Work Text:
If you asked either of them whose fault it had been, they would have turned up their nose at you—but if you had rephrased and asked whose idea it was, each of them would have told you it was the other’s. And if you asked when they were both present, Granny Weatherwax would have sniffed, Nanny Ogg would have delicately suggested it was Granny’s idea, to which Granny would have suggested it was in fact Greebo’s idea, and Nanny would have pretended not to disagree in the spirit of keeping the peace.
The truth, such as it was, was far more complicated. As with many things in life, fault does not lie with one person or another as often as we would like to pretend. Decisions are so often made in a far more collaborative process, where one person says one thing, to which the other person replies as feels natural, to which the first person in turn responds as their preferences and history predispose them, and so on back and forth until they’re both trapped on a dinghy in a lake infested with piranhas. Though neither of them is able to recite the conversation that carried them there with any kind of accuracy, each is entirely convinced that it’s the other who got them there.
This situation is not quite analogous to the one at hand, in no small part because neither Granny Weatherwax nor Nanny Ogg have in their repertoire automatic patterns of conversation that do not involve stopping and asking questions before climbing onto a dinghy in questionable waters, but the principle holds true well enough. Neither remembers the exact sequence of events that led to the six-foot-tall wedding cake crashing to the ground, but it had certainly involved a sequence of words followed by a sequence of actions for which neither could be said to be fully deserving of the fault.
In fact, if an objective observer had seen everything down to the smallest detail, they might have pointed out that the fault in fact lay with the fly that had flown up the nose of the man who was supposed to be watching the door, who—knowing very little about witches and nothing about conventions that said they were welcome to any wedding—would certainly have tried to stop Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg from entering the event in the first place. Then again, as a bystander to the observer might have pointed out, even if he hadn’t been busy trying to blow the fly out of his nose, he was not the sort of person who could have denied entry to Granny and Nanny if they had decided they didn’t want to be stopped. The hypothetical objective observer would have then countered that having been ejected from the nose of the doorkeeper, the fly had proceeded to buzz around the head of the bride, causing her to twitch as she tried her best to keep a smile on her face so as not to disappoint the new husband who had been chosen for her by her family, whom she had only met three times before the wedding. It was this twitching of the bride—or rather, Granny’s disapproval of a bride who would prefer to twitch about than to be sensible and ask for a fly swatter or a fan—which had begun the sequence of back-and-forth with a small contribution from Greebo that had ended in the ruination of the magnificent wedding cake.
But of course, all of this was a moot point, because when the cake crashed down, all eyes turned to them, and as the only two guests covered from head to toe in pink icing and bits of angel food cake, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that both of them must be to blame. The bride burst into tears and loudly chastised them both, with pleas to her new husband to throw out “his” uncouth relatives.
Nanny Ogg pushed her way across the room to the bride’s side, flicking bits of icing and cake off of her as she went, convincing it to clump together so that her little flicks were far more effective than they might have been for anyone else. Everyone felt that someone ought to stop her, but no one wanted to be the one to do it, and so she made her way to the no-longer-happy-and-possibly-never-precisely-happy couple.
“There, now,” said Nanny Ogg, taking the hands of the sobbing bride in her own (now clean) ones. “You’ve had a difficult day, haven’t you? Cry all you like, dear—it can be difficult being a bride on a good day.”
“I’ve done my best,” the bride sobbed. “I’ve been smiling and keeping up decorum, and—I told myself that at least at the end I’d get cake.”
Nanny Ogg nodded.
“You’ll still have cake, dear. Every bride deserves cake.”
“Wedding cake is different from ordinary cake,” sniffled the bride, though her new husband observed that the tears had already stopped at the acknowledgement that she deserved cake. He made note of this for future reference.
“Of course it is. And how fortunate you are that Esme and I are excellent bakers, and have made many a wedding cake in our time.”
The bride blinked up at Nanny Ogg, her eyes shining with hope—or maybe that was the unshed tears.
“You really know how to make a wedding cake?” she asked. “You can do it before the end of the reception?”
“Absolutely,” said Nanny. “How long does the reception last, again?”
“The gall of you, telling that poor girl that you were practiced at baking wedding cakes,” grumbled Granny as they moved around in the kitchen that had been hastily prepared for their use producing the emergency replacement wedding cake.
“I helped you with at least a dozen cakes,” said Nanny. “You don’t produce those masterpieces alone.”
Granny gave Nanny a long look. She didn’t say that Nanny wouldn’t be able to produce a wedding cake up to snuff without Granny, but the sentiment was received loud and clear.
“I do wonder if you could do as well without me,” Nanny said in a tone too contemplative to be entirely sincere.
“You’re beating the egg whites alone,” said Granny.
“Oh, excellent,” said Nanny. “I do so love whipping eggs into shape. They start out so soft and flexible, then you stick enough air in them and they’re all puffed up and full of themselves. There isn’t a more rewarding part of baking than teaching the eggs to stand on their own.”
It was only because Granny really didn’t like dealing with the egg whites that she didn’t reclaim the job.
Fortunately, Nanny was not bluffing. She really did love beating egg whites. She simply also loved making Granny aware that what she personally didn’t like was very rarely as universal as she liked to think.
The egg whites were always quick to take shape under Nanny’s firm hands. She took pride in the knowledge that no one tamed eggs better than she.
The cake was completed and ready to wheel into the reception hall just before the reception was due to end.
It was a cake even larger and more ornate than the original wedding cake, which had been prepared over three days, though this one had been prepared in a mere three hours.
Had any wedding guests been aware that the bakers were witches, they might have erroneously concluded that this was a feat made possible by the bakers being witches. It was, of course, made possible by a combination of experience and practical adjustments.
Rather than baking thick layers of cake and cutting them into layers, Granny and Nanny had gathered as many pots and pans as they could find and baked a thin layer-sized cake in each. The ornate shape of the cake was in part due to their subsequent arrangement of these layers, only a fraction of which had been baked in the tins intended for cake baking. They were both practiced at the art of making quick decorating appear to be ornate, which added to the spectacle of the final product.
The cake thus arrived in the wedding reception hall to gasps and oohs and ahhs.
The bride and groom clasped hands over the knife to cut the cake, and the groom carefully placed the first slice on a plate which he handed to his new wife, with one of the dessert forks. (Traditionally, they would use the first two slices to smash into each other’s faces. However, after the smashing of the first cake to the floor and into the two ladies whom neither member of the couple recognized, the groom judged that his bride would appreciate not having to contend with more cake smashing. In this assessment he was utterly correct, and decades later, she would still be recounting this moment with fondness.)
The bride took her first bite, and her eyes went wide.
“This is the most delicious cake I’ve ever tasted!” she gasped, turning to the groom. “Why, I’m sure it must be better than the original. Where are your aunts? Oh, I must thank them.”
“My aunts?” frowned the groom. “They’re over there.”
“No, no—the ones who made the cake!”
“I thought those were your aunts,” frowned the groom.
The two witches who were aunts to no one present at this wedding were back in the kitchen, where Greebo was licking the last of the remaining icing out of the mixing bowl.
“This isn’t the sort of wedding I like attending,” grumbled Granny as she cleaned the last pot they had used as a cake tin.
“Oh, I do think it’s nice to encounter the unexpected, every now and again,” said Nanny as she finished wiping down the counter and took the now-empty icing bowl away from Greebo. “But I do hope the next wedding we attend involves more eating and less baking.”
“Hmph,” said Granny, and Nanny understood that she was agreeing.