Witches Abroad

wheel at the bottom of all this, you mark my words.”
    “A Black Aliss job?” said Nanny Ogg.
    “Looks like it,” said Granny. Then she added, quietly, “Or someone like her.”
    “Now there was a witch who knew how stories worked,” said Nanny. “She used to be in as many as three of ’em at once.”
    Even Magrat knew about Black Aliss. She was said to have been the greatest witch who ever lived—not exactly bad , but so powerful it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. When it came to sending palaces to sleep for a hundred years or getting princesses to spin straw into Glod, * no one did it better than Black Aliss.
    “I met her once,” said Nanny, as they climbed the castle’s main staircase, which was a cascade of Old Man’s Trousers. “Old Deliria Skibbly took me to see her once, when I was a girl. Of course, she was getting pretty…eccentric by then. Gingerbread houses, that kind of thing.” She spoke sadly, as one might talk about an elderly relative who’d taken to wearing her underwear outside her clothes.
    “That must have been before those two children shut her up in her own oven?” said Magrat, untangling her sleeve from a briar.
    “Yeah. Sad, that. I mean, she didn’t really ever eat anyone,” said Nanny. “Well. Not often. I mean, there was talk, but…”
    “That’s what happens,” said Granny. “You get too involved with stories, you get confused. You don’t know what’s really real and what isn’t. And they get you in the end. They send you weird in the head. I don’t like stories. They’re not real. I don’t like things that ain’t real.”
    She pushed open a door.
    “Ah. A chamber,” she said sourly. “Could even be a bower.”
    “Doesn’t the stuff grow quickly!” said Magrat.
    “Part of the time spell,” said Granny. “Ah. There she is. Knew there’d be someone somewhere.”
    There was a figure lying on a bed, in a thicket of rose bushes.
    “And there’s the spinning wheel,” said Nanny, pointing to a shape just visible in a clump of ivy.
    “Don’t touch it!” said Granny.
    “Don’t worry, I’ll pick it up by the treadle and pitch it out of the window.”
    “How do you know all this?” said Magrat.
    “’Cos it’s a rural myth,” said Nanny. “It’s happened lots of times.”
    Granny Weatherwax and Magrat looked down at the sleeping figure of a girl of about thirteen, almost silvery under the dust and pollen.
    “Isn’t she pretty,” sighed Magrat, the generous-hearted.
    From behind them came the crash of a spinning wheel on some distant cobbles, and then Nanny Ogg appeared, brushing her hands.
    “Seen it happen a dozen times,” she said.
    “No you ain’t,” said Granny.
    “Once, anyway,” said Nanny, unabashed. “And I heard about it dozens of times. Everyone has. Rural myth, like I said. Everyone’s heard about it happening in their cousin’s friend’s neighbor’s village—”
    “That’s because it does,” said Granny.
    Granny picked up the girl’s wrist.
    “She’s asleep because she’ll have got a—” Nanny said.
    Granny turned.
    “I know, I know. I know, right? I know as well as you. You think I don’t know?” She bent over the limp hand. “That’s fairy godmothering, this is,” she added, half to herself. “Always do it impressively . Always meddling, always trying to be in control! Hah! Someone got a bit of poison? Send everyone to sleep for a hundred years! Do it the easy way. All this for one prick. As if that was the end of the world.” She paused. Nanny Ogg was standing behind her. There was no possible way she could have detected her expression. “Gytha?”
    “Yes, Esme?” said Nanny Ogg innocently.
    “I can feel you grinnin”. You can save the tu’penny-ha’penny psycholology for them as wants it.”
    Granny shut her eyes and muttered a few words.
    “Shall I use my wand?” said Magrat hesitantly.
    “Don’t you dare,” said Granny, and went back to her muttering.
    Nanny nodded. “She’s definitely getting a bit of color back,” she said.
    A few minutes later the girl opened her eyes and stared up blearily at Granny Weatherwax.
    “Time to get up,” said Granny, in an unusually cheerful voice, “you’re missing the best part of the decade.”
    The girl tried to focus on Nanny, then on Magrat, and then looked back at Granny Weatherwax.
    “You?” she said.
    Granny raised her eyebrows and looked at the other two.
    “Me?”
    “You are—still here?”
    “Still?” said