"Nothing."

"Really? Last week you went all the way up to the mountains above Copperhead to talk to the trolls. What did you want from them?"

The girl put her head on one side.

"How do you know I did that?"

"It's at the top of your mind, girl. Anyone could see it. Anyone with . . . good sight."

"I shall be able to do that one day," said the girl smugly.

"Who knows? Possibly. What did you want from the trolls?"

"I . . . wanted to talk to them. D'you know they think time goes backward? Because you can see the past, they say, and-"

The woman in the circle laughed.

"But they are like the stupid dwarfs! All they are interested in is pebbles. There is nothing of interest in pebbles."

The girl gives a kind of one-shoulder uni-shrug, as if indicating that pebbles may be full of quiet interest.

"Why can't you come out from between the stones?"

There was a distinct impression that this was the wrong question to have asked. The woman carefully ignored it.

"I can help you find far more than pebbles," she said.

"You can't come out of the circle, can you?"

"Let me give you what you want."

"I can go anywhere, but you're stuck in the circle," said the girl.

"Can you go anywhere?"

"When I am a witch I shall be able to go anywhere."

"But you'll never be a witch."

"What?"

"They say you won't listen. They say you can't keep your temper. They say you have no discipline."

The girl tossed her hair. "Oh, you know that too, do you? Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? But I mean to be a witch whatever they say. You can find things out for yourself. You don't have to listen to a lot of daft old ladies who've never had a life. And, circle lady, I shall be the best witch there has ever been."

"With my help, I believe you may," said the woman in the circle. "Your young man is looking for you, I think," she added mildly

Another of those one-shoulder shrugs, indicating that the young man can go on looking all day.

"I will, will I?"

"You could be a great witch. You could be anything. Anything you want. Come into the circle. Let me show you."

The girl takes a few steps forward, and then hesitates. There is something about the woman's tone. The smile is pleasant and friendly, but there is something in the voice too desperate, too urgent, too hungry.

"But I'm learning a lot-"

"Step through the stones now!"

The girl hesitates again.

"How do I know-"

"Circle time is nearly over! Think of what you can learn! Now!"

"But-"

"Step through!"

But that was a long time ago, in the past[3]. And besides, the bitch is . . .

. . . older.

A land of ice . . .

Not winter, because that presumes an autumn and perhaps one day a spring. This is a land of ice, not just a time of ice.

And three figures on horseback, looking down the snow covered slope to a ring of eight stones. From this side they look much bigger.

You might watch the figures for some time before you realised what it was about them that was strange-stranger, that is, than their clothing. The hot breath of their horses hung in the freezing air. But the breath of the riders did not.

"And this time," said the figure in the centre, a woman in red, "there will be no defeat. The land will welcome us. It must hate humans now."

"But there were witches," said one of the other riders. "I remember the witches."

"Once, yes," said the woman. "But now . . . poor things, poor things. Scarce any power in them at all. And suggestible. Pliant minds. I have crept about, my deary. I have crept about o'nights. I know the witches they have now. Leave the witches to me."

"I remember the witches," said the third rider insistently. "Minds like . . . like metal."

"Not anymore. I tell you, leave them to me." The Queen smiled benevolently at the stone circle.

"And then you can have them," she said. "For me, I rather fancy a mortal husband. A special mortal. A union of the worlds. To show them that this time we mean to stay."

"The King will not like that."

"And when has that ever mattered?"

"Never, lady."

"The time is right, Lankin. The circles are opening. Soon we can return."

The second rider leaned on the saddlehorn.

"And I can hunt again," it said. "When? When?"

"Soon," said the Queen. "Soon."

It was a dark night, the kind of darkness which is not simply explainable by absence of moon or stars, but the darkness that appears to flow in from somewhere else-so thick and tangible that maybe you could snatch a handful of air and squeeze the night out of it.

It was the kind of darkness which causes sheep to leap fences and dogs to skulk in kennels.

Yet the wind was warm, and not so much strong as loud – it howled around the forests and wailed in chimneys.

On nights like this, normal people would pull the covers over their head, sensing that there were times when the world belonged to something else. In the morning it would be human again; there would be fallen branches, a few tiles off the roof, but human. For now . . . better to snuggle down. .

But there was one man awake.

Jason Ogg, master blacksmith and farrier, pumped the bellows of his forge once or twice for the look of the thing, and sat down on his anvil again. It was always warm in the forge, even with the wind whistling around the eaves.

"He could shoe anything, could Jason Ogg. They'd brought him an ant once, for a joke, and he'd sat up all night with a magnifying glass and an anvil made out of the head of a pin. The ant was still around, somewhere-some-times he could hear it clatter across the floor.

But tonight. . . well, tonight, in some way, he was going to pay the rent. Of course, he owned the forge. It had been passed down for generations. But there was more to a forge than bricks and mortar and iron. He couldn't put a name to it, but it was there. It was the difference between being a master farrier and just someone who bent iron in complicated ways for a living. And it had something to do with iron. And something to do with being allowed to be very good at his job. Some kind of rent.

One day his dad had taken him aside and explained what he had to do, on nights like this.

There'd be times, he said, there'd be times – and he'd know when they were without being told – there'd be times when someone would come with a horse to shoe. Make them welcome. Shoe the horse. Don't let your mind wander. And try not to think about anything except horseshoes.

He'd got quite used to it now.

The wind rose, and somewhere there was the creak of a tree going over.

The latch rattled.

Then there was a knock at the door. Once. Twice.

Jason Ogg picked up his blindfold and put it on. That was important, his dad had said. It saved you getting distracted.

He undid the door.

"Evening, m'lord," he said.

A WILD NIGHT.

He smelled wet horse as it was led into the forge, hooves clattering on the stones.

"There's tea brewing on the forge and our Dreen done us some biscuits in the tin with A Present from Ankh-Morpork on it."

THANK YOU. I TRUST YOU ARE WELL.

"Yes, m'lord. I done the shoes already. Won't hold you up long. I know you're . . . very busy, like."

He heard the click-click of footsteps cross the floor to the old kitchen chair reserved for customers, or at least for the owners of customers.

Jason had laid the tools and the horseshoes and the nails ready to hand on the bench beside the anvil. He wiped his hands on his apron, picked up a file, and set to work. He didn't like cold shoeing, but he'd shod horses ever since he was ten. He could do it by feel. He picked up a rasp and set to work.

And he had to admit it. It was the most obedient horse he'd ever encountered. Pity he'd never actually seen it. It'd be a pretty good horse, a horse like that. . .

His dad had said: don't try to sneak a look at it.

He heard the glug of the teapot and then the gling-glong sound of a spoon being stirred and then the clink as the spoon was laid down.

Never any sound, his dad had said. Except when he walks and talks, you'll never hear him make a sound. No smacking of lips, stuff like that.

No breathing.

Oh, and another thing. When you takes the old shoes off, don't chuck 'em in the comer for to go for melt with the other scrap. Keep 'em separate. Melt 'em separate. Keep a pot special for it, and make the new shoes out of that metal. Whatever else you do, never put that iron on another living thing.

In fact, Jason had saved one set of the old shoes for pitching contests at the various village fairs, and never lost when he used them. He won so often that it made him nervous, and now they spent most of their time hanging on a nail behind the door.

Sometimes the wind rattled the window frame, or made the coals crackle. A series of thumps and a squawk a little way off suggested that the chicken house at the end of the garden had parted company with the ground.

The customer's owner poured himself another cup of tea.

Jason finished one hoof and let it go. Then he held out his hand. The horse shifted its weight and raised the last hoof.

This was a horse in a million. Perhaps more.

Eventually, he had finished. Funny, that. It never seemed to take very long. Jason had no use for a clock, but he had a suspicion that a job which took the best part of an hour was at the same time over in a matter of minutes.

"There," he said. "Tis done."

THANK YOU. I MUST SAY THESE ARE VERY GOOD BISCUITS. HOW DO THEY GET THE BITS OF CHOCOLATE IN?

"Dunno, m'lord," said Jason, staring fixedly at the inside of his blindfold.

I MEAN, THE CHOCOLATE OUGHT TO MELT OUT WHEN THEY'RE BAKED. HOW DO THEY DO IT, DO YOU THINK?

"Tis probably a craft secret," said Jason. "I never asks that kind o'question."

GOOD MAN. VERY WISE. I MUST–

He had to ask, if only so's he'd always know that he had asked.

"M'lord?"

YES, MR. OGG?

"I 'as got one question . . ."

YES, MR. OGG?

Jason ran his tongue over his lips.

"If I were to . . . take the blindfold off, what'd I see?"

There. It was done now.

There was a clicking sound on the flagstones, and a change in the air movement which suggested to Jason that the speaker was now standing in front of him.

ARE YOU A MAN OF FAITH, MR. OGG?

Jason gave this some swift consideration. Lancre was not knee-deep in religions. There were the Nine Day Wonderers, and the Strict Offlians, and there were various altars to small gods of one sort or another, tucked away in distant clearings. He'd never really felt the need, just like the dwarfs. Iron was iron and fire was fire – start getting metaphysical and you were scraping your thumb on the bottom of your hammer.

WHAT DO YOU REALLY HAVE FAITH IN, RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT?

He's inches away, Jason thought. I could reach out and touch . . .

There was a smell. It wasn't unpleasant. It was hardly anything at all. It was the smell of air in old forgotten rooms. If centuries could smell, then old ones would smell like that.

MR. OGG?

Jason swallowed.

"Well, m'lord," he said, "right now . . . I really believe in this blindfold."

GOOD MAN. GOOD MAN. AND NOW . . . I MUST BE GOING.

Jason heard the latch lift. There was a thud as the doors scraped back, driven by the wind, and then there was the sound of hooves on the cobbles again.

YOUR WORK, AS ALWAYS, IS SUPERB.

"Thank you, m'lord."

I SPEAK AS ONE CRAFTSMAN TO ANOTHER.

"Thank you, m'lord."

WE WILL MEET AGAIN.

"Yes, m'lord."

WHEN NEXT MY HORSE NEEDS SHOEING.

"Yes, m'lord."

Jason closed the door and bolted it, although there was probably no point, when you thought about it.

But that was the bargain – you shod anything they brought to you, anything, and the payment was that your could shoe anything. There had always been a smith in Lancre, and everyone knew the smith in Lancre was a very powerful smith indeed.

It was an ancient bargain, and it had something to do with iron.

The wind slackened. Now it was a whisper around the horizons, as the sun rose.

This was the octarine grass country. Good growing country, especially for corn.

And here was a field of it, waving gently between the hedges. Not a big field. Not a remarkable one, really It was just a field with corn in it, except of course during the winter, when there were just pigeons and crows in it.

The wind dropped.

The corn still waved. They weren't the normal swells of the wind. They spread out from the centre of the field like ripples from a dropped stone.

The air sizzled and was filled with an angry buzzing.

Then, in the centre of the field, rustling as it bent, the young corn lay down.

In a circle.

And in the sky the bees swarmed and teemed, buzzing angrily.

It was a few weeks to midsummer. The kingdom of Lancre dozed in the heat, which shimmered on the forests and the fields.

Three dots appeared in the sky.

After a while, they became identifiable as three female figures on broomsticks, flying in a manner reminiscent of the famous three plaster flying ducks.

Observe them closely

The first one – let us call her the leader – flies sitting bolt upright, in defiance of air resistance, and seems to be winning. She has features that would generally be described as striking, or even handsome, but she couldn't be called beautiful, at least by anyone who didn't want their nose to grow by three feet.

The second is dumpy and bandy-legged with a face like an apple that's been left for too long and an expression of near-terminal good nature. She is playing a banjo and, until a better word comes to mind, singing. It is a song about a hedgehog.

Unlike the broomstick belonging to the first figure, which is more or less unburdened except for a sack or two, this one is over laden with things like fluffy purple toy donkeys, corkscrews in the shape of small boys urinating, bottles of wine in straw baskets, and other international cultural items. Nestling among them is the smelliest and most evil-minded cat in the world, currently asleep.

The third, and definitely the last, broomstick rider is also the youngest. Unlike the other two, who dress like ravens, she wears bright, cheerful clothes which don't suit her now and probably didn't even suit her ten years ago. She travels with an air of vague good-natured hopefulness. There are flowers in her hair but they're wilting slightly, just like her.

The three witches pass over the borders of Lancre, the kingdom, and very shortly afterward over the town of Lancre itself. They begin their descent over the moor lands beyond, eventually touching down near a standing stone which happens to mark the boundaries of their territories.

They're back.

And everything's all right again.

For about five minutes.

There was a badger in the privy.

Granny Weatherwax poked it with her broom until it got the message and lumbered off. Then she took down the key which hung on the nail beside the copy of last year's Almanack And Booke Of Dayes, and walked back up the path to her cottage.

A whole winter away! There'd be a lot to do. Go and pick the goats up from Mr. Skindle, get the spiders out of the chimney, fish the frogs out of the well, and generally get back into the business of minding everyone's business for them because there'd be no telling what business people'd get up to without a witch around . . .

"Excuse me," said Magrat. There were some things you had to be told.

"Yes?"

"I don't know what it means," said Magrat. "I mean, old Goodie Whemper-"

"-maysherestinpeace-" the older witches chorused.

"-told me once that the circles were dangerous, but she never said anything about why."

The older witches shared a glance.

"Never told you about the Dancers?" said Granny Weatherwax.

"Never told you about the Long Man?" said Nanny Ogg.

"What Dancers? You mean those old stones up on the moor?"

"All you need to know right now," said Granny Weatherwax, "is that we've got to put a stop to Them."

"What Them?"

Granny radiated innocence. . .

"The circles, of course," she said.

"Oh, no," said Magrat. "I can tell by the way you said it.

You said Them as though it was some sort of curse. It wasn't just a them, it was a them with a capital The."

The old witches looked awkward again.

"And who's the Long Man?" said Magrat.

"We do not," said Granny, "ever talk about the Long Man."

"No harm in telling her about the Dancers, at any rate," mumbled Nanny Ogg.

"Yes, but . . . you know . . . I mean . . . she's Magrat," said Granny.

"What's that meant to mean?" Magrat demanded.

"You probably won't feel the same way about Them, is what I am saying," said Granny.

"We're talking about the-" Nanny Ogg began.

"Don't name 'em!"

"Yeah, right. Sorry."

"Mind you, a circle might not find the Dancers," said Granny. "We can always hope. Could be just random."

"But if one opens up inside the-" said Nanny Ogg.

Magrat snapped.

"You just do this on purpose! You talk in code the whole time! You always do this! But you won't be able to when I'm queen\"

That stopped them.

Nanny Ogg put her head on one side.

"Oh?" she said. "Young Verence popped the question, then?"

"Yes!"

"When's the happy event?" said Granny Weatherwax, icily.

"Two weeks' time," said Magrat. "Midsummer Day."

"Bad choice, bad choice," said Nanny Ogg. "Shortest night o' the year-"

"Gytha Ogg!"

"And you'll be my subjects," said Magrat, ignoring this. "And you'll have to curtsy and everything!"

She knew as soon as she said it that it was stupid, but anger drove her on.

Granny Weatherwax's eyes narrowed.

"Hmm," she said. "We will, will we?"

"Yes, and if you don't," said Magrat, "you can get thrown in prison."

"My word," said Granny. "Deary deary me. I wouldn't like that. I wouldn't like that at all."

All three of them knew that the castle dungeons, which in any case had never been its most notable feature, were now totally unused. Verence II was the most amiable monarch in the history of Lancre. His subjects regarded him with the sort of good-natured contempt that is the fate of all those who work quietly and conscientiously for the public good. Besides, Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful.

"Queen Magrat, eh?" said Nanny Ogg, trying to lighten the atmosphere a bit. "Cor. Well, the old castle could do with a bit of lightening up-"

"Oh, it'll lighten up all right," said Granny.

"Well, anyway, I don't have to bother with this sort of thing," said Magrat. "Whatever it is. It's your business. I just shan't have time, I'm sure."

"I'm sure you can please yourself, your going-to-be-majesty," said Granny Weatherwax.

"Hah!" said Magrat. "I can! You can jol – you can damn well find another witch for Lancre! All right? Another soppy girl to do all the dreary work and never be told anything and be talked over the head of the whole time. I've got better things to do!"

"Better things than being a witch?" said Granny

Magrat walked into it. "Yes!"

"Oh, dear," murmured Nanny

"Oh. Well, then I expect you'll be wanting to be off," said Granny, her voice like knives. "Back to your palace, I'll be bound."

"Yes!"

Magrat picked up her broomstick.

Granny's arm shot out very fast and grabbed the handle.

"Oh, no," she said, "you don't. Queens ride around in golden coaches and whatnot. Each to their own. Brooms is for witches."

"Now come on, you two," began Nanny Ogg, one of nature's mediators. "Anyway, someone can be a queen and a w-"

"Who cares?" said Magrat, dropping the broomstick. "I don't have to bother with that sort of thing anymore."

She turned, clutched at her dress, and ran. She became a figure outlined against the sunset.

"You daft old besom, Esme," said Nanny Ogg. "Just because she's getting wed."

"You know what she'd say if we told her," said Granny Weatherwax. "She'd get it all wrong. The Gentry. Circles. She'd say it was . . . nice. Best for her if she's out of it."

"They ain't been active for years and years," said Nanny. "We'll need some help. I mean . . . when did you last go up to the Dancers?"

"You know how it is," said Granny "When it's so quiet. . . you don't think about 'em."

"We ought to have kept 'em cleared."

"True."

"We better get up there first thing tomorrow," said Nanny Ogg.

"Yes."

"Better bring a sickle, too."

There isn't much of the kingdom of Lancre where you could drop a football and not have it roll away from you. Most of it is moor land and steeply forested hillside, giving way to sharp and ragged mountains where even trolls wouldn't go and valleys so deep that they have to pipe the sunlight in.

There was an overgrown path up to the moor land where the Dancers stood, even though it was only a few miles from the town. Hunters tracked up there sometimes, but only by accident. It wasn't that the hunting was bad but, well – there were the stones.

Stone circles were common enough everywhere in the mountains. Druids built them as weather computers and since it was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one there were generally plenty of ancient ones around.

No druids ever came near the Dancers.

The stones weren't shaped. They weren't even positioned in any particularly significant way. There wasn't any of that stuff about the sun striking the right stone at dawn on the right day. Someone had just dragged eight red rocks into a rough circle.

But the weather was different. People said that, if it started to rain, it always began to fall inside the circle a few seconds after it had started outside, as if the rain was coming from further away. If clouds crossed the sun, it'd be a moment or two before the light faded inside the circle.

William Scrope is going to die in a couple of minutes. It has to be said that he shouldn't have been hunting deer out of season, and especially not the fine stag he was tracking, and certainly not a fine stag of the Ramtop Red species, which is officially endangered although not as endangered, right now, as William Scrope.

It was ahead of him, pushing through the bracken, making so much noise that a blind man could have tracked it.

Scrope waded through after it.

Mist was still hanging around the stones, not in a blanket but in long raggedy strings.

The stag reached the circle now, and stopped. It trotted back and forth once or twice, and then looked up at Scrope.

He raised the crossbow.

The stag turned, and leapt between the stones.

There were only confused impressions from then on. The first was of–

–distance. The circle was a few yards across, it shouldn't suddenly appear to contain so much distance.

And the next was of–

–speed. Something was coming out of the circle, a white dot growing bigger and bigger.

She recognised the small dark girl that came in, barely visible behind a stack of linen. Most people in Lancre knew everyone else.

"Millie Chillum?"

The linen bobbed a curtsy.

"Yes'm?"

Magrat lifted up part of the stack.

"It's me, Magrat," she said. "Hello."

"Yes'm." Another bob.

"What's up with you, Millie?"

"Yes'm." Bob, bob.

"I said it's me. You don't have to look at me like that."

"Yes'm."

The nervous bobbing continued. Magrat found her own knees beginning to jerk in sympathy but as it were behind the beat, so that as she was bobbing down she overtook the girl bobbing up.

"If you say 'yes'm' again, it will go very hard with you," she managed, as she went past.

"Y-right, your majesty, m'm."

Faint light began to dawn.

"I'm not queen yet, Millie. And you've known me for twenty years," panted Magrat, on the way up.

"Yes'm. But you're going to be queen. So me mam told me I was to be respectful," said Millie, still curtsying nervously

"Oh. Well. All right, then. Where are my clothes?"

"Got 'em here, your pre-majesty."

"They're not mine. And please stop going up and down all the time. I feel a bit sick."

"The king ordered 'em from Sto Helit special, m'm."

"Did he, eh? How long ago?"

"Dunno, m'm."

He knew I was coming home, thought Magrat. How? What's going on here?

There was a good deal more lace than Magrat was used to, but that was, as it were, the icing on the cake. Magrat normally wore a simple dress with not much underneath it except Magrat. Ladies of quality couldn't get away with that kind of thing. Millie had been provided with a sort of technical diagram, but it wasn't much help.

They studied it for some time.

"This is a standard queen outfit, then?"

"Couldn't say, m'm. I think his majesty just sent 'em a lot of money and said to send you everything." They spread out the bits on the floor.

"Is this the pantoffle?"

Outside, on the battlements, the guard changed. In fact he changed into his gardening apron and went off to hoe the beans. Inside, there was considerable sartorial discussion.

"I think you've got it up the wrong way, m'm. Which bit's the farthingale?"

"Says here Insert Tabbe A into Slotte B. Can't find slotte B."

"These're like saddlebags. I'm not wearing these. And this thing?"

"A ruff, m'm. Um. They're all the rage in Sto Helit, my brother says."

"You mean they make people angry? And what's this?"

"Brocade, I think."

"It's like cardboard. Do I have to wear this sort of thing every day?"

"Don't know, I'm sure, m'm."

"But Verence just trots around in leather gaiters and an old jacket!"

"Ah, but you're queen. Queens can't do that sort of thing. Everyone knows that, m'm. It's all right for kings to go wandering around with their arse half out their trous-"

She rammed her hand over her mouth.

"It's all right," said Magrat. "I'm sure even kings have . . . tops to their legs just like everyone else. Just go on with what you were saying."

Millie had gone bright red.

"I mean, I mean, I mean, queens has got to be ladylike," she managed. "The king got books about it. Etti-quetty and stuff."

Magrat surveyed herself critically in the mirror.

"It really suits you, your soon-going-to-be-majesty," said Millie.

Magrat turned this way and that.

"My hair's a mess," she said, after a while.

"Please m'm, the king said he's having a hairdresser come all the way from Ankh-Morpork, m'm. For the wedding."

Magrat patted a tress into place. It was beginning to dawn on her that being a queen was a whole new life.

"My word," she said. "And what happens now?"

"Dunno, m'm."

"What's the king doing?"

"Oh, he had breakfast early and buggered off over to Slice to show old Muckloe how to breed his pigs out of a book."

"So what do I do? What's my job?"

Millie looked puzzled although this did not involve much of a change in her general expression.

"Dunno, m'm. Reigning, I suppose. Walking around in the garden. Holding court. Doin' tapestry. That's very popular among queens. And then. . . er. . . later on there's the royal succession. . ."

"At the moment," said Magrat firmly, "we'll have a go at the tapestry."

Ridcully was having difficulty with the Librarian.

"I happen to be your Archchancellor, sir!"

"Oook."

"You'll like it up there! Fresh air! Bags of trees! More woods than you can shake a stick at!"

"Oook!"

"Come down this minute!"

"Oook!"

"The books'll be quite safe here during the holidays. Good grief, it's hard enough to get students to come in here at the best of times-"

"Oook!"

Ridcully glared at the Librarian, who was hanging by his toes from the top shelf of Parazoology Ba to Mn.

'Oh, well," he said, his voice suddenly low and cunning, "it's a great shame, in the circumstances. They've got a pretty good library in Lancre castle, I heard. Well, they call it a library – it's just a lot of old books. Never had a catalogue near 'em, apparently."

"Oook?"

"Thousands of books. Someone told me there's incunibles, too. Shame, really, you not wanting to see them." Ridcully's voice could have greased axles.

"Oook?"

"But I can see your mind is quite made up. So I shall be going. Farewell."

Ridcully paused outside the Library door, counting under his breath. He'd reached "three" when the Librarian knuckled through at high speed, caught by the incunibles.

"So that'll be four tickets, then?" said Ridcully.

Granny Weatherwax set about finding out what had been happening around the stones in her own distinctive way.

People underestimate bees.

Granny Weatherwax didn't. She had half a dozen hives of them and knew, for example, there is no such creature as an individual bee. But there is such a creature as a swarm, whose component cells are just a bit more mobile than those of, say, the common whelk. Swarms see everything and sense a lot more, and they can remember things for years, although their memory tends to be external and built out of wax. A honeycomb is a hive's memory – the placement of egg cells, pollen cells, queen cells, honey cells, different types of honey, are all part of the memory array.

And then there are the big fat drones. People think all they do is hang around the hive all year, waiting for those few brief minutes when the queen even notices their existence, but that doesn't explain why they've got more sense organs than the roof of the CIA building.

Granny didn't really keep bees. She took some old wax every year, for candles, and the occasional pound of honey that the hives felt they could spare, but mainly she had them for someone to talk to.

For the first time since she'd returned home, she went to the hives.

And stared.

Bees were boiling out of the entrances. The thrum of wings filled the normally calm little patch behind the raspberry bushes. Brown bodies zipped through the air like horizontal hail.

She wished she knew why.

Bees were her one failure. There wasn't a mind in Lancre she couldn't Borrow. She could even see the world through the eyes of earthworms[9] But a swarm, a mind made up of thousands of mobile parts, was beyond her. It was the toughest test of all. She'd tried over and over again to ride on one, to see the world through ten thousand pairs of multifaceted eyes all at once, and all she'd ever got was a migraine and an inclination to make love to flowers.

"You see," she said, waving her hands vaguely, "them stones. . . the Dancers . . . see, in the old days . . . see, once upon a time. . ."

She stopped, and tried again to explain the essentially fractal nature of reality.

