of the phoenix were hard to see, mere yellow shimmers in the air, with the tiny shape of the little hawk in the centre as it circled high over the castle.

'Why would anyone want to kill something like that?' said Oats.

'Oh, some people'll kill anything for the fun of it.'

'Is it a true bird or is it something that exists within a-'

'It's a thing that is,' said Granny sharply. 'Don't go spilling allegory all down your shirt.'

'Well, I feel... blessed to have seen it.'

'Really? I genially feel the same about the sunrise,' said Granny. 'You would too, at my time of life.' She sighed, and then seemed to be speaking mainly to herself. 'She never went to the bad, then, whatever people said. And you'd have to be on your toes with that of vampire. She never went to the bad. You heard him say that, right? He said it. He didn't have to.'

'Er... yes.'

'She'd have been older'n me, too. Bloody good witch was Nana Alison. Sharp as a knife. Had her funny little ways, o' course, but who hasn't?'

'No one I know, certainly.'

'Right. You're right.' Granny straightened up. 'Good,' she said.

'Er...'

'Yes?'

Oats was looking down at the drawbridge and the road to the castle.

'There's a man in a nightshirt covered in mud and waving a sword down there,' he said, 'followed by a lot of Lancre people and some... little blue men...'

He looked down again. 'At least it looks like mud,' he added.

'That'll be the King,' said Granny. 'Big Aggie's given him some of her brose, by the sound of it. He'll save the day.'

'Er... hasn't the day been saved?'

'Oh, he's the King. It looks like it might be a nice day, so let him save it. You've got to give kings something to do. Anyway, after a drink from Big Aggie he won't know what day it is. We'd better get down there.'

'I feel I should thank you,' said Oats, when they reached the spiral staircase.

'For helping you across the mountains, you mean?'

'The world is... different.' Oats's gaze went out across the haze, and the forests, and the purple mountains. 'Everywhere I look I see something holy.'

For the first time since he'd met her he saw Granny Weatherwax smile properly. Normally her mouth went up at the corners just before something unpleasant was going to happen to someone who deserved it, but this time she appeared to be pleased with what she'd heard.

'That's a start, then,' she said.

The Magpyrs' coach had been righted and dragged up to the castle. Now it returned, with Jason Ogg at the reins. He was concentrating on avoiding the bumps. They made his bruises tender. Besides, the royal family was on board and he was feeling extremely loyal at the moment.

Jason Ogg was very big and very strong and, therefore, not a violent man, because he did not need to be. Sometimes he was summoned down to the pub to sort out the more serious fights, which he usually did by picking up both contestants and holding them apart until they stopped struggling. If that didn't work, he'd bang them together a few times, in as friendly a way as possible.

Aggressiveness did not normally impress him, but since in yesterday's battle at Lancre Castle he'd had to physically lift Verence off the ground in order to stop him slaughtering enemies, friends, furniture, walls and his own feet, he was certainly seeing his king in a new light. It had turned out to be an extremely short battle. The mercenaries had been only too keen to surrender, especially after Shawn's assault. The real fight had been to keep Verence away from them long enough to allow them to say so.

Jason was impressed.

King Verence, inside the coach, laid his head in his wife's lap and groaned as she wiped his brow with a cloth... '

At a respectable distance the coach was followed by a cart containing the witches, although what it contained mostly was snore.

Granny Weatherwax had a primal snore. It had never been tamed. No one had ever had to sleep next to it, to curb its wilder excesses by means of a kick, a prod in the small of the back or a pillow used as a bludgeon. It had had years in a lonely bedroom to perfect the knark, the graaah and the gnoc, gnoc, gnoc unimpeded by the nudges, jabs and occasional attempts at murder that usually moderate the snore impulse over time.