The Shepherd's Crown (32 page)

The younger witches were in and out of the mêlée, diving from
the skies on their broomsticks, throwing spells at every elf they saw: fire burning them where they stood, wind blowing dust into the horses’ faces, madness into their minds, such that the horses reared, throwing their elvish riders to the ground. Then there was the crunching as Nanny Ogg came to the fore with her big, big boots. The ones with nails everywhere.

Petulia was face to face with an
elf – and a different kind of battle was going on, as the elf threw its glamour towards her, sparkling shards of glamour shining in the air between them, and Petulia fought back with her soft voice and strong will, her words hypnotic, irresistible, boring the elf as she bored her beloved pigs, lulling it until it dropped dramatically at her feet.

‘Hah! Easier than pigs!’ was Petulia’s response.
‘Less intelligent.’ And she turned to the next opponent . . .

And in a lull, there was Hodgesaargh, with his favourite gyrfalcon on his wrist – the Lady Elizabeth, a descendant of the famous Lady Jane. He slipped the hood off, and the bird joyfully hurled herself into the fray, hitting the nearest elf between the eyes with her sharp talons. Then her beak got to work . . .

When it came to it,
the battle for Lancre was over quite swiftly. Queen Magrat had all the surviving elves brought before her. ‘Even the goblins are smarter than you – they work
with
us these days,’ she told them, standing tall and strong in her spiked armour, the wings on her helmet silvered in the moonlight. ‘We have had enough of this. You could have had it all. Now, go away to your forlorn spaces. Come back as
good neighbours – or not at all.’

The elves cringed. But Lord Lankin, his warrior garb now only rags and his body bloodied by the terrible swarf, hissed in defiance at them as he crawled away. ‘You may have won this battle,’ he snarled, ‘but not the war. For our Lord Peaseblossom will yet make this world bow down to us.’

And then they were gone.

Nanny Ogg said seriously, ‘It seems to me, girls,
that it goes like this. We fight the elves at every turn, and they is always comin’ back. Perhaps it might be a good thing? To keep us on our toes, to stop us from gettin’ lazy. To put us on the anvil, so that we remembers how to fight. And at the end of time, living
is
about fightin’ against everything.’

She laughed, however, when she heard the old gentlemen coming up the hill, singing, ‘There
was a young lady from Quirm, whose thighs were exceedingly firm . . .’ And the rest of the song helpfully disappeared as the captain remembered just in time how that verse ended.

Captain Makepeace leaned over to Nanny Ogg and said, ‘They came through the Dancers, right? Let’s put a ring of swarf all around the stones. That would be the end of their fun. They would be locked out for ever.’

‘Well,
I reckons it would be a good start,’ said Nanny.

But Lord Lankin had one thing right. The elves might have lost the battle in Lancre, but the war was not yet over. For, many miles rimwards, Lord Peaseblossom had indeed ridden through the stone circle on the Chalk, with a band of elite warriors at his back.

The Feegle mound was one big scuttle as the Nac Mac Feegles turned out of every nook and
cranny to fight. Everywhere was heat and noise. You could call it something like an overgrown termite mound – not in front of the Feegles, unless you liked picking your teeth up from the ground – but there was the same bustling. It could even be said that the vanguard was steaming along, but these being Feegles, there were squabbles in the ranks which, as everyone knew, was just the way of the
clan.

When Tiffany arrived at the mound with Nightshade, the throng spread out in the direction of the stones.

The gateway had fallen to the elves.

Who were now heading towards them, a glorious band of lords and ladies, resplendent in the moonlight. The air was thick with their glamour.

Miss Tick was waiting. A Miss Tick with a board propped up on a few sticks she had handily knotted together
to create a trestle. And on the board was written PLN. With a teacher’s determination not to let anything interrupt her in the midst of any kind of lesson, her insistent voice was demanding the younger Feegles’ attention as she tied a strange net, a tangle of intricate, carefully woven knots and loops, to her broomstick.

‘Remember, I want you to keep it
in one piece
,’ she was saying sternly.

