Free I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett Page A

smelled like sickrooms everywhere: all too much of people, and not enough air. The nurse stood in the doorway as if she was on guard. Tiffany could feel her permanently suspicious gaze on the back of her neck. There was more and more of that sort of attitude about. Sometimes you got wandering preachers around who didn’t like witches, and people would listen to them. It seemed to Tiffany that people lived in a very strange world sometimes. Everybody knew, in some mysterious way, that witches ran away with babies and blighted crops, and all the other nonsense. And at the same time, they would come running to the witch when they needed help.
    The Baron lay in a tangle of sheets, his face grey, his hair totally white now, with little pink patches where it had all gone. He looked neat, though. He had always been a neat man, and every morning one of the guards would come and give him a shave. It cheered him up, as far as anyone could tell, but right now he looked straight through Tiffany. She was used to this; the Baron was what they called ‘a man of the old school’. He was proud and did not have the best of tempers, but he would stand up for himself at all times. To him, the pain was a bully, and what do you do to bullies? You stood up to them, because they always ran away in the end. But the pain didn’t know about that rule. It just bullied even more. And the Baron lay with thin white lips; Tiffany could hear him not screaming.
    Now, she sat down on a stool beside him, flexed her fingers, took a deep breath, and then received the pain, calling it out of the wasted body and putting it into the invisible ball just above her shoulder.
    ‘I don’t hold with magic, you know,’ said the nurse from the doorway.
    Tiffany winced like a tightrope walker who has just felt someone hit the other end of the rope with a big stick. Carefully, she let the flow of pain settle down, a little bit at a time.
    ‘I mean,’ said the nurse, ‘I know it makes him feel better, but where does all this healing power come from, that’s what I’d like to know?’
    ‘Perhaps it comes from all your praying, Miss Spruce,’ said Tiffany sweetly, and was glad to see the moment of fury on the woman’s face.
    But Miss Spruce had the hide of an elephant. ‘We must be sure that we don’t get involved with dark and demonic forces. Better a little pain in this world than an eternity of suffering in the next!’
    Up in the mountains there were sawmills driven by water, and they had big circular saws that spun so fast they were nothing but a silver blur in the air … until an absent-minded man forgot to payattention, when it became a red disc and the air was raining fingers.
    Tiffany felt like that now. She needed to concentrate and the woman was determined to go on talking, while the pain was waiting for just one moment’s lack of attention. Oh well, nothing for it … she threw the pain at a candlestick beside the bed. It shattered instantly, and the candle flashed into flame; she stamped on it until it went out. Then she turned to the astonished nurse.
    ‘Miss Spruce, I am sure that what you have to say is very interesting, but on the whole, Miss Spruce, I don’t really care what you think about anything. I don’t mind you staying in here, Miss Spruce, but what I do mind, Miss Spruce, is that this is very difficult and can be dangerous for me if it goes wrong. Go away, Miss Spruce, or stay, Miss Spruce, but most of all, shut up , Miss Spruce, because I’ve only just started and there is still a lot of pain to shift.’
    Miss Spruce gave her another look. It was fearsome.
    Tiffany returned this with a look of her own, and if there is one thing that a witch learns how to do, it is how to look.
    The door shut behind the enraged nurse.
    ‘Talk quietly – she listens at doors.’
    The voice came from the Baron, but it was hardly a voice at all; you could just hear in it the tones of someone used to command, but now it was cracked and failing,