Lords and Ladies

Terry Pratchett

Summary

The fairies are back -- but this time they don't just want your teeth...

It's a hot Midsummer Night. The crop circles are turning up everywhere -- even on the mustard-and-cress of Pewsey Ogg, aged four. And Magrat Garlick, witch, is going to be married in the morning...

Everything ought to be going like a dream. But the Lancre All-Comers Morris Team have got drunk on a fairy mound and the elves have come back, bringing all those things traditionally associated with the magical, glittering realm of Faerie: cruelty, kidnapping, malice and evil, evil murder (But with tons of style).

Granny Weatherwax and her tiny argumentative coven have really got their work cut out this time...

With full supporting cast of dwarfs, wizards, trolls, Morris Dancers and one orang-utan. And lots of hey-nonny-nonny and blood all over the place.

Quotes

There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be beginnings.

The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired... [Footnote: Probably at the first pawn.]

Much human ingenuity has gone into finding the ultimate Before.

The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus:

In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

Other theories about the ultimate start involve gods creating the universe out of the ribs, entrails and testicles of their father. There are quite a lot of these. They are interesting, not for what they tell you about cosmology, but for what they say about people. Hey, kids, which part do you think they made your town out of?

If there's a stone circle you mustn't go near, the imagination suggests, then there should be big brooding trilithons and ancient altar stones screaming with the dark memory of blood-soaked sacrifice. Not these dull stubby lumps.

Also, there's a certain glint in her eye generally possessed by those people who have found that they are more intelligent than most people around them but who haven't yet learned that one of the most intelligent things they can do is prevent said people ever finding this out.

...[Magrat] wears bright, cheerful clothes which don't suit her now and didn't even suit her ten years ago.

Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people.

Inquisitors would have thrown Nanny Ogg out of their ranks for being too nasty.

No matter what she did with her hair it took about three minutes for it to tangle itself up again, like a garden hosepipe in a shed [Footnote: Which, no matter how carefully coiled, will always uncoil overnight and tie the lawnmower to the bicycles].

...[Verence] was a genuine king and genuine kings tended to attract young women looking for career opportunities in the queening department.

Guard duty at Lancre castle was the province of anyone who didn't have much of anything else to do at the moment.

Some people are born to kingship. Some achieve kingship, or at least Arch-Generalissimo-Father-of-His-Countryship. But Verence had kingship thrust upon him. He hadn't been raised to it, and had only arrived at the throne by one of those complicated mix-ups of fraternity and parentage that are all too common in royal families.

[Verence] had formed the unusual opinion that the job of a king is to make the kingdom a better place for everyone to live in.

"I've got a great respect for witches. And you can be a witch queen, although I think that means you have to wear rather revealing clothes and keep cats and give people poisoned apples. I read that somewhere."

So that was all settled, then. Not a proposal, just a statement. She hadn't been quite sure how the moment would be, even in the darkest hours of the night, but she'd had an idea that roses and sunsets and bluebirds might just possibly be involved. Clover had not figured largely. Beans and other leguminous nitrogen fixers were not a central figure.

Perhaps that was normal. Kings were busy people. Magrat's experience of marrying them was limited.

Verence: "They nod and mumble and smile but I'm afraid they just go off and do the same old things."
Magrat: "I know. The same thing happens when I try to give people lessons in natural childbirth."
Verence: "Really? How had they been having babies before?"
Magrat: "Oh, any old way."

"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."

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.

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.

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 endangerred although not as endangered, right now, as William Scrope.

There are no delusions for the dead. Dying is like waking up after a really good party, when you have one or two seconds of innocent freedom before you recollect all the things you did last night which seemed so logical and hilarious at the time, and then you remember the really amazing thing you did with a lampshade and two balloons, which had them in stitches, and now realize you're going to have to look at lot of people in the eye today and you're sober now and so are they but you can both remember.

Death: WILLIAM SCROPE.
William: "Yes?"
Death: IF YOU WOULD PLEASE STEP THIS WAY.
William: "Are you a hunter?"
Death: I LIKE TO THINK I AM A PICKER-UP OF UNCONSIDERED TRIFLES.

Nanny Ogg gave this the same consideration as would a nuclear physicist who'd just been told that someone was banging two bits of sub-critical uranium together to keep warm.

The Librarian was always up early because he was an orang-utan, and they are naturally early risers, although in his case he didn't bellow a few times to keep other males off his territory. He just unlocked the Library and fed the books.

