Stardust (15 page)

The innkeeper looked to his wife, who said, “Our beds are good, and I shall have the maid make up a fire in the bedroom for you and your companion.”

Primus removed his dripping black robe and hung it by the fire, beside the star’s still-damp blue dress. Then he turned and saw the young lady sitting at the table. “Another guest?” he said. “Well-met, milady, in this noxious weather.” At that, there was a loud clattering from the stable next door. “Something must have disturbed the horses,” said Primus, concerned.

“Perhaps the thunder,” said the innkeeper’s wife.

“Aye, perhaps,” said Primus. Something else was occupying his attention. He walked over to the star and stared into her eyes for several heartbeats. “You . . .” he hesitated. Then, with certainty, “You have my father’s stone. You have the Power of Stormhold.”

The girl glared up at him with eyes the blue of sky. “Well, then,” she said. “Ask me for it, and I can have done with the stupid thing.”

The innkeeper’s wife hurried over and stood at the head of the table. “I’ll not have you bothering the other guests now, my dearie-ducks,” she told him, sternly.

Primus’s eyes fell upon the knives upon the wood of the tabletop. He recognized them: there were tattered scrolls in the vaults of Stormhold in which those knives were pictured, and their names were given. They were old things, from the First Age of the world.

The front door of the inn banged open.

“Primus!” called Tristran, running in. “They have tried to poison me!”

The Lord Primus reached for his short-sword, but even as he went for it the witch-queen took the longest of the knives and drew the blade of it, in one smooth, practical movement, across his throat . . .

For Tristran, it all happened too fast to follow. He entered, saw the star and Lord Primus, and the innkeeper and his strange family, and then the blood was spurting in a crimson fountain in the firelight.

“Get him!” called the woman in the scarlet dress. “Get the brat!”

Billy and the maid ran toward Tristran; and it was then that the unicorn entered the inn.

Tristran threw himself out of the way. The unicorn reared up on its hind legs, and a blow from one of its sharp hooves sent the pot-maid flying.

Billy lowered his head and ran, headlong, at the unicorn, as if he were about to butt it with his forehead. The unicorn lowered its head also, and Billy the Innkeeper met his unfortunate end.

“
Stupid!
” screamed the innkeeper’s wife, furiously, and she advanced upon the unicorn, a knife in each hand, blood staining her right hand and forearm the same color as her dress.

Tristran had thrown himself onto his hands and knees and had crawled toward the fireplace. In his left hand he had hold of the lump of wax, all that remained of the candle that had brought him here. He had been squeezing it in his hand until it was soft and malleable.

“This had better ought to work,” said Tristran to himself. He hoped that the tree had known what she was talking about.

Behind him, the unicorn screamed in pain.

Tristran ripped a lace from his jerkin and closed the wax around it.

“What is happening?” asked the star, who had crawled toward Tristran on her hands and knees.

“I don’t really know,” he admitted.

The witch-woman howled, then; the unicorn had speared her with its horn, through the shoulder. It lifted her off the ground, triumphantly, preparing to hurl her to the ground and then to dash her to death beneath its sharp hooves, when, impaled as she was, the witch-woman swung around and thrust the point of the longer of the rock-glass knives into the unicorn’s eye and far into its skull.

The beast dropped to the wooden floor of the inn, blood dripping from its side and from its eye and from its open mouth. First it fell to its knees, and then it collapsed, utterly, as the life fled. Its tongue was piebald, and it protruded most pathetically from the unicorn’s dead mouth.

The witch-queen pulled her body from the horn, and, one hand gripping her wounded shoulder, the other holding her cleaver, she staggered to her feet.

Her eyes scanned the room, alighting on Tristran and the star huddled by the fire. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, she lurched toward them, a cleaver in her hand and a smile upon her face.

“The burning golden heart of a star at peace is so much finer than the flickering heart of a little frightened star,” she told them, her voice oddly calm and detached, coming, as it was, from that blood-bespattered face. “But even the heart of a star who is afraid and scared is better by far than no heart at all.”

Tristran took the star’s hand in his right hand. “Stand up,” he told her.

“I cannot,” she said, simply.

“Stand, or we die now,” he told her, getting to his feet. The star nodded, and, awkwardly, resting her weight on him, she began to try to pull herself to her feet.

“
Stand, or you die now?
” echoed the witch-queen. “Oh, you die now, children, standing or sitting. It is all the same to me.” She took another step toward them.

“Now,” said Tristran, one hand gripping the star’s arm, the other holding his makeshift candle, “now,
walk!
”

And he thrust his left hand into the fire.

There was pain, and burning, such that he could have screamed, and the witch-queen stared at him as if he were madness personified.

Then his improvised wick caught and burned with a steady blue flame, and the world began to shimmer around them. “Please walk,” he begged the star. “Don’t let go of me.”

And she took an awkward step.

They left the inn behind them, the howls of the witch-queen ringing in their ears.

They were underground, and the candlelight flickered from the wet cave walls; and with their next halting step they were in a desert of white sand, in the moonlight; and with their third step they were high above the earth, looking down on the hills and trees and rivers far below them.

