he was hurrying to keep up with the unicorn, nervous lest the unicorn should get too far ahead and
the chain that linked them both should pull the star from the beast’s back. His stomach rumbled,
as he walked. He was painfully aware how hungry he was; soon Tristran began to think of himself
as nothing more than hunger, thinly surrounded by flesh, and, as fast as he could, walking,
walking...
He stumbled and knew that he was going to fall.
“Please, stop,” he gasped.
The unicorn slowed, and stopped. The star looked down at him. Then she made a face, and
shook her head. “You had better come up here, too,” she said. “If the unicorn will let you.
Otherwise you’ll just faint or something, and drag me onto the ground with you. And we need to go
somewhere so that you can get food.”
Tristran nodded, gratefully.
The unicorn appeared to offer no opposition, waiting, passively, so Tristran attempted to
clamber up onto it. It was like climbing a sheer wall, and as fruitless. Eventually Tristran led the
animal over to a beech tree that had been uprooted several years before by a storm, or a high
wind, or an irritable giant, and, holding his bag and the star’s crutch, he scrambled up the roots
onto the trunk, and from there onto the back of the unicorn.
“There is a village on the other side of that hill,” said Tris-tran. “I expect that we can find
something to eat when we get there.” He patted the unicorn’s flanks with his free hand. The beast
began to walk. Tristran moved his hand to the star’s waist, to steady himself. He could feel the
silken texture of her thin dress, and beneath that, the thick chain of the topaz about her waist.
Riding a unicorn was not like riding a horse: it did not move like a horse; it was a wilder ride,
and a stranger one. The unicorn waited until Tristran and the star were comfortable upon its back,
and then, slowly and easily, it began to put on speed.
The trees surged and leapt past them. The star leaned forward, her fingers tangled into the
unicorn’s mane; Tristran—his hunger forgotten in his fear—gripped the sides of the unicorn with his
knees, and simply prayed that he would not be knocked to the ground by a stray branch. Soon he
found he was beginning to enjoy the experience. There is something about riding a unicorn, for
those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating and intoxicating and
fine.
The sun was setting when they reached the outskirts of the village. In a rolling meadow,
beneath an oak tree, the unicorn came to a skittish halt and would go no further. Tristran dis-
mounted, and landed with a bump on the grass of the meadow. His rump felt sore, but, with the
star looking down at him, uncomplaining, he dared not rub it.
“Are you hungry?” he asked the star.
She said nothing.
“Look,” he said, “I’m starving. Perfectly famished. I don’t know if you—if stars—eat, or what
they eat. But I won’t have you starving yourself.” He looked up at her, questioning. She stared
down at him, first impassively, then, in a trice, her blue eyes filled with tears. She raised a hand to
her face and wiped away the tears, leaving a smudge of mud on her cheeks.
“We eat only darkness,” she said, “and we drink only light. So I’m nuh-not hungry. I’m lonely
and scared and cold and muh-miserable and cuh-captured but I’m nuh-not hungry.”
“Don’t cry,” said Tristran. “Look, I’ll go into the village and get some food. You just wait here.
The unicorn will protect you, if anyone comes.” He reached up and gently lifted her down from the
unicorn’s back. The unicorn shook its mane, then began to crop the grass of the meadow, content-
edly.
The star sniffed, “Wait here?” she asked, holding up the chain that joined them.
“Oh,” said Tristran. “Give me your hand.”
She reached her hand out to him. He fumbled with the chain to undo it, but it would not undo.
“Hmm,” said Tristran. He tugged at the chain around his own wrist, but it, too, held fast. “It
looks,” he said, “as if I’m as tied to you as you are to me.”
The star threw her hair back, closed her eyes, and sighed deeply. And then, opening her eyes,
once again self-possessed, she said, “Perhaps there’s a magic word or something.”
“I don’t know any magic words,” said Tristran. He held the chain up. It glittered red and purple
in the light of the setting sun. “Please?” he said. There was a ripple in the fabric of the chain, and
he slid his hand out of it.