And Mustrum Ridcully, the current Archchancellor, liked to wander around the sleepy buildings, nodding to the servants and leaving little notes for his subordinates, usually designed for no other purpose than to make it absolutely clear that he was up and attending to the business of the day while they were still fast asleep.

The next member of staff to wake up after Ridcully and the Librarian was the Bursar; not because he was a naturally early riser, but because by around ten o'clock the Archchancellor's very limited supply of patience came to an end and he would stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout:

"Bursaaar!"

--until the Bursar appeared.

Ridcully never wasted time on small talk. It was always large talk or nothing.

"I mean it's ridiculous! My family have never gone bald, except for one of my aunts!"

"It's William Scrope, from over Slice way," she said. "One of three brothers. He married that Palliard girl, remember? The one with the air-cooled teeth?"

Corpses as such didn't worry [Nanny Ogg].Witches generally act as layers-out for the dead as well as midwives; there were plenty of people in Lancre for whom Nanny Ogg's face had been the first and last thing they'd ever seen, which had probably made all the bit in the middle seem quite uneventful by comparison.

"We taught her everything she knows," said Granny Weatherwax.

"Yeah," said Nanny Ogg, as they disappeared into the bracken. "D'you think ... maybe...?"

"What?"

"D'you think maybe we ought to have taught her everything we know?"

"It'd take too long."

Mustrum Ridcully did a lot for rare species. For one thing, he kept them rare.

"Well, I'm not going," said the Dean. "It's unnatural, the countryside. Far too many trees."

Ridcully rubbed his beard. In fact he quite liked the Librarian, who never argued with him and always kept himself in shape, even if that shape was a pear shape. It was the right shape for an orang-utan.

...it had been an accident among the potent and magical books of the University library that had as it were bounced the Librarian's genotype down the evolutionary tree and back up a different branch, with the significant difference that now he could hang on to it upside down with his feet.

Ponder: "If there is a suitably high flux level, the inter-continuum pressure can probably overcome quite a high base reality quotient."
Ridcully: "I don't even want you to begin to start explainin' that."

Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu-- was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.

What [Ponder Stibbons] had really wanted out of life was to spend the next hundred years of it at the University, eating big meals and not moving much in between them. ... People were always telling him to make something of his life, and that's what he wanted to do. He wanted to make a bed of it.

...all books, everywhere, affect all other books. This is obvious: books inspire other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past. But the General Theory^* of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the contents of books as yet unwritten can be deduced from books now in existence.

[Footnote: There's a Special Theory as well, but no-one bothers with it much because it's self-evidently a load of marsh gas.]

Well, she'd just have to leam queening. At least she was the only one in Lancre. No one'd be looking over her shoul-der the whole time, saying things like "You ain't holding that scepter right!"

Magrat normally wore a simple dress with not much underneath it except Magrat.

Outside, on the battlements, the guard changed. In fact, he changed into his gardening apron and went off to hoe the beans.

"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?"

Magrat: "So what do I do? What's my job?"
Millie: "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..."
Magrat: "At the moment, we'll have a go at the tapestry."

There wasn't a mind in Lancre [Granny Weatherwax] couldn't Borrow. She could even see the world through the eyes of earthworms. [Footnote: It was largely dark.]

[Nanny Ogg] sat for a while in her spotless kitchen, drinking rum and smoking her foul pipe and staring at the paintings at the wall. They had been done by her youngest grandchildren in a dozen shades of mud, most of them of blobby stick figures with the word GRAN blobbily blobbed in underneath in muddy blobby letters.

Nanny Ogg: "So, what's been happening in these parts while we've been away, my lad?"
Jason: "Oh, well, us had a big whirlwind on Hogswatchnight and one of Mother Peason's hens laid the same egg three times, and old Poorchick's cow gave birth to a seven-headed snake, and there was a rain of frogs over in Slice--"
Nanny Ogg: "Been pretty normal, then."
Jason: "All very quiet, really."

Herme was the god of the chased and the hunted and all small animals whose ultimate destiny is to be an abrupt damp squeak.

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

"Fifty dollars each is highway 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 swing 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."

"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."

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.

"There's too much reading these days. We never had time to read when I was young, I know that."

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

Now Diamanda was showing them how to do the cards.