"Like . . . there's some places that're thinner than others, where the old doorways used to be, well, not doorways, never exactly understood it myself, not doorways as such, more places where the world is thinner . . . Anyway, the thing is, the Dancers . . . are a kind of fence . . . we, well, when I say we I mean thousands of years ago . . . I mean, but they're not just stones, they're some kind of thunderbolt iron but . . . there's things like tides, only not with water, it's when worlds get closer together'n you can nearly step between 'em . . . anyway, if people've been hangin' around the stones, playin' around . . . then They'll be back, if we're not careful."

"What They?"

"That's the whole trouble," said Nanny, miserably. "If I tells you, you'll get it all wrong. They lives on the other side of the Dancers."

Her son stared at her. Then a faint grin of realisation wandered across his face.

"Ah," he said. "I knows. I heard them wizards down in Ankh is always accidentally rippin' holes in this fabric o' reality they got down there, and you get them horrible things coming out o' the Dungeon Dimensions. Huge buggers with dozens o' eyeballs and more legs'n a Morris team." He gripped his No. 5 hammer. "Don't you worry. Mum. If they starts poppin' out here, we'll soon-"

"No, it ain't like that," said Nanny "Those live outside. But Them lives. . . over there."

Jason looked completely lost.

Nanny shrugged. She'd have to tell someone, sooner or later.

"The Lords and Ladies," she said.

"Who're they?"

Nanny looked around. But, after all, this was a forge. There had been a forge here long before there was a castle, long before there was even a kingdom. There were horseshoes everywhere. Iron had entered the very walls. It wasn't just a place of iron, it was a place where iron died and was reborn. If you couldn't speak the words here, you couldn't speak 'em anywhere.

Even so, she'd rather not.

"You know," she said. "The Fair Folk. The Gentry. The Shining Ones. The Star People. You know."

"What?"

Nanny put her hand on the anvil, just in case, and said the word.

Jason's frown very gently cleared, at about the same speed as a sunrise.

"Them?" he said. "But aren't they nice and-?"

'"See?" said Nanny. "I told you you'd get it wrong!"

"How much?" said Ridcully.

The coachman shrugged.

"Take it or leave it," he said.

"I'm sorry, sir," said Ponder Stibbons. "It's the only coach."

"Fifty dollars each is daylight robbery!"

"No," said the coachman patiently. "Daylight robbery," he said, in the authoritative tones of the experienced, "is when someone steps out into the road with an arrow pointing at us and then all his friends swings down from the rocks and trees and take away all our money and things. And then there's nighttime robbery, which is like daytime robbery except they set fire to the coach so's they can see what they're about. Twilight robbery, now, your basic twilight robbery is-"

"Are you saying," said Ridcully, "that getting robbed is included in the price?"

"Bandits' Guild," said the coachman. "Forty dollars per head, see. It's a kind of flat rate."

"What happens if we don't pay it?" said Ridcully.

"You end up flat."

The wizards went into a huddle.

"We've got a hundred and fifty dollars," said Ridcully. "We can't get any more out of the safe because the Bursar ate the key yesterday"

"Can I try an idea, sir?" said Ponder.

"All right."

Ponder gave the coachman a bright smile.

"Pets travel free?" he suggested.

"Oook?"

Nanny Ogg's broomstick skimmed a few feet above the forest paths, cornering so fast that her boots scraped through the leaves. She leapt off at Granny Weather-wax's cottage so quickly that she didn't switch it off, and it kept going until it stuck in the privy.

The door was open.

"Cooee?"

Nanny glanced into the scullery, and then thumped up the small narrow staircase.

Granny Weatherwax was stretched rigid on her bed. Her face was grey, her skin was cold.

People had discovered her like this before, and it always caused embarrassment. So now she reassured visitors but tempted fate by always holding, in her rigid hands, a small handwritten sign which read:

I ATE'NT DEAD.

The window was propped open with a piece of wood.

"Ah," said Nanny, far more for her own benefit than for anyone else's, "I sees you're out. I'll, I'll, I'll just put the kettle on, shall I, and wait 'til you comes back?"

Esme's skill at Borrowing unnerved her. It was all very well entering the minds of animals and such, but too many witches had never come back. For several years Nanny had put out lumps of fat and bacon rind for a bluetit that she was sure was old Granny Postalute, who'd gone out Borrowing one day and never came back. Insofar as a witch could consider things uncanny. Nanny Ogg considered it uncanny.

She went back down to the scullery and lowered a bucket down the well, remembering to fish the newts out this time before she boiled the kettle.

Then she watched the garden.

After a while a small shape flittered across it, heading for the upstairs window.

Nanny poured out the tea. She carefully took one spoonful of sugar out of the sugar basin, tipped the rest of the sugar into her cup, put the spoonful back in the basin, put both cups on a tray, and climbed the stairs.

Granny Weatherwax was sitting up in her bed.

Nanny looked around.

There was a large bat hanging upside down from a beam.

Granny Weatherwax rubbed her ears.

"Shove the po under it, will you, Gytha?" she mumbled. "They're a devil for excusing themselves on the carpet."

Nanny unearthed the shyest article of Granny Weatherwax's bedroom crockery and moved it across the rug with her foot.

"I brought you a cup of tea," she said.

"Good job, too. Mouth tastes of moths," said Granny.

"Thought you did owls at night?" said Nanny.

"Yeah, but you ends up for days trying to twist your head right round," said Granny. "At least bats always faces the same way. Tried rabbits first off, but you know what they are for remembering things. Anyway, you know what they thinks about the whole time. They're famous for it."

"Grass."

"Right."

"Find out anything?" said Nanny

"Half a dozen people have been going up there. Every full moon!" said Granny. "Gels, by the shape of them. You only see silhouettes, with bats."

"You done well there," said Nanny, carefully. "Girls from round here, you reckon?"

"Got to be. They ain't using broomsticks."

Nanny Ogg sighed.

"There's Agnes Nitt, old Threepenny's daughter," she said. "And the Tockley girl. And some others."

Granny Weatherwax looked at her with her mouth open.

"I asked our Jason," she said. "Sorry."

The bat burped. Granny genteelly covered her hand with her mouth.

"I'm a silly old fool, ain't I?" she said, after a while.

"No, no," said Nanny. "Borrowing's a real skill. You're really good at it."

"Prideful, that's what I am. Once upon a time I'd of thought of asking people, too, instead of fooling around being a bat."

"Our Jason wouldn't have told you. He only told me 'cos I would've made 'is life a living hell if he didn't," said Nanny Ogg. "That's what a mother's for."

"I'm losing my touch, that's what it is. Getting old, Gytha."

Currently she was showing them the cards.

The wind had got up again tonight. It rattled the shutters and made soot fall down the chimney. It seemed to Perdita that it had blown all the shadows into the comers of the room–

"Are you paying attention, sister?" said Diamanda coldly.

That was another thing. You had to call one another 'sister,' out of fraternity.

"Yes, Diamanda," she said, meekly.

"This is the Moon," Diamanda repeated, "for those who weren't paying attention." She held up the card. "And what do we see here – you, Muscara?"

"Um . . . it's got a picture of the moon on it?" said Muscara (nee Susan) in a hopeful voice.

"Of course it's not the moon. It's a nonmimetic convention, not tied to a conventional referencing system, actually," said Diamanda.

"Ah."

A gust rocked the cottage. The door burst open and slammed back against the wall, giving a glimpse of cloud-wracked sky in which a non-mimetic convention was showing a crescent.

Diamanda waved a hand. There was a brief flash of octarine light. The door jerked shut. Diamanda smiled in what Perdita thought of as her cool, knowing way.

She placed the card on the black velvet cloth in front of her.

Perdita looked at it gloomily It was all very pretty, the cards were coloured like little pasteboard jewels, and they had interesting names. But that little traitor voice whispered: how the hell can they know what the future holds? Cardboard isn't very bright.

On the other hand, the coven was helping people . . . more or less. Raising power and all that sort of thing. Oh dear, supposing she asks me?

Perdita realized that she was feeling worried. Something was wrong. It had just gone wrong. She didn't know what it was, but it had gone wrong now. She looked up.

"Blessings be upon this house," said Granny Weatherwax.

In much the same tone of voice have people said, "Eat hot lead, Kincaid," and, "I expect you're wondering after all that excitement whether I've got any balloons and lampshades left."

Diamanda's mouth dropped open.

" 'Ere, you're doing that wrong. You don't want to muck about with a hand like that," said Nanny Ogg helpfully, looking over her shoulder. "You've got a Double Onion there."

"Who are you?

Suddenly they were there. Perdita thought: one minute there's shadows, the next minute they were there, solid as anything.

"What's all the chalk on the floor, then?" said Nanny Ogg. "You've got all chalk on the floor. And heathen writing. Not that I've got anything against heathens," she added. She appeared to think about it. "I'm practic'ly one," she added further, "but I don't write on the floor. What'd you want to write all on the floor for?" She nudged Perdita. "You'll never get the chalk out," she said, "it gets right into the grain."

"Um, it's a magic circle," said Perdita. "Um, hello, Mrs. Ogg. Um. It's to keep bad influences away . . ."

Granny Weatherwax leaned forward slightly.

"Tell me, my dear," she said to Diamanda, "do you think it's working?"

She leaned forward further.

Diamanda leaned backward.

And then slowly leaned forward again.

They ended up nose to nose.

"Who's this?" said Diamanda, out of the comer of her mouth.

"Um, it's Granny Weatherwax," said Perdita. "Um. She's a witch, um. . ."

"What level?" said Diamanda.

Nanny Ogg looked around for something to hide behind. Granny Weatherwax's eyebrow twitched.

"Levels, eh?" she said. "Well, I suppose I'm level one."

"Just starting?" said Diamanda.

"Oh dear. Tell you what," said Nanny Ogg quietly to Perdita, "if we was to turn the table over, we could probably hide behind it, no problem."

But to herself she was thinking: Esme can never resist a challenge. None of us can. You ain't a witch if you ain't got self-confidence. But we're not getting any younger. It's like being a hired swordfighter, being a top witch. You think you're good, but you know there's got to be someone younger, practicing every day, polishing up their craft, and one day you're walkin' down the road and you hears this voice behind you sayin': go for your toad, or similar.

Even for Esme. Sooner or later, she'll come up against someone faster on the craftiness than she is.

"Oh, yes," said Granny, quietly "Just starting. Every day, just starting."

Nanny Ogg thought: but it won't be today.

"You stupid old woman," said Diamanda, "you don't frighten me. Oh, yes. I know all about the way you old ones frighten superstitious peasants, actually. Muttering and squinting. It's all in the mind. Simple psychology. It's not real witchcraft."

"I'll, er, I'll just go into the scullery and, er, see if I can fill any buckets with water, shall I?" said Nanny Ogg, to no one in particular.

"I 'spect you'd know all about witchcraft," said Granny Weatherwax.

"I'm studying, yes," said Diamanda.

Nanny Ogg realized that she had removed her own hat and was biting nervously at the brim.

"I 'spect you're really good at it," said Granny Weatherwax.

"Quite good," said Diamanda.

"Show me."

She is good, thought Nanny Ogg. She's been facing down Esme's stare for more'n a minute. Even snakes generally give up after a minute.

If a fly had darted through the few inches of space between their stares it would have flashed into flame in the air.

"I learned my craft from Nanny Gripes," said Granny Weatherwax, "who learned it from Goody Heggety, who got it from Nanna Plumb, who was taught it by Black Aliss, who-"

"So what you're saying is," said Diamanda, loading the words into the sentence like cartridges in a chamber, "that no one has actually learned anything new?"

The silence that followed was broken by Nanny Ogg saying: "Bugger, I've bitten right through the brim. Right through."

"I see, said Granny Weatherwax.

"Look," said Nanny Ogg hurriedly, nudging the trembling Perdita, "right through the lining and everything. Two dollars and curing his pig that hat cost me. That's two dollars and a pig cure I shan't see again in a hurry."

"So you can just go away, old woman," said Diamanda. "But we ought to meet again," said Granny Weatherwax.

The old witch and the young witch weighed one another up.

"Midnight?" said Diamanda.

"Midnight? Nothing special about midnight. Practically anyone can be a witch at midnight," said Granny Weatherwax. "How about noon?"

"Certainly. What are we fighting for?" said Diamanda.

"Fighting? We ain't fighting. We're just showing each other what we can do. Friendly like," said Granny Weatherwax.

She stood up.

"I'd better be goin'," she said. "Us old people need our sleep, you know how it is."

"And what does the winner get?" said Diamanda. There was just a trace of uncertainty in her voice now. It was very faint, on the Richter scale of doubt it was probably no more than a plastic teacup five miles away falling off a low shelf onto a carpet, but it was there.

"Oh, the winner gets to win," said Granny Weatherwax. "That's what it's all about. Don't bother to see us out. You didn't see us in."

The door slammed back.

"Simple psychokinesis," said Diamanda.

"Oh, well. That's all right then," said Granny Weatherwax, disappearing into the night. "Explains it all, that does."

There used to be such simple directions, back in the days before they invented parallel universes – Up and Down, Right and Left, Backward and Forward, Past and Future . . .

But normal directions don't work in the multiverse, which has far too many dimensions for anyone to find their way so new ones have to be invented so that the way can be found.

Like: East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

Or: Behind the North Wind.

Or: At the Back of Beyond.

Or: There and Back Again.

Or: Beyond the Fields We Know.

And sometimes there's a short cut. A door or a gate. Some standing stones, a tree cleft by lightning, a filing cabinet.

Maybe just a spot on some moor land somewhere . . .

A place where there is very nearly here.

Nearly, but not quite. There's enough leakage to make pendulums swing and psychics get nasty headaches, to give a house a reputation for being haunted, to make the occasional pot hurl across a room. There's enough leakage to make the drones fly guard.

Oh, yes. The drones.

There are things called drone assemblies. Sometimes, on fine summer days, the drones from hives for miles around will congregate in some spot, and fly circles in the air, buzzing like tiny early warning systems, which is what they are.

Bees are sensible. It's a human word. But bees are creatures of order, and programmed into their very genes is a hatred of chaos.

If some people once knew where such a spot was, if they had experience of what happens when here and there become entangled, then they might – if they knew how – mark such a spot with certain stones.

In the hope that enough daft buggers would take it as a warning, and keep away.

"Well, what'd you think?" said Granny, as the witches hurried home.

"The little fat quiet one's got a bit of natural talent," said Nanny Ogg. "I could feel it. The rest of 'em are just along for the excitement, to my mind. Playing at witches. You know, ooh-jar boards and cards and wearing black lace gloves with no fingers to 'em and paddlin' with the occult."

"I don't hold with paddlin' with the occult," said Granny firmly. "Once you start paddlin' with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you're believing in gods. And then you're in touble."

"But all them things exist," said Nanny Ogg.

"That's no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages 'em."

Granny Weatherwax slowed to a walk.

"What about her?" she said.

"What exactly about her do you mean?" – "You felt the power there?"

"Oh, yeah. Made my hair stand on end."

"Someone gave it to her, and I know who. Just a slip of a gel with a head full of wet ideas out of books, and suddenly she's got the power and don't know how to deal with it. Cards! Candles! That's not witchcraft, that's just party games. Paddlin' with the occult. Did you see she'd got black fingernails?"

"Well, mine ain't so clean-"

"I mean painted."

"I used to paint my toenails red when I was young," said Nanny, wistfully.

"Toenails is different. So's red. Anyway," said Granny, "you only did it to appear allurin'."

"It worked, too."

"Hah!"

They walked along in silence for a bit.

"I felt a lot of power there," Nanny Ogg said, eventually.

"Yes. I know."

"A lot."

"Yes."

"I'm not saying you couldn't beat her," said Nanny quickly. "I'm not saying that. But I don't reckon I could, and it seemed to me it'd raise a bit of a sweat even on you. You'll have to hurt her to beat her."

"I'm losin' my judgment, aren't I?"

"Oh, I-"

"She riled me, Gytha. Couldn't help myself. Now I've got to duel with a gel of seventeen, and if I wins I'm a wicked bullyin' old witch, and if I loses . . ."

She kicked up a drift of old leaves.

"Can't stop myself, that's my trouble."

Nanny Ogg said nothing.

"And I loses my temper over the least little-"

"Yes, but-"

"I hadn't finished talkin'."

"Sorry, Esme."

A bat fluttered by. Granny nodded to it.

"Heard how Magrat's getting along?" she said, in a tone of voice which forced casualness embraced like a corset.

"Settling in fine, our Shawn says."

"Right."

They reached a crossroads; the white dust glowed very faintly in the moonlight. One way led into Lancre, where Nanny Ogg lived. Another eventually got lost in the forest, became a footpath, then a track, and eventually reached Granny Weatherwax's cottage.

"When shall we . . . two . . . meet again?" said Nanny

Ogg.

"Listen," said Granny Weatherwax. "She's well out of it, d'you hear? She'll be a lot happier as a queen!"

"I never said nothing," said Nanny Ogg mildly.

"I know you never! I could hear you not saying anything! You've got the loudest silences I ever did hear from anyone who wasn't dead!"

"See you about eleven o'clock, then?"

"Right!"

The wind got up again as Granny walked along the track to her cottage.

She knew she was on edge. There was just too much to do. She'd got Magrat sorted out, and Nanny could look after herself, but the Lords and the Ladies . . . she hadn't counted on them.

The point was . . .

The point was that Granny Weatherwax had a feeling she was going to die. This was beginning to get on her nerves.

Knowing the time of your death is one of those strange bonuses that comes with being a true magic user. And, on the whole, it is a bonus.

Many a wizard has passed away happily drinking the last of his wine cellar and incidentally owing very large sums of money.

Granny Weatherwax had always wondered how it felt, what it was that you suddenly saw looming up. And what it turned out to be was a blankness.

People think that they live life as a moving dot travelling from the Past into the Future, with memory streaming out behind them like some kind of mental cometary tail. But memory spreads out in front as well as behind. It's just that most humans aren't good at dealing with it, and so it arrives as premonitions, forebodings, intuitions, and hunches. Witches are good at dealing with it, and to suddenly find a blank where these tendrils of the future should be has much the same effect on a witch as emerging from a cloud bank and seeing a team of sherpas looking down on him does on an airline pilot.

She'd got a few days, and then that was it. She'd always expected to have a bit of time to herself, get the garden in order, have a good clean up around the place so that whatever witch took over wouldn't think she'd been a sloven, pick out a decent burial plot, and then spend some time sitting out in the rocking chair, doing nothing at all except looking at the trees and thinking about the past. Now . . . no chance.

And other things were happening. Her memory seemed to be playing up. Perhaps this is what happened. Perhaps you just drained away toward the end, like old Nanny Gripes, who ended up putting the cat on the stove and the kettle out for the night.

Granny shut the door behind her and lit a candle.

There was a box in the dresser drawer. She opened it on the kitchen table and took out the carefully folded piece of paper. There was a pen and ink in there, too.

After some thought, she picked up where she had left off:

. . . and to my friend Gytha Ogg I leave my bedde and the rag rugge the smith in Bad Ass made for me, and the matchin jug and basin and wosiname sett she always had her eye on, and my broomstick what will be Right as Rain with a bit of work.

To Magrat Garlick I leave the Contentes elsewhere in this box, my silver tea service with the milk jug in the shape of a humorous cow what is an Heir Loom, also the Clocke what belonged to my mother, but I charge her alwayes to keep it wound, for when the clocke stops-

There was a noise outside.

If anyone else had been in the room with her Granny Weatherwax would have thrown open the door boldly, but she was by herself. She picked up the poker very carefully, moved surprisingly soundlessly to the door given the nature of her boots, and listened intently.

There was something in the garden.

It wasn't much of a garden. There were the Herbs, and the soft fruit bushes, a bit of lawn and, of course, the beehives. And it was open to the woods. The local wildlife knew better than to invade a witch's garden.

Granny opened the door carefully.

The moon was setting. Pale silver light turned the world into monochrome.

There was a unicorn on the lawn. The stink of it hit her.

Granny advanced, holding the poker in front of her. The unicorn backed away, and pawed at the ground.

Granny saw the future plain. She already knew the when. Now she was beginning to apprehend the how.

"So," she said, under her breath, "I knows where you came from. And you can damn well get back there."

The thing made a feint at her, but the poker swung toward it.

"Can't stand the iron, eh? Well, just you trot back to your mistress and tell her that we know all about iron in Lancre. And I knows about her. She's to keep away, understand? This is my place!"

Then it was moonlight. Now it was day.

There was quite a crowd in what passed for Lancre's main square. Not much happened in Lancre anyway, and a duel between witches was a sight worth seeing.

Granny Weatherwax arrived at a quarter to noon. Nanny Ogg was waiting on a bench by the tavern. She had a towel around her neck, and was carrying a bucket of water in which floated a sponge.

"What's that for?" said Granny.

"Half time. And I done you a plate of oranges."

She held up the plate. Granny snorted.

"You look as if you could do with eating something, anyway," said Nanny. "You don't look as if you've had anything today. . ."

She glanced down at Granny's boots, and the grubby hem of her long black dress. There were scraps of bracken and bits of heather caught on it.

"You daft old besom!" she hissed. "What've you been doing!"

"I had to-"

"You've been up at the Stones, haven't you! Trying to hold back the Gentry."

"Of course," said Granny. Her voice wasn't faint. She wasn't swaying. But her voice wasn't faint and she wasn't swaying. Nanny Ogg could see, because Granny Weatherwax's body was in the grip of Granny Weatherwax's mind.

"Someone's got to," she added.

"You could have come and asked me!"

"You'd have talked me out of it."

Nanny Ogg leaned forward.

"You all right, Esme?"

"Fine! I'm fine! Nothing wrong with me, all right?"

"Have you had any sleep at all?" she said.

"Well-"

"You haven't, have you? And then you think you can just stroll down here and confound this girl, just like that?"

"I don't know," said Granny Weatherwax.

Nanny Ogg looked hard at her.

"You don't, do you?" she said, in a softer tone of voice. "Oh, well . . . you better sit down here, before you fall down. Suck an orange. They'll be here in a few minutes."

"No she won't," said Granny "She'll be late."

"How d'you know?"

"No good making an entrance if everyone isn't there to see you, is it? That's headology."

In fact the young coven arrived at twenty past twelve, and took up station on the steps of the market pentangle on the other side of the square.

"Look at 'em," said Granny Weatherwax. "All in black, again."

"Well, we wear black too," said Nanny Ogg the reasonable.

"Only 'cos it's respectable and serviceable," said Granny morosely. "Not because it's romantic. Hah. The Lords and Ladies might as well be here already."

After some eye contact. Nanny Ogg ambled across the square and met Perdita in the middle. The young would-be witch looked worried under her makeup. She held a black lace handkerchief in her hands, and was twisting it nervously.

"Morning, Mrs. Ogg," she said.

"Afternoon, Agnes."

"Um. What happens now?"

Nanny Ogg took out her pipe and scratched her ear with it.

"Dunno. Up to you, I suppose."

"Diamanda says why does it have to be here and now?"

"So's everyone can see," said Nanny Ogg. "That's the point, ain't it? Nothing hole and comer about it. Everyone's got to know who's best at witchcraft. The whole town. Everyone sees the winner win and the loser lose. That way there's no argument, eh?"

Perdita glanced toward the tavern. Granny Weatherwax had dozed off.

"Quietly confident," said Nanny Ogg, crossing her fingers behind her back.

"Um, what happens to the loser?" said Perdita.

"Nothing, really," said Nanny Ogg. "Generally she leaves the place. You can't be a witch if people've seen you beat."

"Diamanda says she doesn't want to hurt the old lady too much," said Perdita. "Just teach her a lesson."

"That's nice. Esme's a quick learner."

"Um. I wish this wasn't happening, Mrs. Ogg."

"That's nice."

"Diamanda says Mistress Weatherwax has got a very impressive stare, Mrs. Ogg."

"That's nice."

"So the test is . . . just staring, Mrs. Ogg."

Nanny put her pipe in her mouth.

"You mean the old first-one-to-blink-or-look-away challenge?"

"Um, yes."

"Right." Nanny thought about it, and shrugged. "Right. But we'd better do a magic circle first. Don't want anyone else getting hurt, do we?"

"Do you mean using Skorhian Runes or the Triple Invocation octogram?" said Perdita.

Nanny Ogg put her head on one side.

"Never heard of them things, dear," she said. "I always does a magic circle like this . . ."

She sidled crabwise away from the fat girl, dragging one toe in the dust. She edged around in a rough circle about fifteen feet across, still dragging her boot, until she backed into Perdita.

"Sorry. There. Done it."

"That's a magic circle?"

"Right. People can come to harm else. All kinds of magic zipping around the place when witches fight."

"But you didn't chant or anything."

"No?"

"There has to be a chant, doesn't there?"

"Dunno. Never done one."

"Oh."

"I could sing you a comic song if you likes," said Nanny helpfully.

"Um, no. Um." Perdita had never heard Nanny sing, but news gets around.

"I like your black lace hanky," said Nanny, not a bit abashed. "Very good for not showing the bogies."

Perdita stared at the circle as though hypnotized. "Um. Shall we start, then?"

"Right."

Nanny Ogg scurried back to the bench and elbowed Granny in the ribs.

"Wake up!"

Granny opened an eye.

"I weren't asleep, I was just resting me eyes."

"All you've got to do is stare her down!"

"At least she knows about the importance of the stare, then. Hah! Who does she think she is? I've been staring at people all my life!"

"Yes, that's what's bothering me – aaahh . . . who's Nona's little boy, then?"

The rest of the Ogg clan had arrived.

Granny Weatherwax personally disliked young Pewsey. She disliked all small children, which is why she got on with them so well. In Pewsey's case, she felt that no one should be allowed to wander around in just a vest even if they were four years old. And the child had a permanently runny nose and ought to be provided with a handkerchief or, failing that, a cork.

Nanny Ogg, on the other hand, was instant putty in the hands of any grandchild, even one as sticky as Pewsey

"Want sweetie," growled Pewsey, in that curiously deep voice some young children have.

"Just in a moment, my duck, I'm talking to the lady," Nanny Ogg fluted.

"Want sweetie now."

"Bugger off, my precious, Nana's busy right this minute."