Then, within minutes, it was a mêlée. In fact, a mêlée of mêlées. There was a sting in the air and Tiffany recognized the surge of static electricity. How could the elves be so stupid, she thought, as to attack in the midst of a storm? Did they not remember how she had used thunder and lightning to defeat them before? The sky was crackling. The hairs on her head tingled. She could see signs of a
coming downpour happening everywhere, could recognize the build-up to an enormous storm.

As Awf’ly Wee Billy Bigchin’s mousepipes screeched out a battle hymn, pitched perfectly to assault the elven ears, there was a distant scream from a train at Twoshirts. A roar of iron and steel, a bellow that shouted: This is no world for elves!

Feegles and elves were fighting now, with no quarter given
on either side. Tiffany could see that the Feegles were dealing with things in their own special way – which included getting into the elves’ clothing and fighting them from within. If there was something that an elf really hated, it was to have their clothing torn, and a black eye didn’t do much for the image either. You can’t be suave with a black eye, Tiffany thought.

She suddenly burst out
laughing. It had been a long time since she had set eyes on Horace the Cheese,
^fn2
but now she saw him rolling heavily over every fallen elf, and when they were flattened the younger Feegles got to work as well, mostly with their heavy boots, but also with their double-the-fun clubs that curled in the air, clonking elves on the head and then coming joyfully back for another go. And yes, there was
Maggie in their midst – a Feegle daughter fighting alongside her brothers! And indeed fighting even more furiously than her brothers. Tiffany thought, She’s like a small Ynci. The Feegle maid had been waiting for something like this to prove herself, so woe betide any elf who got in her way. It was one small step for a Feegle lassie – but a giant step for all Feegle womenfolk!

Miss Tick was flying
overhead now, the strange rope-net hanging beneath her broomstick filled with young Feegles. As she pulled at one knot after another, the Wee Free Men were tumbling out to fall smack on the heads of the elves below.
Crash! Whack! Crump!
Followed by
Aargh!
from the elves.

And the witch had small bottles with her too – concoctions mixed in her caravan that she was now gleefully emptying over the
heads of the elves’ horses as she swooped above them. There was a moment’s pause as each horse absorbed the mixture, then its eyes crossed, followed rapidly by its hooves, and it toppled to the ground, losing its footing, hurling its rider onto the earth to be quickly covered by Feegles.

Letitia had arrived now, summoned by Hamish, and was tumbling from her horse, determination in her face, borrowed
chainmail over her dress. She somehow
flowed
through the elves – there was a certain magic to it as if she were some goddess of water, streaming everywhere: no thought to it, but no stopping it either. Suddenly the elvish horses still standing were bogged down in a quagmire, and the Feegles were there on hand to keep them in the mire.

Nevertheless, it looked as if the Feegles, Miss Tick and Letitia
were really not getting the better of the elves. Despite the Wee Free Men’s pouring into elvish underwear and tearing it up, Tiffany realized that the Nac Mac Feegles were actually in danger of losing.

Nightshade pointed out Peaseblossom sitting on a black charger, and Tiffany flew down to confront the leader of the elves. His minions scattered as she arrived – they had seen the expression on
Tiffany’s face.

Peaseblossom was laughing. ‘Ah, the little country girl. How pleased I am to see you!’

She felt the tug of his glamour but rage was a useful tool, and she hated that grinning face. It was so self-centred. It loved itself beyond any other thing.

‘Peaseblossom is a very stupid name for an elf of your size,’ she said rather childishly.

And then, suddenly, the elf had sprung from
his horse to stand before her, a sabre in his hands, and his laughter was gone, only evil in his eyes.

A voice said, ‘Don’t touch her, Peaseblossom.’

And Nightshade was stepping forward, her glamour fully restored and shining gloriously, her hair streaked silver with the moonlight, her new wings resplendent. She held herself like a queen again, her gaze slowly moving over the warriors behind
her treacherous lord, and such was the power of her presence that even the Feegles paused in the frozen silence.

‘Why do you follow this . . . perfidious elf?’ the Queen demanded of the elves. ‘
I
am your rightful queen, and I say that you do not have to do this. There are . . . other ways.’ She spun on the spot, her velvet robes spiralling around her slim body. ‘I have learned this. And this
girl’ – she pointed at Tiffany – ‘is my
friend
.’

