Wyrd Sisters

and now it had Granny Weatherwax.
    She struggled up through the weeds, incoherent with rage, and rose from the ditch like Venus Anadyomene, only older and with more duckweed.
    “T-t-t,” she said, pointing a shaking finger at the disappearing cart.
    “It was young Nesheley from over Inkcap way,” said Nanny Ogg, from a nearby bush. “His family were always a bit wild. Of course, his mother was a Whipple.”
    “He ran us down!” said Granny.
    “You could have got out of the way,” said Magrat.
    “ Get out of the way ?” said Granny. “We’re witches! People get out of our way!” She squelched onto the track, her finger still pointing at the distant cart. “By Hoki, I’ll make him wish he’d never been born—”
    “He was quite a big baby, I recall,” said the bush. “His mother had a terrible time.”
    “It’s never happened to me before, ever,” said Granny, still twanging like a bowstring. “I’ll teach him to run us down as though, as though, as though we was ordinary people!”
    “He already knows,” said Magrat. “Just help me get Nanny out of this bush, will you?”
    “I’ll turn his—”
    “People haven’t got any respect anymore, that’s what it is,” said Nanny, as Magrat helped her with the thorns. “It’s all due to the king being one, I expect.”
    “We’re witches!” screamed Granny, turning her face toward the sky and shaking her fists.
    “Yes, yes,” said Magrat. “The harmonious balance of the universe and everything. I think Nanny’s a bit tired.”
    “What’ve I been doing all this time?” said Granny, with a rhetorical flourish that would have made even Vitoller gasp.
    “Not a lot,” said Magrat.
    “Laughed at! Laughed at! On my own roads! In my own country!” screamed Granny. “That just about does it! I’m not taking ten more years of this! I’m not taking another day of it!”
    The trees around her began to sway and the dust from the road sprang up into writhing shapes that tried to swirl out of her way. Granny Weatherwax extended one long arm and at the end of it unfolded one long finger and from the tip of its curving nail there was a brief flare of octarine fire.
    Half a mile down the track all four wheels fell off the cart at once.
    “Lock up a witch, would he?” Granny shouted at the trees.
    Nanny struggled to her feet.
    “We’d better grab her,” she whispered to Magrat. The two of them leapt at Granny and forced her arms down to her sides.
    “I’ll bloody well show him what a witch could do!” she yelled.
    “Yes, yes, very good, very good ,” said Nanny. “Only perhaps not just now and not just like this, eh?”
    “Wyrd sisters, indeed!” Granny yelled. “I’ll make his—”
    “Hold her a minute, Magrat,” said Nanny Ogg, and rolled up her sleeve.
    “It can be like this with the highly-trained ones,” she said, and brought her plam around in a slap that lifted both witches off their feet. On such a flat, final note the universe might have ended.
    At the conclusion of the breathless silence which followed Granny Weatherwax said, “Thank you.”
    She adjusted her dress with some show of dignity, and added, “But I meant it. We’ll meet tonight at the stone and do what must be done. Ahem.”
    She reset the pins in her hat and set off unsteadily in the direction of her cottage.
    “Whatever happened to the rule about not meddling in politics?” said Magrat, watching her retreating back.
    Nanny Ogg massaged some life back into her fingers.
    “By Hoki, that woman’s got a jaw like an anvil,” she said. “What was that?”
    “I said, what about this rule about not meddling?” said Magrat.
    “Ah,” said Nanny. She took the girl’s arm. “The thing is,” she explained, “as you progress in the Craft, you’ll learn there is another rule. Esme’s obeyed it all her life.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “When you break rules, break ’em good and hard,” said Nanny, and grinned a set of gums that were more menacing than teeth.

    The duke smiled out over the forest.
    “It works,” he said. “The people mutter against the witches. How do you do it, Fool?”
    “Jokes, nuncle. And gossip. People are halfway ready to believe it anyway. Everyone respects the witches. The point is that no one actually likes them very much.”
    Friday afternoon, he thought. I’ll have to get some flowers. And my best suit, the one with the silver bells. Oh gosh.
    “This is very pleasing. If it goes on like this, Fool, you shall