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He deserved it, really. Or if he didn’t deserve it, he understood why Vimes had been angry.
Lord Vetinari understood the power of shouting at people better than he understood many things, which was saying a lot.
The trouble was, while Lord Vetinari may be the most cool and practical leader the city has ever seen, Havelock was a Romantic and a Revolutionary and drew very little distinction between “have to” and “ought to.” Many parallel universes never existed* because of how resolutely Vetinari did what he thought he had to.
It was a foolish and sentimental and ill-advised thing he had suggested. He had run out of track in terms of honors and statues, and anyway he’d thought it had been clear what he was really offering.
He’d asked Aunt Bobbi several times what the curse she’d threatened him with was and she’d always changed the subject but he knew he was too much of a witch for it not to have taken effect. He had failed and so he was cursed. That was how these things worked.
He feared, when he thought about it, that it was a curse on his romantic** prospects and he trusted a curse to not leave any convenient loop holes such as gender. This made very little sense, of course, because Lady Meserole often expressed hopes that he would find as much ordinary happiness as he wanted. But a curse, once threatened, was very difficult to take back.
A death he’d blamed himself for for thirty years had, depending on how you looked at it, never occurred or never been his fault in the first place.
The Assassins Guild must have either never found out about the four people he killed on the barricade or turned a blind eye, because they let him hang around and accumulate doctorates rather than killing him slowly and creatively.
The part of his mind dedicated to a steady background static of “Sam Vimes is a genius. Sam Vimes looks good in tights. Sam Vimes is like a bull in a china shop owned by your worst enemies. Your stupid jokes make Sam Vimes smile too” was now engaged in calmly explaining that “you haven’t impressed him and he doesn’t want to be around you right now.”
That was fine. He’d go to bed, have a little cry and feel better in the morning.
A year later, on young Sam Vimes’ first birthday, Vimes was asking what exactly Vetinari did when he was asked to save him thirty-one years ago.
“I didn’t really know what to do. I ran to the palace yard so I could climb up to the roof.” Vetinari sounded wistful and not for the first time Vimes wondered how much his leg prevented him from doing “I saw the under-boot boy trying to ask me what I knew about swordfish and I told him Snapcase was sending people after John Keel.”
“And he told Nobby Nobbs.”
“What?”
“Nobby warned me Snapcase wanted me dead.”
Something clicked into place. It was a technicality, certainly, but you had to think mythologically about these kinds of things.
“I’m not cursed!” Vetinari said aloud.
“I don’t follow.”
“My aunt said I would be cursed if I didn’t get a warning to you.”
“Aunts always say things like that, I doubt she—“
“Magic is a give-and-take. Practical magic, anyway, I don’t pretend to understand wizardry.”
“Sometimes I think you pretend not to.”
“Haha. Point is, curses work on me.”
Sam Vimes realized something, although he didn’t say it. In the version of history that had existed more than a year ago he hadn’t helped Nobby or sent him to gather information. If Vetinari had been cursed in that version of history he would still be cursed. Maybe it took a while for the ripples to catch up.
“I thought you were going to kiss me in the graveyard last year,” Sam said quietly.
“What? Really? Oh—“ Vetinari said, realizing. “I can do that. Yes.”
It was really more Sam kissing him than the other way around but it was very nice.
Some curses are broken by kisses, others*** by Nobbses. No, it really didn’t do to dwell on technicalities in moments like this.
*this was known to some philosophers and interdimensional cartographers as “Havelock’s Razor”
**lower-case r, looking dramatically over the rooftops and wearing fluttering robes were unassailable
**the curse Lady Roberta Meserole placed on Havelock during the Glorious Revolution of the 25th of May was, in fact, “you shall never find any of the copies of books you bought multiple copies of.” Lord Vetinari had a VERY delighted morning in the palace library the next day