Fantasy Valentine's Day Countdown, Day 1: Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters

It's February and that means it's time for another seasonal bit of fun. This time, we're looking at the great love stories, ranging from regional folklore to war-winning. For day 1, I've decided we need to turn to British satirist and wonderful human analyst, Sir Terry Pratchett, and the absurd love story of two of his most memorable characters.

The old peel-the-apple trick

If you haven't read Pratchett's books, one thing you must understand is that he takes tried-and-true tropes, subverts the expectations, and writes them in a way that replaces the familiar with what he's come up with. In Witches Abroad, he took three witches on an extraordinary quest to fix a world where fairy tales always had to come true. In Wyrd Sisters, we see those same witches take on Shakespeare. Sort of. The book combines Macbeth, Hamlet, a bit of King Lear, and quite a lot of biting commentary on show biz.

It also has one of my favorite fictional love stories. Magrat (so named by an inept speller of a mother who liked the name Margaret and wrote it down) strikes up an allyship with the court jester to a corrupt and usurping king. Because this is so Shakespearean, the jester is both consoler and confidant to the man who killed the old king and is now tormented by his sins. Magrat is one of the witches who make sure the old king's son could grow up without being inconveniently murdered.

There's a great mix of mystical and mundane. Magrat uses the natural magic of peeling an apple to see the name of her true love, but knows that people who haven't had success "hadn't used an unripe Sunset Wonder picked three minutes before noon on the first frosty day in the autumn and peeled left-handedly using a silver knife with a blade less than half an inch wide." On the other hand, when her jester friend refuses to put justice ahead of blidn obedience, she's going to be wasing her hair when he asks to see her.

Because this is a Shakespearean satire, there is a twist ending only made possible by the two lovers truly knowing and respecting each other, but I won't dish on how all of that happens. But it is the one pair of characters I didn't mean to 'ship