Witches Abroad (Discworld 12)

'What did she say?' said Granny.

'As I recall, “oh bugger”,' said Gammer.

'It's the way she would have wanted to go,' said Nanny Ogg. The other witches nodded.

'You know ... we could be looking at the end of witchcraft in these parts,' said Gammer Brevis.

They stared at the fire again.

'I don't 'spect anyone's brought any marshmallows?' said Nanny Ogg, hopefully.

Granny Weatherwax looked at her sister witches. Gammer Brevis she couldn't stand; the old woman taught school on the other side of the mountain, and had a nasty habit of being reasonable when provoked. And Old Mother Dismass was possibly the most useless sibyl in the history of oracular revelation. And Granny really couldn't be having at all with Nanny Ogg, who was her best friend.

'What about young Magrat?' said Old Mother Dismass innocently. 'Her patch runs right alongside Desiderata's. Maybe she could take on a bit extra?'

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg exchanged glances.

'She's gone funny in the head,' said Granny.

'Now, come on, Esme,' said Nanny Ogg. ' 'Well, I call it funny,' said Granny. 'You can't tell me that saying all that stuff about relatives isn't going funny in the head."

'She didn't say that,' said Nanny. 'She said she wanted to relate to herself.'

'That's what I said,' said Granny Weatherwax. 'I told her: Simplicity Garlick was your mother, Araminta Garlick was your granny. Yolande Garlick is your aunt and you're your . , . you're your me.'

She sat back with the satisfied look of someone who has solved everything anyone could ever want to know about a personal identity crisis.

'She wouldn't listen,' she added.

Gammer Brevis wrinkled her forehead.

'Magrat?' she said. She tried to get a mental picture of the Ramtops' youngest witch and recalled - well, not a face, just a slightly watery-eyed expression of hopeless goodwill wedged between a body like a maypole and hair like a haystack after a gale. A relentless doer of good works. A worrier. The kind of person who rescued small lost baby birds and cried when they died, which is the function kind old Mother Nature usually reserves for small lost baby birds.

'Doesn't sound like her,' she said.

'And she said she wanted to be more self-assertive,' said Granny.

'Nothing wrong with being self-assertive,' said Nanny. 'Self-asserting's what witching's all about.'

'I never said there was anything wrong with it,' said Granny. 'I told her there was nothing wrong with it. You can be as self-assertive as you like, I said, just so long as you do what you're told.'

'Rub this on and it'll clear up in a week or two,' said Old Mother Dismass.

The other three witches watched her expectantly, in case there was going to be anything else. It became clear that there wasn't.

'And she's running - what's that she's running, Gytha?' said Granny. •

'Self-defence classes,' said Nanny.

'But she's a witch,' Gammer Brevis pointed out.

'I told her that,' said Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was. 'She said that wasn't the point. Wasn't the point. That's what she said.'

'No-one goes to them, anyway,' said Nanny Ogg.

'I thought she was going to get married to the king,' said Gammer Brevis.

'Everyone did,' said Nanny. 'But you know Magrat. She tends to be open to Ideas. Now she says she refuses to be a sex object.'