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My thanks to the people who showed ine I can best repay their kindness by nottheir names here The wind howled The stors like an old et an elusive blackberry pip out of his false teeth A furze bushes a fire blazed, the flausts An eldritch voice shrieked: 'When shall wetwoain?' Thunder rolled A rather o and shout that for? You ain 'Sorry, Es it foryou knowold tih'

'I'd just got it nice and brown, too'

'Sorry'

'Anyway, you didn't have to shout'

'Sorry'

'I mean, I ain't deaf You could've just asked me in a normal voice And I'd have said, “Next Wednesday” '

'Sorry, Esme'

'Just you cut rat, cut Granny anooh Mind wandering there for a minute I'll do itinto the fire There was no sound for a while but the roar of the wind and the sound of Nanny Ogg cutting bread, which she did with about asto chainsaw aup here,' she said after a while 'Really' It wasn't a question 'Take you out of yourself, sort of thing' Nanny went on, watching her friend carefully 'M ht Nanny I shouldn't've said that The point waswell, the point was that Nanny Ogg orried Very worried She wasn't at all sure that her friend wasn'twellgoingwell, sort ofin awellblackShe knew it happened, with the really powerful ones And Granny Weatheras pretty damn' powerful She was probably an even more accomplished witch now than the infamous Black Aliss, and everyone knehat had happened to her at the finish

Pushed into her own stove by a couple of kids, and everyone said it was a da, even if it took a whole week to clean the oven But Aliss, up until that terrible day, had terrorized the Raic that there wasn't roo else They said weapons couldn't pierce her Swords bounced off her skin They said you could hear her hter was always part of a witch's stock-in-trade in necessary circuhter, the worst kind And she turned people into gingerbread and had a house s It had been very nasty, towards the end It alhen a witch went bad Soo bad They just wentso to do She did not take kindly to boredom She'd take to her bed instead and send her , inside the head of so with its eyes That was all very well for general purposes, but she was too good at it She could stay away longer than anyone Nanny Ogg had ever heard of One day, almost certainly, she wouldn't bother to come backand this was the worst ti across the sky every night, and the autu terribly te reckoned she knehat the cause of the problerat the other day,' she ventured, looking sidelong at Granny There was no reaction 'She's looking well Queening suits her'

'Hroaned inwardly If Granny couldn't even be bothered to rat Nanny Ogg had never believed it at the start, but Magrat Garlick, wet as a sponge though she was half the ti Three was a natural number for witches And they'd lost one Well, not lost, exactly Magrat was queen now, and queens were hard to mislay Butthat meant that there were only two of them instead of three When you had three, you had one to run around getting people to ood for that Without Magrat, Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax got on one another's nerves With her, all three had been able to get on the nerves of absolutely everyone else in the whole world, which had been a lot rat backat least, to be precise about it, there was no having Magrat back yet Because, while three was a good nuht sort of three The right sort oftypes Nanny Ogg found herself embarrassed even to think about this, and this was unusual because embarrassment normally came as naturally to Nanny as altruism comes to a cat As a witch, she naturally didn't believe in any occult nonsense of any sort But there were one or two truths down below the bedrock of the soul which had to be faced, and right in a them was this business of, well, of the maiden, the mother and theother one There She'd put words around it

Of course, it was nothing but an old superstition and belonged to the unenlightened days when 'maiden' or 'mother' orthe other oneencoe of twelve or so, except ht enough to count and sensible enough to take Nanny's advice could put off being at least one of them for quite some time Even soit was an old superstition-older than books, older than writing-and beliefs like that were heavy weights on the rubber sheet of hu to pull people into their orbit And Magrat had been ht to ory At least- Nanny twitched her train of thought on to a branch line-she probably was Oh, surely Young Verence had sent off for a helpful manual It had pictures in it, and numbered parts Nanny knew this because she had sneaked into the royal bedroo one day, and had spent an instructive ten ures Surely even Magrat and Verence could hardly fail toNo, they h Nanny had heard that Verence had been seen enquiring of people where hebefore Magrat was eligible for the second category, even if they were both slow readers Of course, Granny Weatherwax reat play of her independence and self-reliance But the point about that kind of stuff was that you needed someone around to be proudly independent and self-reliant at People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people It was like herers off on top of so with the Infinite unless you could rely on a lot of i occasionally and say 'Gosh'

They needed to be three again Things got exciting, when there were three of you There were rows, and adventures, and things for Granny to get angry about, and she was only happy when she was angry In fact, it seery Yes They needed to be three Or elseit was going to be grey wings in the night, or the clang of the oven doorThe er picked it up It wasn't even on proper paper It had been written on old sugar bags, and the backs of envelopes, and bits of out-of-date calendar He grunted, and grabbed a handful of the ht his eye He read it, and his eye was dragged to the end of the sentence Then he read to the end of the page, doubling back a few times because he hadn't quite believed what he'd just read He turned the page And then he turned back And then he read on At one point he took a ruler out of his drawer and looked at it thoughtfully He opened his drinks cabinet The bottle tinkled cheerfully on the edge of the glass as he tried to pour himself a drink Then he stared out of theat the Opera House on the other side of the road A s the steps And then he said, 'Oh, my' Finally he went to the door and said, 'Could you co a sheaf of proofs 'We're going to have to get Mr Cripslock to engrave page 11 again,' he said mournfully 'He's spelled “famine” with seven letters-'

'Read this,' said Goatberger 'I was just off to lunch-'

'Read this'

'Guild agreement says-'