She said they contained the distilled wisdom of the Ancients. Perdita had found herself treacherously wondering who these Ancients were -- they clearly weren't the same as old people, who were stupid, Diamanda said, but she wasn't quite clear why they were wiser than, say, modern people.

Perdita remembered Magrat bringing a guitar to a Hogswatchnight party once and singing wobbly folk songs with her eyes shut in a way that suggested that she really believed in them. She hadn't been able to play, but this was all right because she couldn't sing, either.

It was all very pretty, the cards were colored 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.

"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."

-- Nanny gives Taroc advice

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.

"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?"

"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 trouble."

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

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

"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!"

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.

Witches are good at dealing with [premonitions], 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.

Nanny Ogg: "They'll be here in a few minutes."
Granny Weatherwax: "No she won't. She'll be late."
Nanny Ogg: "How d'you know?"
Granny Weatherwax: "No good making an entrance if everyone isn't there to see you, is it?"

Agnes: "That's a magic circle? ...But you didn't chant or anything."
Nanny Ogg: "No?"
Agnes: "There has to be a chant, doesn't there?"
Nanny Ogg: "Dunno. Never done one... I could sing you a comic song if you likes."

Granny Weatherwax personally disliked young Pewsey. She disliked all small children, which is why she got on with them so well.

And the child had a permanently runny nose and ought to be provided with a handkerchief or, failing that, a cork.

"If you don't go away," [Granny Weatherwax] said gravely, "I will personally rip your head off and fill it with snakes."

"There!" said Nanny Ogg. "There's lots of poor children in Klatch that'd be grateful for a curse like that."

In the Long Gallery were huge tapestries of ancient battles, done by previous bored regal incumbents; it was amazing how all the fighters had been persuaded to stay still long enough.

Finally she went back to the solar. This was the big room on top of the main tower. In theory, it was there to catch the sun. It did. It also caught the wind and the rain. It was a sort of drift net for anything the sky happened to throw.

"We happen to be Queen," [Magrat] said. "Nearly. So you don't tell one one can't do things, or one'll have you cleaning the privvies!"

"But I does clean the privvies," said Shawn, in a reasonable voice.

"No! That's cheating!"

"Well, you always cheat."

"I cheat for myself. You can't cheat for other people."

Nanny Ogg had a pragmatic attitude to the truth: she told it if it was convenient and she couldn't be bothered to make up something more interesting.

"What's an artisan?" said Weaver the thatcher.

"Dunno. Type of well, I reckon." Jason scratched his head. "Yeah. They've got 'em down on the plains. I repaired a pump for one once. Artisan wells."

"What's comic about them?"

"Maybe people fall down 'em in a funny way?"

"I don't think much of my part," said Carpenter. "It's too small."

"It's his poor wife I feel sorry for," said Weaver, automatically.

"This play was written by a real playsmith! Hah, I can just see a real playsmith putting donkeys in a play!"

The Carter parents were a quiet and respectable Lancre family who got into a bit of a mix-up when it came to naming their children. First, they had four daughters, who were christened Hope, Chastity, Prudence and Charity, because naming girls after virtues is an ancient and unremarkable tradition. Then their first son was born and out of some misplaced idea about how this naming business was done he was called Anger Carter, followed later by Jealousy Carter, Bestiality Carter and Covetousness Carter.

The land between Ankh-Morpork and the Ramtops was fertile, well-cultivated, and dull, dull, dull. Travel broadens the mind. This landscape broadened the mind because the mind just flowed out from the ears like porridge.

"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."

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

Common sense suggested that wizards didn't flash into existence aged seventy and weighing nineteen stone. But common sense needed reminding.

"Poets always get it wrong. 'S'like 'She had lips like cherries'. Small, round and got a stone in the middle? Hah!"

"Kneel and deliver!"

-- Casanunda, the world's smallest lover, turns highwaydwarf

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

"Are you really an outrageous liar?"

"No."

Casanunda: "I am afraid I was waylaid by bandits."
Ridcully: "But it says here that you are a finest swordsman."
Casanunda: "I was outnumbered."
Ridcully: "How many of them were there?"
Casanunda: "Three million."

"Can you play Cripple Mr. Onion?"

"Not very well."

"Capital!"

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

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

"Yes, but I thought you were lying!"

I called her a stupid girl, thought Magrat. Royalty is rubbing off on me.

What's the point of having a king, they thought, if you have to rule yourself? He should do his job, even if he couldn't spell properly. No one was asking him to thatch roofs or milk cows, were they?

