'Wotcha, girl,' said Nanny. 'Try some of the venison, it's good stuff.'
Agnes looked doubtfully at the roasting meat.
Lancre people looked after the calories and let the vitamins go hang.
'Do you think I could get a salad?' she ventured.
'Hope not,' said Nanny happily.
'Lot of people here,' said Agnes.
'Everyone got a invite,' said Nanny. 'Magrat was very gracious about that, I thought.'
Agnes craned her head. 'Can't see Granny around anywhere, though.'
'She'll be inside, tellin' people what to do.'
'I haven't seen her around much at all lately,' said Agnes. 'She's got something on her mind, I think.'
Nanny narrowed her eyes.
'You think so?' she said, adding to herself: you're getting good, miss.
'It's just that ever since we heard about the birth,' Agnes waved a plump hand to indicate the general highcholesterol celebration around them, 'she's been so... stretched, sort of. Twanging.'
Nanny Ogg thumbed some tobacco into her pipe and struck a match on her boot.
'You certainly notice things, don't you?' she said, puffing away. 'Notice, notice, notice. We'll have to call you Miss Notice.'
'I certainly notice you always fiddle around with your pipe when you're thinking thoughts you don't much like,' said Agnes. 'It's displacement activity.'
Through a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke Nanny reflected that Agnes read books. All the witches who'd lived in her cottage were bookish types. They thought you could see life through books but you couldn't, the reason being that the words got in the way.
'She has been a bit quiet, that's true,' she said. 'Best to let her get on with it.'
'I thought perhaps she was sulking about the priest who'll be doing the Naming,' said Agnes.
'Oh, old Brother Perdore's all right,' said Nanny. 'Gabbles away in some ancient lingo, keeps it short and then you just give him sixpence for his trouble, fill him up with brandy and load him on his donkey and off he goes.'
'What? Didn't you hear?' said Agnes. 'He's laid up over in Skund. Broke his wrist and both legs falling off the donkey.'
Nanny Ogg took her pipe out of her mouth.
'Why wasn't I told?' she said.
'I don't know, Nanny. Mrs Weaver told me yesterday.'
'Oo, that woman! I passed her in the street this morning! She could've said!'
Nanny poked her pipe back in her mouth as though stabbing all uncommunicative gossips. 'How can you break both your legs falling off a donkey?'
'It was going up that little path on the side of Skund Gorge. He fell sixty feet.'
'Oh? Well... that's a tall donkey, right enough.'
'So the King sent down to the Omnian mission in Ohulan to send us up a priest, apparently,' said Agnes.
'He did what?' said Nanny.