Pewsey pulled hard on Nanny Ogg's skirts.

"Now sweetie now!"

Granny Weatherwax leaned down until her impressive nose was about level with Pewsey's gushing one.

"There'll be lots to see in Lancre," said the Archchancellor. "The only piece of flat land they've got up there is in a museum."

Ponder said nothing.

"Used to spend whole summers up there," said Ridcully. He sighed. "You know . . . things could have been very different."

Ridcully looked around. If you're going to relate an intimate piece of personal history, you want to be sure it's going to be heard.

The Librarian looked out at the jolting scenery. He was sulking. This had a lot to do with the new bright blue collar around his neck with the word "PONGO' on it. Someone was going to suffer for this.

The Bursar was trying to use his hat like a limpet uses its shell.

"There was this girl."

Ponder Stibbons, chosen by a cruel fate to be the only one listening, looked surprised. He was aware that, technically, even the Archchancellor had been young once. After all, it was just a matter of time. Common sense suggested that wizards didn't flash into existence aged seventy and weighing nineteen stone. But common sense needed reminding.

He felt he ought to say something.

"Pretty, was she, sir?" he said.

"No. No, I can't say she was. Striking. That's the word. Tall. Hair so blond it was nearly white. And eyes like gimlets, I tell you."

Ponder tried to work this out.

"You don't mean that dwarf who runs the delicatessen in-" he began.

"I mean you always got the impression she could see right through you," said Ridcully, slightly more sharply than he had intended. "And she could run . . ."

He lapsed into silence again, staring at the newsreels of memory.

"I would've married her, you know," he said.

Ponder said nothing. When you're a cork in someone else's stream of consciousness, all you can do is spin and bob in the eddies.

"What a summer," murmured Ridcully. "Very like this one, really. Crop circles were bursting like raindrops. And . . . well, I was having doubts, you know. Magic didn't seem to be enough. I was a bit . . . lost. I'd have given it all up for her. Every blasted octogram and magic spell. Without a second thought. You know when they say things like 'she had a laugh like a mountain stream'?"

"I'm not personally familiar with it," said Ponder, "but I have read poetry that-"

"Load of cobblers, poetry," said Ridcully. "I've listened to mountain streams and they just go trickle, trickle, gurgle.

And you get them things in them, you know, insect things with little . . . anyway. Doesn't sound like laughter at all, is my point. Poets always get it wrong. 'S'like 'she had lips like cherries.' Small, round, and got a stone in the middle? Hah!"

He shut his eyes. After a while Ponder said, "So what happened, sir?"

"What?"

"The girl you were telling me about."

"What girl?"

"This girl."

"Oh, that girl. Oh, she turned me down. Said there were things she wanted to do. Said there'd be time enough."

There was another pause.

"What happened then?" Ponder prompted.

"Happened? What d'you think happened? I went off and studied. Term started. Wrote her a lot of letters but she never answered 'em. Probably never got 'em, they probably eat the mail up there. Next year I was studying all summer and never had time to go back. Never did go back. Exams and so on. Expect she's dead now, or some fat old granny with a dozen kids. Would've wed her like a shot. Like a shot." Ridcully scratched his head. "Hah . . . just wish I could remember her name . . ."

He stretched out with his feet on the Bursar.

"'S'funny, that," he said. "Can't even remember her name. Hah! She could outrun a horse-"

"Kneel and deliver!"

The coach rattled to a halt.

Ridcully opened an eye.

"What's that?" he said.

Ponder jerked awake from a reverie of lips like mountain streams and looked out of the window.

"I think," he said, "it's a very small highwayman."

The coachman peered down at the figure in the road. It was hard to see much from this angle, because of the short body and the wide hat. It was like looking at a well-dressed mushroom with a feather in it.

"I do apologize for this," said the very small highwayman. "I find myself a little short."

The coachman sighed and put down the reins. Properly arranged holdups by the Bandits' Guild were one thing, but he was blowed if he was going to be threatened by an outlaw that came up to his waist and didn't even have a crossbow.

"You little bastard," he said. "I'm going to knock your block off."

He peered closer.

"What's that on your back? A hump?"

"Ah, you've noticed the stepladder," said the low highwayman. "Let me demonstrate-"

"What's happening?" said Ridcully, back in the coach.

"Um, a dwarf has just climbed up a small stepladder and kicked the coachman in the middle of the road," said Ponder.

"That's something you don't see every day," said Ridcully. He looked happy. Up to now, the journey had been quite uneventful.

"Now he's coming toward us."

"Oh, good." The highwayman stepped over the groaning body of the driver and marched toward the door of the coach, dragging his stepladder behind him.

He opened the door.

"Your money or, I'm sorry to say, your-"

A blast of octarine fire blew his hat off. The dwarfs expression did not change. ' "I wonder if I might be allowed to rephrase my demands?"

Ridcully looked the elegantly dressed stranger up and down or, rather, down and further down.

"You don't look like a dwarf," he said, "apart from the height, that is."

"Don't look like a dwarf apart from the height?"

"I mean, the helmet and iron boots department is among those you are lacking in," said Ridcully.

The dwarf bowed and produced a slip of pasteboard from one grubby but lace-clad sleeve.

"My card," he said.

It read:

Ponder peered over Ridcully's shoulder.

"Are you really an outrageous liar?"

"No."

"Why are you trying to rob coaches, then?"

"I am afraid I was waylaid by bandits."

"But it says here," said Ridcully, "that you are a finest swordsman."

"I was outnumbered."

"How many of them were there?"

"Three million."

"Hop in," said Ridcully

Casanunda threw his stepladder into the coach and then peered into the gloom.

"Is that an ape asleep in there?"

"Yes."

The Librarian opened one eye.

"What about the smell?"

"He won't mind."

"Hadn't you better apologize to the coachman?" said

Ponder.

"No, but I could kick him again harder if he likes."

"And that's the Bursar," said Ridcully, pointing to Exhibit B, who was sleeping the sleep of the near-terminally overdosed on dried frog pills. "Hey, Bursar? Bursssaaar? No, he's out like a light. Just push him under the seat. Can you play Cripple Mr. Onion?"

"Not very well."

"Capital!"

Half an hour later Ridcully owed the dwarf $8,000.

"But I put it on my visiting card," Casanunda pointed out. "Outrageous liar. Right there."

"Yes, but I thought you were lying!"

Ridcully sighed and, to Ponder's amazement, produced a bag of coins from some inner recess. They were large coins and looked suspiciously realistic and golden.

Casanunda might have been a libidinous soldier of fortune by profession but he was a dwarf by genetics, and there are some things dwarfs know.

"Hmm," he said. "You don't have "outrageous liar" on your visiting card, by any chance?"

"Is it herbal?" she quavered.

"Buggered if I know. It's just brown leaves out of a tin."

Magrat looked uncertainly into a mug which pure tannin was staining brown. But she rallied. One thing you had to do when you were queen, she knew, was Put Commoners at their Ease. She cast around for some easeful question.

"It must be very interesting, being a beekeeper," she said.

"Yes. It is."

"One's often wondered-"

"What?"

"How do you actually milk them?"

The unicorn prowled through the forest. It felt blind, and out of place. This wasn't a proper land. The sky was blue, not flaming with all the colours of the aurora. And time was passing. To a creature not born subject to time, it was a sensation not unakin to falling.

It could feel its mistress inside its head, too. That was worse even than the passing of time.

In short, it was mad.

Magrat sat with her mouth open.

"I thought queens were born," she said.

"Oh, no," said Mr. Brooks. "There ain't no such thing as a queen egg. The bees just decides to feed one of 'em up as a queen. Feeds 'em royal jelly"

"What happens if they don't?"

"Then it just becomes an ordinary worker, your ladyship," said Mr. Brooks, with a suspiciously republican grin.

Lucky for it, Magrat thought.

"So they have a new queen, and then what happens to the old one?"

"Usually the old girl swarms," said Mr. Brooks. "Pushes off and takes some of the colony with her. I must've seen a thousand swarms, me. Never seen a Royal swarm, though."

"What's a Royal swarm?"

"Can't say for sure. It's in some of the old bee books. A swarm of swarms. It's something to see, they say." The old ' beekeeper looked wistful for a moment.

'"Course," he went on, righting himself, "the real fun starts if the weather's bad and the ole queen can't swarm, right?" He moved his hand in a sly circular motion. "What happens then is, the two queens – that's the old queen, right? And the new queen – the two queens start astalkin' one another among the combs, with the rain adrummin' on the roof of the hive, and the business of the hive agoin' on all around them," Mr. Brooks moved his hands graphically, and Magrat leaned forward, "all among the combs, the drones all hummin', and all the time they can sense one another, 'cos they can tell, see, and then they spots one another and-"

"Yes? Yes?" said Magrat, leaning forward.

"Slash! Stab!"

Magrat hit her head on the wall of the hut.

"Can't have more'n one queen in a hive," said Mr. Brooks calmly.

Magrat looked out at the hives. She'd always liked the look of beehives, up until now.

"Many's the time I've found a dead queen in front of the hive after a spell of wet weather," said Mr. Brooks, happily. "Can't abide another queen around the place, you know. And it's a right old battle, too. The old queen's more cunnin'. But the new queen, she's really got everything to fight for."

"Sorry?"

"If she wants to be mated."

"Oh."

"But it gets really interestin' in the autumn," said Mr. Brooks. "Hive don't need any dead weight in the winter, see, and there's all these drones hangin' around not doing anything, so the workers drag all the drones down to the hive entrance, see, and they bite their-"

"Stop! This is horrible!" said Magrat. "I thought beekeeping was, well, nice."

"Of course, that's around the time of year when the bees wear out," said Mr. Brooks. "What happens is, see, your basic bee, why, it works 'til it can't work no more, and you'll see a lot of old workers acrawlin' around in front of the hive 'cos-"

"Stop it! Honestly, this is too much. I'm queen, you know. Almost."

"Sorry, miss," said Mr. Brooks. "I thought you wanted to know a bit about beekeeping."

"Yes, but note this!"

Magrat swept out.

"Oh, I dunno," said Mr. Brooks. "Does you good to get close to Nature."

He shook his head cheerfully as she disappeared among the hedges.

"Can't have more than one queen in a hive," he said. "Slash! Stab! Hehheh!" From somewhere in the distance came the scream of Hodgesaargh as nature got close to him.

Crop circles opened everywhere.

Now the universes swung into line. They ceased their boiling spaghetti dance and, to pass through this chicane of history, charged forward neck and neck in their race across the rubber sheet of incontinent Time.

At such time, as Ponder Stibbons dimly perceived, they had an effect on one another – shafts of reality crackled back and forward as the universes jostled for position.

If you were someone who had trained their mind to be the finest of receivers, and were running it at the moment with the gain turned up until the knob broke, you might pick up some very strange signals indeed . . .

The clock ticked.

Granny Weatherwax sat in front of the open box, reading. Occasionally she stopped and closed her eyes and pinched her nose.

Not knowing the future was bad enough, but at least she understood why. Now she was getting flashes of deja vu. It had been going on all week. But they weren't her deja vus. She was getting them for the first time, as it were – flashes of memory that couldn't have existed. Couldn't have existed. She was Esme Weatherwax, sane as a brick, always had been, she'd never been–

There was a knock at the door.

She blinked, glad to be free of those thoughts. It took her a second or two to focus on the present. Then she folded up the paper, slipped it into its envelope, pushed the envelope back into its bundle, put the bundle into the box, locked the box with a small key which she hung over the fireplace, and walked to the door. She did a last-minute check to make sure she hadn't absentmindedly taken all her clothes off, or something, and opened it.

"Evenin'," said Nanny Ogg, holding out a bowl with a cloth over it, "I've brung you some-"

Granny Weatherwax was looking past her.

"Who're these people?" she said.

The three girls looked embarrassed.

"See, they came round my house and said-" Nanny Ogg began.

"Don't tell me. Let me guess," said Granny. She strode out, and inspected the trio.

"Well, well, well," she said. "My word. My word. Three girls who want to be witches, am I right?" Her voice went falsetto. "'Oh, please, Mrs. Ogg, we has seen the error of our ways, we want to learn proper witchcraft." Yes?"

"Yes. Something like that," said Nanny. "But-"

"This is witchcraft," said Granny Weatherwax. "It's not. . . it's not a game of conkers. Oh, deary, deary me."

She walked along the very short row of trembling girls.

"What's your name, girl?"

"Magenta Frottidge, ma'am."

"I bet that's not what your mum calls you?"

Magenta looked at her feet.

"She calls me Violet, ma'am."

"Well, it's a better colour than magenta," said Granny. "Want to be a bit mysterious, eh? Want to make folks feel you got a grip on the occult? Can you do magic? Your friend taught you anything, did she? Knock my hat off."

"What, ma'am?"

Granny Weatherwax stood back, and turned around.

"Knock it off. I ain't trying to stop you. Go on."

Magenta-shading-to-Violet shaded to pink.

"Er . . . I never got the hang of the psycho-thingy . . ."

"Oh, dear. Well, just let's see what the rest can do . . . Who're you, girl?"

"Amanita, ma'am."

"Such a pretty name. Let's see what you can do."

Amanita looked around nervously.

"I, er, don't think I can while you're watching me-" she began.

"That's a shame. What about you, on the end?"

"All right. I won't."

He knocked on the coach door. The window slid down.

"I wouldn't like you to think of this as a robbery," he said. "I'd like you to think of it more as a colourful anecdote you might enjoy telling your grandchildren about."

A voice from within said, "That's him! He stole my horse!"

A wizard's staff poked out. The chieftain saw the knob on the end.

"Now, then," he said, pleasantly. "I know the rules. Wizards aren't allowed to use magic against civilians except in genuine life-threatening situa-"

There was a burst of octarine light.

"Actually, it's not a rule," said Ridcully. "It's more a guideline." He turned to Ponder Stibbons. "Interestin' use of Stacklady's Morphic Resonator here, I hope you noticed."

Ponder looked down.

The chieftain had been turned into a pumpkin although, in accordance with the rules of universal humour, he still had his hat on.

"And now," said Ridcully, "I'd be obliged if all you fellows hidin' behind the rocks and things would just step out where I can see you. Very good. Mr. Stibbons, you and the Librarian just pass around with the hat, please."

"But this is robbery!" said the coachman. "And you've turned him into a fruit!"

"A vegetable," said Ridcully "Anyway, it'll wear off in a couple of hours."

"And I'm owed a horse," said Casanunda.

The bandits paid up, reluctantly handing over money to Ponder and reluctantly but very quickly handing over money to the Librarian.

"There's almost three hundred dollars, sir," said Ponder.

"And a horse, remember. In fact, there were two horses. I'd forgotten about the other horse until now."

"Capital! We're in pocket on the trip. So if these gentlemen would just remove the roadblock, we'll be on our way."

"In fact, there was a third horse I've just remembered about."

"This isn't what you're supposed to do! You're supposed to be robbed!" shouted the coachman.

Ridcully pushed him off the board.

"We're on holiday," he said.

The coach rattled away There was a distant cry of "And four horses, don't forget" before it rounded a bend.

The pumpkin developed a mouth.

"Have they gone?"

"Yes, boss."

"Roll me into the shade, will you? And no one say anything about this ever again. Has anyone got any dried frog pills?"

Verence II respected witches. They'd put him on the throne. He was pretty certain of that, although he couldn't quite work out how it had happened. And he was in awe of Granny Weatherwax.

He followed her meekly toward the dungeons, hurrying to keep up with her long stride.

"What's happening, Mistress Weatherwax?"

"Got something to show you."

"You mentioned elves."

"That's right."

"I thought they were a fairy story."

"Well?"

"I mean . . . you know . . . an old wives' tale?"

"So?"

Granny Weatherwax seemed to generate a gyroscopic field – if you started out off-balance, she saw to it that you remained there.

He tried again.

"Don't exist, is what I'm trying to say."

Granny reached a dungeon door. It was mainly age-blackened oak, but with a large barred grille occupying some of the top half.

"In there."

Verence peered inside.

"Good grief!"

"I got Shawn to unlock it. I don't reckon anyone else saw us come in. Don't tell anyone. If the dwarfs and the trolls find out, they'll tear the walls apart to get him out."

"Why? To kill him?"

"Of course. They've got better memories than humans."

"What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Just keep it locked up. How should I know? I've got to think!"

Verence peered in again at the elf. It was lying curled up in the centre of the floor.

"That's an elf? But it's . . . just a long, thin human with a foxy face. More or less. I thought they were supposed to be beautiful?"

"Oh, they are when they're conscious," said Granny, waving a hand vaguely "They project this . . . this . . . when people look at them, they see beauty, they see something they want to please. They can look just like you want them to look. 'S'called glamour. You can tell when elves are around. People act funny. They stop thinking clear. Don't you know anything?"

"I thought . . . elves were just stories . . . like the Tooth Fairy. . ."

"Nothing funny about the Tooth Fairy," said Granny. "Very hard-working woman. I'll never know how she manages with the ladder and everything. No. Elves are real. Oh, drat. Listen. . ."

She turned, and held up a finger.

"Feudal system, right?"

"What?"

"Feudal system! Pay attention. Feudal system. King on top, then barons and whatnot, then everyone else . . . witches off to one side a bit," Granny added diplomatically. She steepled her fingers. "Feudal system. Like them pointy buildings heathen kings get buried in. Understand?"

"Yes."

"Right. That's how the elves see things, yes? When they get into a world, everyone else is on the bottom. Slaves. Worse than slaves. Worse than animals, even. They take what they want, and they want everything. But worst of all, the worst bit is . . . they read your mind. They hear what you think, and in self-defence you think what they want. Glamour. And it's barred windows at night, and food out for the fairies, and turning around three times before you talks about 'em, and horseshoes over the door."

"I thought that sort of thing was, you know," the king grinned sickly, "folklore?"

"Of course it's folklore, you stupid man!"

"I do happen to be king, you know," said Verence reproachfully.

"You stupid king, your majesty,"

"Thank you."

"I mean it doesn't mean it's not true! Maybe it gets a little muddled over the years, folks forget details, they forget why they do things. Like the horseshoe thing."

"I know my granny had one over the door," said the king.

"There you are. Nothing to do with its shape. But if you lives in an old cottage and you're poor, it's probably the nearest bit of iron with holes in it that you can find."

"Ah."

"The thing about elves is they've got no . . . begins with m," Granny snapped her fingers irritably.

"Manners?"

"Hah! Right, but no."

"Muscle? Mucus? Mystery?"

"No. No. No. Means like . . . seein' the other person's point of view."

Verence tried to see the world from a Granny Weatherwax perspective, and suspicion dawned.

"Empathy?"

"Right. None at all. Even a hunter, a good hunter, can feel for the quarry. That's what makes 'em a good hunter. Elves aren't like that. They're cruel for fun, and they can't understand things like mercy. They can't understand that anything apart from themselves might have feelings. They laugh a lot, especially if they've caught a lonely human or a dwarf or a troll. Trolls might be made out of rock, your majesty, but I'm telling you that a troll is your brother compared to elves. In the head, I mean."

"But why don't I know all this?"

"Glamour. Elves are beautiful. They've got," she spat the word, "style. Beauty. Grace. That's what matters. If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember. They remember the glamour. All the rest of it, all the truth of it, becomes . . . old wives' tales."

"Magrat's never said anything about them."

Granny hesitated.

"Magrat doesn't know too much about elves," she said. "Hah. She ain't even a young wife yet. They're not something that gets talked about a lot these days. It's not good to talk about them. It's better if everyone forgets about them. They . . . come when they're called. Not called like 'Cooee.' Called inside people's heads. It's enough for people just to want them to be here."

It was still being watched. She could sense the watchfulness. Sufficiently close examination changes the thing being observed, and what was being observed was the whole country. The whole country was under attack, and here she was, her mind unravelling . . .

"Funny thing," said Nanny Ogg, to no one in particular, "while I was sitting up there at the Dancers this morning I thought, funny thing. . ."

"What're you going on about now?"

"I remember when I was young there was a girl like Diamanda. Bad-tempered and impatient and talented and a real pain in the bum to the old witches. I don't know if you happen to remember her, by any chance?"

They passed Jason's forge, which rang to the sound of his hammer.

"I never forgot her," said Granny, quietly.

"Funny thing, how things go round in circles . . ."

"No they don't," said Granny Weatherwax firmly. "I wasn't like her. You know what the old witches round here were like. Set in their ways. No more than a bunch of old wart-charmers. And I wasn't rude to them. I was just . . . firm. Forthright. I stood up for meself. Part of being a witch is standing up for yourself – you're grinning."

"Just wind, I promise."

"It's completely different with her. No one's ever been able to say I wasn't open to new ideas."

"Well known for being open to new ideas, you are," said Nanny Ogg. "I'm always saying, that Esme Weatherwax, she's always open to new ideas."

"Right." Granny Weatherwax looked up at the forested hills around the town, and frowned.

"The thing is," she said, "girls these days don't know how to think with a clear mind. You've got to think clearly and not be distracted. That's Magrat for you, always being distracted. It gets in the way of doing the proper thing." She stopped. "I can feel her, Gytha. The Queen of the Fairies. She can get her mind past the stones. Blast that girl! She's got a way in. She's everywhere. Everywhere I look with my mind, I can smell her."

"Everything's going to be all right," said Nanny, patting her on the shoulder. "You'll see."

"She's looking for a way," Granny repeated.

"Good morrow, brothers, and wherehap do we whist this merry day?" said Carter the baker.

The rest of the Lancre Morris Men looked at him.

"You on some kind of medication or what?" said Weaver the thatcher.

"Just trying to enter into the spirit of the thing," said Carter.

"That's how rude mechanicals talk."

"Who're rude mechanicals?" said Baker the weaver.

"They're the same as Comic Artisans, I think," said Carter the baker.

"I asked my mum what artisans are," said Jason.

"Yeah?"

"They're us."

"And we're Rude Mechanicals as well?" said Baker the weaver.

"I reckon."

"Bum!"

"Well, we certainly don't talk like these buggers in the writing," said Carter the baker. "I never said 'fol-de-rol' in my life. And I can't understand any of the jokes."

"You ain't supposed to understand the jokes, this is a play," said Jason.

"Drawers!" said Baker the weaver.

"Oh, shut up. And push the cart."

"Don't see why we couldn't do the Stick and Bucket Dance . . ." mumbled Tailor the other weaver.

"We're not doing the Stick and Bucket dance! I never want to hear any more ever about the Stick and Bucket dance! I still get twinges in my knee! So shut up about the Stick and Bucket dance!"

"Belly!" shouted Baker, who wasn't a man to let go of an idea.

The cart containing the props bumped and skidded on the rutted track.

Jason had to admit that Morris dancing was a lot easier than acting. People didn't keep turning up to watch and giggle. Small children didn't stand around jeering. Weaver and Thatcher were in almost open rebellion now, and mucking up the words. The evenings were becoming a constant search for somewhere to rehearse.

Even the forest wasn't private enough. It was amazing how people would just happen to be passing.

Weaver stopped pushing, and wiped his brow.

"You'd have thought the Blasted Oak would've been safe," he said. "Half a mile from the nearest path, and damn me if after five minutes you can't move for charcoal burners, hermits, trappers, tree tappers, hunters, trolls, bird-limers, hurdle-makers, swine-herds, truffle hunters, dwarfs, bodgers and suspicious buggers with big coats on. I'm surprised there's room in the forest for the bloody trees. Where to now?"

They'd reached a crossroads, if such it could be called.

"Don't remember this one," said Carpenter the poacher. "Thought I knew all the paths around here."

"That's 'cos you only ever sees 'em in the dark," said Jason.

"Yeah, everyone knows 'tis your delight on a shining night," said Thatcher the carter.

"Tis his delight every night," said Jason.

"Hey," said Baker the weaver, "we're getting really good at this rude mechanism, ain't we?"

"Let's go right," said Jason.

"Nah, it's all briars and thorns that way."

"All right, then, left then."

"It's all winding," said Weaver.

"What about the middle road?" said Carter.

Jason peered ahead.

There was a middle track, hardly more than an animal path, which wound away under shady trees. Ferns grew thickly alongside it. There was a general green, rich, dark feel to it, suggested by the word "bosky[22]"

His blacksmith's senses stood up and screamed.

"Not that way," he said.

"Ah, come on," said Weaver. "What's wrong with it?"

"Goes up to the Dancers, that path does," said Jason. "Me mam said no one was to go up to the Dancers 'cos of them young women dancing round 'em in the nudd."

"Yeah, but they've been stopped from that," said Thatcher. "Old Granny Weatherwax put her foot down hard and made 'em put their drawers on."

"And they ain't to go there anymore, neither," said Carter. "So it'll be nice and quiet for the rehearsing."

"Me mam said no one was to go there," said Jason, a shade uncertainly.

"Yeah, but she probably meant . . . you know . . . with magical intent," said Carter. "Nothing magical about prancing around in wigs and stuff."

"Right," said Thatcher. "And it'll be really private."

"And," said Weaver, "if any young women fancies sneaking back up there to dance around without their drawers on, we'll be sure to see 'em."

There was a moment of absolute, introspective silence.

"I reckon," said Thatcher, voicing the unspoken views of nearly all of them, "we owes it to the community."

"We-ell," said Jason, "me mam said . . ."

"Anyway, your mum's a fine one to talk," said Weaver. "My dad said that when he was young, your mum hardly ever had-"

"Oh, all right," said Jason, clearly outnumbered. "Can't see it can do any harm. We're only actin'. It's . . . it's make-believe. It's not as if it's anything real. But no one's to do any dancing. Especially, and I want everyone to be absolutely definite about this, the Stick and Bucket dance."

"Oh, we'll be acting all right," said Weaver. "And keeping watch as well, o'course."

"It's our duty to the community," said Thatcher, again.

"Make-believe is bound to be all right," said Jason, uncertainly.

Clang boinng clang ding . . .

The sound echoed around Lancre.

Grown men, digging in their gardens, flung down their spades and hurried for the safety of their cottages . . .

Clang boinnng goinng ding . . .

Women appeared in doorways and yelled desperately for their children to come in at once . . .

