The faint, distant hunting horns of sheer terror began to sound in the back of her mind. Had the woman asked Glenda her name? No! But she’d certainly known it and how would she know about the ‘cook’ at Unseen University? And she’d been so quick, she’d worked out the Ploughman’s Pie with a snap of her fingers. That little part of her that had first been liberated by the sherry chimed in with, The trouble with you is that you make assumptions. You see something and you think you know what you’ve seen. She certainly didn’t sound like a librarian, did she?

Very slowly, Glenda raised her right hand into a fist and lowered it into her mouth, and bit down very hard in an attempt to somehow retrieve the last fifteen minutes from the records of the universe and replace them with something far less embarrassing, like her knickers falling down.

Even here, late into the night, the forge was the heart of attention. Coaches were arriving and leaving constantly. The inn did not run according to the sun, it ran according to the timetable, and aimless people waiting for their connections gravitated to the forge as a free show and a place of comfort in the chilly night air.

Nutt was shoeing a horse. Trev had seen horses being shod before, but never like this. The animal stood as if transfixed, trembling very slightly. When Nutt wanted it to move, he clicked his tongue. When he wanted its leg raised, another click caused this to happen. Trev felt that he wasn’t watching a man shoeing a horse, but a master demonstrating his skills to a world of amateurs. When the shoe was on, the horse walked backwards in front of the crowd, for all the world like a fashion model, turning as Nutt moved a hand or made a clicking noise. It didn’t seem to be a particularly happy horse, but, great heavens, it was certainly an obedient one. ‘Yes, that all seems fine,’ Nutt said.

‘How much is that going to cost us?’ said the coachman. ‘Wonderful job, if I may say so.’

‘How much? How much? How much?’ said Nutt, turning it over in his mind. ‘Have I earned worth, sir?’

‘I should say so, mate. I’ve never seen a horse shod as smooth as that.’

‘Then worth will do,’ said Nutt. ‘And a ride for myself and my three friends back to Ankh-Morpork.’

‘An’ five dollars,’ said Trev, coming away from his lounging spot near the wall with the speed of money.

The coachman sniffed. ‘A bit steep,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Trev. ‘For a late-night job? To better than Burleigh and Stronginthearm specification? Not a bad deal, I think.’

A murmur from the other watchers backed Trev up. ‘I never seen anyone do anything like that,’ said Juliet. ‘He’d ’ave ’ad that ’orse dancing if you’d asked ’im.’

The coachman winked at Trev. ‘All right, lad. What can I say? Old Havacook there is a good lad, but a bit bad tempered, as it goes. Once kicked a coachman through the wall. I never thought I’d see him stand there and lift ’is leg up like a trained lap-dog. Your chum has earned his money and his ride.’

‘Please take him away,’ said Nutt. ‘But hold him with care because when he gets a little way away from me he might get a tiny bit frisky.’

The crowd dispersed. Nutt methodically damped down the forge and started to pack his tools into the box. ‘If we’re going to go back, we’d better go now. Has anyone seen Miss Glenda?’

‘Here,’ said Glenda, advancing out of the shadows. ‘Trev, you and Jools go and get us some seats on the coach. I need to talk to Mister Nutt.’

‘Her ladyship was here,’ said Glenda when they’d gone.

‘I would not be surprised,’ said Nutt calmly, snapping the catches shut on his box. ‘Just about everybody passes through here and she travels a great deal.’

‘Why were you running away?’

‘Because I know what will happen,’ said Nutt. ‘I am an orc. It’s as simple as that.’

‘But the people on the bus were on your side,’ said Glenda.

Nutt flexed his hands and the claws slid out, just for a moment. ‘And tomorrow?’ he said. ‘And if something goes wrong? Everybody knows orcs will tear your arms off. Everybody knows orcs will tear your head off. Everybody knows these things. That is not good.’

‘Well, then, why are you coming back?’ Glenda demanded.

‘Because you are kind and came after me. How could I refuse? But it does not change the things that everybody knows.’

‘But every time you make a candle and every time you shoe a horse, you change the things that everybody knows,’ said Glenda. ‘You know that orcs were—’ She hesitated. ‘Sort of made?’

‘Oh, yes, it was in the book.’

She nearly exploded. ‘Well, then, why didn’t you tell me?!’

‘Is it important? We are what we are now.’

‘But you don’t have to be!’ Glenda yelled. ‘Everybody knows trolls eat people and spit them out. Everybody knows dwarfs cut your legs off. But at the same time everybody knows that what everybody knows is wrong. And orcs didn’t decide to be like they are. People will understand that.’

‘It will be a dreadful burden.’

‘I’ll help!’ Glenda was shocked at the speed of her response and then mumbled, ‘I’ll help.’

The coals in the forge crackled as they settled down. Fires in a busy forge seldom die out completely. After a while, Glenda said, ‘You wrote that poem for Trev, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, Miss Glenda. I hope she liked it.’

Glenda thought she’d better raise this carefully. ‘I think I ought to tell you that she didn’t understand a lot of the words exactly. I sort of had to translate it for her.’ It hadn’t been too difficult, she reckoned. Most love poems were pretty much the same under the curly writing.

‘Did you like it?’ said Nutt.

‘It was a wonderful poem,’ said Glenda.

‘I wrote it for you,’ said Nutt. He was looking at her with an expression that stirred together fear and defiance in equal measure.

The cooling embers brightened up at this. After all, a forge has a soul. As if they had been waiting there, the responses lined themselves up in front of Glenda’s tongue. Whatever you do next is going to be very important, she told herself. Really, extremely, very important. Don’t start wondering about what Mary the bloody housemaid would do in one of those cheap novels you read, because Mary was made up by someone with a name suspiciously like an anagram for people like you. She is not real and you are.

‘We had better get on the coach,’ said Nutt, picking up his box.

Glenda gave up on the thinking and burst into tears. It has to be said that they were not the gentle tears they would have been from Mary the housemaid, but the really big long-drawn-out blobby ones you get from someone who very rarely cries. They were gummy, with a hint of snot in there as well. But they were real. Mary the housemaid would just not have been able to match them.

So, of course, it will be just like Trev Likely to turn up out of the shadows and say, ‘They’re calling the coach now—Are you two all right?’

Nutt looked at Glenda. Tears aren’t readily retractable, but she managed to balance a smile on them. ‘I believe this to be the case,’ said Nutt.

Travelling on a fast coach, on even a mild autumn night, those passengers on the roof experience the temperature that can freeze doorknobs. There are leather covers and rugs of various age, thickness and smell. Survival is only possible by wrapping yourself in the biggest cocoon you can achieve, preferably with somebody else next to you; two people can heat up faster than one. In theory, all of this could lead to hanky panky, but the seats of the coach and the rockiness of the road mean that such things are not uppermost in the traveller’s mind, which dreams longingly of cushions. Furthermore, there was a fine rain now.

Juliet craned her head to look at the seats behind, but there were just the mounds of damp rugs that were the coach company’s answer to the cold night air. ‘You don’t think they’re sweet on each other, do you?’ she said.