The Shepherd's Crown recap

Granny Weatherwax, the senior witch of the Ramtops, sets her house in order, dies at a time of her own choosing, and leaves her cottage and her steading to Tiffany Aching. Tiffany, already stretched thin as the witch of the Chalk, tries to hold both countries at once and wears herself out doing it, while the witches argue about who should really have inherited. With Granny gone, the barrier that kept the elves out of the human world is weak, and Lord Peaseblossom deposes the elf Queen Nightshade and prepares an invasion. Nightshade, thrown out into a world full of iron, is taken in by the witches and slowly learns what it is like to be the one who is helpless. Meanwhile Geoffrey Swivel, a runaway young man who wants to be a witch, arrives in Lancre and turns out to have a real gift for calming trouble. The elves raid, then attack the Chalk outright. Tiffany gathers witches, Feegles, goblins, villagers, and the land itself, Nightshade dies turning against her own kind, and Tiffany destroys Peaseblossom and closes the way. Geoffrey takes Granny's steading, and Tiffany becomes wholly and only the Chalk's witch.

Previously, in earlier books: Tiffany Aching, granddaughter of a much-loved Chalk shepherd, discovered a witch's talent as a child and went into the Queen of the Fairies' country of dreams to bring her stolen brother home, helped by the Nac Mac Feegle, the tiny blue fighting men who call her their hag. Trained in the mountains, she survived possession by an ancient mindless hiver, and later stepped into an old midwinter dance and had to end the elemental spirit of winter, and the endless winter he caused, herself. At sixteen she was hunted across her own country by the Cunning Man, the eyeless remnant of a long-dead witch-hunter who turned the Chalk against her, and destroyed him by running through fire as a hare. She has been the Chalk's acknowledged witch ever since, with land and a cottage of her own. Roland, her childhood friend, is now the Baron and married to Letitia; her young man Preston is away in Ankh-Morpork training as a doctor; and the world beyond the Chalk is filling up with railways, machinery, and iron. In Lancre, Granny Weatherwax remains the witch the other witches defer to.

Tiffany's days on the Chalk are the ordinary, endless business of a working witch: sick rooms, births, deaths, feuds, old people nobody else will visit, and a great deal of flying between one emergency and the next on no sleep. The Chalk itself is changing, with the wider world's new machinery and iron reaching even the downs, and with goblins, now recognized as people, taking cheerfully to metalwork and machines. In Lancre, Granny Weatherwax is going about her own rounds and putting her cottage and her steading into a state of unusual order, tidying, mending, settling accounts, and making arrangements with a deliberateness that the bees and the cat notice before anyone else does. Elsewhere, in a place that is not quite anywhere, something old and beautiful and cruel has begun to test the walls of the world, and to notice that the watch on them is not what it was.

Granny Weatherwax dies. She has arranged everything down to the last detail, including who is to be told and in what order, and she leaves her cottage and her whole Lancre steading to Tiffany Aching. The witches gather from across the mountains for a funeral that is also, unmistakably, the end of an era, and the question of who is now the senior witch is left conspicuously unanswered, with Nanny Ogg refusing the role and Mrs Earwig very willing to discuss her own claim. Tiffany, who did not ask for any of it, tries to do both jobs at once, flying between Lancre and the Chalk day after day and steadily wearing herself out, and finds that the people of Lancre are not sure they want a girl from the lowlands as their witch. And with Granny gone, the thing she had been quietly standing in the way of for years discovers that the way is open.

In the elves' country, Lord Peaseblossom moves against the Queen. Nightshade has ruled by glamour and terror for centuries, but the human world has been filling up with iron, engines, and people who no longer believe in her, and her court decides that she has grown weak. She is deposed and thrown out into a world that burns her, and the witches, who have every reason to leave her where she fell, take her in instead. Meanwhile Geoffrey Swivel arrives in Lancre: the unwanted third son of a bullying lord, run away from home, entirely serious about becoming a witch, and accompanied by a goat with opinions. Nanny Ogg takes him on. He has no obvious magic, but he can calm an argument, an animal, or a frightened person simply by being present, which turns out to be a rarer talent than anyone expects.

