Stardust

Stardust

It has occasionally been remarked upon that it is as easy to overlook something large and obvious as it is to overlook something small and niggling, and that the large things one overlooks can often cause problems.

Tristran Thorn approached the gap in the wall, from the Faerie side, for the second time since his conception eighteen years before, with the star limping beside him. His head was in a whirl from the scents and the sounds of his native village, and his heart rose within him. He nodded politely to the guards on the gap as he approached, recognizing them both. The young man shifting idly from foot to foot, sipping a pint of what Tristran supposed to be Mr. Bromios’s best ale, was Wystan Pippin, who had once been Tristran’s schoolfellow, although never his friend; while the older man, sucking irritably upon a pipe, which appeared to have gone out, was none other than Tristran’s former employer at Monday and Brown’s, Jerome Ambrose Brown, Esquire. The men had their backs to Tristran and Yvaine, and were resolutely facing the village as if they thought it sinful to observe the preparations occurring in the meadow behind them.

“Good evening,” said Tristran, politely, “Wystan. Mister Brown.”

The two men started. Wystan spilled his beer down the front of his jacket. Mr. Brown raised his staff and pointed the end of it at Tristran’s chest, nervously. Wystan Pippin put down his ale, picked up his staff, and blocked the gap with it.

“Stay where you are!” said Mr. Brown, gesturing with the staff, as if Tristran were a wild beast that might spring at him at any moment.

Tristran laughed. “Do you not know me?” he asked. “It is me, Tristran Thorn.”

But Mr. Brown, who was, Tristran knew, the senior of the guards, did not lower his staff. He looked Tristran up and down, from his worn brown boots to his mop of shaggy hair. Then he stared into Tristran’s sun-browned face and sniffed, unimpressed. “Even if you are that good-for-nothing Thorn,” he said, “I see no reason to let either of you people through. We guard the wall, after all.”

Tristran blinked. “I, too, have guarded the wall,” he pointed out. “And there are no rules about not letting people through from this direction. Only from the village.”

Mr. Brown nodded, slowly. Then he said, as one talks to an idiot, “And if you are Tristran Thorn—which I’m only conceding for the sake of argument here, for you look nothing like him, and you talk little enough like him either—in all the years you lived here, how many people came through the wall from the meadow side?”

“Why, none that ever I knew of,” said Tristran.

Mr. Brown smiled the same smile he had been used to use when he docked Tristran a morning’s wages for five minutes’ lateness. “Exactly,” he said. “There was no rule against it because it doesn’t happen. No one comes through from the other side. Not while I’m on duty, any road. Now, be off with you, before I take my stick to your head.”

Tristran was dumbfounded. “If you think I have gone through, well, everything I’ve gone through, only to be turned away at the last by a self-important, penny-pinching grocer and by someone who used to crib from me in History . . .” he began, but Yvaine touched his arm and said, “Tristran, let it go for now. You shall not fight with your own people.”

Tristran said nothing. Then he turned, without a word, and together they walked back up the slope of the meadow. Around them a hodgepodge of creatures and people erected their stalls, hung their flags and wheeled their barrows. And it came to Tristran then, in a wave of something that resembled homesickness, but a homesickness comprised in equal parts of longing and despair, that these might as well be his own people, for he felt he had more in common with them than with the pallid folk of Wall in their worsted jackets and their hobnailed boots.

They stopped and watched a small woman, almost as broad as she was high, do her best to put up her stall. Unasked, Tristran walked over and began to help her, carrying the heavy boxes from her cart to the stall, climbing a tall stepladder to hang an assortment of streamers from a tree branch, unpacking heavy glass carafes and jugs (each one stoppered with a huge, blackened cork and sealed with silvery wax and filled with a slowly swirling colored smoke), and placing them on the shelves. As he and the market-woman worked, Yvaine sat on a nearby tree stump and she sang to them in her soft, clean voice the songs of the high stars, and the commoner songs she had heard and learnt from the folk they had encountered on their journeyings.

By the time Tristran and the little woman were done and the stall was set out for the morrow, they were working by lamplight. The woman insisted on feeding them; Yvaine barely managed to convince her that she was not hungry, but Tristran ate everything he was offered with enthusiasm and, unusual for him, he drank the greater part of a carafe of sweet canary wine, insisting that it tasted no stronger than freshly squeezed grape juice and that it had no effect upon him of any kind. Even so, when the stout little woman offered them the clearing behind her cart to sleep in, Tristran was sleeping drunkenly in moments.

