'Yes. Tomjon's still a bit wild. He needs an older head around the place.'

'I'll miss you, laddie. I don't mind telling you. You've been like a son to me. How old are you, exactly? I never did know.'

'A hundred and two.'

Vitoller nodded gloomily. He was sixty, and his arthritis was playing him up.

'You've been like a father to me, then,' he said.

'It evens out in the end,' said Hwel diffidently. 'Half the height, twice the age. You could say that on the overall average we live about the same length of time as humans.'

The playmaster sighed. 'Well, I don't know what I will do without you and Tomjon around, and that's a fact.'

'It's only for the summer, and a lot of the lads are staying. In fact it's mainly the apprentices that are going. You said yourself it'd be good experience.'

Vitoller looked wretched and, in the chilly air of the half-finished theatre, a good deal smaller than usual, like a balloon two weeks after the party. He prodded some wood shavings distractedly with his stick.

'We grow old, Master Hwel. At least,' he corrected himself, 'I grow old and you grow older. We have heard the gongs at midnight.'

'Aye. You don't want him to go, do you?'

'I was all for it at first. You know. Then I thought, there's destiny afoot. Just when things are going well, there's always bloody destiny. I mean, that's where he came from.

Somewhere up in the mountains. Now fate is calling him back. I shan't see him again.'

'It's only for the summer—'

Vitoller held up a hand. 'Don't interrupt. I'd got the right dramatic flow there.'

'Sorry.'

Flick, flick, went the stick on the wood shavings, knocking them into the air.

'I mean, you know he's not my flesh and blood.'

'He's your son, though,' said Hwel. 'This hereditary business isn't all it's cracked up to be.'

'It's fine of you to say that.'

'I mean it. Look at me. I wasn't supposed to be writing plays. Dwarfs aren't even supposed to be able to read. I shouldn't worry too much about destiny, if I was you. I was destined to be a miner. Destiny gets it wrong half the time.'

'But you said he looks like the Fool person. I can't see it myself, mark you.'

'The light's got to be right.'

'Could be some destiny at work there.'

Hwel shrugged. Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn't trust it. Often you couldn't even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else – coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer.

He used destiny a lot. As a tool for his plays it was even better than a ghost. There was nothing like a bit of destiny to get the old plot rolling. But it was a mistake to think you could spot the shape of it. And as for thinking it could be controlled . . .

Granny Weatherwax squinted irritably into Nanny Ogg's crystal ball. It wasn't a particularly good one, being a greenish glass fishing float brought back from forn seaside parts by one of her sons. It distorted everything including, she suspected, the truth.

'He's definitely on his way,' she said, at last. 'In a cart.'

'A fiery white charger would have been favourite,' said Nanny Ogg. 'You know. Caparisoned, and that.'

'Has he got a magic sword?' said Magrat, craning to see.

Granny Weatherwax sat back.

'You're a disgrace, the pair of you,' she said. 'I don't know – magic chargers, fiery swords. Ogling away like a couple of milkmaids.'

'A magic sword is important,' said Magrat. 'You've got to have one. We could make him one,' she added wistfully. 'Out of thunderbolt iron. I've got a spell for that. You take some thunderbolt iron,' she said uncertainly, 'and then you make a sword out of it.'

'I can't be having with that old stuff,' said Granny. 'You can wait days for the damn things to hit and then they nearly take your arm off.'

'And a strawberry birthmark,' said Nanny Ogg, ignoring the interruption.

The other two looked at her expectantly.

'A strawberry birthmark,' she repeated. 'It's one of those things you've got to have if you're a prince coming to claim your kingdom. That's so's everyone will know. O'course, I don't know how they know it's strawberry.'

'Can't abide strawberries,' said Granny vaguely, quizzing the crystal again.

In its cracked green depths, smelling of bygone lobsters, a minute Tomjon kissed his parents, shook hands or hugged the rest of the company, and climbed aboard the leading latty.

It must of worked, she told herself. Else he wouldn't be coming here, would he? All those others must be his trusty band of good companions. After all, common sense, he's got to come five hundred miles across difficult country, anything could happen.

I daresay the armour and swords is in the carts.

She detected a twinge of doubt, and set out to quell it instantly. There isn't any other reason for him to come, stands to reason. We got the spell exactly right. Except for the ingredients. And most of the poetry. And it probably wasn't the right time. And Gytha took most of it home for the cat, which couldn't of been proper.

But he's on his way. What can't speak, can't lie.

'Best put the cloth over it when you've done, Esme,' said Nanny. 'I always get worried someone'll peer in at me when I'm having my bath.'

'He's on his way,' said Granny, the satisfaction in her voice so strong you could have ground corn with it. She dropped the black velvet bag over the ball.

'It's a long road,' said Nanny. 'There's many a slip twixt dress and drawers. There could be bandits.'

'We shall watch over him,' said Granny.

'That's not right. If he's going to be king he ought to be able to fight his own battles,' said Magrat.