Verence had planted it because he'd heard that stately castles should have a maze and everyone agreed that, once the bushes were a bit higher than their current height of about one foot, it would indeed be a very famous maze and people would be able to get lost in it without having to shut their eyes and bend down.

Verence, being king, was allowed a gyrfalcon, whatever the hell that was, any earls in the vicinity could fly a peregrine, and priests were allowed sparrowhawks. Commoners were just about allowed a stick to throw. [Footnote: If it wasn't a big stick.]

...as a queen, the Lancre rules of falconry allowed [Magrat] to fly the wowhawk or the Lappet-faced Worrier. It was small and shortsighted and preferred to walk everywhere. It fainted at the sight of blood. And about twenty wowhawks could kill a pigeon, if it was a sick pigeon.

You couldn't stand on ceremony with Mr. Brooks. He treated everyone as an equal, or more often as a slight inferior ... Mr. Brooks had always seemed to her as close to a witch as it was possible to be while still being male.

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

"Yes. It is."

"One's often wondered--"

"What?"

"How do you actually milk them?"

"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.

"But, but -- you said we had to use magic--" Amanita began.

"No, I didn't," said Granny.

"But anyone could have done that," said Magenta.

"Yes, but that's not the point," said Granny. "The point is that you didn't."

"Don't try the paranormal until you know what's normal."

Nanny Ogg: "I remember when I was fifteen, standing in front of old Biddy Spective, and she said in that voice of hers, 'You want to be a what?' and I was that frightened I near widd--"
Granny Weatherwax: "I never stood in front of no one. I camped on old Nanny Gripes' garden until she promised to tell me everything she knew. Hah. That took her a week and I had the afternoons free."
Nanny Ogg: "You mean you weren't Chosen?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Me? No. I chose."

It was here that the thaum, hitherto believed to be the smallest possible particle of magic, was succesfully demonstrated to be made up of /resons/ [Footnote: Lit.: "Thing-ies"] or reality fragments. Currently research indicates that each reson is itself made up of a combination of at least five "flavours", known as "up", "down", "sideways", "sex appeal" and "peppermint".

Nanny Ogg looked under her bed in case there was a man there. Well, you never knew your luck.

It wasn't exactly whiskey, and it wasn't exactly gin, but it was exactly 90 proof, and a great comfort during those worrying moments that sometimes occurred around 3 a.m. when you woke up and forgot who you were. After a glass of the clear liquid you still didn't remember who you were, but that was all right now because you were someone else anyway.

Greebo always slept on Nanny's bed; the way he'd affectionately try to claw your eyeballs out in the morning was as good as an alarm clock. But she always left a window open at night in case he wanted to go out and disembowel something, bless him.

...people didn't seem to be able to remember what it was like with the elves around. Life was certainly more interesting then, but usually because it was shorter. And it was more colorful, if you liked the color of blood.

There was something about the eyes. It wasn't the shape or the colour. There was no evil glint. But there was...

...a look. It was such a look that a microbe might encounter if it could see up from the bottom end of the microscope. It said: You are nothing. It said: You are flawed, you have no value. It said: You are animal. It said: Perhaps you may be a pet, or perhaps you may be a quarry. It said: And the choice is not yours.

Over short distances a determined human can outrun a horse, because they've only got half as many legs to sort out.

In terms of difficulty, playing one tune on a musical instrument and singing a totally different one was a stroll in the country by comparison. [Footnote: Except for Nanny Ogg, who did it all the time, although not on purpose.]

Granny Weatherwax: "What the hell are you doing?"
Nanny Ogg: "Going to put it out of its misery, Esme."
Granny Weatherwax: "Doesn't look miserable to me."
Nanny Ogg: "Could soon arrange that, Esme."

"That was brave of you, carrying her over your shoulder," said Nanny. "With them elves firing arrows, too."

"And it meant less chance of one hitting me, too," said Granny.

Nanny Ogg was shocked.

"What? You never thought that, did you?"

"Well, she'd been hit already. If I'd been hit too, neither of us'd get out," said Granny, simply.

"But that's-- that's a bit heartless, Esme."

"Heartless it may be, but headless it ain't. I've never claimed to be nice, just to be sensible."

As has been pointed out earlier in the Discworld chronicles, entire agricultural economies have been based on the lifting power of little old ladies in black dresses.