. . . BANG buggrit Dong boinng . . .

Shutters thundered shut. Some men, watched by their frightened families, poured water on the fire and tried to stuff sacks up the chimney . . .

Nanny Ogg lived alone, because she said old people needed their pride and independence. Besides, Jason lived on one side, and he or his wife whatshername could easily be roused by means of a boot applied heavily to the wall, and Shawn lived on the other side and Nanny had got him to fix up a long length of string with some tin cans on it in case his presence was required. But this was only for emergencies, such as when she wanted a cup of tea or felt bored.

Bond drat clang . . .

Nanny Ogg had no bathroom but she did have a tin bath, which normally hung on a nail on the back of the privy. Now she was dragging it indoors. It was almost up the garden, after being bounced off various trees, walls, and garden gnomes on the way.

Three large black kettles steamed by her fireside. Beside them were half a dozen towels, the loofah, the pumice stone, the soap, the soap for when the first soap got lost, the ladle for fishing spiders out, the waterlogged rubber duck with the prolapsed squeaker, the bunion chisel, the big scrubbing brush, the small scrubbing brush, the scrubbing brush on a stick for difficult crevices, the banjo, the thing with the pipes and spigots that no one ever really knew the purpose of, and a bottle of Klatchian Nights bath essence, one drop of which could crinkle paint.

Bong clang slam . . .

Everyone in Lancre had learned to recognize Nanny's pre-ablutive activities, out of self-defense.

"But it ain't April!" neighbours told themselves, as they drew the curtains.

In the house just up the hill from Nanny Ogg's cottage Mrs. Skindle grabbed her husband's arm.

"The goat's still outside!"

"Are you mad? I ain't going out there! Not now!"

"You know what happened last time! It was paralysed all down one side for three days, man, and we couldn't get it down off the roof!"

Mr. Skindle poked his head out of the door. It had all gone quiet. Too quiet.

"She's probably pouring the water in," he said.

"You've got a minute or two," said his wife. "Go on, or we'll be drinking yoghurt for weeks."

Mr. Skindle took down a halter from behind the door, and crept out to where his goat was tethered near the hedge. It too had learned to recognize the bathtime ritual, and was rigid with apprehension.

There was no point in trying to drag it. Eventually he picked it up bodily.

There was a distant but insistent sloshing noise, and the bonging sound of a floating pumice stone bouncing on the side of a tin bath.

Mr. Skindle started to run.

Then there was the distant tinkle of a banjo being tuned.

The world held its breath.

Then it came, like a tornado sweeping across a prairie.

"AAaaaaeeeeeee-"

Three flowerpots outside the door cracked, one after the other. Shrapnel whizzed past Mr. Skindle's ear.

"-wizzaaardsah staaafff has a knobontheend, knobontheend-"

He threw the goat through the doorway and leapt after it. His wife was waiting, and slammed the door shut behind him.

The whole family, including the goat, got under the table.

It wasn't that Nanny Ogg sang badly. It was just that she could hit notes which, when amplified by a tin bath half full of water, ceased to be sound and became some sort of invasive presence.

There had been plenty of singers whose high notes could smash a glass, but Nanny's high C could clean it.

The Lancre Morris Men sat glumly on the turf, passing an earthenware jug between them. It had not been a good rehearsal.

"Don't work, does it?" said Thatcher. "'S'not funny, that I do know," said Weaver. "Can't see the king killing himself laughing at us playing a bunch of mechanical artisans not being very good at doin' a play."

"You're just no good at it," said Jason. "We're sposed to be no good at it," said Weaver. "Yeah, but you're no good at acting like someone who's ho good at acting," said Tinker. "I don't know how, but you ain't. You can't expect all the fine lords and ladies-"

A breeze blew over the moor, tasting of ice at midsummer.

"-to laugh at us not being any good at being no good at acting."

"I don't see what's funny about a bunch of rude artisans trying to do a play anyway," said Weaver.

Jason shrugged.

"It says all the gentry-"

A tang on the wind, the sharp tin taste of snow . . .

"-in Ankh-Morpork laughed at it for weeks and weeks," he said. "It was on Broad Way for three months."

"What's Broad Way?"

"That's where all the theatres are. The Dysk, Lord Wynkin's Men, the Bearpit . . ."

"They'd laugh at any damn thing down there," said Weaver. "Anyway, they all think we're all simpletons up here. They all think we say oo-aah and sings daft folk songs and has three brain cells huddlin' together for warmth 'cos of drinking scumble all the time."

"Yeah. Pass that jug."

"Swish city bastards."

"They don't know what it's like to be up to the armpit in a cow's backside on a snowy night. Hah!"

"And there ain't one of 'em that – what're you talking about? You ain't got a cow."

"No, but I know what it's like."

"They don't know what it's like to get one wellie sucked off in a farmyard full of gyppoe and that horrible moment where you waves the foot around knowin' that wherever you puts it down it's going to go through the crust."

The stoneware jug glugged gently as it was passed from hand to unsteady hand.

"True. That's very true. And you ever seen 'em Morris dancing? "Muff to make you hang up your hanky."

"What, Morris dancing in a city?"

"Well, down in Sto Helit, anyway. Bunch o' soft wizards and merchants. I watched 'em a whole hour and there wasn't even a groinin'."

"Swish city bastards. Comin' up here, takin' our jobs. . ."

"Don't be daft. They don't know what a proper job is."

The jug glugged, but with a deeper tone, suggesting that it contained a lot of emptiness.

"Bet they've never been up to the armpit-"

"The point is. The point is. The point. The point is. Hah. All laughin' at decent rude artisans, eh? I mean. I mean. I mean. What's it all about? I mean. I mean. I mean. Play's all about some mechanical. . . rude buggers makin' a pig's ear out of doin' a play about a bunch of lords and ladies-"

A chill in the air, sharp as icicles . . .

"It needs something else."

"Right. Right."

"A mythic element."

"Right. My point. My point. My point. Needs a plot they can go home whistlin'. Exactly."

"So it should be done here, in the open air. Open to the sky and the hills."

Jason Ogg wrinkled his brows. They were always pretty wrinkled anyway, whenever he was dealing with the complexities of the world. Only when it came to iron did he know exactly what to do. But he held up a wavering finger and tried to count his fellow thespians. Given that the jug was now empty, this was an effort. There seemed, on average, to be seven other people. But he had a vague, nagging feeling that something wasn't right.

"Out here," he said, uncertainly.

"Good idea," said Weaver.

"Wasn't it your idea?" said Jason.

"I thought you said it."

"I thought you did."

"Who cares who said it?" said Thatcher. "'S'a good idea. Seems . . . right."

"What was that about the miffic quality?"

"What's miffic?"

"Something you've got to have," said Weaver, theatrical expert. "Very important, your miffics."

"Me mam said no one was to go-" Jason began.

"We shan't be doing any dancing or anything," said Carter. "I can see you don't want people skulking around up here by 'emselves, doin' magic. But it can't be wrong if everyone comes here. I mean, the king and everyone. Your mam, too. Hah, I'd like to see any girls with no drawers on get past her!"

There are some people that would whistle "Yankee Doodle" in a crowded bar in Atlanta.

Even these people would consider it tactless to mention the word "billygoat" to a troll.

The troll's expression changed very slowly, like a glacier eroding half a mountain. Ponder tried to get under the seat.

"So we'll just trit-trot along, shall we?" said the Bursar, his voice by now slightly muffled.

"He doesn't mean it," said the Archchancellor quickly. "It's the dried frog talking."

"You don't want to eat me," said the Bursar. "You want to eat my brother, he's much mfmfph mfmfph . . ."

"Well, now," said the troll, "seems to me that-" He spotted Casanunda.

"Oh-ho," he said, "dwarf smuggling, eh?"

"Don't be ridiculous, man," said Ridcully, "there's no such thing as dwarf smuggling."

"Yeah? Then what's that you've got there?"

"I'm a giant," said Casanunda.

"Giants are a lot bigger."

"I've been ill."

The troll looked perplexed. This was post-graduate thinking for a troll. But he was looking for trouble. He found it on the roof of the coach, where the Librarian had been sunbathing.

"What's in that sack up there?"

"That's not a sack. That's the Librarian."

The troll prodded the large mass of red hair.

"Ook. . ."

"What? A monkey?"

"Oook?"

Several minutes later, the travellers leaned on the parapet, looking down reflectively at the river far below.

"Happen often, does it?" said Casanunda.

"Not so much these days," said Ridcully. "It's like – what's that word, Stibbons? About breedin' and passin' on stuff to yer kids?"

"Evolution," said Ponder. The ripples were still sloshing against the banks.

"Right. Like, my father had a waistcoat with embroidered peacocks on it, and he left it to me, and now I've got it. They call it hereditarery-"

"No, that's not-" Ponder began, with no hope whatsoever that Ridcully would listen.

"-so anyway, most people left back home know the difference between apes and monkeys now," said Ridcully. "Evolution, that is. It's hard to breed when you've got a headache from being bounced up and down on the pavement."

The ripples had stopped now.

"Do you think trolls can swim?" said Casanunda.

"No. They just sink and walk ashore," said Ridcully He turned, and leaned back on his elbows. "This really takes me back, you know. The old Lancre River. There's trout down there that'd take your arm off."

"Not just trout," said Ponder, watching a helmet emerge from the water.

"And limpid pools further up," said Ridcully. "Full of, of, of . . . limpids, stuff like that. And you can bathe naked and no one'd see. And water meadows full of . . . water, don'tyerknow, and flowers and stuff." He sighed. "You know, it was on this very bridge that she told me she-"

"He's got out of the river," said Ponder. But the troll wasn't moving very fast, because the Librarian was nonchalantly levering one of the big stones out of the parapet.

"On this very bridge I asked-"

"That's a big club he's got," said Casanunda.

"This bridge, I may say, was where I nearly-"

"Could you stop holding that rock in such a provocative way?" said Ponder.

"Oook."

"It'd be a help."

"The actual bridge, if anyone's interested, is where my whole life took a diff-"

"Why don't we just go on?" said Ponder. "He's got a steep climb."

"Good thing for him he hasn't got up here, eh?" said Casanunda. Ponder swiveled the Librarian around and pushed him toward the coach.

"This is the bridge, in fact, where-"

Ridcully turned around.

"Are you coming or not?" said Casanunda, with the reins in his hand.

"I was actually having a quality moment of misty nostalgic remembrance," said Ridcully. "Not that any of you buggers noticed, of course."

Ponder held the door open.

"Well, you know what they say. You can't cross the same river twice, Archchancellor," he said.

Ridcully stared at him.

"Why not? This is a bridge."

On the roof of the coach the Librarian picked up the coach-horn, bit the end of it reflectively – well, you never knew – and then blew it so hard that it uncurled.

It was early morning in Lancre town, and it was more or less deserted. Farmers had got up hours before to curse and swear and throw a bucket at the cows and had then gone back to bed.

The sound of the horn bounced off the houses.

Ridcully leapt out of the coach and took a deep, theatrical breath.

"Can't you smell that?" he said. "That's real fresh mountain air, that is." He thumped his chest.

"I've just trodden in something rural," said Ponder. "Where is the castle, sir?"

"I think it could be that huge black towering thing looming over the town," said Casanunda.

The Archchancellor stood in the middle of the square and turned slowly with his arms spread wide.

"See that tavern?" he said. "Hah! If I had a penny for every time they threw me out of there, I'd have . . . five dollars and thirty-eight pence. And over there is the old forge, and there's Mrs. Persifleur's, where I had lodgings. See that peak up there? That's Copperhead, that is. I climbed that one day with old Carbonaceous the troll. Oh, great days, great days. And see that wood down there, on the hill? That's where she-"

His voice trailed into a mumble. "Oh, my word. It all comes back to me . . . What a summer that was. They don't make 'em like that anymore." He sighed. "You know," he said, "I'd give anything to walk through those woods with her again. There were so many things we never – oh, well. Come on."

Ponder looked around at Lancre. He'd been born and raised in Ankh-Morpork. As far as he was concerned, the countryside was something that happened to other people, and most of them had four legs. As far as he was concerned, the countryside was like raw chaos before the universe, which was to say something with cobbles and walls, something civilized, was created.

"This is the capital city?" he said.

"More or less," said Casanunda, who tended to feel the same way about places that weren't paved.

"I bet there's not a single delicatessen anywhere," said Ponder.

"And the beer here," said Ridcully, "the beer here – well, you'd just better taste the beer here! And there's stuff called scumble, they make it from apples and . . . and damned if I know what else they put in it, except you daren't pour it into metal mugs. You ought to try it, Mr. Stibbons. It'd put hair on your chest. And yours-" he turned to the next one down from the coach, who turned out to be the Librarian.

"Oook?"

"Well, I, er, I should just drink anything you like, in your case," said Ridcully.

He hauled the mail sack down from the roof.

"What do we do with this?" he said.

There were ambling footsteps behind him, and he turned to see a short, red-faced youth in ill-fitting and baggy chain-mail, which made him look like a lizard that had lost a lot of weight very quickly.

"Where's the coach driver?" said Shawn Ogg.

"He's ill," said Ridcully. "He had a sudden attack of bandits. What do we do with the mail?"

"I take the palace stuff, and we generally leave the sack hanging up on a nail outside the tavern so that people can help themselves," said Shawn.

"Isn't that dangerous?" said Ponder.

"Don't think so. It's a strong nail," said Shawn, rummaging in the sack.

"I meant, don't people steal letters?"

"Oh, they wouldn't do that, they wouldn't do that. One of the witches'd go and stare at 'em if they did that." Shawn stuffed a few packages under his arm and hung the sack on the aforesaid nail.

"Yes, that's another thing they used to have round here," said Ridcully. "Witches! Let me tell you about the witches round here-"

"Our mum's a witch," said Shawn conversationally, rummaging in the sack.

"As fine a body of women as you could hope to meet," said Ridcully, with barely a hint of mental gear-clashing. "And not a bunch of interfering power-mad old crones at all, whatever anyone might say."

"Are you here for the wedding?"

"That's right. I'm the Archchancellor of Unseen University, this is Mr. Stibbons, a wizard, this – where are you? Oh, there you are – this is Mr. Casanunda-"

"Count," said Casanunda. "I'm a Count."

"Really? You never said."

"Well, you don't, do you? It's not the first thing you say."

Ridcully's eyes narrowed.

"But I thought dwarfs didn't have titles," he said.

"I performed a small service for Queen Agantia of Skund," said Casanunda.

"Did you? My word. How small?"

"Not that small."

"My word. And that's the Bursar, and this is the Librarian." Ridcully took a step backward, waved his hands in the air, and silently mouthed the words: Don't Say Monkey.

"Pleased to meet you," said Shawn, politely.

Ridcully felt moved to investigate.

"The Librarian," he repeated.

"Yes. You said." Shawn nodded at the orang-utan. "How d'you do?"

"Ook."

"You might be wondering why he looks like that," Ridcully prompted.

"No, sir."

"No?"

"My mum says none of us can help how we're made," said Shawn.

"What a singular lady. And what is her name?" said

Ridcully.

"Mrs. Ogg, sir."

"Ogg? Ogg? Name rings a bell. Any relation to Sobriety Ogg?"

"He was my dad, sir."

"Good grief. Old Sobriety's son? How is the old devil?"

"Dunno, sir, what with him being dead."

"Oh dear. How long ago?"

"These past thirty years," said Shawn.

"But you don't look any older than twen-" Ponder began. Ridcully elbowed him sharply in the ribcage.

"This is the countryside," he hissed. "People do things differently here. And more often." He turned back to Shawn's pink and helpful face.

"Things seem to be waking up a bit," he said, and indeed shutters were coming down around the square. "We'll get some breakfast in the tavern. They used to do wonderful breakfasts." He sniffed again, and beamed.

"Now that" he said, "is what I call fresh air."

Shawn looked around carefully.

"Yes, sir," he said. "That's what we call it, too." ' There was the sound of someone frantically running, and then a pause, and King Verence II appeared around the comer, walking slowly and calmly with a very red face.

"Certainly gives people a rosy complexion," said Ridcully cheerfully.

"It's the king!" hissed Shawn. "And me without my trumpet!"

"Urn," said Verence. "Post been yet, Shawn?"

"Oh, yes, sire!" said Shawn, almost as flustered as the king. "Got it right here. Don't you worry about it! I'll open it all up and have it on your desk right away, sire!"

"Urn. . ."

"Something the matter, sire?"

"Um . . . I think perhaps . . ."

Shawn was already tearing at the wrappers.

"Here's that book on etiquette you've been waiting for, sire, and the pig stockbook, and . . . what's this one . . . ?"

Verence made a grab for it. Shawn automatically tried to hang on to it. The wrapping split, and the large bulky book thumped on to the cobbles. Its fluttering pages played their woodcuts to the breeze.

They looked down.

"Wow!" said Shawn.

"My word," said Ridcully.

"Um," said the king.

"Oook?"

Shawn picked up the book very, very carefully, and turned a few pages.

"Hey, look at this one! He's doing it with his feet! I didn't know you could do it with your feet!" He nudged Ponder Stibbons. "Look, sir!"

Ridcully peered at the king.

"You all right, your majesty?" he said.

Verence squirmed.

"Um . . ."

"And, look, here's one where both chaps are doing it with sticks . . ."

"What?" said Verence.

"Wow," said Shawn. "Thank you, sire. This is going to really come in handy, I can tell you. I mean, I've picked up bits and pieces here and there, but-"

Verence snatched the book from Shawn's hands and looked at the title page.

"'Martial Arts"? Martial Arts. But I'm sure I wrote Marit-"

"Sire?"

There was one exquisite moment while Verence fought for mental balance, but he won.

"Ah. Yes. Right. Uh. Well, yes. Uh. Of course. Yes. Well, you see, a well-trained army is . . . is essential to the security of any kingdom. That's right. Yes. Fine. Magrat and me, we thought. . . yes. It's for you, Shawn."

"I'll start practicing right away, sire!"

"Um. Good."

Jason Ogg awoke, and wished he hadn't.

Let's be clear. Many authorities have tried to describe a hangover. Dancing elephants and so on are often employed for this purpose. The descriptions never work. The always smack of, hoho, here's one for the lads, let's have some hangover machismo, hoho, landlord, another nineteen pints of lager, hey, we supped some stuff last night, hoho . . .

Anyway, you can't describe a scumble hangover. The best bit of it is a feeling that your teeth have dissolved and coated themselves on your tongue.

Eventually the blacksmith sat up and opened his eyes[26].

His clothes were soaked with dew.

His head felt full of wisps and whispers.

He stared at the stones.

The scumble jar was lying in the leather. After a moment or two he picked it up, and took an experimental swig. It was empty.

He nudged Weaver in the ribs with his boot.

"Wake up, you old bugger. We've been up here all night!"

One by one, the Morris Men made the short but painful journey into consciousness.

"I'm going to get some stick from our Eva when I get home," moaned Carter.

"You might not," said Thatcher, who was on his hands and knees looking for his hat. "Maybe when you gets 'ome she'll have married someone else, eh?"

"Maybe a hundred years'll have gone past," said Carter, hopefully.

"Cor, I hope so," said Weaver, brightening up. "I had sevenpence invested in The Thrift Bank down in Ohulan. I'll be a millionaire at complicated interest. I'll be as rich as Creosote."

"Who's Creosote?" said Thatcher.

"Famous rich bugger," said Barker, fishing one of his boots out of a peat pool. "Foreign."

"Wasn't he the one, everything he touched turned to gold?" said Carter.

"Nah, that was someone else. Some king or other. That's what happens in foreign parts. One minute you're all right, next minute, everything you touch turns to gold. He was plagued with it."

Carter looked puzzled.

"How did he manage when he had to-"

"Let that be a lesson to you, young Carter," said Baker. "You stay here where folks are sensible, not go gadding off abroad where you might suddenly be holding a fortune in your hands and not have anything to spend it on."

"We've slept out here all night," said Jason uncertainly "That's dangerous, that is."

"You're right there, Mr. Ogg," said Carter, "I think something went to the toilet in my ear."

"I mean strange things can enter your head."

"That's what I mean, too."

Jason blinked. He was certain he'd dreamed. He could remember dreaming. But he couldn't remember what the dream had been about. But there was still the feeling in his head of voices talking to him, but too far away to be heard.

"Oh, well," he said, managing to stand up at the third attempt, "probably no harm done. Let's get on home and see what century it is."

"What century is it, anyway?" said Thatcher. "Century of the Fruitbat, isn't it?" said Baker. "Might not be anymore," said Carter hopefully. It turned out that it was, indeed, the Century of the Fruitbat. Lancre didn't have much use for units of time any smaller than an hour or larger than a year, but people were clearly putting up bunting in the town square and a gang of men were erecting the Maypole. Someone was nailing up a very badly painted picture of Verence and Magrat under which was the slogan: God Bless Their Majestieys.

She dressed herself in her commoner's clothes for the ' last time, and let herself out and down the back stairs to the widdershins tower and the room where Diamanda lay

Magrat had instructed Shawn to keep a good fire going in the grate, and Diamanda was still sleeping, peacefully, the unwakeable sleep.

Magrat couldn't help noticing that Diamanda was strikingly good-looking and, from what she'd heard, quite brave enough to stand up to Granny Weatherwax. She could hardly wait to get her better so that she could envy her properly.

The wound seemed to be healing up nicely, but there seemed to be –

Magrat strode to the bellpull in the comer and hauled on it.

After a minute or two Shawn Ogg arrived, panting. There was gold paint on his hands.

"What," said Magrat, "are all these things?"

"Um. Don't like to say, ma'am . . ."

"One happens to be . . . very nearly . . . the queen," said Magrat.

"Yes, but the king said . . . well. Granny said-"

"Granny Weatherwax does not happen to rule the kingdom," said Magrat. She hated herself when she spoke like this, but it seemed to work. "And anyway she's not here. One is here, however, and if you don't tell one what's going on I'll see to it that you do all the dirty jobs around the palace."

"But I do all the dirty jobs anyway," said Shawn.

"I shall see to it that there are dirtier ones."

Magrat picked up one of the bundles. It was made up of strips of sheet wrapped around what turned out to be an iron bar.

"They're all around her," she said. "Why?"

Shawn looked at his feet. There was gold paint on his boots, too.

"Well, our mum said . . ."

"Yes?"

"Our mum said I was to see to it that there was iron round her. So me and Millie got some bars from down the smithy and wrapped 'em up like this and Millie packed 'em round her."

"Why?"

"To keep away the . . . the Lords and Ladies, ma'am."

"What? That's just old superstition! Anyway, everyone knows elves were good, whatever Granny Weatherwax says."

Behind her, Shawn flinched. Magrat pulled the wrapped iron lumps out of the bed and tossed them into the comer.

"No old wives' tales here, thank you very much. Is there anything else people haven't been telling me, by any chance?"

Shawn shook his head, guiltily aware of the thing in the dungeon.

"Huh! Well, go away. Verence wants the kingdom to be modem and efficient, and that means no horseshoes and stuff around the place. Go on, go away."

"Yes, Miss Queen."

At least I can do something positive around here, Magrat told herself.

Yes. Be sensible. Go and see him. Talk. Magrat clung to the idea that practically anything could be sorted out if only people talked to one another.

"Shawn?"

He paused at the door.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Has the king gone down to the Great Hall yet?"

"I think he's still dressing, Miss Queen. He hasn't rung for me to do the trumpet, I know that."

In fact, Verence, who didn't like going everywhere preceded by Shawn's idea of a fanfare, had already gone downstairs incognito. But Magrat slipped along to his room, and knocked on the door.

Why be bashful? It'd be her room as well from tomorrow, wouldn't it? She tried the handle. It turned. Without quite willing it, Magrat went in.

Rooms in the castle could hardly be said to belong to anyone in any case. They'd had too many occupants over the centuries. The very atmosphere was the equivalent of those walls scattered with outbreaks of drawing-pin holes where last term's occupants hung the posters of rock groups long disbanded. You couldn't stamp your personality on that stone. It stamped back harder.

For Magrat, stepping into a man's bedroom was like an explorer stepping on to that part of the map marked Here Be Dragons[27].

And it wasn't exactly what it ought to have been.

Verence had arrived at the bedroom concept fairly late in life. When he was a boy, the entire family slept on straw in the cottage attic. As an apprentice in the Guild of Joculators, he'd slept on a pallet in a long dormitory of other sad, beaten young men. When he was a fully fledged Fool he'd slept, by tradition, curled up in front of his master's door. Suddenly, at a later age than is usual, he'd been introduced to the notion of soft mattresses.

And now Magrat was privy to the big secret.

It hadn't worked.

There was the Great Bed of Lancre, which was said to be able to sleep a dozen people, although in what circumstances and why it should be necessary history had never made clear. It was huge and made of oak.

It was also, very clearly, unslept in.

Magrat pulled back the sheets, and smelled the scorched smell of linen. But it also smelled unaired, as if it hadn't been slept in.

She stared around the room until her eye lit on the little still-life by the door. There was a folded nightshirt, a candlestick, and a small pillow.

As far as Verence had been concerned, a crown merely changed which side of the door you slept.

Oh, gods. He'd always slept in front of the door of his master. And now he was king, he slept in front of the door to his kingdom.

Magrat felt her eyes fill with tears.

You couldn't help loving someone as soppy as that.

Fascinated, and aware that she was where she technically shouldn't be, Magrat blew her nose and explored further. A heap of discarded garments by the bed suggested that Verence had mastered the art of hanging up clothes as practiced by half the population of the world, and also that he had equally had difficulty with the complex topological manoeuvres necessary to turn his socks the right way out.

There was a tiny dressing table and a mirror. Stuck to the mirror frame was a dried and faded flower that looked, to Magrat, very like the ones she habitually wore in her hair.

She shouldn't have gone on looking. She admitted that to herself, afterward. But she seemed to have no self-control.

There was a wooden bowl in the middle of the dresser table, full of odd coins, bits of string, and the general detritus of the nightly emptied pocket.

And a folded paper. Much folded, as if it had stayed in said pocket for some time.

She picked it up, and unfolded it.