And it was then that the last of the wax ran molten over Tristran’s hand, and the burning became impossible for him to bear, and the last of the flame burned out forever.

Which Treats of Castles in the Air, and Other Matters

I
t was dawn in the mountains. The storms of the last few days had passed on and the air was clean and cold.

Lord Septimus of Stormhold, tall and crowlike, walked up the mountain pass, looking about him as he walked as if he were seeking something he had lost. He was leading a brown mountain pony, shaggy and small.Where the pass grew wider he stopped, as if he had found what he was looking for beside the trail. It was a small, battered chariot, little more than a goat-cart, which had been tipped onto its side. Nearby it lay two bodies. The first was that of a white billy goat, its head stained red with blood. Septimus prodded the dead goat experimentally with his foot, moving its head; it had received a deep and fatal wound to its forehead, equidistant between its horns. Next to the goat was the body of a young man, his face as dull in death as it must have been in life.There were no wounds to show how he had died, nothing but a leaden bruise upon his temple.

Several yards away from these bodies, half-hidden beside a rock, Septimus came upon the corpse of a man in his middle years, facedown, dressed in dark clothes. The man’s flesh was pale, and his blood had pooled upon the rocky floor below him. Septimus crouched down beside the body and, gingerly, lifted its head by the hair; its throat had been cut, expertly, slit from one ear to the other. Septimus stared at the corpse in puzzlement. He
knew
it, yet . . .

And then, in a dry, hacking cough of a noise, he began to laugh. “Your beard,” he told the corpse aloud. “You cut your beard. As if I would not have known you with your beard gone, Primus.”

Primus, who stood, grey and ghostly, beside his other brothers, said, “You would have known me, Septimus. But it might have bought me a few moments, wherein I might have seen you before you knew me,” and his dead voice was nothing but the morning breeze rattling the thorn bush.

Septimus stood up. The sun began to rise, then, over the easternmost peak of Mount Belly, framing him in light. “So I am to be the eighty-second Lord of the Stormhold,” he said to the corpse on the ground, and to himself, “not to mention the Master of the High Crags, Seneschal of the Spire-Towns, Keeper of the Citadel, Lord High Guardian of Mount Huon and all the rest of it.”

“Not without the Power of Stormhold about your neck you’re not, my brother,” said Quintus, tartly.

“And then there’s the matter of revenge,” said Secundus, in the voice of the wind howling through the pass. “You must take revenge upon your brother’s killer before anything else, now. It’s blood-law.”

As if he had heard them, Septimus shook his head. “Why could you not have waited just a few more days, brother Primus?” he asked the corpse at his feet. “I would have killed you myself. I had a fine plan for your death. When I discovered you were no longer on the
Heart of a Dream
, it took me little enough time to steal the ship’s boat and get on your trail. And now I must revenge your sad carcass, and all for the honor of our blood and the Stormhold.”

“So Septimus will be the eighty-second Lord of Stormhold,” said Tertius.

“There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks,” pointed out Quintus.

Septimus walked away from the body to piss against a grey boulder. Then he walked back to Primus’s corpse. “If I had killed you, I could leave you here to rot,” he said. “But because that pleasure was another’s, I shall carry you with me a little way and leave you on a high crag, to be eaten by eagles.” With that, grunting with the effort, he picked up the sticky-fronted body and hauled it over the back of the pony. He fumbled at the corpse’s belt, removing the bag of rune stones. “Thank you for these, my brother,” he said, and he patted the corpse on the back.

“May you choke on them if you do not take revenge on the bitch who slit my gullet,” said Primus, in the voice of the mountain birds waking to greet the new day.

T
hey sat side by side on a thick, white cumulus cloud the size of a small town. The cloud was soft beneath them, and a little cold. It became colder the deeper into it one sank, and Tristran pushed his burned hand as far as he could down into the fabric of it: it resisted him slightly, but accepted his hand. The interior of the cloud felt spongy and chilly, real and insubstantial at once. The cloud cooled a little of the pain in his hand, allowing him to think more clearly.

“Well,” he said, after some time, “I’m afraid I’ve made rather a mess of everything.”

The star sat on the cloud beside him, wearing the robe she had borrowed from the woman in the inn, with her broken leg stretched out on the thick mist in front of her. “You saved my life,” she said, eventually. “Didn’t you?”

“I suppose I must have done, yes.”

“I hate you,” she said. “I hated you for everything already, but now I hate you most of all.”

Tristran flexed his burned hand in the blessed cool of the cloud. He felt tired and slightly faint. “Any particular reason?”

“Because,” she told him, her voice taut, “now that you have saved my life, you are, by the law of my people, responsible for me, and I for you. Where you go, I must also go.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s not that bad, is it?”

“I would rather spend my days chained to a vile wolf or a stinking pig or a marsh-goblin,” she told him flatly.

“I’m honestly not that bad,” he told her, “not when you get to know me. Look, I’m sorry about all that chaining you up business. Perhaps we could start all over again, just pretend it never happened. Here now, my name’s Tristran Thorn, pleased to meet you.” He held out his unburned hand to her.

