with two painted wooden bowls, two wooden-handled knives, and a small pot of herbs, dried and
flaked to a green powder. “I was going to be eating with fingers on a plate of fresh leaves,” she
said, handing a bowl to the lady in the scarlet kirtle. The bowl had a sunflower painted upon it,
under a layer of dust. “But I thought, well, how often does I get such fine company? So nothing but
the best. Heads or tails?”
“Let it be your choice,” said her guest.
“Head, then, for you, with the luscious eyes and brains, and the crispy-crunchy ears of him. And
I’ll have the rump, with nothing but dull meat to nibble.” She lifted the spit off the fire as she
spoke, and, using both knives so fast they seemed little more than a glitter of blades, she parted
the carcass and sliced the meat from the bones, and dealt it out, fairly equitably, into each bowl.
She passed the pot of herbs to her guest. “There’s no salt, my dear, but if you shake this on it will
do the trick. A little basil, a little mountain thyme—my own receipt.”
The witch-queen took her portion of roasted hare, and one of the knives, and sprinkled a little
of the herbs onto the dish. She speared a bite on the point of the knife and ate it with relish, while
her hostess toyed with her own portion, then blew on it fastidiously, steam coming from the crisp
brown meat.
“How is it?” asked the old woman.
“Perfectly palatable,” said her guest, honestly.
“It is the herbs make it so fine,” explained the harridan.
“I can taste the basil and the thyme,” said the guest, “but there is another taste I find harder
to place.”
“Ah,” said Madame Semele, and she nibbled a sliver of the meat.
“It is certainly a most uncommon taste.”
“That it is. It’s a herb that grows only in Garamond, on an island in the midst of a wide lake. It
is most pleasant with all manner of meats and fishes, and it reminds me in flavor a little of the
leaves of fennel, with but a hint of nutmeg. The flowers of it are a most attractive shade of
orange. It is good for wind and the ague, and it is, in addition, a gentle soporific, which has the
curious property of causing one who tastes of it to speak nothing but the truth for several hours.”
The lady in the scarlet kirtle dropped her wooden bowl onto the ground. “Limbus grass?” she
said. “You dared to feed me limbus grass.”
“That’s how it would seem, dearie,” and the old woman cackled and hooted with delight. “So,
tell me now, Mistress Morwanneg, if that’s your name, where are you a-going-of, in your fine
chariot? And why do you remind me so of someone I knew once... ? And Madame Semele forgets
nothing and no one.”
“I am on my way to find a star,” said the witch-queen, “which fell in the great woods on the
other side of Mount Belly. And when I find her, I shall take my great knife and cut out her heart,
while she lives, and while her heart is her own. For the heart of a living star is a sovereign remedy
against all the snares of age and time. My sisters wait for me to return.”
Madame Semele hooted and hugged herself, swaying back and forth, bony fingers clutching her
sides. “The heart of a star, is it? Hee! Hee! Such a prize it will make for me. I shall taste enough of
it that my youth will come back, and my hair turn from grey to golden, and my dugs swell and
soften and become firm and high. Then I shall take all the heart that’s left to the Great Market at
Wall. Hee!”
“You shall not do this thing,” said her guest, very quietly. “No? You are my guest, my dear. You
swore your oath. You’ve tasted of my food. According to the laws of our sisterhood, there is
nothing you can do to harm me.”
“Oh, there are so many things I could do to harm you, Ditchwater Sal, but I shall simply point
out that one who has eaten limbus grass can speak nothing but the truth for several hours
afterward; and one more thing ...” Distant lightning flickered in her words as she spoke, and the
forest was hushed, as if every leaf and every tree were listening intently to what she said. “This I
say: you have stolen knowledge you did not earn, but it shall not profit you. For you shall be unable
to see the star, unable to perceive it, unable to touch it, to taste it, to find it, to kill it. Even if
another were to cut out its heart and give it to you, you would not know it, never know what you
had in your hand. This I say. These are my words, and they are a true-speaking. And know this also:
I swore, by the compact of the Sisterhood, that I would do you no harm. Had I not so sworn I would
change you into a black-beetle, and I would pull your legs off, one by one, and leave you for the
birds to find, for putting me to this indignity.”
