Witches Abroad

to move with the times.”
    “I don’t see why. Don’t see why we—”
    “So I reckon we got to shift the boundaries again,” said Gammer Brevis.
    “Can’t do that,” said Granny Weatherwax promptly. “I’m doing four villages already. The broomstick hardly has time to cool down.”
    “Well, with Mother Hollow passing on, we’re definitely short handed,” said Gammer Brevis. “I know she didn’t do a lot, what with her other work, but she was there. That’s what it’s all about. Being there. There’s got to be a local witch.”
    The four witches stared gloomily at the fire. Well, three of them did. Nanny Ogg, who tended to look on the cheerful side, made toast.
    “They’ve got a wizard in, down in Creel Springs,” said Gammer Brevis. “There wasn’t anyone to take over when old Granny Hopliss passed on, so they sent off to Ankh-Morpork for a wizard. An actual wizard. With a staff. He’s got a shop there and everything, with a brass sign on the door. It says ‘Wizard.’”
    The witches sighed.
    “Mrs. Singe passed on,” said Gammer Brevis. “And Gammer Peavey passed on.”
    “Did she? Old Mabel Peavey?” said Nanny Ogg, through a shower of crumbs. “How old was she?”
    “One hundred and nineteen,” said Gammer Brevis. “I said to her, ‘You don’t want to go climbing mountains at your age’ but she wouldn’t listen.”
    “Some people are like that,” said Granny. “Stubborn as mules. Tell them they mustn’t do something and they won’t stop till they’ve tried it.”
    “I actually heard her very last words,” said Gammer.
    “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