“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 moor land 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 moor land 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.
ce was looking at her with some concern.
“Is it the witching?” he said. “You don't have to give that up entirely, of course. 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. The witching's a problem, is it?”
“No,” Magrat mumbled, “it's not that. . . um . . . did you mention a crown?”
“You've got to have a crown,” said Verence. “Queens do. I looked it up.”
Her brain cut in again. Queen Magrat, it suggested. It held up the mirror of the imagination . . .
“You're not upset, are you?” said Verence.
“What? Oh. No. Me? No.”
“Good. That's all sorted out, then. I think that just about covers everything, don't you?”
“Um-”
Verence rubbed his hands together.
“We're doing some marvellous things with legumes,” he said, as if he hadn't just completely rearranged Magrat's life without consulting her. “Beans, peas . . . you know. Nitrogen fixers. And marl and lime, of course. Scientific husbandry. Come and look at this.”
He bounced away enthusiastically.
“You know,” he said, “we could really make this kingdom work.”
Magrat trailed after him.
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 feature.
On the other hand Magrat was, at the core, far more practical than most people believed who saw no further than her vague smile and collection of more than three hundred pieces of occult jewellery, none of which worked.
So this was how you got married to a king. It all got arranged for you. There were no white horses. The past flipped straight into the future, carrying you with it.
Perhaps that was normal. Kings were busy people. Magrat's experience of marrying them was limited.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“The old rose garden.”
Ah . . . well, this was more like it.
Except that there weren't any roses. The walled garden had been stripped of its walks and arbors and was now waist high in green stalks with white flowers. Bees were furiously at work in the blossoms.
“Beans?” said Magrat.