[Shawn Ogg] daydreamed of leading an army into battle and wished the king would get one.

He had any amount of ways of passing the time, since guard duty in Lancre involved such an awful lot of it. There was Getting the Nostrils Really Clean, that was a good one. Or Farting Tunes. Or Standing On One Leg. Holding His Breath and Counting was something he fell back on when he couldn't think of anything else and his meals hadn't been too rich in carbohydrates.

Nanny Ogg: "How did you do that?"
Granny Weatherwax: "Simple. He knows you wouldn't make his daft head explode."
Nanny Ogg: "Well, I know you wouldn't too."
Granny Weatherwax: "No you don't. You just know I ain't done it up to now."

If kings went round putting their own food on their own plate, the whole system of monarchy would come crashing down.

The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No-one knew what would happen to ice-cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.

Magrat had tried explaining [nutrition] to Mrs. Scorbic the cook, but the woman's three chins wobbled so menacingly at words like "vitamins" that she'd made an excuse to back out of the kitchen.

Granny swept a candlestick and some crockery on to the floor with a dramatic motion and laid Diamanda on the table. In fact there were several acres of table totally devoid of any obstruction, but there's no sense in making an entrance unless you're prepared to make a mess.

Eye of what newt? What species of ravined salt-sea shark? It's all very well a potion calling for Love-in-idleness, but which of the thirty-seven common plants called by that name in various parts of the continent was actually meant?

The reason that Granny Weatherwax was a better witch than Magrat was that she knew that in witchcraft it didn't matter a damn which one it was, or even if it was a piece of grass.

The reason that Magrat was a better doctor than Granny was that she thought it did.

"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."

"Now, then," [the robber] said, pleasantly. "I know the rules. Wizards aren't allowed to use magic against civilians except in genuine lifethreatening situa--"

There was a burst of octarine light.

"Actually, it's not a rule," said Ridcully. "It's more a guideline."

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

Coachman: "This isn't what you're supposed to do! You're supposed to be robbed!"
Ridcully: "We're on holiday."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"You don't have to understand. You're a king."

Nanny Ogg: "There isn't anything you need to ask me, though, is there?"
Magrat: "What do you mean?"
Nanny Ogg: "What with your mum being dead and you having no female relatives and everything... After the wedding, is what I'm hinting about,"
Magrat: "Oh, that. No, most of that's being done by a caterer. The cook here isn't much good at canapes and things."
Nanny Ogg: "And what about after that? If you catch my meaning."
Magrat: "I'm getting a lot of girls in to do the clearing up."

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.

Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.

Elves aer fantastic. They create fantasies.

Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.

Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.

Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

"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.

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.

Royalty, when they marry, either get very small things, like exquisitely-constructed clockwork eggs, or large bulky items, like dutchesses.

It's bad enough at an ordinary wedding, what with old relatives who dribble and swear, brothers who get belligerent after one drink, and various people who Aren't Talking to other people because of What They Said About Our Sharon. Royalty has to deal with entire countries who get belligerent after one drink, and entire kingdoms who Have Broken Off Diplomatic Relations after what the Crown Prince Said About Our Sharon.

Magrat was probably the only person in Lancre who worried about things being biodegradable. Everyone else just hoped things would last and knew that damn near everything went rotten if you left it long enough.

And the clothes [for queens] weren't getting any better. Magrat had drawn the line at a wimple, and she wasn't at all happy about the big pointy hat with the scarf dangling from it. It probably looked beautiful on the Lady of Shallot, but on Magrat it looked as though someone had dropped a big ice cream on her neck.

"Afternoon, your lordships," it said. "Customs inspection."

"I don't think we have any," babbled the Bursar happily. "I mean, we used to have a tradition of rolling boiled eggs downhill on Soul Cake Tuesday, but--"

Troll: "Do you have any beer, spirits, wines, liquors, hallucinogenic herbage or books of a lewd or licentious nature?"
Ridcully: "No."
Troll: "No?"
Ridcully: "No."
Troll: "Sure?"
Ridcully: "Yes."
Troll: "Would you like some?"

"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 got there?"

"I'm a giant," said Casanunda.

"Giants are a lot bigger."

"I've been ill."

Ridcully: "It's like -- what's that word, Stibbons? About breedin' and passin' on stuff to yer kids?"
Ponder: "Evolution."
Ridcully: "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--"

"I've just trodden in something rural."

