Lords And Ladies

"At least the thing about queening," said Granny, "is that no one notices if you're doing it wrong. It has to be right 'cos it's you doing it."

"S'funny, royalty," said Nanny. "It's like magic. You take some girl with a bum like two pigs in a blanket and a head full of air and then she marries a king or a prince or someone and suddenly she's this radiant right royal princess. It's a funny old world."

"I ain't going to kowtow to her, mind," said Granny.

"You never kowtow to anyone anyway," said Nanny Ogg patiently. "You never bowed to the old king. You barely gives young Verence a nod. You never kowtows to anyone ever, anyway."

"That's right!" said Granny. "That's part of being a witch, that is."

Nanny relaxed a bit. Granny being an old woman made her uneasy. Granny in her normal state of barely controlled anger was far more her old self.

Granny stood up.

"Old Toekley's girl, eh?"

"That's right."

"Her mother was a Keeble, wasn't she? Fine woman, as I recall."

"Yeah, but when she died the old man sent her off to Sto Lat to school."

"Don't hold with schools," said Granny Weatherwax. "They gets in the way of education. All them books. Books? What good are they? There's too much reading these days. We never had time to read when we was young, I know that."

"We were too busy makin' our own entertainment."

"Right. Come on – we ain't got much time."

"What d'you mean?"

"It's not just the girls. There's something out there, too. Some kind of mind, movin' around."

Granny shivered. She'd been aware of it in the same way that a skilled hunter, moving through the hills, is aware of another hunter – by the silences where there should have been noise, by the trampling of a stem, by the anger of the bees.

Nanny Ogg had never liked the idea of Borrowing, and Magrat had always refused even to give it a try. The old witches on the other side of the mountain had too much trouble with inconvenient in-body experiences to cope with the out-of-body kind. So Granny was used to having the mental dimension to herself.

There was a mind moving around in the kingdom, and Granny Weatherwax didn't understand it.

She Borrowed. You had to be careful. It was like a drug. You could ride the minds of animals and birds, but never bees, steering them gently, seeing through their eyes. Granny Weatherwax had many times flicked through the channels of consciousness around her. It was, to her, part of the heart of witchcraft. To see through other eyes . . .

. . . through the eyes of gnats, seeing the slow patterns of time in the fast pattern of one day, their minds travelling rapidly as lightning . . .

. . . to listen with the body of a beetle, so that the world is a three-dimensional pattern of vibrations . . .

. . . to see with the nose of a dog, all smells now colours . . .

But there was a price. No one asked you to pay it, but the very absence of demand was a moral obligation. You tended not to swat. You dug lightly. You fed the dog. You paid. You cared; not because it was kind or good, but because it was right. You left nothing but memories, you took nothing but experience.

But this other roving intelligence . . . it'd go in and out of another mind like a chainsaw, taking, taking, taking. She could sense the shape of it, the predatory shape, all cruelty and cool unkindness; a mind full of intelligence, that'd use other living things and hurt them because it was fun.

She could put a name to a mind like that.

Elf.

Branches thrashed high in the trees.

Granny and Nanny strode through the forest. At least, Granny Weatherwax strode. Nanny Ogg scurried.

"The Lords and Ladies are trying to find a way," said Granny. "And there's something else. Something's already come through. Some kind of animal from the other side. Scrope chased a deer into the circle and the thing must have been there, and they always used to say something can come through if something goes the other way-"

"What thing?"

"You know what a bat's eyesight is like. Just a big shape is all it saw. Something killed old Scrope. It's still around. Not an . . . not one o' the Lords and Ladies," said Granny, "but something from El . . . that place."

Nanny looked at the shadows. There are a lot of shadows in a forest at night.

•"Ain't you scared?" she said.

Granny cracked her knuckles.

"No. But I hope it is."

"Ooo, it's true what they say. You're a prideful one, Esmerelda Weatherwax."

"Who says that?"

"Well, you did. Just now."

"I wasn't feeling well."

Other people would probably say: I wasn't myself. But Granny Weatherwax didn't have anyone else to be.

The two witches hurried on through the gale.

From the shelter of a thorn thicket, the unicorn watched them go.

Diamanda Tockley did indeed wear a floppy black velvet hat. It had a veil, too.