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“Don't you sarky me, young-fellow-me-lass. Nothing wrong with peppermint. Pass me that bowl.”
Another advantage of city life, Granny had discovered, was glassware. Some of her more complicated potions required apparatus which either had to be bought from the dwarves at extortionate rates or, if ordered from the nearest human glassblower, arrived in straw and, usually, pieces. She had tried blowing her own and the effort always made her cough, which produced some very funny results. But the city's thriving alchemy profession meant that there were whole shops full of glass for the buying, and a witch could always arrange bargain prices.
She watched carefully as yellow steam surged along a twisty maze of tubing and eventually condensed as one large, sticky droplet. She caught it neatly on the end of a glass spoon and very carefully tipped it into a tiny glass phial.
Esk watched her through her tears.
“What's that?” she asked.
“It's a neveryoumind,” said Granny, sealing the phial's cork with wax.
“A medicine?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Granny pulled her writing set towards her and selected a pen. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she very carefully wrote out a label, with much scratching and pausing to work out the spellings.
“Who's it for?”
“Mrs Herapath, the glassblower's wife.”
Esk blew her nose. “He's the one who doesn't blow much glass, isn't he?”
Granny looked at her over the top of the desk.
“How do you mean?”
“When she was talking to you yesterday she called him Old Mister Once A Fortnight.”
“Mmph,” said Granny. She carefully finished the sentence: “Dylewt in won pint warter and won droppe in hys tee and be Shure to wear loose clowthing allso that no vysitors exspected.”
One day, she told herself, I'm going to have to have that talk with her.
The child seemed curiously dense. She had already assisted at enough births and taken the goats to old Nanny Annaple's billy without drawing any obvious conclusions. Granny wasn't quite certain what she should do about it, but the time never seemed appropriate to bring up the subject. She wondered whether, in her hearts of hearts, she was too embarrassed; she felt like a farrier who could shoe horses, cure them, rear them and judge them, but had only the sketchiest idea about how one rode them.
She pasted the label on to the phial and wrapped it carefully in plain paper.
Now.
“There is another way into the University,” she said, looking sidelong at Esk, who was making a disgruntled job of mashing herbs in a mortar. “A witches' way.”
Esk looked up. Granny treated herself to a thin smile and started work on another label; writing labels was always the hard part of magic, as far as she was concerned.
“But I don't expect you'd be interested,” she went on. “It's not very glamorous.”
“They laughed at me,” Esk mumbled.
“Yes. You said. So you won't be wanting to try again, then. I quite understand.”
There was silence broken only by the scratching of Granny's pen. Eventually Esk said: “This way -”
“Mmph?”
“It'll get me into the University?”
“Of course,” said Granny haughtily. “I said I'd find a way, didn't I? A very good way, too. You won't have to bother with lessons, you can go all over the place, no one will notice you you'll be invisible really - and, well, you can really clean up. But of course, after all that laughing, you won't be interested. Will you?”
“Pray have another cup of tea, Mrs Weatherwax?” said Mrs Whitlow.
“Mistress,” said Granny.