It was a clear, cold night. The star sat beside the sleeping man, who had once been her captor and had become her companion on the road, and she wondered where her hatred had gone. She was not sleepy.

There was a rustle in the grass behind her. A dark-haired woman stood next to her, and together they stared down at Tristran.

“There is something of the dormouse in him still,” said the dark-haired woman. Her ears were pointed and catlike, and she looked little older than Tristran himself. “Sometimes I wonder if she transforms people into animals, or whether she finds the beast inside us, and frees it. Perhaps there is something about me that is, by nature, a brightly colored bird. It is something to which I have given much thought, but about which I have come to no conclusions.”

Tristran muttered something unintelligible and stirred in his sleep. Then he began, gently, to snore.

The woman walked around Tristran and sat down beside him. “He seems good-hearted,” she said.

“Yes,” admitted the star. “I suppose that he is.”

“I should warn you,” said the woman, “that if you leave these lands for . . . over there . . .” and she gestured toward the village of Wall with one slim arm, from the wrist of which a silver chain glittered, “. . . then you will be, as I understand it, transformed into what you would be in that world: a cold, dead thing, sky-fallen.”

The star shivered, but she said nothing. Instead, she reached across Tristran’s sleeping form to touch the silver chain which circled the woman’s wrist and ankle and led off into the bushes and beyond.

“You become used to it, in time,” said the woman.

“Do you? Really?”

Violet eyes stared into blue eyes, and then looked away. “No.”

The star let go of the chain. “He once caught me with a chain much like yours. Then he freed me, and I ran from him. But he found me and bound me with an obligation, which binds my kind more securely than any chain ever could.”

An April breeze ran across the meadow, stirring the bushes and the trees in one long chilly sigh. The cat-eared woman tossed her curly hair back from her face, and said,“You are under a prior obligation, are you not? You have something that does not belong to you, which you must deliver to its rightful owner.”

The star’s lips tightened. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I told you. I was the bird in the caravan,” said the woman. “I know what you are, and I know why the witch-woman never knew that you were there. I know who seeks you and why she needs you. Also, I know the provenance of the topaz stone you wear upon a silver chain about your waist. Knowing this, and what manner of thing you are, I know the obligation you must be under.” She leaned down, and, with delicate fingers, she tenderly pushed the hair from Tristran’s face. The sleeping youth neither stirred nor responded.

“I do not think that I believe you, or trust you,” said the star. A night bird cried in a tree above them. It sounded very lonely in the darkness.

“I saw the topaz about your waist when I was a bird,” said the woman, standing up once more. “I watched, when you bathed in the river, and recognized it for what it was.”

“How?” asked the star. “How did you recognize it?”

But the dark-haired woman only shook her head and walked back the way that she had come, sparing but one last glance for the sleeping youth upon the grass. And then she was taken by the night.

Tristran’s hair had, obstinately, fallen across his face once more. The star leaned down and gently pushed it to one side, letting her fingers dwell upon his cheek as she did so. He slept on.

Tristran was woken a little after sunrise by a large badger walking upon its hind legs and wearing a threadbare heliotrope silk dressing-gown, who snuffled into his ear until Tristran sleepily opened his eyes, and then said, self-importantly, “Party name of Thorn? Tristran of that set?”

“Mm?” said Tristran. There was a foul taste in his mouth, which felt dry and furred. He could have slept for another several hours.

“They’ve been asking about you,” said the badger. “Down by the gap. Seems there’s a young lady wants to have a word with you.”

Tristran sat up and grinned widely. He touched the sleeping star on her shoulder. She opened her sleepy blue eyes and said, “What?”

“Good news,” he told her. “Do you remember Victoria Forester? I might have mentioned her name once or twice on our travels.”

“Yes,” she said. “You might have.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m off to see her. She’s down by the gap.” He paused. “Look. Well. Probably best if you stay here. I wouldn’t want to confuse her or anything.”

The star rolled over and covered her head with her arm and said nothing else. Tristran decided that she must have gone back to sleep. He pulled on his boots, washed his face and rinsed out his mouth in the meadow stream, and then ran pell-mell through the meadow, toward the village.

The guards on the wall this morning were the Reverend Myles, the vicar of Wall, and Mr. Bromios, the innkeeper. Standing between them was a young lady with her back to the meadow. “Victoria!” called Tristran in delight; but then the young lady turned, and he saw that it was not Victoria Forester (who, he remembered suddenly, and with delight in the knowing, had grey eyes. That was what they were: grey. How could he ever have allowed himself to forget?). But who this young lady could have been in her fine bonnet and shawl, Tristran could not say, although her eyes flooded with tears at the sight of him.

