Title: Millie Reed and the Subtle Education
Author: ScarletAsphodel
Rating: G. Safe for all the family.
Disclaimer: Discworld is the sole property of Terry Pratchett, as are many of the Pratchettisms seen below. Millie Reed and Olivia Hartley, however, belong to me, as does the semi-plot.
Notes: This was written as part of an English class; the author managed to get away with studying Pratchett and attempting Appropriation of Style. There aren't canon characters here as it's just an excuse for me to use Discworld as a toy.
It would have been nice to say the night was a dark, empty one, devoid of movement and sound like a nihilist black hole, but reality rarely has time for poetry and tends to carry on regardless of the way it should be. Lamps lined the streets and there was the usual clamour of a city minding its own business.(1)
The figure in the window above leant back slightly, calloused fingers steepling together. Miss Olivia Hartley was a great believer in self-determination – so long as it wasn't determination to go against her will, she was a teacher, after all – but this scene lacked a certain something. The magic wasn't there.
(1) And other people's, too; this was Ankh-Morpork, after all.
The street-stalls were mostly quiet, most of the night's residents not being inclined to shop here, but it was a busy quiet, the noise of mercantile well-being. There was the occasional chink of money as the takings of the day were packed away and the last calls of "Genuine Goods" (2) faded.
The rather shabby table which had attracted Miss Hartley's attentions was covered by a rag; the girl sitting at it blended into her brown surroundings easily. Millie Reed faded into the background along with her stall.
Her reddish hair was pulled back into a bun; in the light from her tallow candle her dress looked more like sackcloth than usual. Perhaps it was the proliferation of freckles across her rounded nose, or maybe her soft grey eyes, but the sign on the stall always came as a shock.
"Fortunes!" it claimed to the world, the bad punctuation a last resort for the totally desperate. Even if the sign said fortunes, the stall didn't; it didn't even say "novice clerk". There were no mystic runes, badly-illustrated cards and purple was unseen, which had to be breaking some unwritten law of fortune stalls. Millie's makeshift crystal ball was set up out of pathetic adherence to tradition, but it clearly glass, and an odd colour of green.
Millie had been proud of her stall at first, almost as proud as she was of her neatly pointed black witch's hat, but this had paled when she'd seen the reaction to it. Her customers had been distinctly disappointed; money had been changing hands frequently, especially back from her.
(2) Not genuine anything in particular, just genuine. Ankh-Morpork had no morals as such, but a half-lie was always easier to wriggle out of than a full one.
It's not enough to be skilled, thought Miss Hartley in exasperation. Witches were known not to have teachers, but she ran the school which they didn't attend and Millie was quite possibly the worst witch she'd ever seen.
You had to put on a show when you started out. Not too much; it wasn't the time for three foot hats or stars, but they didn't believe you if you didn't advertise. The girl probably told good fortunes – there was something about the neatness of the sign which meant she wouldn't do it if she weren't skilled – but they were good in a correct way. That wasn't the point; real lives were shockingly mundane. To be told that the spirits claimed you were likely to soon suffer a mild cold or have a dull conversation with a man in a grocer's somehow broke a fundamental law. It wasn't what anyone wanted to hear.
To be a real witch, a girl had to know how to tell them what they wanted to hear while still being useful. It was an art and the magic wasn't the point. Part of knowing how to use magic was knowing how not to use magic, because real magic is so terribly easy.
Teaching Millie Reed, Miss Hartley knew, wouldn't be easy, but she pulled out her pen in exasperation, scribbling a neat letter in black(3) ink. It might be better if the girl was 11 and living with nasty relatives after the death of her parents, but there was real potential here behind the mistakes. That was the purpose.
(3) The fanciful green or purple she didn't hold with. There was advertising and just being silly, after all.
When Millie read the letter a week later, she looked across the street in consternation, packed up her neat little stall and shook her head.
A little while later, a small stall set up across from Miss Hartley's Academy. It had a tablecloth with silver stars and the red-headed girl who ran it seemed to fade into the foreground instead.