As far as [Ponder] was concerned, the countryside was something that happened to other people, and most of them had four legs.

"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."

"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."

...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.

"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."

Most woodland animals avoided The Herbs. This was because animals that didn't avoid The Herbs over the past fifty years had tended not to have descendants.

Things had to balance. You couldn't set out to be a good witch or a bad witch. It never worked for long. All you could try to be was a witch, as hard as you could.

"I've seen that herb garden! It's all leggy sage and yellowy parsely! If you can't stuff it up a chicken's bum, she doesn't think it's a herb!"

Being a queen was like being an actor, and Magrat had never been any good at acting. She'd always felt she wasn't very good at being Magrat, if it came to that.

"One is here, however, and if you don't tell one what is going on around here, 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."

For Magrat, stepping into a man's bedroom was like an explorer stepping on to that part of the map marked Here Be Dragons.

[Verence had] 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.

A heap of discarded garments by the bed suggested that Verence had mastered the art of hanging up clothes as practised by half the population of the world, and that he had equally had difficulty with the complex topological manoeuvres necessary to turn the socks the right way out.

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.

Lancre was one of the biggest kingdoms. It could actually afford a standing army. [Footnote: Shawn Ogg (Except when he was lying down).]

There have, in the course of decadent history, been many large wigs, often with build-in gewgaws to stop people having to look at boring hair all the time. There had been ones big enough to contain pet mice or clockwork ornaments. Mme Cupidor, mistress of Mad King Soup II, had one with a bird cage in it, but on special state occasions wore one containing a perpetual calendar, a floral clock and a take-away linguini shop.

"Our stars are entwined," said Casanunda. "We're fated for one another. I wants your body, Mrs. Ogg."

"I'm still using it."

"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."

-- Human-Dwarf romance

[Nanny's] 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.

Granny Weatherwax: "You haven't got the morals of a cat, Gytha Ogg."
Nanny Ogg: "Now, Esme, you know that's not true."
Granny Weatherwax: "All right. You have got the morals of a cat."
Nanny Ogg: "That's better."

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.

Archchancellor: "That really is you, isn't it?"
Granny Weatherwax: "It's really me."
Archchancellor: "You haven't changed a bit, Esme."
Granny Weatherwax: "Nor have you, then. You're still a rotten liar, Minstrum Ridcully."

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I know she's in there," said Verence, holding his crown in his hands in the famous Ai-Senor-Mexican-Bandits-Have-Raided-Our-Village position.

"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?"

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.

"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.

"Stand before your god, bow before your king, and kneel before your man. Recipe for a happy life, that is."

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. [Footnote: Carrots so you can see in the dark, she'd explain, and oysters so's you've got something to look at.]

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 was a popular visitor to many courts and palaces, for some strange reason generally while the local lord was away.

[Nanny Ogg] was an incredibly comfortable person to be around, partially because she had a mind so broad it could accomodate three football fields and a bowling alley.

"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!"

The Librarian, an ape of simple but firmly held tastes, considered an episode with custard pies, buckets of whitewash, and especially that bit when someone takes someone else's hat off, fills it with something oozy, and replaces it on the deadpan head while the orchestra plays "WHAH... Whah... whah... whaaaa..." to be an absolutely essential part of any theatrical performance. Since a roasted peanut is a dangerous and painful item when hurled with pinpoint accuracy, directors in Ankh-Morpork had long ago taken the hint.

The dress-maker had done cunning things with the material, so that it went in where Magrat went straight up and down and billowed out where Magrat didn't.

News went around Lancre faster than turpentine through a sick donkey.

"This is damn good wine," [Nanny Ogg] said, picking up another bottle. "What did you say it's called? ... Chateau Maison? Chat-eau ... that's foreign for cat's water, you know, but it's only their way, I know it ain't real cat's water. Real cat's water is sharper."

Show Nanny Ogg a good and she went at it with knife, fork and rammer. Watching her eat a lobster was a particular experience he would not forget in a hurry. They'd be picking bits of claw out of the woodwork for weeks.

If you climbed cliffs and braved rivers and ski'd down mountains to bring a box of chocolates to Gytha Ogg, she'd have the nougat centers out of the bottom layer even before you got your crampons off.

And then there had been the gypsy violinist. At first Nanny had complained about people playin' the fiddle while she was trying to concentrate on her eatin', but between courses she'd snatched it off the man, thrown the bow into a bowl of camellias, retuned the instrument to something approaching a banjo, and had given Casanunda three rous-ing verses of what, him being foreign, she chose to call II Porcupino Nil Sodomy Est.