There were little kingdoms all over the hubward slopes of the Ramtops. Every narrow valley, every ledge that something other than a goat could stand on, was a kingdom. There were kingdoms in the Ramtops so small that, if they were ravaged by a dragon, and that dragon had been killed by a young hero, and the king had given him half his kingdom as per Section Three of the Heroic Code, then there wouldn't have been any kingdom left. There were wars of annexation that went on for years just because someone wanted a place to keep the coal.

Lancre was one of the biggest kingdoms. It could actually afford a standing army[28].

Kings and queens and various sub-orders of aristocracy were even now streaming over Lancre bridge, watched by a sulking and soaking-wet troll who had given up on bridge-keeping for the day.

The Great Hall had been thrown open. Jugglers and fire-eaters strolled among the crowd. Up in the minstrels gallery a small orchestra were playing the Lancre one-string fiddle and famed Ramtop bagpipes, but fortunately they were more or less drowned out by the noise of the crowd.

Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax moved through said crowd. In deference to this being a festive occasion, Nanny Ogg had exchanged her normal black pointy hat for one the same shape but in red, with wax cherries on it.

"All the hort mond are here," Nanny observed, taking a drink off a passing tray. "Even some wizards from Ankh-Morpork, our Shawn said. One of them said I had a fine body, he said. Been tryin' to remember all morning who that could have been."

"Spoilled for choice," said Granny, but it was automatic nastiness, with no real heart to it. It worried Nanny Ogg. Her friend seemed preoccupied.

"There's some gentry we don't want to see here," said Granny. "I won't be happy until all this is over."

Nanny Ogg craned to try and see over the head of a small emperor.

"Can't see Magrat around," she said. "There's Verence talking to some other kings, but can't see our Magrat at all. Our Shawn said Millie Chillum said she was just a bag of nerves this morning."

"All these high-born folks," said Granny, looking around at the crowned heads. "I feel like a fish out of water."

"Well, the way I see it, it's up to you to make your own water," said Nanny, picking up a cold roast chicken leg from the buffet and stuffing it up a sleeve.

"Don't drink too much. We've got to keep alert, Gytha. Remember what I said. Don't let yourself get distracted-"

"That's never the delectable Mrs. Ogg, is it?"

Nanny turned.

There was no one behind her.

"Down here," said the voice.

She looked down, into a wide grin.

"Oh, blast," she said.

"It's me, Casanunda," said Casanunda, who was dwarfed still further by an enormous[30] powdered wig. "You remember? We danced the night away in Genua?"

"No we didn't."

"Well, we could have done."

"Fancy you turning up here," said Nanny, weakly. The thing about Casanunda, she recalled, was that the harder you slapped him down the faster he bounced back, often in an unexpected direction.

"Our stars are entwined," said Casanunda. "We're fated for one another. I wants your body, Mrs. Ogg."

"I'm still using it."

And while she suspected, quite accurately, that this was an approach the world's second greatest lover used on anything that appeared to be even vaguely female, Nanny Ogg had to admit that she was flattered. She'd had many admirers in her younger days, but time had left her with a body that could only be called comfortable and a face like Mr. Grape the Happy Raisin. Long-banked fires gave off a little smoke.

Besides, she'd rather liked Casanunda. Most men were oblique in their approach, whereas his direct attack was refreshing.

"It'd never work," she said. "We're basically incompatible. When I'm 5' 4" you'll still only be 3' 9". Anyway, I'm old enough to be your mother."

"You can't be. My mother's nearly 300, and she's got a better beard than you."

And of course that was another point. By dwarf standards, Nanny Ogg was hardly more than a teenager.

"La, sir," she said, giving him a playful tap that made his ears ring, "you do know how to turn a simple country girl's head and no mistake!"

Casanunda picked himself up and adjusted his wig happily

"I like a girl with spirit," he said. "How about you and me having a little tete-a-tete when this is over?"

Nanny Ogg's face went blank. Her cosmopolitan grip of language had momentarily let her down.

"Excuse me a minute," she said. She put her drink down on his head and pushed through the crowd until she found a likely looking duchess, and prodded her in the bustle regions.

"Hey, your grace, what's a tater tate?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"A tater tate? Do you do it with your clothes on or what?"

"It means an intimate meeting, my good woman."

"Is that all? Oh. Ta."

Nanny Ogg elbowed her way back to the vibrating dwarf.

"You're on," she said.

"I thought we could have a little private dinner, just you and me," said Casanunda. "In one of the taverns?"

Never, in a long history of romance, had Nanny Ogg ever been taken out for an intimate dinner. Her courtships had been more noted for their quantity than their quality.

"OK," was all she could think of to say.

"Dodge your chaperone and meet me at six o'clock?"

Nanny Ogg glanced at Granny Weatherwax, who was watching them disapprovingly from a distance.

"She's not my-" she began.

Then it dawned on her that Casanunda couldn't possibly have really thought that Granny Weatherwax was chaperoning her.

Compliments and flattery had also been very minor components in the machinery of Nanny Ogg's courtships.

"Yes, all right," she said.

"And now I shall circulate, so that people don't talk and ruin your reputation," said Casanunda, bowing and kissing Nanny Ogg's hand.

Her mouth dropped open. No one had ever kissed her hand before, either, and certainly no one had ever worried about her reputation, least of all Nanny Ogg.

As the world's second greatest lover bustled off to accost a countess. Granny Weatherwax – who had been watching from a discreet distance[31] – said, in an amiable voice: "You haven't got the morals of a cat, Gytha Ogg."

"Now, Esme, you know that's not true."

"All right. You have got the morals of a cat, then."

"That's better."

Nanny Ogg patted her mass of white curls and wondered if she had time to go home and put her corsets on.

"We must stay on our guard, Gytha."

"Yes, yes."

"Can't let other considerations turn our heads."

"No, no."

"You're not listening to a word I say, are you?"

"What?"

"You could at least find out why Magrat isn't down here."

"All right."

Nanny Ogg wandered off, dreamily.

Granny Weatherwax turned–

–there should have been violins. The murmur of the crowd should have faded away, and the crowd itself should have parted in a quite natural movement to leave an empty path between her and Ridcully

There should have been violins. There should have been something.

There shouldn't have been the Librarian accidentally knuckling her on the toe on his way to the buffet, but this, in fact, there was.

She hardly noticed.

"Esme?" said Ridcully

"Mustrum?" said Granny Weatherwax.

Nanny Ogg bustled up.

"Esme, I saw Millie Chillum and she said-"

Granny Weatherwax's vicious elbow jab winded her. Nanny took in the scene.

"Ah," she said, "I'll just, I'll just. . . I'll just go away, then."

The gazes locked again.

The Librarian knuckled past again with an entire display of fruit.

Granny Weatherwax paid him no heed.

The Bursar, who was currently on the median point of his cycle, tapped Ridcully on the shoulder.

"I say, Archchancellor, these quails' eggs are amazingly go-"

"DROP DEAD. Mr. Stibbons, fish out the frog pills and keep knives away from him, please."

The gazes locked again.

"Well, well," said Granny, after a year or so.

"This must be some enchanted evening," said Ridcully.

"Yes. That's what I'm afraid of."

"That really is you, isn't it?"

"It's really me," said Granny

"You haven't changed a bit, Esme."

"Nor have you, then. You're still a rotten liar, Mustrum Ridcully"

They walked toward one another. The Librarian shuttled between them with a tray of meringues. Behind them, Ponder Stibbons grovelled on the floor for a spilled bottle of dried frog pills.

"Well, well," said Ridcully.

"Fancy that."

"Small world."

"Yes indeed."

"You're you and I'm me. Amazing. And it's here and now."

"Yes, but then was then."

"I sent you a lot of letters," said Ridcully

"Never got 'em."

There was a glint in Ridcully's eye.

"That's odd. And there was me putting all those destination spells on them too," he said. He gave her a critical up-and-down glance. "How much do you weigh, Esme? Not a spare ounce on you, I'll be bound."

"What do you want to know for?"

"Indulge an old man."

"Nine stones, then."

"Hmm . . . should be about right . . . three miles hubward . . . you'll feel a slight lurch to the left, nothing to worry about. . ."

In a lightning movement, he grabbed her hand. He felt young and light-headed. The wizards back at the University would have been astonished.

"Let me take you away from all this."

He snapped his fingers.

There has to be at least an approximate conservation of mass. It's a fundamental magical rule. If something is moved from A to B, something that was at B has got to find itself at A.

And then there's momentum. Slow as the disc spins, various points of its radii are moving at different speeds relative to the Hub, and a wizard projecting himself any distance toward the Rim had better be prepared to land jogging.

The three miles to Lancre Bridge merely involved a faint tug, which Ridcully had been ready for, and he landed up leaning against the parapet with Esme Weatherwax in his arms.

The customs troll who had until a fraction of a second previously been sitting there ended up lying full length on the floor of the Great Hall, coincidentally on top of the Bursar.

Granny Weatherwax looked over at the rushing water, and then at Ridcully.

"Take me back this instant," she said. "You've got no right to do that."

"Dear me, I seem to have run out of power. Can't understand it, very embarrassing, fingers gone all limp," said Ridcully. "Of course, we could walk. It's a lovely evening. You always did get lovely evenings here."

"It was all fifty or sixty years ago!" said Granny. "You can't suddenly turn up and say all those years haven't happened."

"Oh, I know they've happened all right," said Ridcully. "I'm the head wizard now. I've only got to give an order and a thousand wizards will. . . uh . . . disobey, come to think of it, or say 'What?', or start to argue. But they have to take notice."

"I've been to that University a few times," said Granny. "A bunch of fat old men in beards."

"That's right! That's them!"

"A lot of 'em come from the Ramtops," said Granny. "I knew a few boys from Lancre who became wizards."

"Very magical area," Ridcully agreed. "Something in the air."

Below them, the cold black waters raced, always dancing to gravity, never flowing uphill.

"There was even a Weatherwax as Archchancellor, years ago," said Ridcully.

"So I understand. Distant cousin. Never knew him," said Granny.

They both stared down at the river for a moment. Occasionally a twig or a branch would whirl along in the current.

"Do you remember-"

"I have a . . . very good memory, thank you."

"Do you ever wonder what life would have been like if

you'd said yes?" said Ridcully.

"No."

"I suppose we'd have settled down, had children, grandchildren, that sort of thing . . ."

Granny shrugged. It was the sort of thing romantic idiots said. But there was something in the air tonight. . .

"What about the fire?" she said.

"What fire?"

"Swept through our house just after we were married.

Killed us both."

"What fire? I don't know anything about any fire?"

Granny turned around.

"Of course not! It didn't happen. But the point is, it might have happened. You can't say 'if this didn't happen then that would have happened' because you don't know everything that might have happened. You might think something'd be good, but for all you know it could have turned out horrible. You can't say 'If only I'd . . . ' because you could be wishing for anything. The point is, you'll never know. You've gone past. So there's no use thinking about it.

So I don't."

"The Trousers of Time," said Ridcully, moodily. He picked a fragment off the crumbling stonework and dropped it into the water. It went plunk, as is so often the case.

"What?"

"That's the sort of thing they go on about in the High Energy Magic building. And they call themselves wizards! You should hear them talk. The buggers wouldn't know a magic sword if it bit them on the knee. That's young wizards today. Think they bloody invented magic."

"Yes? You should see the girls that want to be witches these days," said Granny Weatherwax. "Velvet hats and black lipstick and lacy gloves with no fingers to 'em. Cheeky, too."

They were side by side now, watching the river.

"Trousers of Time," said Ridcully. "One of you goes down one leg, one of you goes down the other. And there's all these continuinuinuums all over the place. When I was a lad there was just one decent universe and this was it, and all you had to worry about was creatures breaking through from the Dungeon Dimensions, but at least there was this actual damn universe and you knew where you stood. Now it turns out there's millions of the damn things. And there's this damn cat they've discovered that you can put in a box and it's dead and alive at the same time. Or something. And they all run around saying marvellous, marvellous, hooray, here comes another quantum. Ask 'em to do a decent levitation spell and they look at you as if you've started to dribble. You should hear young Stibbons talk. Went on about me not inviting me to my own wedding. Me!"

From the side of the gorge a kingfisher flashed, hit the water with barely a ripple, and ricocheted away with something silver and wriggly in its beak.

"Kept going on about everything happening at the same time," Ridcully went on morosely. "Like there's no such thing as a choice. You just decide which leg you're heading for. He says that we did get married, see. He says all the things that might have been have to be. So there's thousands of me out there who never became a wizard, just like there's thousands of you who, oh, answered letters. Hah! To them, we're something that might have been. Now, d'you call that proper thinking for a growing lad? When I started wizarding, old 'Tudgy' Spold was Archchancellor, and if any young wizard'd even mentioned that sort of daft thing, he'd feel a staff across his backside. Hah!"

Somewhere far below, a frog plopped off a stone. "Mind you, I suppose we've all passed a lot of water since then."

It dawned gently on Ridcully that the dialogue had become a monologue. He turned to Granny, who was staring round-eyed at the river as if she'd never seen water before.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid," she said.

"I beg your pardon? I was only-"

"Not you. I wasn't talking to you. Stupid! I've been stupid. But I ain't been daft! Hah! And I thought it was my memory going! And it was, too. It was going and fetching!"

"What?"

"I was getting scared! Me! And not thinking clear!

Except I was thinking clear!"

"What!"

"Never mind! Well, I won't say this hasn't been . . . nice," said Granny. "But I've got to get back. Do the thing with the fingers again. And hurry."

Ridcully deflated a little.

"Can't," he said.

"You did it just now."

"That's the point. I wasn't joking when I said I couldn't do it again. It takes a lot out of you, transmigration."

"You used to be able to do it all the time, as I recall," said Granny. She risked a smile. "Our feet hardly touched the ground."

"I was younger then. Now, once is enough." Granny's boots creaked as she turned and started to walk quickly back toward the town. Ridcully lumbered after her.

"What's the hurry?"

"Got important things to do," said Granny, without turning around. "Been letting everyone down."

"Some people might say this is important."

"No. It's just personal. Personal's not the same as important. People just think it is."

"You're doing it again!"

"What?"

"I don't know what the other future would have been like," said Ridcully, "but I for one would have liked to give it a try."

Granny paused. Her mind was crackling with relief. Should she tell him about the memories? She opened her mouth to do so, and then thought again. No. He'd get soppy.

"I'd have been crabby and bad-tempered," she said, instead.

"That goes without saying."

"Hah! And what about you? I'd have put up with all your womanizing and drunkenness, would I?"

Ridcully looked bewildered.

"What womanizing?"

"We're talking about what might have been."

"But I'm a wizard! We hardly ever womanize. There's laws about it. Well. . . rules. Guidelines, anyway."

"But you wouldn't have been a wizard then."

"And I'm hardly ever drunk."

"You would have been if you'd been wedded to me."

He caught up with her.

"Even young Ponder doesn't think like this," he said. "You've made up your mind that it would have been dreadful, have you?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Why'd you think?"

"I asked you!"

"I'm too busy for this," said Granny. "Like I said, personal ain't the same as important. Make yourself useful, Mr. Wizard. You know it's circle time, don't you?"

Ridcully's hand touched the brim of his hat.

"Oh, yes."

"And you know what that means?"

"They tell me it means that the walls between realities get weaker. The circles are . . . what's the word Stibbons uses? Isoresons. They connect levels of, oh, something daft . . . similar levels of reality. Which is bloody stupid. You'd be able to walk from one universe to another."

"Ever tried it?"

"No!"

"A circle is a door half open. It doesn't need much to open it up all the way. Even belief'll do it. That's why they put the Dancers up, years ago. We got the dwarfs to do it. Thunderbolt iron, those stones. There's something special about 'em. They've got the love of iron. Don't ask me how it works. Elves hate it even more than ordinary iron. It . . . upsets their senses, or something. But minds can get through. . ."

"Elves? Everyone knows elves don't exist anymore. Not proper elves. I mean, there's a few folk who say they're elves-"

"Oh, yeah. Elvish ancestry. Elves and humans breed all right, as if that's anything to be proud of. But you just get a race o'skinny types with pointy ears and a tendency to giggle and burn easily in sunshine. I ain't talking about them. There's no harm in them. I'm talking about real wild elves, what we ain't seen here for-"

The road from the bridge to the town curved between high banks, with the forest crowding in on either side and in places even meeting overhead. Thick ferns, already curling like green breakers, lined the clay banks.

They rustled.

The unicorn leapt on the road.

Thousands of universes, twisting together like a rope being plaited from threads . . .

There's bound to be leakages, a sort of mental equivalent of the channel breakthrough on a cheap hi-fi that gets you the news in Swedish during quiet bits in the music. Especially if you've spent your life using your mind as a receiver.

Picking up the thoughts of another human being is very hard, because no two minds are on the same, er, wavelength.

But somewhere out there, at the point where the parallel universes tangle, are a million minds just like yours. For a very obvious reason.

Granny Weatherwax smiled.

Millie Chillum and the king and one or two hangers-on were clustered around the door to Magrat's room when Nanny Ogg arrived.

"What's happening?"

"I know she's in there," said Verence, holding his crown in his hands in the famous At'-Senor-Mexican-Bandits-Have-Raided-Our-Village position. "Millie heard her shout go away and I think she threw something at the door."

Nanny Ogg nodded sagely.

"Wedding nerves," she said. "Bound to happen."

"But we're all going to attend the Entertainment," said Verence. "She really ought to attend the Entertainment."

"Well, I dunno," said Nanny. "Seeing our Jason and the rest of 'em prancing about in straw wigs . . . I mean, they mean well, but it's not something a young – a fairly young – girl has to see on the night before her nuptials. You asked her to unlock the door?"

"I did better than that," said Verence. "I instructed her to. That was right, wasn't it? If even Magrat won't obey me, I'm a poor lookout as king."

"Ah," said Nanny, after a moment's slow consideration. "You've not entirely spent a lot of time in female company, have you? In a generalized sort of way?"

"Well, I-"

The crown spun in Verence's nervous fingers. Not only had the bandits invaded the village, but the Magnificent Seven had decided to go bowling instead.

"Tell you what," said Nanny, patting him on the back,

"you go and preside over the Entertainment and hobnob with the other nobs. I'll see to Magrat, don't you worry. I've been a bride three times, and that's only the official score."

"Yes, but she should-"

"I think if we go easy on the 'shoulds,'" said Nanny, "we might all make it to the wedding. Now, off you all go."

"Someone ought to stay here," said Verence. "Shawn will be on guard, but-"

"No one's going to invade, are they?" said Nanny. "Let me sort this out."

"Well. . . if you're sure . . ."

"Go on!"

Nanny Ogg waited until she heard them go down the main staircase. After a while a rattle of coaches and general shouting suggested that the wedding party was leaving, minus the bride-to-be.

She counted to a hundred, under her breath.

Then:

"Magrat?"

"Go away!"

"I know how it is," said Nanny. "I was a bit worried on the night before my wedding." She refrained from adding:

because there was a reasonable chance Jason would turn up as an extra guest.

"I am not worried! I am angry!"

"Why?"

"You know!"

Nanny took off her hat and scratched her head.

"You've got me there," she said.

"And he knew. I know he knew, and I know who told him," said the muffled voice behind the door. "It was all arranged. You must all have been laughing!"

Nanny frowned at the impassive woodwork.

"Nope," she said. "Still all at sea this end."

"Well, I'm not saying anymore."

"Everyone's gone to the Entertainment," said Nanny Ogg.

No reply.

"And later they'll be back." A further absence of dialogue.

"Then there'll be carousing and jugglers and fellas that put weasels down their trousers," said Nanny. Silence.

"And then it'll be tomorrow, and then what're you going to do?"

Silence.

"You can always go back to your cottage. No one's moved in. Or you can stop along of me, if you like. But you'll have to decide, d'you see, because you can't stay locked in there."

Nanny leaned against the wall.

"I remember years ago my granny telling me about Queen Amonia, well, I say queen, but she never was queen except for about three hours because of what I'm about to unfold, on account of them playing hide-and-seek at the wedding party and her hiding in a big heavy old chest in some attic and the lid slamming shut and no one finding her for seven months, by which time you could definitely say the wedding cake was getting a bit stale."

Silence.

"Well, if you ain't telling me, I can't hang around all night," said Nanny. "It'll all be better in the morning, you'll see."

Silence.

"Why don't you have an early night?" said Nanny. "Our Shawn'll do you a hot drink if you ring down. It's a bit nippy out here, to tell you the truth. It's amazing how these old stone places hang on to the chill."

Silence.

"So I'll be off then, shall I?" said Nanny, to the unyielding silence. "Not doing much good here, I can see that. Sure you don't want to talk?"

Silence.

"Stand before your god, bow before your king, and kneel before your man. Recipe for a happy life, that is," said Nanny, to the world in general. "Well, I'm going away now. Tell you what, I'll come back early tomorrow, help you get ready, that sort of thing. How about it?"

Silence.

"So that's all sorted out then," said Nanny. "Cheerio." She waited a full minute. By rights, by the human mechanics of situations like this, the bolts should have been drawn back and Magrat should have peeped out into the corridor, or possibly even called out to her. She did not.

Nanny shook her head. She could think of at least three ways of getting into the room, and only one of them involved going through the door. But there was a time and a place for witchcraft, and this wasn't it. Nanny Ogg had led a long and generally happy life by knowing when not to be a witch, and this was one of those times.

She went down the stairs and out of the castle. Shawn was standing guard at the main gate, surreptitiously practicing karate chops on the evening air. He stopped and looked embarrassed as Nanny Ogg approached.

"Wish I was going to the Entertainment, Mum."

"I daresay the king will be very generous to you come payday on account of your duty," said Nanny Ogg. "Remind me to remind him."

"Aren't you going?"

"Well, I'm . . . I'm just going for a stroll into town," said Nanny. "I expect Esme went with 'em, did she?"

"Couldn't say, Mum."

"Just a few things I got to do."

She hadn't gone much further before a voice behind her said, "Ello, oh moon of my delight."

"You do sneak up on people, Casanunda."

"I've arranged for us to have dinner at the Goat and Bush," said the dwarf Count.

"Ooo, that's a horrible expensive place," said Nanny Ogg. "Never eaten there."

"They've got some special provisions in, what with the wedding and all the gentry here," said Casanunda. "I've made special arrangements."

These had been quite difficult.

Food as an aphrodisiac was not a concept that had ever caught on in Lancre, apart from Nanny Ogg's famous Carrot and Oyster Pie[32]. As far as the cook at the Goat and Bush was concerned, food and sex were only linked in certain humorous gestures involving things like cucumbers. He'd never heard of chocolate, banana skins, avocado and ginger, marshmallow and the thousand other foods people had occasionally employed to drive an A-to-B freeway through the rambling pathways of romance. Casanunda had spent a busy ten minutes sketching out a detailed menu, and quite a lot of money had changed hands.

He'd arranged a careful romantic candlelit supper. Casanunda had always believed in the art of seduction.

Many tall women accessible by stepladder across the continent had reflected how odd it was that the dwarfs, a race to whom the aforesaid art of seduction consisted in the main part of tactfully finding out what sex, underneath all that leather and chain-mail, another dwarf was, had generated someone like Casanunda.

It was as if Eskimos had produced a natural expert in the care and attention of rare tropical plants. The great pent up waters of dwarfish sexuality had found a leak at the bottom of the dam-small, but with enough power to drive a dynamo.

Everything that his fellow dwarfs did very occasionally as nature demanded he did all the time, sometimes in the back of a sedan chair and once upside down in a tree – but, and this is important, with care and attention to detail that was typically dwarfish. Dwarfs would spend months working on an exquisite piece of jewellery, and for broadly similar reasons Casanunda was a popular visitor to many courts and palaces, for some strange reason generally while the local lord was away. He also had a dwarfish ability with locks, always a useful talent for those awkward moments sur la boudoir.

And Nanny Ogg was an attractive lady, which is not the same as being beautiful. She fascinated Casanunda. She was an incredibly comfortable person to be around, partly because she had a mind so broad it could accommodate three football fields and a bowling alley.

* * *

"I wish I had my crossbow," muttered Ridcully. "With that head on my wall I'd always have a place to hang my hat."

The unicorn tossed its head and pawed the ground. Steam rose from its flanks.

"I ain't sure that would work," said Granny. "You sure you've got no whoosh left in them fingers of yours?"

"I could create an illusion," said the wizard. "That's not hard."

"It wouldn't work. The unicorn is an elvish creature. Magic don't work on 'em. They see through illusions. They ought to, they're good enough at 'em. How about the bank? Reckon you could scramble up it?"

They both glanced at the banks. They were red clay, slippery as priests.

"Let's walk backward," said Granny. "Slowly."

"How about its mind? Can you get in?"

"There's someone in there already. The poor thing's her pet. It obeys only her."

The unicorn walked after them, trying to watch both of them at the same time.

"What shall we do when we come to the bridge?"

"You can still swim, can't you?"

"The river's a long way down."

"But there's a deep pool there. Don't you remember? You dived in there once. One moonlit night. . ."

"I was young and foolish then."

"Well? You're old and foolish now."

"I thought unicorns were more . . . fluffy."

"See clear! Don't let the glamour get you! See what's in front of your eyes! It's a damn great horse with a horn on the end!" said Granny.

The unicorn pawed the ground.

Granny's feet scraped the bridge.

"Got here by accident, can't get back," she said. "Ifn there'd been one of us it'd be charging by now. We're about halfway across the bridge-"

"Lot of snow runoff in that river," said Ridcully, doubtfully

"Oh, yes," said Granny "See you at the weir."

And she was gone.

The unicorn, which had been trying to decide between targets, was left with Ridcully.

It could count up to one.

It lowered its head.

Ridcully had never liked horses, animals which seemed to him to have only the weakest possible grip on sanity

As the unicorn charged, he vaulted the parapet and dropped, without much aerodynamic grace, into the icy waters of the Lancre.

The Librarian liked the stage. He was always in the front seat on the first night of a new production at any of Ankh's theatres, his prehensile abilities allowing him to clap twice as hard as anyone else or, if necessary, hurl peanut shells.

