Lords and Ladies

bats always faces the same way. Tried rabbits first off, but you know what they are for remembering things. Anyway, you know what they thinks about the whole time. They’re famous for it.”
    “Grass.”
    “Right.”
    “Find out anything?” said Nanny.
    “Half a dozen people have been going up there. Every full moon!” said Granny. “Gels, by the shape of them. You only see silhouettes, with bats.”
    “You done well there,” said Nanny, carefully. “Girls from round here, you reckon?”
    “Got to be. They ain’t using broomsticks.”
    Nanny Ogg sighed.
    “There’s Agnes Nitt, old Threepenny’s daughter,” she said. “And the Tockley girl. And some others.”
    Granny Weatherwax looked at her with her mouth open.
    “I asked our Jason,” she said. “Sorry.”
    The bat burped. Granny genteelly covered her hand with her mouth.
    “I’m a silly old fool, ain’t I?” she said, after a while.
    “No, no,” said Nanny. “Borrowing’s a real skill. You’re really good at it.”
    “Prideful, that’s what I am. Once upon a time I’d of thought of asking people, too, instead of fooling around being a bat.”
    “Our Jason wouldn’t have told you. He only told me ’cos I would’ve made ’is life a living hell if he didn’t,” said Nanny Ogg. “That’s what a mother’s for.”
    “I’m losing my touch, that’s what it is. Getting old, Gytha.”
    “You’re as old as you feel, that’s what I always say.”
    “That’s what I mean.”
    Nanny Ogg looked worried.
    “Supposing Magrat’d been here,” said Granny. “She’d see me being daft.”
    “Well, she’s safe in the castle,” said Nanny. “Learning how to be queen.”
    “At least the thing about queening,” said Granny, “is that no one notices if you’re doing it wrong. It has to be right ’cos it’s you doing it.”
    “S’funny, royalty,” said Nanny. “It’s like magic. You take some girl with a bum like two pigs in a blanket and a head full of air and then she marries a king or a prince or someone and suddenly she’s this radiant right royal princess. It’s a funny old world.”
    “I ain’t going to kowtow to her, mind,” said Granny.
    “You never kowtow to anyone anyway,” said Nanny Ogg patiently. “You never bowed to the old king. You barely gives young Verence a nod. You never kowtows to anyone ever, anyway.”
    “That’s right!” said Granny. “That’s part of being a witch, that is.”
    Nanny relaxed a bit. Granny being an old woman made her uneasy. Granny in her normal state of barely controlled anger was far more her old self.
    Granny stood up.
    “Old Tockley’s girl, eh?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Her mother was a Keeble, wasn’t she? Fine woman, as I recall.”
    “Yeah, but when she died the old man sent her off to Sto Lat to school.”
    “Don’t hold with schools,” said Granny Weatherwax. “They gets in the way of education. All them books. Books? What good are they? There’s too much reading these days. We never had time to read when we was young, I know that.”
    “We were too busy makin’ our own entertainment.”
    “Right. Come on—we ain’t got much time.”
    “What d’you mean?”
    “It’s not just the girls. There’s something out there, too. Some kind of mind, movin’ around.”
    Granny shivered. She’d been aware of it in the same way that a skilled hunter, moving through the hills, is aware of another hunter—by the silences where there should have been noise, by the trampling of a stem, by the anger of the bees.
    Nanny Ogg had never liked the idea of Borrowing, and Magrat had always refused even to give it a try. The old witches on the other side of the mountain had too much trouble with inconvenient in-body experiences to cope with the out-of-body kind. So Granny was used to having the mental dimension to herself.
    There was a mind moving around in the kingdom, and Granny Weatherwax didn’t understand it.
    She Borrowed. You had to be careful. It was like a drug. You could ride the minds of animals and birds, but never bees, steering them gently, seeing through their eyes. Granny Weatherwax had many times flicked through the channels of consciousness around her. It was, to her, part of the heart of witchcraft. To see through other eyes…
    …through the eyes of gnats, seeing the slow patterns of time in the fast pattern of one day, their minds traveling rapidly as lightning…
    …to listen with the body of a beetle, so that the world is a