Witches Abroad

"I see it! I see it!" said Mrs Pleasant.

"And you know what that means?"

"Means it's going to taste real tesme[?]!"

"Sure," said Mrs Gogol, kindly. "And it means some people's coming."

"Wow! How many?"

Mrs Gogol dipped a spoon into the seething mass and tasted it.

"Three people," she said. She smacked her lips thoughtfully. "Women."

She dipped the spoon again.

"Have a taste," she said. "There's a cat, too. Ye can tell by the sassafras." She smacked her lips. "Grey. One eye."

She explored the cavity of a tooth with her tongue. "The... left one."

Mrs Pleasant's jaw dropped.

"They'll find you before they find me," said Mrs Gogol. "You lead ‘em here."

Mrs Pleasant stared at Mrs Gogol's grim smile and then back down at the mixture in the pot.

"They coming all this way for a taste?" she said.

"Sure." Mrs Gogol sat back. "You been to see the girl in the white house?"

Mrs Pleasant nodded. "Young Embers," she said. "Yeah. When I can. When the Sisters are out at the palace. They got her real scared, Mrs Gogol."

She looked down at the pot again, and back up to Mrs Gogol.

"Can you really see - ?"

"I expect you've got things to marinate?" said Mrs Gogol.

"Yeah. Yeah." Mrs Pleasant backed out, but with reluctance. Then she halted. Mrs Pleasant, at rest, was not easily moved again until she wanted to be.

"That Lilith woman says she can see the whole world in mirrors," she said, in slightly accusing tones.

Mrs Gogol shook her head.

"All anyone gets in a mirror is themselves," she said. "But what you gets in a good gumbo is everything."

Mrs Pleasant nodded. This was a well-known fact. She couldn't dispute it.

Mrs Gogol shook her head sadly when the cook had gone. A voodoo woman was reduced to all sorts of stratagems in order to appear knowing, but she felt slightly ashamed of letting an honest woman believe that she could see the future in a pot of gumbo. Because all you could see in a pot of Mrs Gogol's gumbo was that the future certainly contained a very good meal.

She'd really seen it in a bowl of jambalaya she'd prepared earlier.

Magrat lay with the wand under her pillow. She wobbled gently between sleep and wakefulness.

Certainly she was the best person for the wand. There was no doubt about that. Sometimes - and she hardly dared give the thought headroom, when she was under the same roof as Granny Weatherwax - she really wondered about the others' commitment to witchcraft. Half the time they didn't seem to bother.

Take medicine, for example. Magrat knew she was much better than them at herbs. She'd inherited several large books on the subject from Goodie Whemper, her predecessor in the cottage, and had essayed a few tentative notes of her own as well. She could tell people things about the uses of Devil's Bit Scabious that would interest them so much they'd rush off, presumably to look for someone else to tell. She could fractionally distil, and double-distil, and do things that meant sitting up all night watching the colour of the flame under the retort. She worked at it.

Whereas Nanny just tended to put a hot poultice on everything and recommend a large glass of whatever the patient liked best on the basis that since you were going to be ill anyway you might as well get some enjoyment out of it. (Magrat forbade her patients alcohol, because of what it did to the liver; if they didn't know what it did to the liver, she spent some time telling them.)

And Granny... she just gave people a bottle of coloured water and told them they felt a lot better.

And what was so annoying was that they often did.

Where was the witchcraft in that?

With a wand, though, things could be different. You could help people a lot with a wand. Magic was there to make life better. Magrat knew this in the pink fluttering boudoir of her heart.

She dipped under the surface of sleep again.

And there was an odd dream. She never mentioned it to anyone afterwards because, well, you didn't. Not things like that.

But she thought she'd got up in the night, awakened by the silence, to get some more air. And as she passed the mirror she saw a movement in it.

It wasn't her face. It looked a lot like Granny Weather-wax. It smiled at her - a much nicer and friendlier smile than she'd ever got from Granny, Magrat recalled - and then vanished, the cloudy silver surface closing over it.

She hurried back to bed and awoke to the sound of a brass band, engaged in unrelenting oompah. People were shouting and laughing.

Magrat got dressed quickly, went out into the corridor, and knocked on the door of the older witches. There was no reply. She tried the handle.

After she'd rattled it a couple of times there was a thump as the chair wedged under the handle on the other side, the better to deter ravishers, burglars and other nocturnal intruders, fell over.