Wyrd Sisters (Discworld 6)

'Your shoulders are shaking!'

'Lost my shawl back there. I'm a bit chilly. Look, we're nearly there.'

Granny glared ahead, her mind a maze of suspicions. She was going to get to the bottom of this. When she had time.

The damp logs of Lancre's main link to the outside world drifted gently underneath them. From the chicken farm half a mile away came a chorus of strangled squawks and a thud.

'And that? What was that, then?' demanded Granny.

'Fowl pest. Careful, I'm bringing us down.'

'Are you laughing at me?'

'Just pleased for you, Esme. You'll go down in history for this, you know.'

They drifted between the timbers of the bridge. Granny Weatherwax alighted cautiously on the greasy planking and adjusted her dress.

'Yes. Well,' she added, nonchalantly.

'Better than Black Aliss, everyone'll say,' Nanny Ogg went on.

'Some people will say anything,' said Granny. She peered over the parapet at the foaming torrent far below, and then up at the distant outcrop on which stood Lancre Castle.

'Do you think they will?' she added, nonchalantly.

'Mark my words.'

'Hmm.'

'But you've got to complete the spell, mind.'

Granny Weatherwax nodded. She turned to face the dawn, raised her arms, and completed the spell.

It is almost impossible to convey the sudden passage of fifteen years and two months in words.

It's a lot easier in pictures, when you just use a calendar with lots of pages blowing off, or a clock with hands moving faster and faster until they blur, or trees bursting into blossom and fruiting in a matter of seconds . . .

Well, you know. Or the sun becomes a fiery streak across the sky, and days and nights flicker past jerkily like a bad zoetrope, and the fashions visible in the clothes shop across the road whip on and off faster than a lunchtime stripper with five pubs to do.

There are any amount of ways, but they won't be required because, in fact, none of this happened.

The sun did jerk sideways a bit, and it seemed that the trees on the rimward side of the gorge were rather taller, and Nanny couldn't shake off the sensation that someone had just sat down heavily on her, squashed her flat, and then opened her out again.

This was because the kingdom did not, in so many words, move through time in the normal flickering sky, high-speed photography sense of the word. It moved around it, which is much cleaner, considerably easier to achieve, and saves all that travelling around trying to find a laboratory opposite a dress shop that will keep the same dummy in the window for sixty years, which has traditionally been the most time-consuming and expensive bit of the whole business.

The kiss lasted more than fifteen years.

Not even frogs can manage that.

The Fool drew back, his eyes glazed, his expression one of puzzlement.

'Did you feel the world move?' he said.

Magrat peered over his shoulder at the forest.

'I think she's done it,' she said.

'Done what?'