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spells under her breath, and grabbed the staff. It didn’t resist; she nearly fell over. But now she had it in her hands, and felt the tingle of it, the distinctive thunderstorm crackle of the magic in it, and she laughed.
    It was as simple as this, then. There was no fight in it now.
    Calling down a curse upon wizards and all their works she raised the staff above her head and brought it down with a clang across the firedogs, over the hottest part of the fire.
    Esk screamed. The sound bounced down through the bedroom floorboards and scythed through the dark cottage.
    Granny was old and tired and not entirely clear about things after a long day, but to survive as a witch requires an ability to jump to very large conclusions and as she stared at the staff in the flames and heard the scream her hands were already reaching for the big black kettle. She upended it over the fire, dragged the staff out of the cloud of steam, and ran upstairs, dreading what she might see.
    Esk was sitting up in the narrow bed, unsinged but shrieking. Granny took the child in her arms and tried to comfort her; she wasn’t sure how one went about it, but a distracted patting on the back and vague reassuring noises seemed to work, and the screams became wails and, eventually, sobs. Here and there Granny could pick out words like “fire” and “hot,” and her mouth set in a thin, bitter line.
    Finally she settled the child down, tucked her in, and crept quietly down stairs.
    The staff was back against the wall. She was not surprised to see that the fire hadn’t marked it at all.
    Granny turned her rocking chair to face it, and sat down with her chin in her hand and an expression of grim determination.
    Presently the chair began to rock, of its own accord. It was the only sound in a silence that thickened and spread and filled the room like a terrible dark fog.

    Next morning, before Esk got up, Granny hid the staff in the thatch, well out of harm’s way.
    Esk ate her breakfast and drank a pint of goat’s milk without the least sign of the events of the last twenty-four hours. It was the first time she had been inside Granny’s cottage for more than a brief visit, and while the old woman washed the dishes and milked the goats she made the most of her implied license to explore.
    She found that life in the cottage wasn’t entirely straightforward. There was the matter of the goats’ names, for example.
    “But they’ve got to have names!” she said. “Everything’s got a name.”
    Granny looked at her around the pear-shaped flanks of the head nanny, while the milk squirted into the low pail.
    “I daresay they’ve got names in Goat,” she said vaguely. “What do they want names in Human for?”
    “Well,” said Esk, and stopped. She thought for a bit. “How do you make them do what you want, then?”
    “They just do, and when they want me they holler.”
    Esk gravely gave the head goat a wisp of hay. Granny watched her thoughtfully. Goats did have names for themselves, she well knew: there was “goat who is my kid,” “goat who is my mother,” “goat who is herd leader,” and half a dozen other names not least of which was “goat who is this goat.” They had a complicated herd system and four stomachs and a digestive system that sounded very busy on still nights, and Granny had always felt that calling all this names like Buttercup was an insult to a noble animal.
    “Esk?” she said, making up her mind.
    “Yes?”
    “What would you like to be when you grow up?”
    Esk looked blank. “Don’t know.”
    “Well,” said Granny, her hands still milking, “what do you think you will do when you are grown up?”
    “Don’t know. Get married, I suppose.”
    “Do you want to?”
    Esk’s lips started to shape themselves around the D, but she caught Granny’s eye and stopped, and thought.
    “All the grown ups I know are married,” she said at last, and thought some more. “Except you,” she added, cautiously.
    “That’s