Tear Jerker / Wintersmith

• In the opening scene, Tiffany's fear for the lambs that are dying under the snowdrifts, as exhausted men labor to move snow they have nowhere to put. Her father, begging her to do something beyond her powers to fix a disaster she knows is all her fault. And then he tells her that her little brother is missing...
  • As the fire Tiffany is using to melt the snow runs out of fuel, her father goes to throw himself in the fire. Fortunately the others were ready and held him back.
• Annagramma, "leader" of a coven of young witches, is handed a cottage in a steading she is wholly incapable of managing, as part of Granny Weatherwax's Batman Gambit to discredit a rival witch. After Annagramma comes to Tiffany, our heroine decides to talk to the other members of the coven and convince them all to pull together and help out, to Annagramma's shock.
  "They probably will help," said Tiffany. "It won't look good if one of us fails."
  To her amazement, the girl was really crying. "It's just that I didn't really think they were my friends..."
  • What's even sadder is that she was right. None of those girls really were her friends; they just feared how she'd act if they didn't pretend to be. They all hate her. Come to think of it, does anyone truly like her?
• The part where the townspeople are still asking Miss Treason for help even after she's dead.
  And just as she was about to speak sharply to the villagers for still bothering Miss Treason, she remembered the packets of Jolly Sailor tobacco that the shepherds even now left on the turf where the old shepherding hut had been. They didn't write their petitions down, but they were there, all the same, floating in the air:
  Granny Aching, who herds the clouds in the blue sky, please watch my sheep. Granny Aching, cure my son. Granny Aching, find my lambs.
  • One of the notes left at Miss Treason's grave:
    Miss Treason please find our Girl Becky what run away Im sorry.
• Tiffany, in the final confrontation with the Wintersmith, realizes that he does think like a human. "He thinks like a human who's never met another human. He's cackling. He's so mad he will never, ever understand how mad he is, he doesn't know what horrors he's planning, and he's so happy he's almost sweet ..."
  She'd cry, later, for the Wintersmith who wanted to be human.
• Rob Anybody reads Where's My Cow? to his children. The idea of Where's My Cow? as a metaphor for going to extremes to be a good father...
• A book-long one which lingers for the rest of the series: Tiffany didn't just ruin this winter, but every winter that will ever come after it for her, the Achings, and the Chalk. Now every time the first snow falls on her country again, it will carry within it a memory of death and destruction. And it wouldn't be so unbearable if it weren't her fault.
  • And the fact that it's her fault wouldn't be so unbearable if Tiffany weren't Tiffany. If she isn't a protector, she's someone else; she isn't her. That part of her identity was so powerful it helped her stand against anything. Now that protector is responsible, accidentally but still responsible, for the deaths of innocent lives.