“Tristran!” she said. “It is you! They said it was! Oh Tristran! How could you? Oh, how could you?” and he realized who the young lady reproaching him must be.

“Louisa?” he said to his sister. And then, “You have certainly grown while I was away, from a chit of a girl into a fine young lady.”

She sniffed and blew her nose into a lace-edged linen handkerchief, which she pulled from her sleeve. “And you,” she told him, dabbing at her cheeks with the handkerchief, “have turned into a mop-haired raggle-taggle gypsy on your journeyings. But I suppose you look well, and that is a good thing. Come on, now,” and she motioned, impatiently, for him to walk through the gap in the wall, and come to her.

“But the wall—” he said, eyeing the innkeeper and the vicar a little nervously.

“Oh, as to that, when Wystan and Mister Brown finished their shift last night they repaired to the saloon bar at the Seventh Pie, where Wystan happened to mention their meeting with a ragamuffin who claimed to be you, and how they blocked his way. Your way. When news of this reached Father’s ears, he marched right up to the Pie and gave the both of them such a tongue-lashing and a telling-of-what-for that I could scarcely believe it was him.”

“Some of us were for letting you come back this morning,” said the vicar, “and some were for keeping you there until midday.”

“But none of the ones who were for making you wait are on Wall duty this morning,” said Mr. Bromios. “Which took a certain amount of jiggery-pokery to organize—and on a day when I should have been seeing to the refreshment stand, I could point out. Still, it’s good to see you back. Come on through.” And with that he stuck out his hand, and Tristran shook it with enthusiasm. Then Tristran shook the vicar’s hand.

“Tristran,” said the vicar, “I suppose that you must have seen many strange sights upon your travels.”

Tristran reflected for a moment. “I suppose I must have,” he said.

“You must come to the Vicarage, then, next week,” said the vicar. “We shall have tea, and you must tell me all about it. Once you’re settled back in. Eh?” And Tristran, who had always held the vicar in some awe, could do nothing but nod.

Louisa sighed, a little theatrically, and began to walk, briskly, in the direction of the Seventh Magpie. Tristran ran along the cobbles to catch her up, and then he was walking beside her.

“It does my heart good to see you again, my sister,” he said.

“As if we were not all worried sick about you,” she said, crossly, “what with all your gallivantings. And you did not even wake me to say good-bye. Father has been quite distracted with concern for you, and at Christmas, when you were not there, after we had eaten the goose and the pudding, Father took out the port and he toasted absent friends, and Mother sobbed like a babe, so of course I cried too, and then Father began to blow his nose into his best handkerchief and Grandmother and Grandfather Hempstock insisted upon pulling the Christmas crackers and reading the jolly mottoes and somehow that only made matters worse, and, to put it bluntly, Tristran, you quite spoiled our Christmas.”

“Sorry,” said Tristran. “What are we doing now? Where are we going?”

“We are going into the Seventh Pie,” said Louisa. “I should have thought that was obvious. Mister Bromios said that you could use his sitting room. There’s somebody there who needs to talk to you.” And she said nothing more as they went into the pub. There were a number of faces Tristran recognized, and the people nodded at him, or smiled, or did not smile, as he walked through the crowds and made his way up the narrow stairs behind the bar to the landing with Louisa by his side. The wooden boards creaked beneath their feet.

Louisa glared at Tristran. And then her lip trembled, and, to Tristran’s surprise, she threw her arms about him and hugged him so tightly that he could not breathe. Then, with not another word, she fled back down the wooden stairs.

He knocked at the door to the sitting room and went in. The room was decorated with a number of unusual objects, of small items of antique statuary and clay pots. Upon the wall hung a stick, wound about with ivy leaves, or rather, with a dark metal cunningly beaten to resemble ivy. Apart from the decorations the room could have been the sitting room of any busy bachelor with little time for sitting. It was furnished with a small chaise longue, a low table upon which was a well-thumbed leather-bound copy of the sermons of Laurence Sterne, a pianoforte, and several leather armchairs, and it was in one of these armchairs that Victoria Forester was sitting.

Tristran walked over to her slowly and steadily, and then he went down upon one knee in front of her, as once he had gone down on his knees before her in the mud of a country lane.

“Oh, please don’t,” said Victoria Forester, uncomfortably. “Please get up. Why don’t you sit down over there. In that chair? Yes. That’s better.” The morning light shone through the high lace curtains and caught her chestnut hair from behind, framing her face in gold. “Look at you,” she said. “You became a man. And your hand. What happened to your hand?”

