Lords and Ladies

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 moorland 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 moorland 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.
    He knew he’d aimed the bow. But it was whirled out of his hands as the thing struck, and suddenly there was only the sensation of—
    — peace.
    And the brief remembrance of pain.
    William Scrope died.
    William Scrope looked