And he was feeling let down. There were hardly any books in the castle, except for serious volumes on etiquette and animal breeding and estate management. As a rule, royalty doesn't read much.

He wasn't expecting to be amazed at the Entertainment. He'd peered behind the bit of sacking that was doing service as a dressing room, and seen half a dozen heavily built men arguing with one another. This did not bode well for an evening of thespianic splendor, although there was always the possibility that one of them might hit another one in the face with a custard pie[33].

He had managed to get the three of them seats in the front row. This wasn't according to the rules of precedence, but it was amazing how everyone squeezed up to make room. He'd also found some peanuts. No one ever knew how he managed that.

Then she'd drunk more wine.

What also captivated Casanunda was the way Nanny Ogg's face became a mass of cheerful horizontal lines when she laughed, and Nanny Ogg laughed a lot.

In fact Casanunda was finding, through the faint haze of wine, that he was actually having fun.

"I take it there is no Mr. Ogg?" he said, eventually.

"Oh, yes, there's a Mr. Ogg," said Nanny. "We buried him years ago. Well, we had to. He was dead."

"It must be very hard for a woman living all alone?"

"Dreadful," said Nanny Ogg, who had never prepared a meal or wielded a duster since her eldest daughter had been old enough to do it for her, and who had at least four meals cooked for her every day by various terrified daughters-in-law.

"It must be especially lonely at night," said Casanunda, out of habit as much as anything else.

"Well, there's Greebo," said Nanny "He keeps my feet warm."

"Greebo-"

"The cat. I say, do you think there's any pudding?"

Later, she asked for a doggy bottle.

Mr. Brooks the beekeeper ladled some greenish, foul smelling liquid out of the saucepan that was always simmering in his secret hut, and filled his squirter.

There was a wasps' nest in the garden wall. It'd be a mortuary by morning.

That was the thing about bees. They always guarded the entrance to the hive, with their lives if necessary. But wasps were adept at finding the odd chink in the woodwork around the back somewhere and the sleek little devils'd be in and robbing the hive before you knew it. Funny. The bees in the hive'd let them do it, too. They guarded the entrance, but if a wasp found another way in, they didn't know what to do.

He gave the plunger a push. A stream of liquid bubbled out and left a smoking streak on the floor.

Wasps looked pretty enough. But if you were for bees, you had to be against wasps.

There seemed to be some sort of party going on in the hall. He vaguely remembered getting an invitation but, on the whole, that sort of thing never really caught his imagination. And especially now. Things were wrong. None of the hives showed any signs of swarming. Not one.

As he passed the hives in the dusk he heard the humming. You got that, on a warm night. Battalions of bees stood at the hive entrance, fanning the air with their wings to keep the brood cool. But there was also the roar of bees circling the hive.

They were angry, and on guard.

There was a series of small weirs just on the borders of Lancre. Granny Weatherwax hauled herself up on to the damp woodwork, and squelched to the bank where she emptied her boots.

After a while a pointy wizard's hat drifted downriver, and rose to reveal a pointy wizard underneath it. Granny lent a hand to help Ridcully out of the water.

"There," she said, "bracing, wasn't it? Seemed to me you could do with a cold bath."

Ridcully tried to clean some mud out of his ear. He glared at Granny.

"Why aren't you wet?"

"I am."

"No you're not. You're just damp. I'm wet through. How can you float down a river and just be damp?"

"I dries out quick."

Granny Weatherwax glared up the rocks. A short distance away the steep road ran on to Lancre, but there were other, more private ways known to her among the trees,

"So," she said, more or less to herself. "She wants to stop me going there, does she? Well, we'll see about that."

"Going where?" said Ridcully.

"Ain't sure," said Granny. "All I know is, if she don't want me to go there, that's where I'm going. But I hadn't bargained on you tumin' up and having a rush of blood to the heart. Come on."

Ridcully wrung out his robe. A lot of the sequins had come off. He removed his hat and unscrewed the point.

Headgear picks up morphic vibrations. Quite a lot of trouble had once been caused in Unseen University by a former Archchancellor's hat, which had picked up too many magical vibrations after spending so much time on wizardly heads and had developed a personality of its very own. Ridcully had put a stop to this by having his own hat made to particular specifications by an Ankh-Morpork firm of completely insane hatters.

It was not a normal wizard hat. Few wizards have ever made much use of the pointy bit, except maybe to keep the odd pair of socks in it. But Ridcully's hat had small cupboards. It had surprises. It had four telescopic legs and a roll of oiled silk in the brim that extended downward to make a small but serviceable tent, and a patent spirit stove just above it. It had inner pockets with three days' supply of iron rations. And the tip unscrewed to dispense an adequate supply of spirituous liquors for use in emergencies, such as when Ridcully was thirsty.

Ridcully waved the small pointed cup at Granny.

"Brandy?" he said.

"What have you got on your head?"

Ridcully felt his pate gingerly.

"Urn . . ."

"Smells like honey and horse apples to me. And what's that thing?"

Ridcully lifted the small cage off his head. There was a small treadmill in it, in a complex network of glass rods. A couple of feeding bowls were visible. And there was a small, hairy and currently quite wet mouse.

"Oh, it's something some of the young wizards came up with," said Ridcully diffidently "I said I'd . . . try it out for them. The mouse hair rubs against the glass rods and there's sparks, don't'y'know, and . . . and . . ."

Granny Weatherwax looked at the Archchancellor's somewhat grubby hair and raised an eyebrow.

"My word," she said. "What will they think of next?"

"Don't really understand how it works, Stibbons is the man for this sort of thing, I thought I'd help them out. . ."

"Lucky you were going bald, eh?"

In the darkness of her sickroom Diamanda opened her eyes, if they were her eyes. There was a pearly sheen to them. The song was as yet only on the threshold of hearing. And the world was different. A small part of her mind was still Diamanda, and looked out through the mists of enchantment. The world was a pattern of fine silver lines, constantly moving, as though everything was coated with filigree. Except where there was iron. There the lines were crushed and tight and bent. There, the whole world was invisible. Iron distorted the world. Keep away from iron.

She slipped out of bed, using the edge of the blanket to grasp the door handle, and opened the door.

Shawn Ogg was standing very nearly to attention.

Currently he was guarding the castle and Seeing How Long He Could Stand On One Leg.

Then it occurred to him that this wasn't a proper activity for a martial artist, and he turned it into No. 19, the Flying Chrysanthemum Double Drop Kick.

After a while he realized that he had been hearing something. It was vaguely rhythmical, and put him in mind of a grasshopper chirruping. It was coming from inside the castle.

He turned carefully, keeping alert in case the massed armies of Foreign Parts tried to invade while his back was turned.

This needed working out. He wasn't on guard from things inside the castle, was he? "On guard" meant things outside. That was the point of castles. That's why you had all the walls and things. He'd got the big poster they gave away free with Jane's All the World's Siege Weapons. He knew what he was talking about.

Shawn was not the quickest of thinkers, but his thoughts turned inexorably to the elf in the dungeon. But that was locked up. He'd locked the door himself. And there was iron all over the place, and Mum had been very definite about the iron.

Nevertheless. . .

He was methodical about it. He raised the drawbridge and dropped the portcullis and peered over the wall for good measure, but there was just the dusk and the night breeze.

He could feel the sound now. It seemed to be coming out of the stone, and had a saw-toothed edge to it that grated on his nerves.

It couldn't have got out, could it? No, it stood to reason. People hadn't gone around building dungeons you could get out of.

The sound swung back and forth across the scale.

Shawn leaned his rusty pike against the wall and drew his sword. He knew how to use it. He practiced for ten minutes every day, and it was one sorry hanging sack of straw when he'd finished with it.

He slipped into the keep by the back door and sidled along the passages toward the dungeon. There was no one else around. Of course, everyone was at the Entertainment. And they'd be back any time now, carousing all over the place.

The castle felt big, and old, and cold.

Any time now.

Bound to.

The noise stopped.

Shawn peered around the comer. There were the steps, there was the open doorway to the dungeons.

"Stop!" shouted Shawn, just in case.

The sound echoed off the stones.

"Stop! Or . . . or . . . or . . . Stop!"

He eased his way down the steps and looked through the

archway

"I warn you! I'm learning the Path of the Happy Jade

Lotus!"

There was the door to the cell, standing ajar. And a

white-clad figure next to it. Shawn blinked. "Aren't you Miss Tockley?"

She smiled at him. Her eyes glowed in the dim light. "You're wearing chain-mail, Shawn," she said. "What, miss?" He glanced at the open door again. "That's terrible. You must take it off, Shawn. How can

you hear with all that stuff around your ears?"

Shawn was aware of the empty space behind him. But

he daren't look around.

"I can hear fine, miss," he said, trying to ease himself around so that his back was against a wall.

"But you can't hear truly," said Diamanda, drifting forward. "The iron makes you deaf."

Shawn was not yet used to thinly clad young women approaching him with a dreamy look on their faces. He fervently wished he could take the Path of the Retreating Back.

He glanced sideways.

There was a tall skinny shape outlined in the open cell doorway. It was standing very carefully, as if it wanted to keep as far away from its surroundings as possible.

Diamanda was smiling at him in a funny way.

He ran.

Somehow, the woods had changed. Ridcully was certain that in his youth they'd been full of bluebells and primroses and – and bluebells and whatnot and so on. Not bloody great briars all over the place. They snagged at his robe and once or twice some tree-climbing equivalent knocked his hat off.

What made it worse was that Esme Weatherwax seemed to avoid all of them.

"How do you manage that?"

"I just know where I am all the time," said Granny.

"Well? I know where I am, too."

"No you don't. You just happen to be present. That's not the same."

"Well, do you happen to know where a proper path is?"

"This is a short cut."

"Between two places where you're not lost, d'you mean?"

"I keep tellin' you, I ain't lost! I'm . . . directionally challenged."

"Hah!"

But it was a fact about Esme Weatherwax, he had to admit. She might be lost, and he had reason to suspect this was the case now, unless there were in this forest two trees with exactly the same arrangement of branches and a strip of his robe caught on one of them, but she did have a quality that in anyone not wearing a battered pointy hat and an antique black dress might have been called poise. Absolute poise. It would be hard to imagine her making an awkward movement unless she wanted to.

He'd seen that years ago, although of course at the time he'd just been amazed at the way her shape fitted perfectly into the space around it. And–

He'd got caught up again.

"Wait a minute!"

"Entirely the wrong sort of clothes for the country!"

"I wasn't expecting a hike through the woods! This is ceremonial damn costume!"

"Take it off, then."

"Then how will anyone know I'm a wizard?"

"I'll be sure to tell them!"

Granny Weatherwax was getting rattled. She was also, despite everything that she'd said, getting lost. But the point was that you couldn't get lost between the weir at the bottom of the Lancre rapids and Lancre town itself. It was uphill all the way Besides, she'd walked through the local forests all her life. They were her forests.

She was pretty sure they'd passed the same tree twice. There was a bit of Ridcully's robe hanging on it.

It was like getting lost in her own garden.

She was also sure she'd seen the unicorn a couple of times. It was tracking them. She'd tried to get into its mind. She might as well have tried to climb an ice wall.

It wasn't as if her own mind was tranquil. But now at least she knew she was sane.

When the walls between the universes are thin, when the parallel strands of If bunch together to pass through the Now, then certain things leak across. Tiny signals, perhaps, but audible to a receiver skilled enough.

In her head were the faint, insistent thoughts of a thousand Esme Weatherwaxes.

Magrat wasn't sure what to pack. Most of her original clothes seemed to have evaporated since she'd been in the castle, and it was hardly good manners to take the ones Verence had bought for her. The same applied to the engagement ring. She wasn't sure if you were allowed to keep it.

She glared at herself in the mirror.

She'd have to stop thinking like this. She seemed to have spent her whole life trying to make herself small, trying to be polite, apologizing when people walked over her, trying to be good-mannered. And what had happened? People had treated her as if she was small and polite and good-mannered.

She'd stick the, the, the damn letter on the mirror, so they'd all know why she'd gone.

She'd a damn good mind to go off to one of the cities and become a courtesan.

Whatever that was.

And then she heard the singing.

It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful sound Magrat had ever heard. It flowed straight through the ears and into the hindbrain, into the blood, into the bone . . .

A silk camisole dropped from her fingers on to the floor.

She wrenched at the door, and a tiny part of her mind still capable of rational thought remembered about the key.

The song filled the passageway. She gripped some folds of the wedding dress to make running easier and hurried toward the stairs . . .

Something bulleted out of another doorway and bore her to the floor.

It was Shawn Ogg. Through the chromatic haze she could see his worried face peering out from its hood of rusty–

–iron.

The song changed while staying the same. The complex harmonies, the fascinating rhythm did not alter but suddenly grated, as if she was hearing the song through different ears.

She was dragged into the doorway.

"Are you all right. Miss Queen?"

"What's happening?"

"Dunno, Miss Queen. But I think we've got elves."

"Elves?"

"And they've got Miss Tockley. Um. You know you took the iron away-"

"What are you talking about, Shawn?"

Shawn's face was white.

"That one down the dungeons started singing, and they'd put their mark on her, so she's doing what they want-"

"Shawn!"

"And Mum said they don't kill you, if they can help it. Not right away. You're much more fun if you're not dead."

Magrat stared at him.

"I had to run away! She was trying to get my hood off! I had to leave her, miss! You understand, miss?"

"Elves?"

"You got to hold on to something iron, miss! They hate iron!"

She slapped his face, hurting her fingers on the mail.

"You're gabbling, Shawn!"

"They're out there, miss! I heard the drawbridge go down! They're out there and we're in here and they don't kill you, they keep you alive-"

"Stand to attention, soldier!"

It was all she could think of. It seemed to work. Shawn pulled himself together.

"Look," said Magrat, "everyone knows there really aren't any elves any mo . . . " Her voice faded. Her eyes narrowed. "Everyone but Magrat Garlick knows different, yes?"

Shawn shook. Magrat grabbed his shoulders.

"Me mum and Mistress Weatherwax said you wasn't to know!" Shawn wailed. "They said it was witch business!"

"And where are they now, when they've got some witch business to mind?" said Magrat. "I don't see them, do you? Are they behind the door? No! Are they under the bed? How strange, they're not . . . there's just me, Shawn Ogg. And if you don't tell me everything you know right now I'll make you regret the day I was born."

Shawn's Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he considered this. Then he shook himself free of Magrat's grasp and listened at the door.

The singing had stopped. For a moment Magrat thought she heard footsteps outside the door, hurrying away.

"Well, Miss Queen, our mum and Mistress Weatherwax was up at the Dancers-"

Magrat listened.

Finally she said, "And where's everyone now?"

"Dunno, miss. All gone to the Entertainment . . . but they ought to've been back by now."

"Where's the Entertainment?"

"Dunno, miss. Miss?"

"Yes?"

"Why've you got your wedding dress on?"

"Never you mind."

"It's unlucky for the groom to see the bride in her dress before the wedding," said Shawn, taking refuge in run-of-the-mill idiocies to relieve his terror.

"It will be for him if I see him first," snarled Magrat.

"Miss?"

"Yes?"

"I'm feared about what's happened to everyone. Our Jason said they'd be back in an hour or so, and that was hours ago."

"But there's almost a hundred guests and everyone from the town, practically. Elves couldn't do anything to them."

"They wouldn't have to, miss." Shawn went to the unglazed window. "Look, miss. I can drop down on to the granary in the stable yard from here. It's thatch, I'll be all right. Then I can sneak around the kitchens and out by the little gate by the hubward tower with military precision."

"What for?"

"To get help, miss."

"But you don't know if there's any help to get."

"Can you think of anything else, miss?"

She couldn't.

"It's very . . . brave of you, Shawn," said Magrat.

"You stay here and you'll be right as rain," said Shawn. "Tell you what. . . How about if I lock the door and take the key with me? Then even if they sing at you they can't get you to open the door."

Magrat nodded.

Shawn tried to smile. "Wish we had another suit of mail," he said. "But it's all in the armoury."

"I'll be fine," said Magrat. "Off you go, then."

Shawn nodded. He waited for a moment on the window ledge, and then dropped into the darkness.

Magrat pushed the bed against the door and sat on it.

It occurred to her that she should have gone as well. But that would mean leaving the castle empty, and that didn't feel right.

Besides, she was scared.

There was one candle in the room, and that was half burned down. When it was gone, there'd be nothing but the moonlight. Magrat had always liked moonlight. Up to now.

It was quiet outside. There should be the noises of the town.

It crept over her that letting Shawn go away with a key to the door was not a wholly sensible thing, because if they caught him they could open–

There was a scream, which went on for a long time.

And then the night rolled back in again.

After a few minutes there was a scrabbling at the lock, such as might be made by someone trying to manipulate a key held in several thicknesses of cloth, so as not to come into contact with the iron.

The door began to open, and wedged up against the bed.

"Will you not step outside, lady?"

The door creaked again.

"Will you not come dance with us, pretty lady?"

The voice had strange harmonics and an echo that buzzed around the inside of the head for several seconds after the last word had been spoken.

The door burst open.

Three figures slid into the room. One looked up the bed, and the others poked into dark comers. Then one of them crossed to the window and looked out.

The crumbling wall stretched down to the thatched roof entirely unoccupied.

The figure nodded to two more shapes in the courtyard, its blond hair glowing in the moonlight.

One of them pointed up, to where a figure, its long white dress billowing in the breeze, was climbing up the wall of the keep.

The elf laughed. This was going to be more enjoyable than it'd suspected.

Magrat pulled herself over the windowsill and collapsed, panting, on the floor. Then she staggered across to the door, which was missing its key. But there were two heavy wooden bars, which she slotted into place.

There was a wooden shutter for the window.

They'd never let her get away with it again. She'd been expecting an arrow but . . . no, something as simple as that wouldn't have been enough fun.

She glared at the darkness. So . . . there was this room. She didn't even know which one it was. She found a candlestick and a bundle of matches and, after some scrabbling, got it lit.

There were some boxes and cases piled by the bed. So . . . a guest room.

The thoughts trickled through the silence of her brain, one after another.

She wondered if they'd sing to her, and if she could stand it again. Maybe if you knew what to expect. . .

There was a gentle tap at the door.

"We have your friends downstairs, lady. Come dance with me."

Magrat stared desperately around the room.

It was as featureless as guest bedrooms everywhere. Jug and basin on a stand, the horrible garderobe alcove inadequately concealed behind a curtain, the bed which had a few bags and bundles tossed on it, a battered chair with all the varnish gone and a small square of carpet made grey with age and ground-in dust.

The door rattled. "Let me in, sweet lady."

The window was no escape this time. There was the bed to hide under, and that'd work for all of two seconds, wouldn't it?

Her eye was drawn by some kind of horrible magic back to the room's garderobe, lurking behind its curtain.

Magrat lifted the lid. The shaft was definitely wide enough to admit a body. Garderobes were notorious in that respect. Several unpopular kings had met their end, as it were, in the garderobe, at the hands of an assassin with good climbing ability, a spear, and a fundamental approach to politics.

Something hit the door hard.

"Lady, shall I sing to you?"

Magrat reached a decision.

It was the hinges that gave way eventually, the rusty bolts finally losing their grip on the stone.

The alcove's half-drawn curtain moved in the breeze.

The elf smiled, strode to the curtain, and pulled it aside.

The oak lid was up.

The elf looked down.

Magrat rose up behind it like a white ghost and hit it hard across the back of the neck with the chair, which shattered.

The elf tried to turn and keep its balance, but there was still enough chair left in Magrat's hands for her to catch it on the desperate upswing. It toppled backward, flailed at the lid, and only succeeded in pulling it shut behind it. Magrat ' heard a thump and a scream of rage as it dropped into the noisome darkness. It'd be too much to hope that the fall would kill it. After all, it'd land in something soft.

"Not just high," said Magrat to herself, "but stinking."

Hiding under the bed is only good for about two seconds, but sometimes two seconds is enough.

She let go of the chair. She was shaking. But she was still alive, and that felt good. That's the thing about being alive. You're alive to enjoy it.

Magrat peered out into the passage.

She had to move. She picked up a stricken chair leg for the little comfort that it gave, and ventured out.

There was a scream again, from the direction of the Great Hall.

Magrat looked the other way, toward the Long Gallery She ran. There had to be a way out, somewhere, some gate, some window . . .

Some enterprising monarch had glazed the windows some time ago. The moonlight shone through in big silver blocks, interspersed with squares of deep shadow.

Magrat ran from light to shade, light to shade, down the endless room. Monarch after monarch flashed past, like a speeded-up film. King after king, all whiskers and crowns and beards. Queen after queen, all corsages and stiff bodices and Lappet-faced wowhawks and small dogs and–

Some shape, some trick of moonlight, some expression on a painted face somehow cut through her terror and caught her eye. That was a portrait she'd never seen before. She'd never walked down this far. The idiot vapidity of the assembled queens had depressed her. But this one . . .

This one, somehow, reached out to her.

She stopped.

It couldn't have been done from life. In the days of this queen, the only paint known locally was a sort of blue, and generally used on the body But a few generations ago King Lully I had been a bit of a historian and a romantic. He'd researched what was known of the early days of Lancre, and where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom[34] and extrapolated from associated sources[35].

He'd commissioned the portrait of Queen Ynci the Short-Tempered, one of the founders of the kingdom.

She had a helmet with wings and a spike on it and a mass of black hair plaited into dreadlocks with blood as a setting lotion. She was heavily made-up in the woad-and-blood-and-spirals school of barbarian cosmetics. She had a 42 D-cup breastplate and shoulder pads with spikes. She had knee pads with spikes on, and spikes on her sandals, and a rather short skirt in the fashionable tartan and blood motif. One hand rested nonchalantly on a double-headed battle axe with a spike on it, the other caressed the hand of a captured enemy warrior. The rest of the captured enemy warrior was hanging from various pine trees in the background. Also in the picture was Spike, her favourite war pony, of the now extinct Lancre hill breed which was the same general shape and disposition as a barrel of gunpowder, and her war chariot, which picked up the popular spiky theme. It had wheels you could shave with.

Magrat stared.

They'd never mentioned this.

They'd told her about tapestries, and embroidery, and farthingales, and how to shake hands with lords. They'd never told her about spikes.

There was a sound at the end of the gallery, from back the way she'd come. She grabbed her skirts and ran.

There were footsteps behind her, and laughter.

Left down the cloisters, then along the dark passage above the kitchens, and past the–

A shape moved in the shadows. Teeth flashed. Magrat raised the chair leg, and stopped in mid-strike.

"Greebo?"

Nanny Ogg's cat rubbed against her legs. His hair was flat against his body. This unnerved Magrat even more. This was Greebo, undisputed king of Lancre's cat population and father of most of it, in whose presence wolves trod softly and bears climbed trees. He was frightened.

"Come here, you bloody idiot!"

She grabbed him by the scruff of his scarred neck and ran on, while Greebo gratefully sank his claws into her arm to the bone[36] and scrambled up to her shoulder.

She must be somewhere near the kitchen now, because that was Greebo's territory. This was an unknown and shadowy area, terror incognita, where the flesh of carpets and the plaster pillars ran out and the stone bone of the castle showed through.

She was sure there were footsteps behind her, very fast and light.

If she hurried around the next comer–

In her arms, Greebo tensed like a spring. Magrat stopped.

Around the next comer–

Without her apparently willing it, the hand holding the broken wood came up, moving slowly back.

She stepped to the comer and stabbed in one movement. There was a triumphant hiss which turned into a screech as the wood scraped down the side of the waiting elfs neck. It reeled away Magrat bolted for the nearest doorway, weeping in panic, and wrenched at the handle. It swung open. She darted through, slammed the door, flailed in the dark for the bars, felt them clonk home, and collapsed on to her knees.

Something hit the door outside.

After a while Magrat opened her eyes, and then wondered if she really had opened her eyes, because the darkness was no less dark. There was a feeling of space in front of her. There were all sorts of things in the castle, old hidden rooms, anything . . . there could be a pit there, there could be anything. She fumbled for the doorframe, guided herself upright, and then groped cautiously in the general direction of the wall.

There was a shelf. This was a candle. And this was a bundle of matches.

So, she insisted above her own heartbeat, this was a room that got used recently. Most people in Lancre still used tinderboxes. Only the king could afford matches all the way from Ankh-Morpork. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg got them too, but they didn't buy them. They got given them. It was easy to get given things, if you were a witch.

Magrat lit the stub of candle, and turned to see what kind of room she'd scuttled into.

Oh, no . . .

"Well, well," said Ridcully "There's a familiar tree."

"Shut up."

"I thought someone said we just had to walk up hill," said Ridcully.

"Shut up."

"I remember once when we were in these woods you let

"me-"

"Shut up."

Granny Weatherwax sat down on a stump.

"We're being mazed," she said. "Someone's playing tricks on us."

"I remember a story once," said Ridcully, "where these two children were lost in the woods and a lot of birds came and covered them with leaves." Hope showed in his voice like a toe peeking out from under a crinoline.

"Yes, that's just the sort of bloody stupid thing a bird would think of," said Granny. She rubbed her head.

"She's doing it," she said. "It's an elvish trick. Leading travellers astray. She's mucking up my head. My actual head. Oh, she's good. Making us go where she wants. Making us go round in circles. Doing it to me."

"Maybe you've got your mind on other things," said Ridcully, not quite giving up hope.

"Course I've got my mind on other things, with you falling over all the time and gabbling a lot of nonsense," said Granny. "If Mr. Cleverdick Wizard hadn't wanted to dredge up things that never existed in the first place I wouldn't be here, I'd be in the centre of things, knowing what's going on." She clenched her fists.

"Well, you don't have to be," said Ridcully. "It's a fine night. We could sit here and-"

"You're falling for it too," said Granny. "All that dreamy-weamy, eyes-across-a-crowded-room stuff. Can't imagine how you keep your job as head wizard."

"Mainly by checking my bed carefully and makin' sure someone else has already had a slice of whatever it is I'm eating," said Ridcully, with disarming honesty. "There's not much to it, really. Mainly it's signin' things and having a good shout-"

Ridcully gave up.

"Anyway, you looked pretty surprised when you saw me," he said. "Your face went white."

