"Agnes Nitt," said Agnes, who was much faster on the uptake than the other two and saw that there was no point in pushing Perdita.

"Go on, then. Try."

Agnes concentrated.

"Oh, deary, deary me," said Granny. "And my hat's still on. Show them, Gytha."

Nanny Ogg sighed, picked up a piece of fallen branch, and hurled it at Granny's hat. Granny caught the stick in mid-air.

"But, but – you said we had to use magic-" Amanita began.

"No, I didn't," said Granny.

"But anyone could have done that," said Magenta. ' "Yes, but that's not the point," said Granny. "The point is that you didn't." She smiled, which was unusual for her. "Look, I don't want to be nasty to you. You're young. The world's full of things you could be doing. You don't want to be witches. Not if you knew what it means. Now just go away. Go home. Don't try the paranormal until you know what's normal. Go on. Run along."

"But that's just trickery! That's what Diamanda said! You just use words and trickery-" Magenta protested.

Granny raised a hand.

In the trees, the birds stopped singing.

"Gytha?"

Nanny Ogg gripped her own hat brim defensively.

"Esme, listen, this hat cost me two whole dollars-"

The boom echoed through the woods.

Bits of hat lining zigzagged gently out of the sky.

Granny pointed her finger at the girls, who tried to lean out of the way.

"Now," she said, "why don't you go and see to your friend? She was beat. She probably ain't very happy. That's no time to go leaving people."

They still stared at her. Her finger seemed to fascinate them.

"I just asked you to go home. Perfectly reasonable voice. Do you want me to shout?"

They turned and ran.

Nanny Ogg glumly pushed her hand through the stricken hat brim.

"It took me ages to get that pig cure together," she mumbled. "You need eight types of leaves. Willow leaves, tansy leaves, Old Man's Trousers leaves . . . I was collecting 'em all day. It's not as though leaves grow on trees-"

Granny Weatherwax watched the disappearing girls.

Nanny Ogg paused. Then she said: "Takes you back, eh? I remember when I was fifteen, standing in front of old Biddy Spective, and she said in that voice of hers, 'You want to be a what and I was that frightened I near widd-"

"I never stood in front of no one," said Granny Weatherwax distantly. "I camped on old Nanny Gripes' garden until she promised to tell me everything she knew. Hah. That took her a week and I had the afternoons free."

"You mean you weren't Chosen?"

"Me? No. I chose," said Granny. The face she turned to Nanny Ogg was one she wouldn't forget in a hurry, although she might try. "I chose, Gytha Ogg. And I want that you should know this right now. Whatever happens. I ain't never regretted anything. Never regretted one single thing. Right?"

"If you say so, Esme."

What is magic?

There is the wizards' explanation, which comes in two forms, depending on the age of the wizard. Older wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes, and the importance of having at least four good meals every day. Younger wizards, particularly the pale ones who spend most of their time in the High Energy Magic building[18], chatter at length about fluxes in the morphic nature of the universe, the essentially impermanent quality of even the most apparently rigid time-space framework, the implausibility of reality, and so on: what this means is that they have got hold of something hot and are gabbling the physics as they go along . . .

It was almost midnight. Diamanda ran up the hill toward the Dancers, the briars and heather tearing at her dress. The humiliation banged back and forth in her skull. Stupid malicious old women! And stupid people, too! She'd won. According to the rules, she'd won! But everyone had laughed at her.

That stung. The recollection of those stupid faces, all grinning. And everyone supporting those horrible old women, who had no idea about the meaning of witchcraft and what it could become.

She'd show them.

Ahead of her, the Dancers were dark against the moonlit clouds.

Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.

She was going to have an early night. It had been a busy day

There was a jar of boiled sweets by her bed, and a thick glass bottle of the clear fluid from her complicated still out behind the woodshed. It wasn't exactly whiskey, and it wasn't exactly gin, but it was exactly 90° proof, and a great comfort during those worrying moments that sometimes occurred around 3 A.M. when you woke up and forgot who you were. After a glass of the clear liquid you still didn't remember who you were, but that was all right now because you were someone else anyway.

She plumped up the four pillows, kicked her fluffy slippers into the comer, and pulled the blankets over her head, creating a small, warm, and slightly rank cave. She sucked a boiled sweet; Nanny had only one tooth left, and that had taken all she could throw at it for many years, so a sweet at bedtime wasn't going to worry it much.

After a few seconds a sense of pressure on her feet indicated that the cat Greebo had taken up his accustomed place on the end of the bed. Greebo always slept on Nanny's bed; the way he'd affectionately try to claw your eyeballs out in the morning was as good as an alarm clock. But she always left a window open all night in case he wanted to go out and disembowel something, bless him.

Well, well. Elves. (They couldn't hear you say the word inside your head, anyway. At least, not unless they were real close.) She really thought they'd seen the last of them. How long was it, now? Must be hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe thousands. Witches didn't like to talk about it, because they'd made a big mistake about the elves. They'd seen through the buggers in the end, of course, but it had been a close thing. And there'd been a lot of witches in those days. They'd been able to stop them at every turn, make life in this world too hot for them. Fought them with iron. Nothing elvish could stand iron. It blinded them, or something. Blinded them all over.

There weren't many witches now. Not proper witches. More of a problem, though, was that people didn't seem to be able to remember what it was like with the elves around. Life was certainly more interesting then, but usually because it was shorter. And it was more colourful, if you liked the colour of blood. It got so people didn't even dare talk openly about the bastards.

You said: The Shining Ones. You said: The Fair Folk. And you spat, and touched iron. But generations later, you forgot about the spitting and the iron, and you forgot why you used those names for them, and you remembered only that they were beautiful.

Yes, there'd been a lot of witches in them days. Too many women found an empty cradle, or a husband that never came home from the hunt. Had been the hunt.

Elves! The bastards . . . and yet . . . and yet . . . somehow, yes, they did things to memory.

Nanny Ogg turned over in bed. Greebo growled in protest.

Take dwarfs and trolls, for e.g. People said: Oh, you can't trust 'em, trolls are OK if you've got 'em in front of you, and some of 'em are decent enough in their way, but they're cowardly and stupid, and as for dwarfs, well, they're greedy and devious devils, all right, fair enough, sometimes you meet one of the clever little sods that's not too bad, but overall they're no better'n trolls, in fact–