Tiffany couldn’t stop what happened next.

‘Friend?’ Peaseblossom spat. ‘There are no
friends
for elves.’

He raised his arm and his sabre tore through Nightshade with a terrible swishing sound. The elf Queen fell, crumpling to the ground at Tiffany’s feet, where she writhed for a moment that seemed to last a lifetime, myriad faces and shapes appearing
and disappearing, flickering in and out of substance, before finally lying still, a forlorn heap. Tiffany reeled back in shock.
Peaseblossom had killed the Queen of the Fairies!

Worse, he had killed her
friend
.

Peaseblossom, revelling, turned to Tiffany, his face sharp and merciless. ‘You have no friend now!’

Suddenly the air was full of ice. ‘You killed one of your own to get to me, you cursed
elf,’ Tiffany said, her voice cold, red-hot anger boiling inside her. ‘She wanted to explore a new way, an alliance of humans and elves, and now you have killed her.’

‘You stupid little girl!’ Peaseblossom taunted. ‘You think you can stand against me? What a fool you are! We elves knew well of the witch who once walked the edges of this world . . . but you, you are just a
child
, filled with pride
because you were once lucky against a failing queen’ – he glanced contemptuously down at the little heap that had once been the Queen of Fairyland – ‘and now I will see you dead, alongside your
friend
.’ He spat out the last word, and his glamour snaked towards her, creeping into her head, into her thoughts.

Tiffany recoiled, a memory of Nanny Ogg’s voice suddenly saying to her:
Granny Weatherwax said to me as you is the one who’s to deal with the future. An’ bein’ young means you’ve got a lot of future
. Well, it looked like Granny Weatherwax might have been wrong. She
didn’t
have much future to come.

She had failed everyone.

She had tried to be the witch for two steadings. And let everyone down . . .

She had gone to see the King of the Elves. He had turned her away . . .

She had made
a friend of Nightshade. Now the elf Queen was dead . . .

She was facing a powerful elf lord who would kill her . . .

She deserved to die . . .

She was alone . . .

Then it came to her. She did
not
deserve to die. And she was
not
alone. She never would be. Not while her land was beneath her boots.
Her
land. The land of the Achings.

She was Tiffany Aching. Not Granny Weatherwax, but a witch
in her own right. A witch who knew exactly who she was and how she wanted to do things. Her way. And she had not failed, because she had barely begun . . .

She stood tall. Frosty. Furious. ‘You called me a country girl,’ she said, ‘and I will see to it that the
country
will see you dead.’

The land was speaking to her now, filling her up, throwing the glamour of the elf lord aside as though it
were nothing, and the air crackled like lightning. Yes, she thought. Thunder and Lightning. The two dogs were long gone, buried in the hills alongside Granny Aching, but their strength was with her.

And she was standing firm, her feet on the turf, the murmur of the ancient ocean below swelling through her soles. Earth. Water.

She raised her arms. ‘Thunder and Lightning, I command you.’ Fire
and Air. As she drew on the power of the two sheepdogs, there in the air was a flash of lightning, a rumble of thunder. The shepherd’s crown glowed golden on her breast – at the heart of it all, the soul and centre of her being – the golden light rising from the apex to surround her, protect her, add its energy to her own.

And the sky broke in half.

Never had there been such a storm. It was
full of vengeance and the elves were running, or rather trying to run because the Feegles were in their way and the Wee Free Men had no liking for the elves. In the carnage and the shouting, it seemed to Tiffany that she wasn’t in charge any more. She was just a conduit for the wrath of the Chalk.

The land under her feet was trembling, shaking like a wounded animal on a leash, yearning to be
free. And the shepherd’s crown was shining like a living thing in front of her.

A shepherd’s crown, not a royal one.

A crown for someone who knew where she had come from.

A crown for the lone light zigzagging through the night sky, hunting for a single lost lamb.

A crown for the shepherd who was there to herd away the predators.

A crown for the shepherd who could work with the best sheepdogs
any shepherd could possibly have.

A
shepherd’s
crown.

And she heard again that voice:
Tiffany Aching is the first among shepherds, for she puts others before herself . . .