"Anyone'd go white, seeing a full-grown man standing there looking like a sheep about to choke," said Granny.

"You really don't let up, do you?" said Ridcully. "Amazing. You don't give an inch."

Another leaf drifted past.

Ridcully didn't move his head.

"You know," he said, his voice staying quite level, "either autumn comes really early in these parts, or the birds here are the ones out of that story I mentioned, or someone's in the tree above us."

"I know."

"You know?"

"Yes, because I've been paying attention while you were dodging the traffic in Memory Lane," said Granny. "There's at least five of 'em, and they're right above us. How's those magic fingers of yours?"

"I could probably manage a fireball."

"Wouldn't work. Can you carry us out of here?"

"Not both of us."

"Just you?"

"Probably, but I'm not going to leave you."

Granny rolled her eyes. "It's true, you know," she said. "All men are swains. Push off, you soft old bugger. They're not intending to kill me. At least, not yet. But they don't hardly know nothing about wizards and they'll chop you down without thinking."

"Now who's being soft?"

"I don't want to see you dead when you could be doin' something useful."

"Running away isn't useful."

"It's going to be a lot more useful than staying here."

"I'd never forgive myself if I went."

"And I'd never forgive you if you stayed, and I'm a lot more unforgiving than you are," said Granny. "When it's all over, try to find Gytha Ogg. Tell her to look in my old box. She'll know what's in there. And if you don't go now-"

An arrow hit the stump beside Ridcully.

"The buggers are firing at me!" he shouted. "If I had my crossbow-"

"I should go and get it, then," said Granny.

"Right! I'll be back instantly!"

Ridcully vanished. A moment later several lumps of castle masonry dropped out of the space he had just occupied.

"That's him out of the way, then," said Granny, to no one in particular.

She stood up, and gazed around at the trees.

"All right," she said, "here I am. I ain't running. Come and get me. Here I am. All of me."

Magrat calmed down. Of course it existed. Every castle had one. And of course this one was used. There was a trodden path through the dust to the rack a few feet away from the door, where a few suits of unravelling chain-mail hung on a rack, next to the pikes.

Shawn probably came in here every day.

It was the armoury.

Greebo hopped down from Magrat's shoulders and wandered off down the cobwebbed avenues, in his endless search for anything small and squeaky.

Magrat followed him, in a daze.

The kings of Lancre had never thrown anything away. At least, they'd never thrown anything away if it was possible to kill someone with it.

There was armour for men. There was armour for horses. There was armour for fighting dogs. There was even armour for ravens, although King Gumt the Stupid's plan for an aerial attack force had never really got off the ground. There were more pikes, and swords, cutlasses, rapiers, epees, broadswords, flails, momingstars, maces, clubs, and huge knobs with spikes. They were all piled together and, in those places where the roof had leaked, were rusted into a lump. There were longbows, short bows, pistol bows, stirrup bows, and crossbows, piled like firewood and stacked with the same lack of care. Odd bits of armour were piled in more heaps, and were red with rust. In fact rust was everywhere. The whole huge room was full of the death of iron.

Magrat went on, like some clockwork toy that won't change direction until it bumps into something.

The candlelight was reflected dully in helmets and breastplates. The sets of horse armour in particular were terrible, on their rotting wooden frames – they stood like exterior skeletons, and, like skeletons, nudged the mind into thoughts of mortality. Empty eye sockets stared sightlessly down at the little candlelit figure.

"Lady?"

The voice came from outside the door, far behind Magrat. But it echoed around her, bouncing off the centuries of mouldering armaments.

They can't come in here, Magrat thought. Too much iron. In here, I'm safe.

"If lady wants to play, we will fetch her friends."

As Magrat turned, the light caught the edge of something, and gleamed.

Magrat pulled aside a huge shield.

"Lady?"

Magrat reached out.

"Lady?"

Magrat's hands held a rusty iron helmet, with wings.

"Come dance at the wedding, lady."

Magrat's hands closed on a well-endowed breastplate, with spikes.

Greebo, who had been tracking mice through a prone suit of armour, stuck his head out of a leg.

A change had come over Magrat. It showed in her breathing. She'd been panting, with fear and exhaustion. Then, for a few seconds, there was no sound of her breathing at all. And finally it returned. Slowly. Deeply. Deliberately.

Greebo saw Magrat, who he'd always put down as basically a kind of mouse in human shape, lift the hat with the wings on it and put it on her head.

Magrat knew all about the power of hats.

In her mind's ear she could hear the rattle of the chariots.

"Lady? We will bring your friends to sing to you."

She turned.

The candlelight sparkled off her eyes.

Greebo drew back into the safety of his armour. He recalled a particular time when he'd leapt out on a vixen. Normally Greebo could take on a fox without raising a sweat but, as it turned out, this one had cubs. He hadn't found out until he chased her into her den. He'd lost a bit of one ear and quite a lot of fur before he'd got away.

The vixen had a very similar expression to the one Magrat had now.

"Greebo? Come here!"

The cat turned and tried to find a place of safety in the suit's breastplate. He was beginning to doubt he'd make it through the knight.

Elves prowled the castle gardens. They'd killed the fish in the ornamental pond, eventually.

Mr. Brooks was perched on a kitchen chair, working at a crevice in the stable wall.

He'd been aware of some sort of excitement, but it was involving humans and therefore of secondary importance. But he did notice the change in the sound from the hives, and the splintering of wood.

A hive had already been tipped over. Angry bees clouded around three figures as feet ripped through comb and honey and brood.

The laughter stopped as a white-coated, veiled figure appeared over the hedge. It raised a long metal tube.

No one ever knew what Mr. Brooks put in his squirter. There was old tobacco in it, and boiled-up roots, and bark scrapings, and herbs that even Magrat had never heard of. It shot a glistening stream over the hedge which hit the middle elf between the eyes, and sprayed over the other two.

Mr. Brooks watched dispassionately until their struggles stopped.

"Wasps," he said.

Then he went and found a box, lit a lantern and, with great care and delicacy, oblivious to the stings, began to repair the damaged combs.

* * *

Shawn couldn't feel much in his arm anymore, except in the hot dull way that indicated at least one broken bone, and he knew that two of his fingers shouldn't be looking like that. He was sweating, despite being only in his vest and drawers. He should never have taken his chain-mail off, but it's hard to say no when an elf is pointing a bow at you. Shawn knew what, fortunately, many people didn't – chain-mail isn't much defence against an arrow. It certainly isn't when the arrow is being aimed between your eyes.

"Yuk," said Nanny, looking around at the debris. "This really is the pips."

"You should have let me fight them!"

"There were too many of them, my lad."

Casanunda threw his sword on the floor in disgust.

"We were just getting to know one another properly and fifty elves burst into the place! Damn! This kind of thing happens to me all the time!"

"That's the best thing about black, it doesn't show the soot," said Nanny Ogg vaguely, dusting herself off. "They managed it, then. Esme was right. Wonder where she is? Oh, well. Come on."

"Where're we going?" said the dwarf.

"Down to my cottage."

"Ah!"

"To get my broomstick," said Nanny Ogg firmly. "I ain't having the Queen of the Fairies ruling my children. So we'd better get some help. This has gone too far."

"We could go up into the mountains," said Casanunda, as they crept down the stairs. "There's thousands of dwarfs up there."

"No," said Nanny Ogg. "Esme won't thank me for this, but I'm the one who has to wave the bag o' sweets when she overreaches herself . . . and I'm thinking about someone who really hates the Queen."

"You won't find anyone who hates her worse than dwarfs do," said Casanunda.

"Oh, you will," said Nanny Ogg, "if you knows where to look."

The elves had been into Nanny Ogg's cottage, too. There weren't two pieces of furniture left whole.

"What they don't take they smash," said Nanny Ogg.

She stirred the debris with her foot. Glass tinkled.

"That vase was a present from Esme," she said, to the unfeeling world in general. "Never liked it much."

"Why'd they do it?" said Casanunda, looking around.

"Oh, they'd smash the world if they thought it'd make a pretty noise," said Nanny She stepped outside again and felt around under the eaves of the low thatched roof, and pulled out her broomstick with a small grunt of triumph.

"I always shove it up there," she said, "otherwise the kids nick it and go joy-riding. You ride behind me, and I say this against my better judgement."

Casanunda shuddered. Dwarfs are generally scared of heights, since they don't often have the opportunity to get used to them.

Nanny scratched her chin, making a sandpapery sound.

"And we'll need a crowbar," she said. "There'll be one in Jason's forge. Hop on, my lad."

"I really wasn't expecting this," said Casanunda, feeling his way on to the broomstick with his eyes shut. "I was looking forward to a convivial evening, just me and you."

"It is just me and you."

"Yes, but I hadn't assumed there'd be a broomstick involved."

The stick left the ground slowly Casanunda clung miserably to the bristles.

"Where're we going?" he said weakly

"Place I know, up in the hills," said Nanny "Ages since I've been there. Esme won't go near it, and Magrat's too young to be tole. I used to go there a lot, though. When I was a girl. Girls used to go up there if they wanted to get-oh, bugger. . ."

"What?"

"Thought I saw something fly across the moon, and I'm damn sure it wasn't Esme."

Casanunda tried to look around while keeping his eyes shut.

"Elves can't fly," he muttered.

"That's all you know," said Nanny. "They ride yarrow stalks."

"Yarrow stalks?"

"Yep. Tried it meself, once. You can get some lift out of 'em, but it plays merry hell with the gussets. Give me a nice bundle of bristles every time. Anyway," she nudged Casanunda, "you should be right at home on one of these. Magrat says a broomstick is one of them sexual metaphor things.[39]"

Casanunda had opened one eye just long enough to see a rooftop drift silently below him. He felt sick.

"The difference being," said Nanny Ogg, "that a broomstick stays up longer. And you can use it to keep the house clean, which is more than you can say for – are you all right?"

"I really don't like this at all, Mrs. Ogg."

"Just trying to cheer you up, Mr. Casanunda."

"'Cheer' I like, Mrs. Ogg," said the dwarf, "but can we avoid the 'up'?"

"Soon be down."

"That I like."

Nanny Ogg's boots scraped along the hard-packed mud of the smithy's yard.

"I'll leave the magic running, won't be a mo," she said. Ignoring the dwarfs bleat for help, she hopped off the stick and disappeared through the back door.

The elves hadn't been there, at least. Too much iron. She pulled a crowbar from the toolbench and hurried out again.

"You can hold this," she said to Casanunda. She hesitated. "Can't have too much luck, can we?" she said, and scurried back into the forge. This time she was out again much faster, slipping something into her pocket.

"Ready?" she said. ' "No."

"Then let's go. And keep a look out. With your eyes open."

"I'm looking for elves?" said Casanunda, as the stick rose into the moonlight.

"Could be. It wasn't Esme, and the only other one ever flying around here is Mr. Ixolite the banshee, and he's very good about slipping us a note under the door when he's going to be about. For air traffic control, see?"

Most of the town was dark. The moonlight made a black and silver checkerboard across the country. After a while, Casanunda began to feel better about things. The motion of the broomstick was actually quite soothing.

"Carried lots of passengers, have you?" he said.

"On and off, yes," said Nanny.

Casanunda appeared to be thinking about things. And then he said, in a voice dripping with scientific inquiry, "Tell me, has anyone ever tried to mak-"

"No," said Nanny Ogg firmly. "You'd fall off."

"You don't know what I was going to ask."

"Bet you half a dollar?"

They flew in silence for a couple of minutes, and then Casanunda tapped Nanny Ogg on the shoulder.

"Elves at three o'clock!"

"That's all right, then. That's hours away."

"I mean they're over there!"

Nanny squinted at the stars. Something ragged moved across the night.

"Oh, blast."

"Can't you outfly them?"

"Nope. They can put a girdle round the world in forty minutes."

"Why? It's not that fat," said Casanunda, who was feeling in the mood for a handful of dried frog pills.

"I mean they're fast. We can't outrun 'em, even if we lost some weight."

"I think I'm losing a tiny bit," said Casanunda, as the broomstick dived toward the trees.

Leaves scraped on Nanny Ogg's boots. Moonlight glinted briefly off ash-blond hair, away to her left. "Bugger, bugger, bugger."

Three elves were keeping station with the broomstick. That was the thing about elves. They chased you till you dropped, until your blood was curdling with dread; if a dwarf wanted you dead, on the other hand, they'd simply cut you in half with an axe first chance they got. But that was because dwarfs were a lot nicer than elves.

"They're gaming on us!" said Casanunda.

"Got the crowbar?"

"Yes!"

"Right. . ."

The broomstick zigzagged over the silent forest. One of the elves drew its sword and swung down. Knock them down into the trees, leave them alive as long as possible . . .

The broomstick went into reverse. Nanny Ogg's head and legs went forward, so that partly she was sitting on her hands but mainly she was sitting on nothing. The elf swooped toward her, laughing–

Casanunda stuck out the crowbar.

There was a sound very like doioinng.

The broomstick jerked ahead again, dumping Nanny Ogg in Casanunda's lap.

"Sorry."

"Don't mention it. In fact, do it again if you like."

"Get him, did you?"

"Took his breath away."

"Good. Where're the others?"

"It leaks out even up here," said Nanny. "Very mackko place, this."

"But I mean, good grief-"

"He's brighter than she is. Or more lazy," said Nanny. "He's going to wait it out."

"But he was-"

"They can look like whatever they want, to us," said Nanny. "We see the shape we've given 'em." She let the rock drop back, and dusted off her hands.

"But why should he want to stop her?"

"Well, he's her husband, after all. He can't stand her. It's what you might call an open marriage."

"Wait what out?" said Casanunda, looking around to see if there were anymore elves.

"Oh, you know," said Nanny, waving a hand. "All this iron and books and clockwork and universities and reading and suchlike. He reckons it'll all pass, see. And one day it'll all be over, and people'll look up at the skyline at sunset and there he'll be."

Casanunda found himself turning to look at the sunset beyond the mound, half-imagining the huge figure outlined against the afterglow.

"One day he'll be back," said Nanny softly "When even the iron in the head is rusty"

Casanunda put his head on one side. You don't move around among a different species for most of your life without learning to read a lot of their body language, especially since it's in such large print.

"You won't entirely be sorry, eh?" he said.

"Me? I don't want 'em back! They're untrustworthy and cruel and arrogant parasites and we don't need 'em one bit."

"Bet you half a dollar?"

Nanny was suddenly flustered.

"Don't you look at me like that! Esme's right. Of course she's right. We don't want elves anymore. Stands to reason."

"Esme's the short one, is she?"

"Hah, no, Esme's the tall one with the nose. You know her."

"Right, yes."

"The short one is Magrat. She's a kind-hearted soul and a bit soft. Wears flowers in her hair and believes in songs, I reckon she'd be off dancing with the elves quick as a wink, her."

More doubts were entering Magrat's life. They concerned crossbows, for one thing. A crossbow is a very useful and usable weapon designed for speed and convenience and deadliness in the hands of the inexperienced, like a faster version of an out-of-code TV dinner. But it is designed to be used once, by someone who has somewhere safe to duck while they reload. Otherwise it is just so much metal and wood with a piece of string on it.

Then there was the sword. Despite Shawn's misgivings, Magrat did in theory know what you did with a sword. You tried to stick it into the enemy by a vigorous arm motion, and the enemy tried to stop you. She was a little uncertain about what happened next. She hoped you were allowed another go.

She was also having doubts about her armour. The helmet and the breastplate were OK, but the rest of it was chain-mail. And, as Shawn Ogg knew, chain-mail from the point of view of an arrow can be thought of as a series of loosely connected holes.

The rage was still there, the pure fury still gripped her at the core. But there was no getting away from the fact that the heart it gripped was surrounded by the rest of Magrat Garlick, spinster of this parish and likely to remain so.

There were no elves visible in the town, but she could see where they had been. Doors hung off their hinges. The place looked as though it had been visited by Genghiz Cohen[41].

Now she was on the track that led to the stones. It was wider than it had been; the horses and carriages had churned it on the way up, and the fleeing people had turned it into a mire on the way down.

She knew she was being watched, and it almost came as a relief when three elves stepped out from under the trees before she'd even lost sight of the castle.

The middle one grinned.

"Good evening, girl," it said. "My name is Lord Lankin, and you will curtsy when you talk to me."

The tone suggested that there was absolutely no possibility that she would disobey She felt her muscles strain to comply.

Queen Ynci wouldn't have obeyed . . .

"I happen to be practically the queen," she said.

It was the first time she'd looked an elf in the face when she was in any condition to notice details. This one was currently wearing high cheekbones and hair tied in a ponytail; it wore odds and ends of rags and lace and fur, confident in the knowledge that anything would look good on an elf.

It wrinkled its perfect nose at her.

"There is only one Queen in Lancre," it said. "And you are, most definitely, not her."

Magrat tried to concentrate.

"Where is she, then?" she said.

The other two raised their bows.

"You are looking for the Queen? Then we will take you to her," Lankin stated. "And, lady, should you be inclined to make use of that nasty iron bow there are more archers hidden in the trees." There was indeed a rustling in the trees on one side of the track, but it was followed by a thump. The elves looked disconcerted.

"Get out of my way," said Magrat.

"I think you have a very wrong idea," said the elf. Its smile widened, but vanished when there was another sylvan crash from the other side of the track.

"We felt you coming all the way up the track," said the elf. "The brave girl off to rescue her lover! Oh, the romance! Take her."

A shadow rose up behind the two armed elves, took a head in either hand, and banged them together.

The shadow stepped forward over their bodies and, as Lankin turned, caught it with one roundarm punch that picked it up and slammed it into a tree.

Magrat drew her sword.

Whatever this was, it looked worse than elves. It was muddy and hairy and almost troll-like in its build, and it reached out for the bridle with an arm that seemed to extend for ever. She raised the sword–

"Oook?"

"Put the sword down, please, miss!"

The voice came from somewhere behind her, but it sounded human and worried. Elves never sounded worried.

"Who are you?" she said, without turning around. The monster in front of her gave her a big, yellow-toothed grin.

"Um, I'm Ponder Stibbons. A wizard. And he's a wizard, too."

"He's got no clothes on!"

"I could get him to have a bath, if you like," said Ponder, slightly hysterically. "He always puts on an old green dressing gown when he's had a bath."

Magrat relaxed a bit. No one who sounded like that could be much of a threat, except to themselves.

"Whose side are you on, Mr. Wizard?"

"How many are there?"

"Oook?"

"When I get off this horse," said Magrat, "it'll bolt. So can you ask your . . . friend to let go of the bridle? He'll be hurt."

"Oook?"

"Um. Probably not."

Magrat slid off. The horse, relieved of the presence of iron, bolted. For about two yards.

"Oook."

The horse was struggling to get back on its feet.

Magrat blinked.

"Um, he's just a bit annoyed at the moment," said Ponder. "One of the . . . elves . . . shot him with an arrow."

"But they do that to control people!"

"Um. He's not a person."

"Oook!"

"Genetically, I mean."

Magrat had met wizards before. Occasionally one visited Lancre, although they didn't stay very long. There was something about the presence of Granny Weatherwax that made them move on.

They didn't look like Ponder Stibbons. He'd lost most of his robe and, of his hat, only the brim remained. Most of his face was covered in mud, and there was a multicoloured bruise over one eye.

"Did they do that to you?"

"Well, the mud and the torn clothes is just from, you know, the forest. And we've run into-"

"Ook."

"-over elves a few times. But this is when the Librarian hit me."

"Oook."

"Thank goodness," Ponder added. "Knocked me cold. Otherwise I'd be like the others."

A foreboding of a conversation to come swept over Magrat.

"What others?" she snapped.

"Are you alone?"

"What others?"

"Have you any idea what's been happening?"

Magrat thought about the castle, and the town.

"I might be able to hazard a guess," she said.

Ponder shook his head.

"It's worse than that," he said.

"What others?" said Magrat.

"I think there's definitely been a cross-continuum break-through, and I'm sure there's a difference in energy levels."

"But what others?" Magrat insisted.

Ponder Stibbons glanced nervously at the surrounding forest.

"Let's get off the path. There's a lot more elves back there."

Ponder disappeared into the undergrowth. Magrat followed him, and found a second wizard propped against a tree like a ladder. He had a huge smile creasing his face.

"The Bursar," said Ponder. "I think we may have overdone the dried frog pills a bit." He raised his voice. "How . . . are . . . you . . . doing . . . sir?"

"Why, I'll have a little of the roast weasel, if you would be so good," said the Bursar, beaming happily at nothing.

"Why's he gone so stiff?" said Magrat. "We think it's some kind of side effect," said Ponder. "Can't you do anything about it?"

"What, and have nothing to cross streams on?"

"Call again tomorrow, baker, and we'll have a crusty one!" said the Bursar.

"Besides, he seems quite happy," said Ponder. "Are you a warrior, miss?"

"What?" said Magrat. "Well, I mean, the armour and everything . . ." Magrat looked down. She was still holding the sword. The helmet kept falling over her eyes, but she'd padded it a bit with a scrap of wedding dress.

"I . . . er . . . yes. Yes, that's right. That's what I am," she said. "Absolutely. Yes."

"Here for the wedding, I expect. Like us."

"That's right. Definitely here for the wedding. That's true." She changed her grip on the sword. "Now tell me what happened," she said. "Paying particular attention to what happened to the others."

"Well . . ." Ponder absentmindedly picked up a corner of his torn robe and began to screw it up in his fingers. "We all went to see this Entertainment, you see. A play. You know. Acting? And, and it was very funny. There were all these yokels in their big boots and everything, straw wigs and everything, clumping around pretending to be lords and ladies and everything, and getting it all wrong. It was very funny. The Bursar laughed at them a lot. Mind you, he's been laughing at trees and rocks, too. But everyone was having fun. And then . . . and then . . ."

"I want to know everything," said Magrat. "Well . . . well . . . then there was this bit I can't really remember. It was something to do with the acting, I think. I mean, suddenly . . . suddenly it all seemed real. Do you know what I mean?"

"No."

"There was this chap with a red nose and bandy legs and he was playing the Queen of the Fairies or something and suddenly he was still him but. . . everything felt. . . everything round me just vanished, there was just the actors . . . and there was this hill . . . I mean, they must have been good, because I really believed . . . I think at some point I remember someone asking us to clap our hands . . . and everyone was looking very strange and there was this singing and it was wonderful and . . . and . . ."

"Oook."

"Then the Librarian hit me," said Ponder simply.

"Why?"

"Best if he tells it in his own words," said Ponder.

"Oook ook eek. Ook! Ook!"

"Cough, Julia! Over the bender!" said the Bursar.

"I didn't understand what the Librarian said," said Magrat.

"Um. We were all present at an interdimensional rip," said Ponder. "Caused by belief. The play was the last little thing that opened it up. There must have been a very delicate area of instability very close. It's hard to describe, but if you had a rubber sheet and some lead weights I could demonstrate-"

"You're trying to tell me those . . . things exist because people believe in them?"

"Oh, no. I imagine they exist anyway. They're here because people believe in them here."

"Ook."

"He ran off with us. They shot an arrow at him."

"Eeek."

"But it just made him itch."

"Ook."

"Normally he's as gentle as a lamb. Really he is."

"Ook."

"But he can't abide elves. They smell wrong to him."

The Librarian flared his nostrils.

Magrat didn't know much about jungles, but she thought about apes in trees, smelling the rank of the tiger. Apes never admired the sleek of the fur and the bum of the eye, because they were too well aware of the teeth of the

mouth.

"Yes," she said, "I expect they would. Dwarfs and trolls hate them, too. But I think they don't hate them as much as I do."

"You can't fight them all," said Ponder. "They're swarming like bees up there. There's flying ones, too. The Librarian says they made people get fallen trees and things and push those, you know, those stones down? There were some stones on the hill. They attacked them. Don't know why."

"Did you see any witches at the Entertainment?" said Magrat.

"Witches, witches . . ." muttered Ponder.

"You couldn't have missed them," said Magrat. "There'd be a thin one glaring at everyone and a small fat one cracking nuts and laughing a lot. And they'd be talking to each other very loudly. And they'd both have tall pointy hats."

"Can't say I noticed them," said Ponder.

"Then they couldn't have been there," said Magrat. "Being noticed is what being a witch is all about." She was about to add that she'd never been good at it, but didn't. Instead she said: "I'm going on up there."

"You'll need an army, miss. I mean, you'd have been in trouble just now if the Librarian hadn't been up in the trees."

"But I haven't got an army. So I'm going to have to try by myself, aren't I?"

This time Magrat managed to spur the horse into a gallop.

Ponder watched her go.

"You know, folksongs have got a lot to answer for," he said to the night air.

"Oook."

"She's going to get utterly killed."

"Oook."

"Hello, Mr. Flowerpot, two pints of eels if you would be so good."

"Of course, it could be her destiny, or one of those sort of things."

"Oook."

"Millennium hand and shrimp."

Ponder Stibbons looked embarrassed.

"Anyone want to follow her?"

"Oook."

"Whoops, there he goes with his big clock."

"Was that a 'yes'?"

"Oook."

"Not yours, his."

"Flobby wobbly, here comes our jelly."

"I think that probably counts as a 'yes'," said Ponder, reluctantly.

"Oook?"

"I've got a lovely new vest."

"But look," said Ponder, "the graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely."

"Ook."

"What'd he say?" said the Bursar, passing briefly through reality on his way somewhere else.

"I think he said, 'Sooner or later the graveyards are full of everybody,'" said Ponder. "Oh, blast. Come on."

"Yes indeedy," said the Bursar, "hands up the mittens, Mr. Bosun!"

"Oh, shut up."

* * *

Magrat dismounted and let the horse go.

She knew she was near the Dancers now. Collared light flickered in the sky.

She wished she could go home.

The air was colder here, far too cold for a midsummer night. As she plodded onward, flakes of snow swirled in the breeze and turned to rain.

Ridcully materialized inside the castle, and then clung on to a pillar for support until he got his breath back. Transmigration always made blue spots appear in front of his eyes.