“I burnt it,” he said. “In a fire.”

She said nothing in response, at first. She just looked at him. Then she sat back in the armchair and looked ahead of her, at the stick on the wall, or one of Mr. Bromios’s quaint old statues perhaps, and she said, “There are a number of things I must tell you, Tristran, and none of them will be easy. I would appreciate it if you said nothing until I have had a chance to say my piece. So: firstly, and perhaps most importantly, I must apologize to you. It was my foolishness, my idiocy, that sent you off on your journeyings. I thought you were joking . . . no, not joking. I thought that you were too much the coward, too much of a boy, ever to follow up on any of your fine, silly words. It was only when you had gone, and the days passed, and you did not return, that I realized that you had been in earnest, and by then it was much too late.

“I have had to live . . . each day . . . with the possibility that I had sent you to your death.”

She stared ahead of herself as she spoke, and Tristran had the feeling, which became a certainty, that she had conducted this conversation in her head a hundred times in his absence. It was why he could not be permitted to say anything; this was hard enough on Victoria Forester, and she would not be able to manage it if he caused her to depart from her script.

“And I did not play you fair, my poor shop-boy . . . but you are no longer a shop-boy, are you? . . . since I thought that your quest was just foolishness, in every way . . .” She paused, and her hands gripped the wooden arms of the chair, grasping them so tightly her knuckles first reddened, then went white. “Ask me why I would not kiss you that night, Tristran Thorn.”

“It was your right not to kiss me,” said Tristran. “I did not come here to make you sad, Vicky. I did not find you your star to make you miserable.”

Her head tipped to one side. “So you did find the star we saw that night?”

“Oh yes,” said Tristran. “The star is back in the meadow, though, right now. But I did what you asked me to do.”

“Then do something else for me now. Ask me why I would not kiss you that night. I had kissed you before, when we were younger, after all.”

“Very well, Vicky. Why would you not kiss me, that night?”

“Because,” she said, and there was relief in her voice as she said it, enormous relief, as if it were escaping from her, “the day before we saw the shooting star, Robert had asked me to marry him. That evening, when I saw you, I had gone to the shop hoping to see him, and to talk to him, and to tell him that I accepted, and he should ask my father for my hand.”

“Robert?” asked Tristran, his head all in a whirl.

“Robert Monday. You worked in his shop.”

“Mister Monday?” echoed Tristran. “You and Mister Monday?”

“Exactly.” She was looking at him now. “And then you had to take me seriously and run off to bring me back a star, and not a day would go by when I did not feel as if I had done something foolish and bad. For I promised you my hand, if you returned with the star. And there were some days, Tristran, when I honestly do not know which I thought worse, that you would be killed in the Lands Beyond, all for the love of me, or that you would succeed in your madness, and return with the star, to claim me as your bride. Now, of course, some folks hereabouts told me not to take on so, and that it was inevitable that you would have gone off to the Lands Beyond, of course, it being your nature, and you being from there in the first place, but, somehow, in my heart, I knew I was at fault, and that, one day, you would return to claim me.”

“And you love Mister Monday?” said Tristran, seizing on the only thing in all this he was certain he had understood.

She nodded, and raised her head, so her pretty chin pointed toward Tristran. “But I gave you my word, Tristran. And I will keep my word, and I have told Robert this. I am responsible for all that you have gone through—even for your poor burned hand. And if you want me, then I am yours.”

“To be honest,” he said, “I think that I am responsible for all that I have done, not you. And it is hard to regret a moment of it, although I missed soft beds from time to time, and I shall never be able to look at another dormouse in quite the same way ever again. But you did not promise me your hand if I came back with the star, Vicky.”

“I didn’t?”

“No. You promised me anything I desired.”

Victoria Forester sat bolt upright then, and looked down at the floor. A red spot burned in each pale cheek, as if she had been slapped. “Do I understand you to be—” she began, but Tristran interrupted her.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think you do, actually. You said you would give me whatever I desire.”

“Yes.”

“Then . . .” He paused. “Then I desire that you should marry Mister Monday. I desire that you should be married as soon as possible—why, within this very week, if such a thing can be arranged. And I desire that you should be as happy together as ever a man and woman have ever been.”

She exhaled in one low shuddering breath of release. Then she looked at him. “Do you mean it?” she asked.

“Marry him with my blessing, and we’ll be quits and done,” said Tristran. “And the star will probably think so, too.”

