Oh dear, thought Nanny. I shouldn't've said that.

The point was... well, the point was that Nanny Ogg was worried. Very worried. She wasn't at all sure that her friend wasn't... well... going... well, sort of... in a manner of speaking... well... black...

She knew it happened, with the really powerful ones. And Granny Weatherwax was pretty damn' powerful. She was probably an even more accomplished witch now than the infamous Black Aliss, and everyone knew what had happened to her at the finish. Pushed into her own stove by a couple of kids, and everyone said it was a damn' good thing, even if it took a whole week to clean the oven.

But Aliss, up until that terrible day, had terrorized the Ramtops. She'd become so good at magic that there wasn't room in her head for anything else.

They said weapons couldn't pierce her. Swords bounced off her skin. They said you could hear her mad laughter a mile off, and of course, while mad laughter was always part of a witch's stock‑in‑trade in necessary circumstances, this was insane mad laughter, the worst kind. And she turned people into gingerbread and had a house made of frogs. It had been very nasty, towards the end. It always was, when a witch went bad.

Sometimes, of course, they didn't go bad. They just went... somewhere.

Granny's intellect needed something to do. She did not take kindly to boredom. She'd take to her bed instead and send her mind out Borrowing, inside the head of some forest creature, listening with its ears, seeing 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 back... and this was the worst time of the year, with the geese honking and rushing across the sky every night, and the autumn air crisp and inviting. There was something terribly tempting about that.