'We've got to do something,' said Magrat, her voice choked with emotion. 'Rules or no rules!'
'It's very vexing,' said Granny, quietly.
'Yes, but what are you going to do?' she said.
'Reflect on things,' said Granny. 'Think about it all.'
'You've been thinking about it for a year,' Magrat said.
'One what? Are one what?' said Nanny Ogg.
'It's no good just reacting,' said Granny. 'You've got to—'
A cart came bouncing and rumbling along the track from Lancre. Granny ignored it.
'—give these things careful consideration.'
'You don't know what to do, do you?' said Magrat.
'Nonsense. I—'
'There's a cart coming, Granny.'
Granny Weatherwax shrugged. 'What you youngsters don't realise—' she began.
Witches never bothered with elementary road safety. Such traffic as there was on the roads of Lancre either went around them or, if this was not possible, waited until they moved out of the way. Granny Weatherwax had grown up knowing this for a fact; the only reason she didn't die knowing that it wasn't was that Magrat, with rather better reflexes, dragged her into the ditch.
It was an interesting ditch. There were jiggling corkscrew things in it which were direct descendants of things which had been in the primordial soup of creation. Anyone who thought that ditchwater was dull could have spent an instructive half-hour in that ditch with a powerful microscope. It also had nettles in it, 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 on to 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 any more, 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 towards 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.