There was a knock at the door. “Is all well in there?” called a man’s voice.

“Everything is very well,” said Victoria. “Please come in, Robert. You remember Tristran Thorn, do you not?”

“Good morning, Mister Monday,” said Tristran, and he shook Mr. Monday’s hand, which was sweaty and damp. “I understand that you are to be married soon. Permit me to tender my congratulations.”

Mr. Monday grinned, though it made him look as if he had a toothache. Then he held out a hand for Victoria, and she rose from the chair.

“If you wish to see the star, Miss Forester . . .” said Tristran, but Victoria shook her head.

“I am delighted that you came home safely, Mister Thorn. I trust that I shall see you at our wedding?”

“I’m sure that nothing could give me greater pleasure than to be there,” said Tristran, although he was sure of no such thing.

On a normal day it would have been unheard-of for the Seventh Magpie to have been so crowded before breakfast, but this was market day, and the Wall-folk and the strangers were crowded into the bar, eating heaped plates of lambchops and bacon and mushrooms and fried eggs and black pudding.

Dunstan Thorn was waiting for Tristran in the bar. He stood up when he saw him, walked over and clasped him on the shoulder, without speaking. “So you made it back without hurt,” he said, and there was pride in his voice.

Tristran wondered if he had grown while he was away; he remembered his father as a bigger man. “Hello Father,” he said. “I hurt my hand a bit.”

“Your mother has breakfast waiting for you, back at the farm,” said Dunstan.

“Breakfast would be wonderful,” admitted Tristran. “And seeing Mother again, of course. Also we need to talk.” For his mind was still on something that Victoria Forester had said.

“You look taller,” said his father. “And you are badly in need of a trip to the barber’s.” He drained his tankard, and together they left the Seventh Magpie and walked out into the morning.

The two Thorns climbed over a stile into one of Dunstan’s fields, and, as they walked through the meadow in which he had played as a boy, Tristran raised the matter that had been vexing him, which was the question of his birth. His father answered him as honestly as he was able to during the long walk back to the farmhouse, telling his tale as if he were recounting a story that had happened a very long time ago, to someone else. A love story.

And then they were at Tristran’s old home, where his sister waited for him, and there was a steaming breakfast on the stove and on the table, prepared for him, lovingly, by the woman he had always believed to be his mother.

Madame Semele adjusted the last of the crystal flowers on the stall and eyed the market with disfavor. It was a little past noon, and the customers had just started to wander through. None of them had yet stopped at her stall.

“Fewer of them and fewer of them, every nine-year,” she said. “Mark my words, soon enough this market will be just a memory. There’s other markets, and other marketplaces, I am thinking. This market’s time is almost over. Another forty, fifty, sixty years at the most, and it will be done for good.”

“Perhaps,” said her violet-eyed servant, “but it does not matter to me. This is the last of these markets I shall ever attend.”

Madame Semele glared at her. “I thought I had long since beaten all of your insolence out of you.”

“It is not insolence,” said her slave. “Look.” She held up the silver chain which bound her. It glinted in the sunlight, but still, it was thinner, more translucent than ever it had been before; in places it seemed as if it were made not of silver but of smoke.

“What have you done?” Spittle flecked the old woman’s lips.

“I have done nothing; nothing that I did not do eighteen years ago. I was bound to you to be your slave until the day that the moon lost her daughter, if it occurred in a week when two Mondays came together. And my time with you is almost done.”

It was after three in the afternoon. The star sat upon the meadow grass beside Mr. Bromios’s wine-and-ale-and-food stall and stared across at the gap in the wall and the village beyond it. Upon occasion, the patrons of the stall would offer her wine or ale or great, greasy sausages, and always she would decline.

“Are you waiting for someone, my dear?” asked a pleasant-featured young woman, as the afternoon dragged on.

“I do not know,” said the star. “Perhaps.”

“A young man, if I do not mistake my guess, a lovely thing like you.”

The star nodded. “In a way,” she said.

“I’m Victoria,” said the young woman. “Victoria Forester.”

“I am called Yvaine,” said the star. She looked Victoria Forester up and down and up again. “So,” she said, “you are Victoria Forester. Your fame precedes you.”

“The wedding, you mean?” said Victoria, and her eyes shone with pride and delight.

“A wedding, is it?” asked Yvaine. One hand crept to her waist and felt the topaz upon its silver chain. Then she stared at the gap in the wall and bit her lip.

“Oh you poor thing! What a beast he must be, to keep you waiting so!” said Victoria Forester. “Why do you not go through, and look for him?”

