'That means lots of terrible happenings,' said Magrat. 'You always put that in plays.'
'Alarums and what?' said Nanny Ogg, who hadn't been listening.
'Excursions,' said Magrat patiently.
'Oh.' Nanny Ogg brightened a bit. 'The seaside would be nice,' she said.
'Do shut up, Gytha,' said Granny Weatherwax. 'They're not for you. They're only for divers, like it says. Probably so they can recover from all them alarums.'
'We can't let this happen,' said Magrat, quickly and loudly. 'If this gets about, witches'll always be old hags with green blusher.'
'And meddlin' in the affairs of kings,' said Nanny. 'Which we never do, as is well known.'
'It's not the meddlin' I object to,' said Granny Weatherwax, her chin on her hand. 'It's the evil meddling.'
'And the unkindness to animals,' muttered Magrat. 'All that stuff about eye of dog and ear of toad. No-one uses that kind of stuff.'
Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg carefully avoided one another's faces.
'Drabe!' said Nanny Ogg bitterly.
'Witches just aren't like that,' said Magrat. 'We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it's wicked of them to say we don't. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.'
The other two looked at her with a certain amount of surprised admiration. She blushed, although not greenly, and looked at her knees.
'Goodie Whemper did a recipe,' she confessed. 'It's quite easy. What you do is, you get some lead, and you—'
'I don't think that would be appropriate,' said Granny carefully, after a certain amount of internal struggle. 'It could give people the wrong idea.'
'But not for long,' said Nanny wistfully.
'No, we can't be having with that sort of thing,' said Granny, a little more firmly this time. 'We'd never hear the last of it.'
'Why don't we just change the words?' said Magrat. 'When they come back on stage we could just put the 'fluence on them so they forget what they're saying, and give them some new words.'
'I suppose you're an expert at theatre words?' said Granny sarcastically. 'They'd have to be the proper sort, otherwise people would suspect.'
'Shouldn't be too difficult,' said Nanny Ogg dismissively. 'I've been studyin' it. You go tumpty-tumpty-tumpty.'
Granny gave this some consideration.
'There's more to it than that, I believe,' she said. 'Some of those speeches were very good. I couldn't understand hardly any of it.'
'There's no trick to it at all,' Nanny Ogg insisted. 'Anyway, half of them are forgetting their lines as it is. It'll be easy.'
'We could put words in their mouths?' said Magrat.
Nanny Ogg nodded. 'I don't know about new words,' she said. 'But we can make them forget these words.'
They both looked at Granny Weatherwax. She shrugged.
'I suppose it's worth a try,' she conceded.
'Witches as yet unborn will thank us for it,' said Magrat ardently.
'Oh, good,' said Granny.
'At last! What are you three playing at? We've been looking for you everywhere!'