Madame Semele’s eyes opened wide with fright, and she stared over the flames of the fire at
her guest. “Who are you?” she said.
“When you knew me last,” said the woman in the scarlet kirtle, “I ruled with my sisters in
Carnadine, before it was lost.”
“Vow? But you are dead, long dead.”
“They have said that the Lilim were dead before now, but they have always lied. The squirrel
has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the
babe who will grow to slay me.”
Silver flashes glittered and flared in the flames as she spoke.
“So it is you. And you have your youth back.” Madame Semele sighed. “And now I, too, shall be
young again.”
The lady in the scarlet kirtle stood up then, and placed the bowl which had contained her
portion of hare into the fire. “You shall be nothing of the kind,” she said. “Did you not hear me? A
moment after I leave, you shall forget that ever you saw me. You shall forget all of this, even my
curse, although the knowledge of it shall vex and irritate you, like an itch in a limb long since
amputated. And may you treat your guests with more grace and respect in the future.”
The wooden bowl burst into flames then, a huge gout of flame which singed the leaves of the
oak tree far above them. Madame Semele knocked the blackened bowl from the fire with a stick,
and she stamped it out in the long grass. “Whatever could have possessed me to drop the bowl into
the fire?” she exclaimed aloud. “And look, one of my nice knives, all burned up and ruined.
Whatever was I a-thinking of?”
There came no answer. From further down the road came the drumming beats of something
that might have been the hooves of goats, racing on into the night. Madame Semele shook her
head, as if to clear it of dust and cobwebs. “I’m getting old,” she said to the multicolored bird who
sat on its perch by the driver’s seat, and who had observed everything and forgotten nothing.
“Getting old. And there’s no doing anything about that.” The bird shifted uncomfortably on the
perch.
A red squirrel quested, hesitating a little, into the firelight. It picked up an acorn, held it for a
moment in its handlike front paws, as if it were praying. Then it ran away—to bury the acorn, and
to forget it.
Scaithe’s Ebb is a small seaport town built on granite, a town of chandlers and carpenters and
sailmakers; of old sailors with missing fingers and limbs who have opened their own grog houses or
spend their days in them, what is left of their hair still tarred into long queues, though the stubble
on their chins has long since dusted to white. There are no whores in Scaithe’s Ebb, or none that
consider themselves as such, although there have always been many women who, if pressed, would
describe themselves as much-married, with one husband on this ship here every six months, and
another husband on that ship, back in port for a month or so every nine months.
The mathematics of the thing have always kept most folk satisfied; and if ever it disappoints
and a man returns to his wife while one of her other husbands is still in occupancy, why, then there
is a fight—and the grog shops to comfort the loser. The sailors do not mind the arrangement, for
they know that this way there will, at the least, be one person who, at the last, will notice when
they do not come back from the sea, and will mourn their loss; and their wives content themselves
with the certain knowledge that their husbands are also unfaithful, for there is no competing with
the sea in a man’s affections, since she is both mother and mistress, and she will wash his corpse
also, in time to come, wash it to coral and ivory and pearls.
So it was to Scaithe’s Ebb that Lord Primus of Stormhold came one night, all dressed in black
with a beard as thick and serious as one of the storks’ nests in the town’s chimneys. He came in a
carriage drawn by four black horses and he took a room in the Seaman’s Rest on Crook Street.
He was considered most peculiar in his needs and requests, for he brought his own food and
drink into his rooms, and kept it locked in a wooden chest, which he would only open to take
himself an apple, or a wedge of cheese, or a cup of pepper-wine. His was the topmost room in the
Seaman’s Rest, a high and spindly building, built on a rocky outcrop to facilitate smuggling.
He bribed a number of the local street urchins to report to him the moment they saw any fellow
they did not know come to town, by land or sea; in particular, they were to look for a very tall,
angular, dark-haired fellow, with a thin hungry face, and blank eyes.
“Primus is certainly learning caution,” said Secundus to his five other dead brothers.
“Well, you know what they say,” whispered Quintus, in the wistful tones of the dead, which
sounded, on that day, like the lapping of distant waves upon the shingle, “a man who is tired of
looking over his shoulder for Septimus is tired of life.”