'We don't want him to go wasting his strength,' said Nanny primly. 'We want him good and fresh for when he gets here.'

'And then, I hope, we shall leave him to fight his battles in his own way,' said Magrat.

Granny clapped her hands together in a businesslike fashion.

'Quite right,' she said. 'Provided he looks like winning.'

They had been meeting at Nanny Ogg's cottage. Magrat made an excuse to tarry after Granny left, around dawn, allegedly to help Nanny with tidying up.

'Whatever happened to not meddling?' she said.

'What do you mean?'

'You know, Nanny.'

'It's not proper meddling,' said Nanny awkwardly. 'Just helping matters along.'

'Surely you can't really think that!'

Nanny sat down and fidgeted with a cushion.

'Well, see, all this not meddling business is fine in the normal course of things,' she said. 'Not meddling is easy when you don't have to. And then I've got the family to think about. Our Jason's been in a couple of fights because of what people have been saying. Our Shawn was thrown out of the army. The way I see it, when we get the new king in, he should owe us a few favours. It's only fair.'

'But only last week you were saying—' Magrat stopped, shocked at this display of pragmatism.

'A week is a long time in magic,' said Nanny. 'Fifteen years, for one thing. Anyway, Esme is determined and I'm in no mood to stop her.'

'So what you're saying,' said Magrat, icily, 'is that this “not meddling” thing is like taking a vow not to swim. You'll absolutely never break it unless of course you happen to find yourself in the water?'

'Better than drowning,' Nanny said.

She reached up to the mantelpiece and took down a clay pipe that was like a small tar pit. She lit it with a spill from the remains of the fire, while Greebo watched her carefully from his cushion.

Magrat idly lifted the hood from the ball and glared at it.

'I think,' she said, 'that I will never really understand about witchcraft. Just when I think I've got a grip on it, it changes.'

'We're all just people.' Nanny blew a cloud of blue smoke at the chimney. 'Everyone's just people.'

'Can I borrow the crystal?' said Magrat suddenly.

'Feel free,' said Nanny. She grinned at Magrat's back. 'Had a row with your young man?' she said.

'I really don't know what you're talking about.'

'Haven't seen him around for weeks.'

'Oh, the duke sent him to—' Magrat stopped, and went on – 'sent him away for something or other. Not that it bothers me at all, either way.'

'So I see. Take the ball, by all means.'

Magrat was glad to get back home. No-one was about on the moors at night anyway, but over the last couple of months things had definitely been getting worse. On top of the general suspicion of witches, it was dawning on the few people in Lancre who had any dealings with the outside world that a) either more things had been happening than they had heard about before or b) time was out of joint. It wasn't easy to prove[19], but the few traders who came along the mountain tracks after the winter seemed to be rather older than they should have been. Unexplained happenings were always more or less expected in the Ramtops because of the high magical potential, but several years disappearing overnight was a bit of a first.

She locked the door, fastened the shutters, and carefully laid the green glass globe on the kitchen table.

She concentrated . . .

The Fool dozed under the tarpaulins of the river barge, heading up the Ankh at a steady two miles an hour. It wasn't an exciting method of transport but it got you there eventually.

He looked safe enough, but he was tossing and turning in his sleep.

Magrat wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn't want to do. Like being dead, she considered, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it.

She considered the Fool to be weak, badly led and sorely in need of some backbone. And she was longing for him to get back, so she could look forward to never seeing him again.

It was a long, hot summer.

They didn't rush things. There was a lot of country between Ankh-Morpork and the Ramtops. It was, Hwel had to admit, fun. It wasn't a word dwarfs were generally at home with.

Please Yourself went over well. It always did. The apprentices excelled themselves. They forgot lines, and played jokes; in Sto Lat the whole third act of Gretalina and Mellias was performed against the backdrop for the second act of The Mage Wars, but no-one seemed to notice that the greatest love scene in history was played on a set depicting a tidal wave sweeping across a continent. That was possibly because Tomjon was playing Gretalina. The effect was so disconcertingly riveting that Hwel made him swap roles for the next house, if you could apply the term to a barn hired for the day, and the effect still had more rivets than a suit of plate armour, including the helmet, and even though Gretalina in this case was now young Wimsloe, who was a bit simple and tended to stutter and whose spots might eventually clear up.

The following day, in some nameless village in the middle of an endless sea of cabbages, he let Tomjon play Old Miskin in Please Yourself, a role that Vitoller always excelled in. You couldn't let anyone play it who was under the age of forty, not unless you wanted an Old Miskin with a cushion up his jerkin and greasepaint wrinkles.

Hwel didn't consider himself old. His father had still been digging three tons of ore a day at the age of two hundred.

Now he felt old. He watched Tomjon hobble off the stage, and for a fleeting instant knew what it was to be a fat old man, pickled in wine, fighting old wars that no-one cared about any more, hanging grimly on to the precipice of late middle-age for fear of dropping off into antiquity, but only with one hand, because with the other he was raising two fingers at Death. Of course, he'd known that when he wrote the part. But he hadn't known it.