“Here you go,” he said, passing the star the other end of the chain that had bound her. “I’ll try
not to be too long. And if any of the fair folk sing their silly songs at you, for heaven’s sake, don’t
throw your crutch at them. They’ll only steal it.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“I’ll have to trust you, on your honor as a star, not to run away,” he said.
She touched her splinted leg. “I will do no running for quite some time,” she said, pointedly.
And with that Tristran had to content himself.
He walked the last half a mile into the village. It had no inn, being far off the beaten track for
travelers, but the portly old woman who explained this to him then insisted he accompany her to
her cottage, where she pressed upon him a wooden bowlful of barley porridge with carrots in it,
and a mug of small beer. He exchanged his cambric handkerchief for a bottle of elderflower
cordial, a round of green cheese and a number of unfamiliar fruits: they were soft and fuzzy, like
apricots, but were the purple-blue of grapes, and they smelled a little like ripe pears; also the
woman gave him a small bale of hay, for the unicorn.
He walked back to the meadow where he had left them, munching on a piece of the fruit,
which was juicy, and chewy and quite sweet. He wondered if the star would like to try one,
whether she would like it if she did. He hoped that she would be pleased with what he had
brought her.
At first, Tristran thought that he must have made a mistake, and that he had lost his way in the
moonlight. No: that was the same oak tree, the one beneath which the star had been sitting.
“Hello?” he called. Glow-worms and fireflies glittered green and yellow in the hedgerows and in
the branches of trees. There came no reply, and Tristran felt a sick, stupid feeling in the pit of his
stomach. “Hello?” he called. He stopped calling, then, because there was no one to answer.
He dropped the bale of hay, and then he kicked it.
She was to the southwest of him, moving faster than he could walk. He followed after her in the
bright moonlight. Inside, he felt numbed and foolish; stung by a pang of guilt and shame and
regret. He should not have loosed her chain, he should have tied it to a tree; he should have forced
the star to go with him into the village. This went through his head as he walked; but another voice
spoke to him also, pointing out that if he had not unchained her then, he would have done it
sometime soon, and she would have run from him then.
He wondered if he would ever see the star again, and he stumbled over roots as the way led
him between old trees, into the deep woods. The moonlight slowly vanished beneath the thick
canopy of leaves, and after stumbling vainly in the dark for a short while, he laid himself down
beneath a tree, rested his head on his bag, and closed his eyes, and felt sorry for himself until he
fell asleep.
On a rocky mountain pass, on the southernmost slopes of Mount Belly, the witch-queen reined
in her goat-drawn chariot and stopped and sniffed the chilly air.
The myriad stars hung cold in the sky above her.
Her red, red lips curved up into a smile of such beauty, such brilliance, such pure and perfect
happiness that it would have frozen your blood in your veins to have seen it. “There,” she said.
“She is coming to me.”
And the wind of the mountain pass howled about her triumphantly, as if in answer.
Primus sat beside the embers of his fire and he shivered beneath his thick black robe. One of
the black stallions, waking or dreaming, whinnied and snorted, and then rested once more.
Primus’s face felt strangely cold; he missed his thick beard. With a stick he pushed a clay ball from
the embers. He spat on his hands, then he split open the hot clay and smelled the sweet flesh of
the hedgehog, which had cooked, slowly, in the embers, as he had slept.
He ate his breakfast meticulously, spitting the tiny bones into the fire circle once he had
chewed the meat from them.
He washed the hedgehog down with a lump of hard cheese and a slightly vinegary white wine.
Once he had eaten, he wiped his hands upon his robe and then he cast the runes to find the
topaz stone which conferred the lordship of the crag towns and the vast estates of the Stormhold.
He cast them, then he stared, puzzled, at the small, square, red granite tiles. He picked them up
once more, shook them in his long-fingered hands, dropped them onto the ground and stared at
them again. Then Primus spat into the embers, which hissed lazily. He swept the tiles up and
dropped them into the pouch at his belt.
“It is moving faster, further,” said Primus to himself.
He pissed on the embers of the fire, for he was in wild country, and there were bandits and
hobgoblins and worse in those lands, and he had no desire to alert them to his presence. Then, he
hitched the horses to the carriage and climbed into the driver’s seat, and drove them toward the
forest, to the west, and to the mountain range beyond.
