Lords and Ladies

air. The Queen had to step back.
    “My own turf?” said Granny.
    She slapped the Queen again, almost gently.
    “What’s this?” said Granny Weatherwax. “Can’t you resist me? Where’s your power now, madam? Gather your power, madam!”
    “You foolish old crone !”
    It was felt by every living creature for a mile around. Small things died. Birds spiraled out of the sky. Elves and humans alike dropped to the ground, clutching their heads.
    And in Granny Weatherwax’s garden the bees rose out of their hives.
    They emerged like steam, colliding with one another in their rush to get airborne. The deep gunship hum of the drones underpinned the frantic roars of the workers.
    But, louder than the drones, was the piccolo piping of the queens.
    The swarms spiraled up over the clearing, circled once, and then broke and headed away. Others joined them, out of backyard skeps and hollow trees, blackening the sky.
    After a while, order became apparent in the great circling cloud. The drones flew on the wings, throbbing like bombers. The workers were a cone made up of thousands of tiny bodies. And at its tip, a hundred queens flew.
    The fields lay silent after the arrow-shaped swarm of swarms had gone.
    Flowers stood alone and uncourted. Nectar flowed undrunk. Blossoms were left to go fertilize themselves.
    The bees headed toward the Dancers.

    Granny Weatherwax dropped to her knees, clutching at her head.
    “No—”
    “Oh, but yes,” said the Queen.
    Esme Weatherwax raised her hands. The fingers were curled tightly with effort and pain.
    Magrat found she could move her eyes. The rest of her felt weak and useless, even with chain-mail and the breastplates. So this was it. She could feel the ghost of Queen Ynci laughing scornfully from a thousand years ago. She’d not give up. Magrat was just another one of those dozens of simpering stiff women who’d just hung around in long dresses, ensuring the royal succession—
    Bees poured down out of the sky.
    Granny Weatherwax turned her face toward Magrat.
    Magrat heard the voice clearly in her head.
    “You want to be queen?”
    And she was free.
    She felt the weariness drop away from her and it also felt as though pure Queen Ynci poured out of the helmet.
    More bees rained down, covering the slumped figure of the old witch.
    The Queen turned, and her smile froze as Magrat straightened up, stepped forward and, with hardly a thought in her head, raised the battleaxe and brought it around in one long sweep.
    The Queen moved faster. Her hand snaked out and gripped Magrat’s wrist.
    “Oh yes,” she said, grinning into Magrat’s face. “Really? You think so?”
    She twisted. The axe dropped from Magrat’s fingers.
    “And you wanted to be a witch ?”
    Bees were a brown fog, hiding the elves—too small to hit, impervious to glamour, but determined to kill.
    Magrat felt the bone scrape.
    “The old witch is finished,” said the Queen, forcing Magrat down. “I won’t say she wasn’t good. But she wasn’t good enough . And you certainly aren’t.”
    Slowly and inexorably, Magrat was forced downward.
    “Why don’t you try some magic?” said the Queen.
    Magrat kicked. Her foot caught the Queen on the knee, and she heard a crack. As she staggered back Magrat launched herself forward and caught her around the waist, bearing her to the ground.
    She was amazed at the lightness. Magrat was skinny enough, but the Queen seemed to have no weight at all.
    “Why,” she said, pulling herself up until the Queen’s face was level with hers, “you’re nothing . It’s all in the mind, isn’t it? Without the glamour, you’re—”
    —an almost triangular face, a tiny mouth, the nose hardly existing at all, but eyes larger than human eyes and now focused on Magrat in pinpoint terror.
    “Iron,” whispered the Queen. Her hands gripped Magrat’s arms. There was no strength there. An elf’s strength lay in persuading others they were weak.
    Magrat could feel her desperately trying to enter her mind, but it wasn’t working. The helmet—
    —was lying several feet away, in the mud.
    She just had time to wish she hadn’t noticed that before the Queen attacked again, exploding into her uncertainty like a nova.
    She was nothing. She was insignificant. She was so worthless and unimportant that even something completely worthless and exhaustively unimportant would consider her beneath contempt. In laying hands upon the Queen she truly deserved an eternity of pain. She had no