No one noticed him. The castle was in turmoil. Not everyone had run home. Armies had marched across Lancre many times over the last few thousand years, and the recollection of the castle's thick safe walls had been practically engraved in the folk memory. Run to the castle. And now it held most of the little country's population.

Ridcully blinked. People were milling around and being harangued by a small young man in loose-fitting chain-mail and one arm in a sling, who seemed to be the only person

with any grip on things.

When he was certain he could walk straight, Ridcully

headed toward him.

"What's going on, young-" he began, and then stopped.

Shawn Ogg looked around.

"The scheming minx!" said Ridcully, to the air in general. '"Oh, go back and get it then,' she said, and I fell right for it! Even if I could cut the mustard again I don't know where we were!"

"Sir?" said Shawn.

Ridcully shook himself. "What's happening?" he said.

"I don't know!" said Shawn, who was almost in tears. "I think we're being attacked by elves! Nothing anyone's telling me's making any sense! Somehow they arrived during the Entertainment! Or something!"

Ridcully looked around at the frightened, bewildered people.

"And Miss Magrat's gone out to fight them alone!" Ridcully looked perplexed.

"Who's Miss Magrat?"

"She's going to be queen! The bride! You know? Magrat Garlick?"

Ridcully's mind could digest one fact at a time.

"What's she gone out for?"

"They captured the king!"

"Did you know they've got Esme Weatherwax as well?"

"What, Granny Weatherwax?"

"I came back to rescue her," said Ridcully, and then realized that this sounded either nonsense or cowardly.

Shawn was too upset to notice. "I just hope they're not collecting witches," he said. "They'll need our mum to get the complete set."

"They ain't got me, then," said Nanny Ogg, behind him.

"Mum? How did you get in?"

"Broomstick. You'd better get some people with bows up on the roof. I came down that way. So can others."

"What're we going to do, Mum?"

"There's bands of elves all over the place," said Nanny, "and there's a big glow over the Dancers-"

"We must attack them!" shouted Casanunda. "Give 'em a taste of cold steel!"

"Good man, that dwarf!" said Ridcully. "That's right! I'll get my crossbow!"

"There's too many of them," said Nanny flatly.

"Granny and Miss Magrat are out there, Mum," said Shawn. "Miss Magrat came over all strange and put on armour and went out to fight all of them!"

"But the hills are crawling with elves," said Nanny. "It's a double helping of hell with extra devils. Certain death."

"It's certain death anyway," said Ridcully. "That's the thing about Death, certainty."

"We'd have no chance at all," said Nanny.

"Actually, we'd have one chance," said Ridcully. "I don't understand all this continuinuinuum stuff, but from what young Stibbons says it means that everything has to happen somewhere, d'y'see, so that means it could happen here. Even if it's a million to one chance, ma'am."

"That's all very well," said Nanny, "but what you're saying is, for every Mr. Ridcully that survives tonight's work,

999,999 are going to get killed?"

"Yes, but I'm not bothered about those other buggers," said Ridcully. "They can look after themselves. Serve 'em right for not inviting me to their weddings."

"What?"

"Nothing."

Shawn was hopping from one foot to the other. "We ought to be fighting 'em. Mum!"

"Look at everyone!" said Nanny. "They're dog tired and wet and confused! That's not an army!"

"Mum, Mum, Mum!"

"What?"

"I'll pussike 'em up, Mum! That's what you have to do before troops go into battle. Mum! I read about that in books! You can take a rabble of thingy and make the right kind of speech and pussike them up and turn 'em into a terrible fighting force. Mum!"

"They look terrible anyway!"

"I mean terrible like fierce. Mum!"

Nanny Ogg looked at the hundred or so Lancre subjects. The thought of them managing to fight anyone at all took some getting used to.

"You been studyin' this, Shawn?" she inquired. "I've got five years' worth of Bows and Ammo, Mum," said Shawn reproachfully.

"Give it a try, then. If you think it'll work." Trembling with excitement, Shawn climbed on to a table, drew his sword with his good hand, and banged it on the planks until people were silent. He made a speech.

He pointed out that their king had been captured and their prospective queen had gone out to save him. He pointed out their responsibility as loyal subjects. He pointed out that other people currently not here but at home hiding under the bed would, after the glorious victory, wish they'd been there too instead of under the aforesaid bed which they were hiding under, you know, the bed he'd just mentioned. In fact it was better that there were so few here to face the enemy, because that meant that there would be a higher percentage of honour per surviving head. He used the word "glory" three times. He said that in times to come people would look back on this day, whatever the date was, and proudly show their scars, at least those who'd survived would show their scars, and be very proud and probably have drinks bought for them. He advised people to imitate the action of the Lancre Reciprocating Fox and stiffen some sinews while leaving them flexible enough so's they could move their arms and legs, in fact, probably it'd be better to relax them a bit now and stiffen them properly when the time came. He suggested that Lancre expected everyone to do their duty. And urn. And uh. Please?

The silence that followed was broken by Nanny Ogg, who said, "They're probably considering it a bit, Shawn. Why don't you take Mr. Wizard here up to his room and help him with his crossbow?"

She nodded meaningfully in the direction of the stairs.

Shawn wavered, but not for long. He'd seen the glint in his mother's eye.

When he'd gone. Nanny climbed up on the same table.

"Well," she said, "it's like this. If you go out there you may have to face elves. But if you stops here, you definitely have to face me. Now, elves is worse than me, I'll admit. But I'm persistent."

Weaver put up a tentative hand.

"Please, Mrs. Ogg?"

"Yes, Weaver?"

"What exactly is the action of the Reciprocating Fox?"

Nanny scratched her ear.

"As I recall," she said, "its back legs go like this but its front legs go like this."

"No, no, no," said Quamey the storekeeper. "It's its tail that goes like that. Its legs go like this."

"That's not reciprocating, that's just oscillating," said someone. "You're thinking of the Ring-tailed Ocelot."

Nanny nodded.

"That's settled, then," she said.

"Hold on, I'm not sure-"

"Yes, Mr. Quamey?"

"Oh . . . well. . ."

"Good, good," said Nanny, as Shawn reappeared. "They was just saying, our Shawn, how they was swayed by your speech. Really pussiked up."

"Cor!"

"They're ready to follow you into the jaws of hell itself, I expect," said Nanny.

Someone put up their hand.

"Are you coming too, Mrs. Ogg?"

"I'll just stroll along behind," said Nanny.

"Oh. Well. Maybe as far as the jaws of hell, then."

"Amazing," said Casanunda to Nanny, as the crowd filed reluctantly toward the armoury.

"You just got to know how to deal with people."

"They'll follow where an Ogg leads?"

"Not exactly," said Nanny, "but if they know what's good for 'em they'll go where an Ogg follows."

Magrat stepped out from under the trees, and the moor land lay ahead of her.

A whirlpool of cloud swirled over the Dancers, or at least, over the place where the Dancers had been. She could make out one or two stones by the flickering light, lying on their side or rolled down the slope of the hill.

The hill itself glowed. Something was wrong with the landscape. It curved where it shouldn't curve. Distances weren't right. Magrat remembered a woodcut shoved in as a place marker in one of her old books. It showed the face of an old crone but, if you stared at it, you saw it was also the head of a young woman; a nose became a neck, an eyebrow became a necklace. The images seesawed back and forth. And like everyone else, she'd squinted herself silly trying to see them both at the same time.

The landscape was doing pretty much the same thing. What was a hill was also at the same time a vast snowbound panorama. Lancre and the land of the elves were trying to occupy the same space.

The intrusive country wasn't having it all its own way. Lancre was fighting back.

There was a circle of tents just on the cusp of the warring landscapes, like a beachhead on an alien shore. They were brightly collared. Everything about the elves was beautiful, until the image tilted, and you saw it from the other side. . .

Something was happening. Several elves were on horseback, and more horses were being led between the tents.

It looked as though they were breaking camp.

The Queen sat on a makeshift throne in her tent. She sat with her elbow resting on one arm of the throne and her fingers curling pensively around her mouth.

There were other elves seated in a semicircle, except that "seated" was a barely satisfactory word. They lounged; elves could make themselves at home on a wire. And here there was more lace and velvet and fewer feathers, although it was hard to know if it meant that these were aristocrats-elves seemed to wear whatever they felt like wearing, confident of looking absolutely stunning[42].

Every one of them watched the Queen, and was a mirror of her moods. When she smiled, they smiled. When she said something she thought was amusing, they laughed.

Currently the object of her attention was Granny Weatherwax.

"What is happening, old woman?" she said.

"It ain't easy, is it?" said Granny. "Thought it would be easy, didn't you?"

"You've done some magic, haven't you? Something is fighting us."

"No magic," said Granny. "No magic at all. It's just that you've been away too long. Things change. The land belongs to humans now."

"That can't be the case," said the Queen. "Humans take. They plough with iron. They ravage the land."

"Some do, I'll grant you that. Others put back more'n they take. They put back love. They've got soil in their bones. They tell the land what it is. That's what humans are for. Without humans, Lancre'd just be a bit of ground with green bits on it. They wouldn't even know they're trees. We're all down here together, madam – us and the land. It's not just land anymore, it's a country. It's like a horse that's been broken and shod or a dog that's been tamed. Every time people put a plough in the soil or planted a seed they took the land further away from you," said Granny. "Things change."

Verence sat beside the Queen. His pupils were tiny pinpoints; he smiled faintly, permanently, in a way very reminiscent of the Bursar.

"Ah. But when we are married," said the Queen, "the land must accept me. By your own rules. I know how it works. There's more to being a king than wearing a crown. The king and the land are one. The king and the queen are one. And I shall be queen."

She smiled at Granny. There was an elf on either side of her and. Granny knew, at least one behind her. Elves were not given to introspection; if she moved without permission, she'd die.

"What you shall be is something I have yet to decide," said the Queen. She held up an exquisitely thin hand and curled the thumb and forefinger into a ring, which she held up to her eye.

"And now someone comes," she said, "with armour that doesn't fit and a sword she cannot use and an axe she can hardly even lift, because it is so romantic, is it not? What is her name?"

"Magrat Garlick," said Granny.

"She is a mighty enchantress, is she?"

"She's good with herbs."

The Queen laughed.

"I could kill her from here."

"Yes," said Granny, "but that wouldn't be much fun, would it? Humiliation is the key."

The Queen nodded.

"You know, you think very much like an elf."

"I think it will soon be dawn," said Granny. "A fine day. Clear light."

"Not soon enough," The Queen stood up. She glanced at King Verence for a moment, and changed. Her dress went from red to silver, catching the torchlight like glittering fish scales. Her hair unraveled and reshaped itself, became corn blond. And a subtle ripple of alterations flowed across her face before she said, "What do you think?"

She looked like Magrat. Or, at least, like Magrat wished she looked and maybe as Verence always thought of her. Granny nodded. As one expert to another, she recognized accomplished nastiness when she saw it.

"And you're going to face her like that," she said.

"Certainly. Eventually. At the finish. But don't feel sorry for her. She's only going to die. Would you like me to show you what you might have been?"

"No."

"I could do it easily. There are other times than this. I could show you grandmother Weatherwax."

"No."

"It must be terrible, knowing that you have no friends. That no one will care when you die. That you never touched a heart."

"Yes."

"And I'm sure you think about it. . . in those long evenings when there's no company but the ticking of the clock and the coldness of the room and you open the box and look at-"

The Queen waved a hand vaguely as Granny tried to break free.

"Don't kill her," she said. "She is much more fun alive."

Magrat stuck the sword in the mud and hefted the battleaxe.

Woods pressed in on either side. The elves would have to come this way There looked like hundreds of them and there was only one Magrat Garlick.

She knew there was such a thing as heroic odds. Songs and ballads and stories and poems were full of stories about one person single-handedly taking on and defeating a vast number of enemies.

Only now was it dawning on her that the trouble was that they were songs and ballads and stories and poems because they dealt with things that were, not to put too fine a point on it, untrue.

She couldn't, now she had time to think about it, ever remember an example from history.

In the woods to one side of her an elf raised its bow and took careful aim.

A twig snapped behind it. It turned.

The Bursar beamed. "Whoopsy daisy, old trouser, my bean's all runny."

The elf swung the bow.

A pair of prehensile feet dropped out of the greenery, gripped it by the shoulders, and pulled it upward sharply. There was a crack as its head hit the underside of a branch.

"Oook."

"Move right along!"

On the other side of the path another elf took aim. And then its world flowed away from it. . .

This is the inside of the mind of an elf:

Here are the normal five senses but they are all subordinate to the sixth sense. There is no formal word for it on the Discworld, because the force is so weak that it is only ever encountered by observant blacksmiths, who call it the Love of Iron. Navigators might have discovered it were it not that the Disc's standing magical field is much more reliable. But bees sense it, because bees sense everything. Pigeons navigate by it. And everywhere in the multiverse elves use it to know exactly where they are.

The Librarian watched them join the procession of tired men who were staggering down the valley.

Then he pulled at the nail a few times, and watched it fly back to the stone.

"Oook."

He looked up into the eyes of Jason Ogg.

Much to Jason's surprise, the orang-utan winked.

Sometimes, if you pay real close attention to the pebbles you find out about the ocean.

The clock ticked.

In the chilly morning gloom of Granny Weatherwax's cottage. Nanny Ogg opened the box.

Everyone in Lancre knew about Esme Weatherwax's mysterious box. It was variously rumoured to contain books of spells, a small private universe, cures for all ills, the deeds of lost lands and several tons of gold, which was pretty good going for something less than a foot across. Even Nanny Ogg had never been told about the contents, apart from the will.

She was a bit disappointed but not at all surprised to find that it contained nothing more than a couple of large envelopes, a bundle of letters, and a miscellaneous assortment of common items in the bottom.

Nanny lifted out the paperwork. The first envelope was addressed to her, and bore the legend: To Gytha Ogge, Reade This NOWE.

The second envelope was a bit smaller and said: The Will of Esmerelda Weatherwax, Died Midsummer's Eve.

And then there was a bundle of letters with a bit of string round them. They were very old; bits of yellowing paper crackled off them as Magrat picked them up.

"They're all letters to her," she said.

"Nothing odd about that," said Nanny. "Anyone can get letters."

"And there's all this stuff at the bottom," said Magrat. "It looks like pebbles."

She held one up.

"This one's got one of those curly fossil things in it," she said. "And this one . . . looks like that red rock the Dancers were made of. It's got a darning needle stuck to it. How strange."

"She always paid attention to small details, did Esme. Always tried to see inside to the real thing."

They were both silent for a moment, and the silence wound out around them and filled the kitchen, to be sliced into gentle pieces by the soft ticking of the clock.

"I never thought we'd be doing this," said Magrat, after a while. "I never thought we'd be reading her will. I thought she'd keep on going for ever."

"Well, there it is," said Nanny. "Tempus fuggit."

"Nanny?"

"Yes, love?"

"I don't understand. She was your friend but you don't seem . . . well. . . upset?"

"Well, I've buried a few husbands and one or two kiddies. You get the hang of it. Anyway, if she hasn't gone to a better place she'll damn well be setting out to improve it."

"Nanny?"

"Yes, love?"

"Did you know anything about the letter?"

"What letter?"

"The letter to Verence."

"Don't know anything about any letter to Verence."

"He must have got it weeks before we got back. She must have sent it even before we got to Ankh-Morpork."

Nanny Ogg looked, as far as Magrat could tell, genuinely blank.

"Oh, hell," said Magrat. "I mean this letter."

She fished it out of the breastplate.

"See?"

Nanny Ogg read:

"Dear sire. This is to inform youe that Magrate Garlick will bee retouning to Lancre on or aboute Blind Pig Tuesday. Shee is a Wet Hen but shee is clean and has got Good Teeth. If you wishes to marrie her, then starte arranging matters without delae, because if you just proposes and similar she will lede you a Dance because there is noone like Magrat for getting in the way of her own life. She does not Knoe her own Mind. You aere Kinge and you can doe what you like. You muste present her with a Fate Accompli. PS. I hear there is talk aboute making witches pay tax, no kinges of Lancre has tried this for many a Year, you could profit from their example. Yrs. in good health, at the moment. A FRIEND (MSS)."

The ticking of the clock stitched the blanket of silence.

Nanny Ogg turned to look at it.

"She arranged it all!" said Magrat. "You know what Verence is like. I mean, she hardly disguised who she was, did she? And I got back and it was all arranged-"

"What would you have done if nothing had been arranged?" said Nanny.

Magrat looked momentarily taken aback.

"Well, I would . . . I mean, if he had . . . I'd-"

"You'd be getting married today, would you?" said Nanny, but in a distant voice, as if she was thinking about something else.

"Well, that depends on-"

"You want to, don't you?"

"Well, yes, of course, but-"

"That's nice, then," said Nanny, in what Magrat thought of as her nursery voice.

"Yes, but she pushed me on one side and shut me up in the castle and I got so wound up-"

"You were so angry that you actually stood Up to the Queen. You actually laid hands on her," said Nanny. "Well done. The old Magrat wouldn't have done that, would she? Esme could always see the real thing. Now nip out of the back door and look at the log pile, there's a love."

"But I hated her and hated her and now she's dead!"

"Yes, dear. Now go and tell Nanny about the log pile."

Magrat opened her mouth to frame the words "I happen to be very nearly queen" but decided not to. Instead she graciously went outside and looked at the log pile.

"It's quite high," she said, coming back and blowing her nose. "Looks like it's just been stacked."

And she wound up the clock yesterday," said Nanny. "And the tea caddy's half full, I just looked."

"Well?"

"She wasn't sure," said Nanny. "Hmm." She opened the envelope addressed to her. It was larger and flatter than the one holding the will, and contained a single piece of card.

Nanny read it, and let it drop on to the table.

"Come on," she said. "We ain't got much time!"

"What's the matter?"

"And bring the sugar bowl!"

Nanny wrenched open the door and hurried toward her broomstick.

"Come on!"

Magrat picked up the card. The writing was familiar. She'd seen it several times before, when calling on Granny Weatherwax unexpectedly.

It said: I ATE'NT DEAD.

"Halt! Who goes there?"

"What're you doing on guard with your arm in a sling, Shawn?"

"Duty calls. Mum."

"Well, let us in right now."

"Are you Friend or Foe, Mum?"

"Shawn, this is almost-Queen Magrat here with me, all right?"

"Yes, but you've got to-"

"Right now!"

"Oooaaaww, Mum!"

Magrat tried to keep up with Nanny as she scurried through the castle.

"The wizard was right. She was dead, you know. I don't blame you for hoping, but I can tell when people are dead."

"No, you can't. I remember a few years ago you came running down to my house in tears and it turned out she was just off Borrowing. That's when she started using the sign."

"But-"

"She wasn't sure what was going to happen," said Nanny. "That's good enough for me."

"Nanny-"

"You never know until you look," said Nanny Ogg, expounding her own Uncertainty Principle.

Nanny kicked open the doors to the Great Hall.

"What's all this?"

Ridcully got up from his chair, looking embarrassed.

"Well, it didn't seem right to leave her all alone-"

"Oh dear, oh dear," said Nanny, gazing at the solemn tableau.

"Candles and lilies. I bet you pinched 'em yourself, out of the garden. And then you all shut her away indoors like this."

"Well-"

"And no one even thought to leave a damn window

open! Can't you hear them?"

"Hear what?" Nanny looked around hurriedly and picked up a silver candlestick. "No!"

Magrat snatched it out of her hand. "This happens to be," winding her arm back, "very nearly," taking aim, "my castle-"

The candlestick flew up, turning end over end, and hit a big stained glass window right in the centre.

Fresh sunlight extruded down to the table, visibly moving in the Disc's slow magical field. And down it, like marbles down a chute, the bees cascaded.

The swarm settled on the witch's head, giving the impression of a very dangerous wig.

"What did you-" Ridcully began.

"She's going to swank about this for weeks," said Nanny. "No one's ever done it with bees. Their mind's everywhere, see? Not just in one bee. In the whole swarm."

"What are you-"

Granny Weatherwax's fingers twitched.

Her eyes flickered. Very slowly, she sat up. She focused on Magrat and

Nanny Ogg with some difficulty, and said:

"I wantzzz a bunzzch of flowerszz, a pot of honey, and someone to szzzting."

"I brung the sugar bowl, Esme," said Nanny Ogg.

Granny eyed it hungrily, and then looked at the bees that were taking off from her head like planes from a stricken carrier.

"Pour a dzzrop of water on it, then, and tip it out on the table for them."

She stared triumphantly at their faces as Nanny Ogg bustled off.

"I done it with beezzz! No one can do it with beezzz, and I done it! You endzzz up with your mind all flying in different directionzzz! You got to be good to do it with beezzz!"

Nanny Ogg sloshed the bowl of makeshift syrup across the table. The swarm descended.

"You're alive?" Ridcully managed.

"That's what a univerzzity education doezz for you," said Granny, trying to massage some life into her arms. "You've only got to be sitting up and talking for five minutzz and they can work out you're alive."

Nanny Ogg handed her a glass of water. It hovered in the air for a moment and then crashed to the floor, because Granny had tried to grasp it with her fifth leg.

"Zzorry."

"I knew you wasn't certain!" said Nanny.

"Czertain? Of courze I waz certain! Never in any doubt whatsoever."

Magrat thought about the will.

"You never had a moment's doubt?"

Granny Weatherwax had the grace not to look her in the eye. Instead, she rubbed her hands together.

"What's been happening while I've been away?"

"Well," said Nanny, "Magrat stood up to the-"

"Oh, I knew she'd do that. Had the wedding, have you?"

"Wedding?" The rest of them exchanged glances.

"Of course not!" said Magrat. "Brother Perdore of the Nine Day Wonderers was going to do it and he was knocked out cold by an elf, and anyway people are all-"

"Don't let's have any excuses," said Granny briskly. "Anyway, a senior wizard can conduct a service at a pinch, ain't that right?"

"I, I, I think so," said Ridcully, who was falling behind a bit in world events.

"Right. A wizard's only a priest without a god and a damp handshake," said Granny

"But half the guests have run away!" said Magrat.

"We'll round up some more," said Granny

"Mrs. Scorbic will never get the wedding feast done in time!"

"You'll have to tell her to," said Granny.

"The bridesmaids aren't here!"

"We'll make do."

"I haven't got a dress!"

"What's that you've got on?"

Magrat looked down at the stained chain-mail, the mud-encrusted breastplate, and the few damp remnants of white silk that hung over them like a ragged tabard.

"Looks good to me," said Granny "Nanny'll do your hair."

Magrat reached up instinctively, removed the winged helmet, and patted her hair. Bits of twigs and fragments of heather had twisted themselves in it with comb-breaking complexity It never looked good for five minutes together at the best of times; now it was a bird's nest.

"I think I'll leave it," she said.

Granny nodded approvingly

"That's the way of it," she said. "It's not what you've got that matters, it's how you've got it. Well, we're just about ready, then."

Nanny leaned toward her and whispered.

"What? Oh, yes. Where's the groom?"

"He's a bit muzzy. Not sure what happened," said Magrat.

"Perfectly normal," said Nanny, "after a stag night."

There were difficulties to overcome:

"We need a Best Man."

"Ook."

"Well, at least put some clothes on."

Mrs. Scorbic the cook folded her huge pink arms.

"Can't be done," she said firmly.

"I thought perhaps just some salad and quiche and some light-" Magrat said, imploringly.

The cook's whiskery chin stuck out firmly.

"Them elves turned the whole kitchen upside down," she said. "It's going to take me days to get it straight. Anyway, everyone knows raw vegetables are bad for you, and I can't be having with them eggy pies."

Magrat looked beseechingly at Nanny Ogg; Granny Weatherwax had wandered off into the gardens, where she was getting a tendency to stick her nose in flowers right out of her system.

"Nothin' to do with me," said Nanny. "It's not my kitchen, dear."

"No, it's mine. I've been cook here for years," said Mrs. Scorbic, "and I knows how things should be done, and I'm not going to be ordered around in my own kitchen by some chit of a girl."

Magrat sagged. Nanny tapped her on the shoulder.

"You might need this at this point," she said, and handed Magrat the winged helmet.

"The king's been very happy with-" Mrs. Scorbic began.

There was a click. She looked down the length of a crossbow and met Magrat's steady gaze.

"Go ahead," said the Queen of Lancre softly, "bake my quiche."

Verence sat in his nightshirt with his head in his hands. He could remember hardly anything about the night, except a feeling of coldness. And no one seemed very inclined to tell him.

There was a faint creak as the door opened.

He looked up. "Glad to see you're up and about already," said Granny Weatherwax. "I've come to help you dress."

"I've looked in the garderobe," said Verence. "The . . . elves, was it? . . . they ransacked the place. There's nothing I can wear."

Granny looked around the room. Then she went to a low chest and opened it. There was a faint tinkling of bells, and a flash of red and yellow.

"I thought you never threw them away," she said. "And you ain't put on any weight, so they'll still fit. On with the motley. Magrat'll appreciate it."

"Oh, no," said Verence. "I'm very firm about this. I'm king now. It'd be demeaning for Magrat to marry a Fool. I've got a position to maintain, for the sake of the kingdom. Besides, there is such a thing as pride."

Granny stared at him for so long that he shifted uncomfortably.

"Well, there is," he said.

Granny nodded, and walked toward the doorway.

"Why're you leaving?" said Verence nervously.

"I ain't leaving," said Granny, quietly, "I'm just shutting the door."

And then there was the incident with the crown.

Ceremonies and Protocols of The Kingdom of Lancre was eventually found after a hurried search of Verence's bedroom. It was very clear about the procedure. The new queen was crowned, by the king, as part of the ceremony. It wasn't technically difficult for any king who knew which end of a queen was which, which even the most inbred king figured out in two goes.

But it seemed to Ponder Stibbons that the ritual wobbled a bit at this point.

It seemed, in fact, that just as he was about to lower the crown on the bride's head he glanced across the hall to where the skinny old witch was standing. And nearly everyone else did too, including the bride.

The old witch nodded very slightly.

Magrat was crowned.

Wack-fol-a-diddle, etc.

The bride and groom stood side by side, shaking hands with the long line of guests in that dazed fashion normal at this point in the ceremony.