Once More With Footnotes

Ogg didn't often swear, or at least use words beyond the boundaries of what the Lancrastrians thought of as "colourful language." She looked as if she habitually used bad words, and had just thought up a good one, but mostly witches are quite careful about what they say. You can never be sure what the words are going to do when they're out of earshot. But now she swore und er her breath and caused small brief fires to start in the dry grass.
     
                  This put her in just about the right frame of mind for the Cursing.
     
                  It was said that once upon a time this had been done on a living, breathing subject, at least at the start of the event, but that wasn't right for a family day out and for several hundred years the Curses had been directed at Unlucky Charlie, who was, however you looked at it, nothing more than a scarecrow. And since curses are generally directed at the mind of the c u rsed, this presented a major problem, because even, "May your straw go moldy and your carrot fall off," didn't make much impression on a pumpkin. But points were given for general style and inventiveness.
     
                  There wasn't much pressure for those in any case. Everyone knew what event counted, and it wasn't Unlucky Charlie.
     
                  One year Granny Weatherwax had made the pumpkin explode. No one had ever worked out how she'd done it.
     
                  Someone would walk away at the end of today and everyone would know that person was the winner, whatever the points said. You could win the Witch with the Pointiest Hat prize and the broomstick dressage, but that was just for the audience. What counted was the Trick you'd been working on all summer.
     
                  Nanny had drawn last place, at numbe r nineteen. A lot of witches had turned up this year. News of Granny Weatherwax's withdrawal had got around, and nothing moves faster than news in the occult community, since it doesn't just have to travel at ground level. Many pointy hats moved and nodde d among the crowds.
     
                  Witches are among themselves generally as sociable as cats but, as also with cats, there are locations and times and neutral grounds where they meet at something like peace. And what was going on was a sort of slow, complicated dance ...
     
                  The witches walked around saying hello to one another, and rushing to meet newcomers, and innocent bystanders might have believed that here was a meeting of old friends. Which, at one level, it probably was. But Nanny watched through a witch's eyes, a nd saw the subtle positioning, the careful weighing-up, the little changes of stance, the eye contact finely tuned by intensity and length.
     
                  And when a witch was in the arena, especially if she was comparatively unknown, all the others found some excuse t o keep an eye on her, preferably without appearing to do so.
     
                  It was like watching cats. Cats spend a lot of time carefully eyeing one another. When they have to fight, that's merely to rubber-stamp something that's already been decided in their heads.
     
                  Nanny knew all this. And she also knew most of the witches to be kind (on the whole), gentle (to the meek), generous (to the deserving; the undeserving got more than they bargained for), and by and large quite dedicated to a life that really offered more k icks than kisses. Not one of them lived in a house made of confectionery, although some of the conscientious younger ones had experimented with various crisp breads. Even children who deserved it were not slammed into their ovens. Generally they did what t hey'd always done — smooth the passage of their neighbors into and out of the world, and help them over some of the nastier hurdles in between.
     
                  You needed to be a special kind of person to do that. You needed a special kind of ear, because you saw people i n circumstances where they were inclined to tell you things, like where the money is buried or who the father was or how come they'd got a black eye again. And you needed a special kind of mouth, the sort that stayed shut. Keeping secrets made you powerfu l . Being powerful earned you respect. Respect was hard currency.
     
                  And within this sisterhood — except that it wasn't a sisterhood, it