“Because . . .” said the star, and then she stopped. “Aye,” she said. “Perhaps I shall.” The sky above them was striped with grey and white bands of cloud, through which patches of blue could be seen. “I wish my mother were out,” said the star. “I would say good-bye to her, first.” And, awkwardly, she got to her feet.

But Victoria was not willing to let her new friend go that easily, and she was prattling on about banns, and marriage licenses, and special licenses which could only be issued by archbishops, and how lucky she was that Robert knew the archbishop. The wedding, it seemed, was set for six days’ time, at midday.

Then Victoria called over a respectable gentleman, greying at the temples, who was smoking a black cheroot and who grinned as if he had the toothache. “And this is Robert,” she said. “Robert, this is Yvaine. She’s waiting for her young man. Yvaine, this is Robert Monday. And on Friday next, at midday, I shall be Victoria Monday. Perhaps you could make something of that, my dear, in your speech at the wedding breakfast—that on Friday there will be two Mondays together!”

And Mr. Monday puffed on his cheroot, and told his bride-to-be that he would certainly consider it.

“Then,” asked Yvaine, picking her words with care, “you are not marrying Tristran Thorn?”

“No,” said Victoria.

“Oh,” said the star. “Good.” And she sat down again.

She was still sitting there when Tristran came back through the gap in the wall, several hours later. He looked distracted, but brightened up when he saw her. “Hello, you,” he said, helping her to her feet. “Have a good time waiting for me?”

“Not particularly,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” said Tristran. “I suppose I should have taken you with me, into the village.”

“No,” said the star. “You shouldn’t have. I live as long as I am in Faerie. Were I to travel to your world, I would be nothing but a cold iron stone fallen from the heavens, pitted and pocked.”

“But I almost took you through with me!” said Tristan, aghast. “I tried to, last night.”

“Yes,” she said. “Which only goes to prove that you are indeed a ninny, a lackwit, and a . . . a clodpoll.”

“Dunderhead,” offered Tristran. “You always used to like calling me a dunderhead. And an oaf.”

“Well,” she said, “you are all those things, and more besides. Why did you keep me waiting like that? I thought something terrible had happened to you.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I won’t leave you again.”

“No,” she said, seriously and with certainty, “you will not.”

His hand found hers, then. They walked, hand in hand, through the market. A wind began to come up, flapping and gusting at the canvas of the tents and the flags, and a cold rain spat down on them. They took refuge under the awning of a book stall, along with a number of other people and creatures. The stallholder hauled a boxful of books further under the canvas, to ensure that it did not get wet.

“Mackerel sky, mackerel sky, not long wet nor not long dry,” said a man in a black silk top hat to Tristran and Yvaine. He was purchasing a small book bound in red leather from the bookseller.

Tristran smiled and nodded, and, as it became apparent that the rain was easing up, he and Yvaine walked on.

“Which is all the thanks I shall ever get from them, I’ll wager,” said the tall man in the top hat to the bookseller, who had not the slightest idea what he was speaking about, and did not care.

“I have said my good-byes to my family,” said Tristran to the star, as they walked. “To my father, and my mother—my father’s wife, perhaps I should say—and to my sister, Louisa. I don’t think I shall be going back again. Now we just need to solve the problem of how to put you back up again in the sky. Perhaps I shall come with you.”

“You would not like it, up in the sky,” the star assured him. “So . . . I take it you will not be marrying Victoria Forester.”

Tristran nodded. “No,” he said.

“I met her,” said the star. “Did you know that she is with child?”

“What?” asked Tristran, shocked and surprised.

“I doubt that she knows. She is one, perhaps two moons along.”

“Good lord. How do you know?”

It was the star’s turn to shrug. “You know,” she said, “I was happy to discover that you are not marrying Victoria Forester.”

“So was I,” he confessed.

The rain began once more, but they made no move to get under cover. He squeezed her hand in his. “You know,” she said, “a star and a mortal man . . .”

“Only half mortal, actually,” said Tristran, helpfully. “Everything I ever thought about myself—who I was, what I am—was a lie. Or sort of. You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that feels.”

“Whatever you are,” she said, “I just wanted to point out that we can probably never have children. That’s all.”

Tristran looked at the star, then, and he began to smile, and he said nothing at all. His hands were on her upper arms. He was standing in front of her, and looking down at her.

“Just so you know, that’s all,” said the star, and she leaned forward.

They kissed for the first time then in the cold spring rain, though neither one of them now knew that it was raining. Tristran’s heart pounded in his chest as if it were not big enough to contain all the joy that it held. He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her.