[Magrat] 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-natured. And what happened? People treated her as if she was small and polite and good-natured.

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.

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.

[Queen Ynci] 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.

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.

"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.

"...I've been paying attention while you were dodging the traffic in Memory Lane."

Ridcully: "Running away isn't useful."
Granny Weatherwax: "It's going to be a lot more useful than staying here."
Ridcully: "I'd never forgive myself if I went."
Granny Weatherwax: "And I'd never forgive you if you stayed, and I'm a lot more unforgiving than you are."

"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.

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.

[The elves] didn't say much. They just laughed a lot. They were a merry folk, especially when they were twisting your arm to see how far it could go.

Mum was right -- Magrat always was the nice soft one...

...who'd just fired a crossbow through a keyhole.

Greebo had spent an irritating two minutes in that box. Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.

Shawn suddenly felt frightened. He'd been scared before, but it had been immediate and physical. But Magrat, like this, frightened him more than the elves. It was like being charged by a sheep.

"That's my best bird," he said proudly. "I've nearly got her trained. She's very good. I'm training her. She's very intelligent. She knows eleven words of command."

The elf nodded solemnly. Then it slipped the hood off the bird's head, and nodded toward Hodgesaargh.

"Kill," it commanded.

Lady Jane's eyes glittered in the torchlight. Then she leapt, and hit the elf full in the throat with two sets of talons and a beak.

"She does that with me, too," said Hodgesaargh.

Shawn had never been privy to what queens wore under their clothes, but even starting with certain observations about Millie Chillum and working his way up, he'd never consider metal underwear.

There was a helmet in it. It had wings on, and to Shawn's mind was quite impractical. [Footnote: He knew this because the previous month's issue of Popular Armor had run a feature entitled "We Test The Top Twenty Sub-$50 Helmets." It had also run a second feature called "Battleaxes: We Put The Ten Best Through Their Paces" and had advertised for half a dozen new testers.]

It's not enough to be able to pick up a sword. You have to know which end to poke into the enemy.

Magrat: "I remember a folksong about a situation just like this. This girl had her fiance stolen by the Queen of Elves and she didn't hang around whining, she jolly well got on her horse and went and rescued him. Well, I'm going to do that too."
Jason: "You're going to sing?"

I thought I'd show everyone what I'm made of. And now they'll probably find out: I'm made of lots of tubes and greeny purple wobbly bits.

Queen Ynci had probably never sewn a tapestry in her life and undoubtedly had a temper shorter than a wet cowpat.

The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.

It was better to think that something of [Queen Ynci] had rubbed off on the helmet and was being transmitted to Magrat like some kind of royal scalp disease.

Thatcher: "We are between a rock and a hard place."
Carter: "No we ain't. I been there. That's that gorge just above Bad Ass. We ain't there! I wish we was there!"

Carter, tears of terror mingling with make-up and the rain, squeezed the accordion. There was the long-drawn-out chord that by law must precede all folk music to give bystanders time to get away.

"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!"

Dwarfs are generally scared of heights, since they don't often have the opportunity to get used to them.

Casanunda: "I was looking forward to a convivial evening, just me and you."
Nanny Ogg: "It is just me and you."
Casanunda: "Yes, but I hadn't assumed there'd be a broomstick involved."

"Magrat says a broomstick is one of them sexual metaphor things." [Footnote: Although this is a phallusy.]

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?"

"Is that all? It's just an old burial mound."

"Three old burial mounds," said Nanny.

Casanunda took in the overgrown landscape.

"Yes, I see them," he said. "Two round ones and a long one. Well?"

"The first time I saw 'em from the air," said Nanny, "I nearly fell off the bloody broomstick for laughin'."

"I thought the people who built burial mounds and earthworks and things were serious druids and people like that, not... not people who drew on privy walls with 200,000 tons of earth, in a manner of speaking."

"Tell you what... when we get back home, I'll bake you some proper dwarf bread, how about that?"

Casanunda's face split into a disbelieving grin.

"Real dwarf bread?"

"Yes. I reckon I've still got the recipe, and anyway it's been weeks since I emptied out the cat box."

There are many recipies for the flat round loaves of Lancre dwarf bread, but the common aim of all of them is to make a field ration that is long-lasting, easily packed and can disembowel the enemy if skimmed through the air hard enough. Edibility is a kind of optional extra.