The girl held tight to the unicorn’s neck as it tumbled headlong through the dark forest.
There was no moonlight between the trees, but the unicorn glimmered and shone with pale
light, like the moon, while the girl herself glittered and glowed as if she trailed a dust of lights.
And, as she passed through the trees, it might have appeared to a distant observer that she seemed
to twinkle, on and off and off and on, like a tiny star.
Chapter
Six
What the Tree Said
Tristran Thorn was dreaming.
He was in an apple tree, staring through a window at Victoria Forester, who was getting
undressed. As she removed her dress, revealing a healthy expanse of petticoat, Tristran felt the
branch begin to give way beneath his feet, and then he was tumbling down through the air in the
moonlight...
He was falling into the moon.
And the moon was talking to him: Please, whispered the moon, in a voice that reminded him a
little of his mother’s, protect her. Protect my child. They mean her harm. I have done all I can.
And the moon would have told him more, and perhaps she did, but the moon became the glimmer
of moonlight on water far below him, and then he became aware of a small spider walking across
his face, and of a crick in his neck, and he raised a hand and brushed the spider carefully from his
cheek, and the morning sun was in his eyes And the world was gold and green.
“You were dreaming,” said a young woman’s voice from somewhere above him. The voice was
gentle, and oddly accented. He could hear leaves rustle in the copper beech tree overhead.
“Yes,” he said, to whoever was in the tree, “I was dreaming.”
“I had a dream last night, too,” said the voice. “In my dream, I looked up and I could see the
whole forest, and something huge was moving through it. And it got closer, and closer, and I knew
what it was.” She stopped talking abruptly.
“What was it?” asked Tristran.
“Everything,” she said. “It was Pan. When I was very young, somebody—maybe it was a squirrel,
they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie—told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not
owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall all around it—”
“Or cut down the trees,” said Tristran, helpfully. There was a silence. He wondered where the
girl had gone. “Hello?” he said. “Hello?”
There was another rustle of leaves from above him.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” she said.
“Sorry,” said Tristran, not entirely sure what he was apologizing for. “But you were telling me
that Pan owned the forest...”
“Of course he does,” said the voice. “It’s not hard to own something. Or everything. You just
have to know that it’s yours, and then be willing to let it go. Pan owns this forest, like that. And in
my dream he came over to me. You were in my dream, too, leading a sad girl by a chain. She was a
very sad, sad girl. Pan told me to help you.”
“Me?”
“And it made me feel all warm and tingly and squishy inside, from the tips of my leaves to the
end of my roots. So I woke up, and there you were, fast asleep with your head by my trunk, snoring
like a pig-wiggin.”
Tristran scratched his nose. He stopped looking for a woman in the branches of the copper
beech tree above him, and looked instead at the tree itself. “You are a tree,” said Tristran,
putting his thoughts into words.
“I didn’t always used to be a tree,” said the voice in the rustling of the copper beech leaves. “A
magician made me a tree.”
“What were you before?” asked Tristran.
“Do you think he likes me?”
“Who?”
“Pan. If you were the Lord of the Forest, you wouldn’t give a job to someone, tell them to give
all possible aid and succor, unless you liked them, would you?”
“Well...” said Tristran, but before he had decided on the politic answer, the tree had already
said, “A nymph. I was a wood-nymph. But I got pursued by a prince, not a nice prince, the other
kind, and, well, you’d think a prince, even the wrong kind, would understand about boundaries,
wouldn’t you?”
“You would?”
“Exactly what I think. But he didn’t, so I did a bit of invoking while I was running, and—ba-
boom—tree. What do you think?”
“Well,” said Tristran. “I do not know what you were like as a wood-nymph, madam, but you are
a magnificent tree.”
The tree made no immediate reply, but her leaves rustled prettily. “I was pretty cute as a
nymph, too,” she admitted, coyly.
“What kind of aid and succor, exactly?” asked Tristran. “Not that I am grumbling. I mean, right
now I need all the aid and succor I can get. But a tree is not necessarily the obvious place to look
for it. You cannot come with me, or feed me, or bring the star here, or send us back to Wall to see