The silver chain was now nothing but smoke and vapor. For a heartbeat it hung on the air, then a sharp gust of wind and rain blew it out into nothing at all.

“There,” said the woman with the dark, curling hair, stretching like a cat, and smiling. “The terms of my servitude are fulfilled, and now you and I are done with each other.”

The old woman looked at her helplessly. “But what shall I do? I am old. I cannot manage this stall by myself. You are an evil, foolish slattern, so to desert me like this.”

“Your problems are of no concern to me,” said her former slave, “but I shall never again be called a slattern, or a slave, or anything else that is not my own name. I am Lady Una, first-born and only daughter of the eighty-first Lord of Stormhold, and the spells and terms you bound me with are over and done. Now, you will apologize to me, and you will call me by my right name, or I will—with enormous pleasure—devote the rest of my life to hunting you down and destroying every thing that you care for and every thing that you are.”

They looked at each other, then, and it was the old woman who looked away first.

“Then I must apologize for having called you a slattern, Lady Una,” she said, as if each word of it were bitter sawdust that she spat from her mouth.

Lady Una nodded. “Good. And I believe that you owe me payment for my services, now my time with you is done,” she said. For these things have their rules. All things have rules.

The rain was still falling in gusts, then not falling for just long enough to lure people out from underneath their makeshift shelters, then raining on them once more. Tristran and Yvaine sat, damp and happy, beside a campfire, in the company of a motley assortment of creatures and people.

Tristran had asked if any of them knew the little hairy man he had met upon his travels, and had described him as well as he could. Several people acknowledged that they had met him in the past, although none had seen him at this market.

He found his hands twining, almost of their own volition, into the star’s wet hair. He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize how much he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.

“So, where are we going once the market is done?” Tristran asked the star.

“I do not know,” she said. “But I have one obligation still to discharge.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” she said. “The topaz thing I showed you. I have to give it to the right person. The last time the right person came along, that innkeeper woman cut his throat, so I have it still. But I wish it were gone.”

A woman’s voice at his shoulder said, “Ask her for what she carries, Tristran Thorn.”

He turned and stared into eyes the color of meadow-violets. “You were the bird in the witch’s caravan,” he told the woman.

“When you were the dormouse, my son,” said the woman. “I was the bird. But now I have my own form again, and my time of servitude is over. Ask Yvaine for what she carries. You have the right.”

He turned back to the star. “Yvaine?”

She nodded, waiting.

“Yvaine, will you give me what you are carrying?”

She looked puzzled; then she reached inside her robe, fumbled discreetly, and produced a large topaz stone on a broken silver chain.

“It was your grandfather’s,” said the woman to Tristran. “You are the last male of the line of Stormhold. Put it about your neck.”

Tristran did so; as he touched the ends of the silver chain together they knit and mended as if they had never been broken. “It’s very nice,” said Tristran, dubiously.

“It is the Power of Stormhold,” said his mother. “There’s no one can argue with that. You are of the blood, and all of your uncles are dead and gone. You will make a fine Lord of Stormhold.”

Tristran stared at her in honest puzzlement. “But I have no wish to be a lord of anywhere,” he told her, “or of anything, except perhaps my lady’s heart.” And he took the star’s hand in his, and he pressed it to his breast and smiled.

The woman flicked her ears impatiently. “In almost eighteen years, Tristran Thorn, I have not demanded one single thing of you. And now, the first simple little request that I make—the tiniest favor that I ask of you—you say me no. Now, I ask of you, Tristran, is that any way to treat your mother?”

“No, Mother,” said Tristran.

“Well,” she continued, slightly mollified, “and I think it will do you young people good to have a home of your own, and for you to have an occupation. And if it does not suit you, you may leave, you know. There is no silver chain that will be holding you to the throne of Stormhold.”

And Tristran found this quite reassuring. Yvaine was less impressed, for she knew that silver chains come in all shapes and sizes; but she knew also that it would not be wise to begin her life with Tristran by arguing with his mother.

“Might I have the honor of knowing what you are called?” asked Yvaine, wondering if she was laying it on a bit thickly. Tristran’s mother preened, and Yvaine knew that she was not.

“I am the Lady Una of Stormhold,” she said. Then she reached into a small bag, which hung from her side, and produced a rose made of glass, of a red so dark that it was almost black in the flickering firelight. “It was my payment,” she said. “For more than sixty years of servitude. It galled her to give it to me, but rules are rules, and she would have lost her magic and more if she had not settled up. Now, I plan to barter it for a palanquin to take us back to the Stormhold, for we must arrive in style. Oh, I have missed the Stormhold so badly. We must have bearers, and outriders, and perhaps an elephant—they are so imposing, nothing says ‘Get out of the way’ quite like an elephant in the front . . .”