In the mornings, Primus would talk to the sea captains with ships in Scaithe’s Ebb, buying them
grog liberally, but neither drinking nor eating with them. In the afternoon he would inspect the
ships in the docks.
Soon the gossips of Scaithe’s Ebb (and there were many) had the gist and juice of it all: the
bearded gentleman was to be taking ship to the East. And this tale was soon chased by another,
that he would be sailing out on the Heart of a Dream under Captain Yann, a black-trimmed ship
with its decks painted crimson red, of more or less savory reputation (by which I mean that it was
generally held that she kept her piracies for distant waters) and this would be happening as soon as
he gave the word.
“Good master!” said a street urchin to Lord Primus. “There’s a man in town, come by land. He
lodges with Mistress Pettier. He is thin and crowlike, and I saw him in the Ocean’s Roar, buying
grog for every man in the room. He says he is a distressed seafaring man, seeking a berth.”
Primus patted the boy’s filthy head and handed him a coin. Then he returned to his
preparations, and that afternoon it was announced that the Heart of a Dream would leave harbor
in three short days.
The day before the Heart of a Dream was to set sail, Primus was seen to sell his coach and four
horses to the stableman on
Wardle Street, after which he walked down to the quay, dispensing small coins to the urchins.
He entered his cabin in the Heart of a Dream and gave strict orders that none was to disturb him,
for any reason, good or bad, until they were at least a week out of port.
That evening an unfortunate accident befell an able seaman who had crewed the rigging on the
Heart of a Dream. He fell, when drunk, on the slippery cobblestones of Revenue Street, and broke
his hip. Luckily there was a replacement at the ready: the very sailor with whom he had been
drinking that evening, and to whom the injured man had been persuaded to demonstrate a
particularly complicated hornpipe step on the wet cobbles. And this sailor, tall, dark and crowlike,
marked his ship’s papers with a circle that night and was on deck at dawn when the ship sailed out
of the harbor, in the morning mist. The Heart of a Dream sailed east.
Lord Primus of Stormhold, his beard freshly shaven, watched it sail from the cliff top until it
was lost to view. Then he walked down to Wardle Street, where he returned the stableman’s
money and something more besides, and he rode off on the coast road toward the west, in a dark
coach pulled by four black horses.
It was an obvious solution. After all, the unicorn had been ambling hugely behind them for most
of the morning, occasionally nudging the star’s shoulder with its big forehead. The wounds on its
dappled flanks, which had blossomed like red flowers under the lion’s claws the day before, were
now dried to brown and scabbed over.
The star limped and hobbled and stumbled, and Tristran walked beside her, cold chain binding
wrist to wrist.
On the one hand, Tristran felt there was something almost sacrilegious about the idea of riding
the unicorn: it was not a horse, did not subscribe to any of the ancient pacts between Man and
Horse. There was a wildness in its black eyes, and a twisting spring to its step which was dangerous
and untamed. On the other hand, Tristran had begun to feel, in a way that he could not articulate,
that the unicorn cared about the star, and wished to help her. So he said, “Look, I know all that
stuff about frustrating my plans every step of the way, but if the unicorn is willing, perhaps it
would carry you on its back, for a little way.”
The star said nothing.
“Well?”
She shrugged.
Tristran turned to the unicorn, stared into its pool-black eyes. “Can you understand me?” he
asked. It said nothing. He had hoped it would nod its head or stamp a hoof, like a trained horse he
had once seen on the village green when he was younger. But it simply stared. “Will you carry the
lady? Please?”
The beast said not a word, nor did it nod or stamp. But it walked to the star, and it knelt down
at her feet.
Tristran helped the star onto the unicorn’s back. She grasped its tangled mane with both hands
and sat sidesaddle upon it, her broken leg sticking out. And that was how they traveled for some
hours.
Tristran walked along beside them, carrying her crutch over his shoulder, with his bag dangling
from the end. He found it as hard to travel with the star riding the unicorn as it had been before.
Then he had been forced to walk slowly, trying to keep pace with the star’s limping hobble—now