The words rose unbidden into his head, from somewhere in the back pocket of his genes.

"You know, Mrs. Ogg, you have a way of showing respect to your god that would make the average atheist green with envy," said the dark figure.

"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."

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.

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.

No-one who sounded like that could be much of a threat, except to themselves.

Magrat had met wizards before. Occassionally one visited Lancre, although they didn't stay very long. There was something about the presence of Granny Weatherwax that made them move on.

Apes never admired the sleek of the fur and the burn of the eye, because they were too well aware of the teeth of the mouth.

"But look," said Ponder, "the graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely."

"Oook."

"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.

"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."

"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."

"Well," [Nanny Ogg] 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."

"They was just saying, our Shawn, how they was swayed by your speech. Really pussiked up. ... 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."

The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo, my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And the correct answer is: Hey, whatever I select.

[Magrat] knew there was such a thing as heroic odds. Songs and ballads and stories and poems well full of stories about one person single-handedly taking on a vast number of enemies.

Only now it was 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.

"I love the way humans think. They think like songs."

"What don't die can't live. What don't live can't change. What don't change can't learn."

[Ponder] turned to the others with the agonized expression of a man who has the whole great whirring machinery of the Universe to dismantle and only a bent paper-clip to do it with.

Everyone in Lancre knew about Esme Weatherwax's mysterious box. It was variously rumored 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.

Magrat: "Yes, but she pushed me on one side and shut me up in the castle and I got so wound up--"
Nanny Ogg: "You were so angry that you actually stood up to the Queen. You actually laid hands on her. Well done. The old Magrat wouldn't have done that, would she?"

"You never know until you look," said Nanny Ogg, expounding her own Uncertainty Principle.

"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."

"A wizard's only a priest without a god and a damp handshake."

"It's not what you've got that matters, it's how you've got it."

"Go ahead," said the Queen of Lancre softly, "bake my quiche."

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.

"This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here."

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, especially simian ones. They are not all that subtle.

Nanny Ogg: "I gave her a few tips. Always wear something in bed. Keeps a man interested."
Granny Weatherwax: "You always wore your hat."
Nanny Ogg: "Right."

"When I married Mr. Ogg, we had three dozen oysters at our wedding feast. Mind you, they didn't all work."

Granny Weatherwax: "What was that dance your Jason and his men did when they'd got drunk?"
Nanny Ogg: "It's the Lancre Stick and Bucket Dance, Esme."
Granny Weatherwax: "It's legal, is it?"
Nanny Ogg: "Technically they shouldn't do it when there's women present. Otherwise it's sexual morrisment."

"And I thought Magrat was very surprised when you recited that poem at the reception."

"Poem?"

"The one where you did the gestures."

"Oh, that poem."

"I saw Verence making notes on his napkin."

"You know that ole painting of Queen Ynci? You know, the one with the iron bodice? Her with all the spikes and knives on her chariot? Well, [Magrat] said she was sure the... the spirit of Ynci was helping her. She said she wore the armor and she did things she'd never dare do."

"My word," said Granny, noncommittally.

"Funny ole world," agreed Nanny.

They walked in silence for a while.

"So you didn't tell her that Queen Ynci never existed, then?"

"No point."

"No-one's ever put shoes on a unicorn," said Jason.

"Think of this," said Granny Weatherwax, "as your big moment."

"The price for being able to shoe anything, anything that anyone brings you... is having to shoe anything anyone brings you. The price for being the best is always... having to be the best. And you pays it, same as me."

"It's an animal. Animals can't murder. Only us superior races can murder. That's one of the things that sets us apart from animals."

"I thought there was some things everyone knew about trapping unicorns," said Nanny archly. "Who could trap 'em, is what I am delicately hintin' at. She always could run faster'n you, could Esme. She could outdistance any man."

Ridcully stood there with his mouth open.

"Now, me," said Nanny, "I'd always trip over first ole tree root I came to. Took me ages to find one, sometimes."

"Act your age, Gytha."

"Act? Don't have to act, can do it automatic," said Nanny. "Acting half my age ... now that's the difficult trick."

Granny Weatherwax: "It's enough to know that everything happens somewhere, isn't it?"
Ridcully: "Is that the best you can tell me?"
Granny Weatherwax: "It's the best there is. Or the next best thing."