“No,” said Tristran.

“No?” said his mother.

“No,” repeated Tristran. “You may travel by palanquin, and elephant, and camel and all that, if you wish to, Mother. But Yvaine and I will make our own way there, and travel at our own speed.”

The Lady Una took a deep breath, and Yvaine decided that this argument was one that she would rather be somewhere else for, so she stood up and told them that she would be back soon, that she needed a walk, and that she would not go wandering too far. Tristran looked at her with pleading eyes, but Yvaine shook her head: this was his fight to win, and he would fight it better if she were not there.

She limped through the darkening market, pausing beside a tent from which music and applause could be heard, and from which light spilled like warm, golden honey. She listened to the music, and she thought her own thoughts. It was there that a bent, white-haired old woman, glaucous-blind in one eye, hobbled over to the star, and bade her to stop a while and talk.

“About what?” asked the star.

The old woman, shrunk by age and time to little bigger than a child, held onto a stick as tall and bent as herself with palsied and swollen-knuckled hands. She stared up at the star with her good eye and her blue-milk eye, and she said, “I came to fetch your heart back with me.”

“Is that so?” asked the star.

“Aye,” said the old woman. “I nearly had it, at that, up in the mountain pass.” She cackled at the back of her throat at the memory. “D’ye remember?” She had a large pack that sat like a hump on her back. A spiral ivory horn protruded from the pack, and Yvaine knew where she had seen that horn before.

“That was you?” asked the star of the tiny woman. “You, with the knives?”

“Mm. That was me. But I squandered away all the youth I took for the journey. Every act of magic lost me a little of the youth I wore, and now I am older than I have ever been.”

“If you touch me,” said the star, “lay but a finger on me, you will regret it forevermore.”

“If ever you get to be my age,” said the old woman, “you will know all there is to know about regrets, and you will know that one more, here or there, will make no difference in the long run.” She snuffled the air. Her dress had once been red, but it seemed to have been much patched and taken up and faded over the years. It hung down from one shoulder, exposing a puckered scar that might have been many hundreds of years old. “So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o’ the wisp. Not long ago you burned—your heart burned—in my mind like silver fire. But after that night in the inn it became patchy and dim, and now it is not there at all.”

Yvaine realized that she felt nothing but pity for the creature who had wanted her dead, so she said, “Could it be that the heart that you seek is no longer my own?”

The old woman coughed. Her whole frame shook and spasmed with the retching effort of it.

The star waited for her to be done, and then she said, “I have given my heart to another.”

“The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?”

“Yes.”

“You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do.”

“Nonetheless,” said the star, “he has my heart. I hope that your sisters will not be too hard on you, when you return to them without it.”

It was then that Tristran walked across to Yvaine, and took her hand, and nodded to the old woman. “All sorted out,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

“And the palanquin?”

“Oh, Mother will be traveling by palanquin. I had to promise that we’d get to the Stormhold sooner or later, but we can take our time on the way. I think we should buy a couple of horses and see the sights.”

“And your mother acceded to this?”

“In the end,” he said blithely. “Anyway, sorry to interrupt.”

“We are almost done,” said Yvaine, and she turned back to the little old woman.

“My sisters will be harsh, but cruel,” said the old witch-queen. “However, I appreciate the sentiment. You have a good heart, child. A pity it will not be mine.”

The star leaned down, then, and kissed the old woman on her wizened cheek, feeling the rough hairs on it scrape her soft lips.

Then the star and her true love walked away, toward the wall. “Who was the old biddy?” asked Tristran. “She seemed a bit familiar. Was anything wrong?”

“Nothing was wrong,” she told him. “She was just someone I knew from the road.”

Behind them were the lights of the market, the lanterns and candles and witch-lights and fairy glitter, like a dream of the night sky brought down to earth. In front of them, across the meadow, on the other side of the gap in the wall, now guardless, was the town of Wall. Oil lamps and gas lamps and candles glowed in the windows of the houses of the village. To Tristran, then, they seemed as distant and unknowable as the world of the Arabian Nights.

He looked upon the lights of Wall for what he knew (it came to him then with certainty) was the last time. He stared at them for some time and said nothing, the fallen star by his side. And then he turned away, and together they began to walk toward the East.