“Mother Moon defend me!” said the star. “I would sooner take the hand of an—”

“I’m sure you would,” said Tristran, not waiting to find out what he was going to be unflatteringly compared to this time. “I’ve
said
I’m sorry,” he told her. “Let’s start afresh. I’m Tristran Thorn. Pleased to meet you.”

She sighed.

The air was thin and chill so high above the ground, but the sun was warm, and the cloud-shapes about them reminded Tristran of a fantastical city or an unearthly town. Far, far below he could see the real world: the sunlight pricking out every tiny tree, turning every winding river into a thin silver snail-trail glistening and looping across the landscape of Faerie.

“Well?” said Tristran.

“Aye,” said the star. “It is a mighty joke, is it not? Whither thou goest, there I must go. Even if it kills me.” She swirled the surface of the cloud with her hand, rippling the mist. Then, momentarily, she touched her hand to Tristran’s. “My sisters called me Yvaine,” she told him. “For I was an evening star.”

“Look at us,” he said. “A fine pair.You with your broken leg, me with my hand.”

“Show me your hand.” He pulled it from the cool of the cloud: his hand was red, and blisters were coming up on each side of it and on the back of it, where the flames had licked against his flesh.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Quite a lot, really.”

“Good,” said Yvaine.

“If my hand had not been burned, you would probably be dead now,” he pointed out. She had the grace to look down, ashamed. “You know,” he added, changing the subject, “I left my bag in that madwoman’s inn. We have nothing now, save the clothes we stand up in.”

“Sit down in,” corrected the star.

“There’s no food, no water, we’re half a mile or so above the world with no way of getting down, and no control over where the cloud is going. And both of us are injured. Did I leave anything out?”

“You forgot the bit about clouds dissipating and vanishing into nothing,” said Yvaine. “They do that. I’ve seen them. I could not survive another fall.”

Tristran shrugged. “Well,” he said. “We’re probably doomed, then. But we may as well have a look around while we’re up here.”

He helped Yvaine to her feet, and, awkwardly, the two of them took several faltering steps on the cloud. Then Yvaine sat down again. “This is no use,” she told him. “You go and look around. I will wait here for you.”

“Promise?” he asked. “No running away this time?”

“I swear it. On my mother the moon I swear it,” said Yvaine, sadly. “You saved my life.”

And with that Tristran had to content himself.

H
er hair was mostly grey, now, and her face was pouched, and wrinkled at the throat and eyes and at the corners of the mouth. There was no color to her face, although her skirt was a vivid, bloody splash of scarlet; it had been ripped at the shoulder, and beneath the rip could be seen, puckered and obscene, a deep scar. The wind whipped her hair about her face as she drove the black carriage on through the Barrens. The four stallions stumbled often: thick sweat dripped from their flanks and a bloody foam dripped from their lips. Still, their hooves pounded along the muddy path through the Barrens, where nothing grows.

The witch-queen, oldest of the Lilim, reined in the horses beside a pinnacle of rock the color of verdigris, which jutted from the marshy soil of the Barrens like a needle. Then, as slowly as might be expected from any lady no longer in her first, or even her second, youth, she climbed down from the driver’s seat to the wet earth.

She walked around the coach and opened the door. The head of the dead unicorn, her dagger still in its cold eye-socket, flopped down as she did so. The witch clambered up into the coach and pulled open the unicorn’s mouth. Rigor mortis was starting to set in, and the jaw opened only with difficulty. The witch-woman bit down, hard, on her own tongue, bit hard enough that the pain was metal-sharp in her mouth, bit down until she could taste the blood. She swirled it around in her mouth, mixing the blood with spittle (she could feel that several of her front teeth were beginning to come loose), then she spat onto the dead unicorn’s piebald tongue. Blood flecked her lips and chin. She grunted several syllables that shall not be recorded here, then pushed the unicorn’s mouth closed once more. “Get out of the coach,” she told the dead beast.

Stiffly, awkwardly, the unicorn raised its head. Then it moved its legs, like a newborn foal or fawn just learning to walk, and twitched and pushed itself up onto all fours and, half climbing, half falling, it tumbled out of the carriage door and onto the mud, where it raised itself to its feet. Its left side, upon which it had lain in the coach, was swollen and dark with blood and fluids. Half-blind, the dead unicorn stumbled toward the green rock needle until it reached a depression at its base, where it dropped to the knees of its forelegs in a ghastly parody of prayer.

The witch-queen reached down and pulled her knife from out of the beast’s eye-socket. She sliced across its throat. Blood began to ooze, too slowly, from the gash she had made. She walked back to the carriage and returned with her cleaver. Then she began to hack at the unicorn’s neck, until she had separated it from the body, and the severed head tumbled into the rock hollow, now filling with a dark red puddle of brackish blood.

She took the unicorn’s head by the horn and placed it beside the body, on the rock; thereupon she looked with her hard, grey eyes into the red pool she had made. Two faces stared out at her from the puddle: two women, older by far in appearance than she was now.