Nightshade, kept alive and being taught the humiliating human skills of being helpless, gradually comes to understand what her own kind have always done to people, which is not a lesson elves are built for. Geoffrey settles into Lancre and quietly changes it, gathering the old men who have been left with nothing to do into a shed of their own where they can work, argue, and be useful again. Tiffany is stretched past what one witch can manage, resented in Lancre for holding Granny's cottage and missed on the Chalk when she is away, and the other witches are divided over her. And the raids begin: elves slipping through into the human world in ones and twos, stealing, tormenting, killing livestock, and testing what the people of the Chalk and the mountains will do about it. Peaseblossom is measuring the ground for something much larger.

The raids turn into a campaign. The elves work through the old mound on the Chalk, and this time they do not go away when they are chased off; people are hurt, a child is taken, and the countryside learns what it had forgotten about what elves actually are. Tiffany calls in everyone she can: the Nac Mac Feegle, who have been waiting their whole lives for exactly this; the witches of the mountains, including the ones who have been arguing about her; the goblins, whose ironwork is a weapon in itself; and the shepherds, blacksmiths, and villagers of the Chalk. Nightshade, now something no elf has been before, tells them what her people fear and how their glamour works, and has to decide whether she is with the world that took her in or with the court that threw her out. Magrat Garlick, Queen of Lancre, takes her witchcraft and her iron back out of storage.

Peaseblossom brings his whole court through onto the Chalk, and the fighting is real, frightening, and costly. The elves' glamour turns people against each other and makes them see what is not there, and it has to be broken person by person; iron, cold and everywhere in the new world of tools and machines and rails, hurts the elves more than they had allowed for. Nightshade turns openly against her own kind and fights alongside the witches, and Peaseblossom kills her for it. The Feegles fight the way they have always wanted to. Geoffrey does what nobody else can and calms the terror the elves live on. Tiffany, standing on the ground she has known all her life and which knows her, works her way toward Peaseblossom himself, because this is not something she can hand to anyone else.

Tiffany faces Peaseblossom and destroys him, and with their leader gone the elves are broken and driven back through the mound, which is shut behind them; between the iron and the machinery of the new world and what has just happened to them, the elves will not be coming back easily. Nightshade is dead, having ended as something no elf had been before. Afterwards the arrangements settle themselves: Geoffrey takes on Granny Weatherwax's cottage and steading, which he is plainly right for, so Tiffany is released from trying to be the witch of two countries and can be entirely the witch of the Chalk; Nanny Ogg is left as the senior witch of the mountains, in her own quite different fashion. Preston comes home when the hospital lets him, and what is between them is understood rather than announced. At the last, Tiffany takes the shepherd's crown, the small fossil out of the chalk she has carried since the start, and puts it back into the ground on the downs where it belongs.

The elves invade the Chalk in force, and Tiffany meets them with everything she can gather: the witches, the Nac Mac Feegle, the goblins with their ironwork, the villagers and shepherds, Geoffrey's shed full of old men, Magrat in armour again, and the land itself, which knows her. Nightshade, who has learned in exile what it is to be on the receiving end of cruelty, turns against her own kind and is killed for it by Peaseblossom. Tiffany faces Peaseblossom herself and destroys him, and the elves are broken and driven back through the mound, with the way closed behind them and iron and machinery making the human world a place they can no longer easily enter. Afterwards the arrangements settle: Geoffrey takes over Granny Weatherwax's cottage and steading in Lancre and proves to be exactly the right person for it, so Tiffany is no longer trying to be the witch of two countries at once and can be wholly the witch of the Chalk. Nanny Ogg is left as the senior witch of the mountains, in her own quite different way. Preston comes home when he can, and Tiffany's future with him is understood without being settled. At the last, Tiffany takes the shepherd's crown, the small fossil out of the chalk that she has carried since the beginning, and puts it back into the ground on the downs where it belongs.