Lords and Ladies

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 Quarney 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. Quarney?”
    “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 armory.
    “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 moorland 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 colored. 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. *
    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,