Equal Rites recap

A dying wizard passes his staff and power to what he believes is the eighth son of an eighth son in a small mountain village, only for the newborn to be a girl, Eskarina Smith. Since custom holds that women can only be witches and men only wizards, Esk's wizardly gift is treated as impossible. The village witch, Granny Weatherwax, tries to raise her as a witch, but the wizard magic keeps breaking loose. Granny finally takes Esk to the Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork and demands she be admitted, only to be turned away because she is a girl. At the University Esk befriends Simon, a brilliant but sickly student whose powerful theoretical magic accidentally opens the way to the Dungeon Dimensions, letting alien creatures reach toward the world. Esk is drawn into that other realm to save him. Combining witch sense with wizard power, she and Granny pull Simon back and drive the creatures off. In the aftermath the rigid line between the two kinds of magic begins to soften, and the University edges toward admitting women.

In the Ramtop mountains of the Discworld, tradition holds that magic is divided by sex: men become wizards, trained at the Unseen University, while women become witches, working alone in their villages. A dying wizard named Drum Billet travels to the small village of Bad Ass to give his staff and power to the eighth son of an eighth son, as custom demands. He hands the gift to a newborn child, only to discover too late that the baby is a girl, Eskarina Smith. The village witch, Granny Weatherwax, foresees that this is going to cause trouble, because a girl with a wizard's staff is something the world is not supposed to allow. As Esk grows, her inherited magic begins to surface in ways that fit neither the witch's craft Granny knows nor anything the mountains have seen before.

Simon's gift for magical theory grows so strong that it draws the attention of the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, mindless entities that hunger to invade the world through the openings his thinking creates. When his magic pulls him into that cold, formless other place, Esk follows to bring him back, using her own staff and the connection between them. Granny Weatherwax reaches them by borrowing her way into the University and lending Esk her strength. Working together, Esk's instinctive witch craft and Simon's raw power drive the invaders back and close the breach. Both children survive, changed by the experience. The confrontation forces the wizards to recognize that the strict division of magic by sex is neither natural nor safe: Esk has done what no rule said she could. The story closes with the barrier between wizardry and witchcraft cracked open, Esk accepted as something new, and the way cleared for women to be taught at the University at last.