His companion grunted. He wiped the rain from his eyes and mouth with a cold wet hand, and
then he said, “You’re a fool, boy. But I appreciate it.” He transferred the reins to his left hand,
and extended his right hand. “I am known as Primus. The Lord Primus.”
“Tristran. Tristran Thorn,” he said, feeling that the man had, somehow, earned the right to
know his true name.
They shook hands. The rain fell harder. The horses slowed to the slowest walk as the path
became a stream, and the heavy rain cut off all vision as effectively as the thickest fog.
“There is a man,” said the Lord Primus, shouting to be heard now over the rain, the wind
whipping the words from his lips. “He is tall, looks a little like me, but thinner, more crowlike. His
eyes seem innocent and dull, but there is death in them. He is called Septimus, for he was the
seventh boy-child our father spawned. If ever you see him, run and hide. His business is with me.
But he will not hesitate to kill you if you stand in his way, or, perhaps, to make you his instrument
with which to kill me.”
A wild gust of wind drove a tankardful of rainwater down Tristran’s neck.
“He sounds a most dangerous man,” said Tristran.
“He is the most dangerous man you will ever meet.”
Tristran peered silently into the rain, and the gathering darkness. It was becoming harder to see
the road. Primus spoke again, saying, “If you ask me, there is something unnatural about this
storm.”
“Unnatural?”
“Or more-than-natural; super-natural, if you will. I hope there is an inn along the way. The
horses need a rest, and I could do with a dry bed and a warm fire. And a good meal.”
Tristran shouted his agreement. They sat together, getting wetter. Tristran thought about the
star and the unicorn. She would be cold by now, and wet. He worried about her broken leg, and
thought about how saddle sore she must be. It was all his fault. He felt wretched.
“I am the most miserable person who ever lived,” he said to the Lord Primus, when they
stopped to feed the horses feedbags of damp oats.
“You are young, and in love,” said Primus. “Every young man in your position is the most
miserable young man who ever lived.”
Tristran wondered how Lord Primus could have divined the existence of Victoria Forester. He
imagined himself recounting his adventures to her, back at Wall, in front of a blazing parlor fire;
but somehow all of his tales seemed a little flat.
Dusk seemed to have started at dawn that day, and now the sky was almost black. Their path
continued to climb. The rain would let up for moments, and then redouble, falling harder than
ever.
“Is that a light over there?” asked Tristran.
“I cannot see anything. Maybe it was fool’s fire, or lightning ...” said Primus. And then they
gained a bend in the road, and he said, “I was wrong. That is a light. Well-spotted, young ‘un. But
there are bad things in these mountains. We must only hope that they are friendly.”
The horses put on a fresh burst of speed, now that their destination was in sight. A flash of
lightning revealed the mountains, rising steeply up on either side of them.
“We’re in luck!” said Primus, his bass voice booming like thunder. “It’s an inn!”
Chapter
Seven
“At the Sign of the Chariot”
The star had been soaked to the skin when she arrived at the pass, sad and shivering. She was
worried about the unicorn; they had found no food for it on the last day’s journey, as the grasses
and ferns of the forest had been replaced by grey rocks and stunted thorn bushes. The unicorn’s
unshod hooves were not meant for the rocky road, nor was its back meant to carry riders, and its
pace became slower and slower.
As they traveled, the star cursed the day she had fallen to this wet, unfriendly world. It had
seemed so gentle and welcoming when seen from high in the sky. That was before. Now, she hated
everything about it, except the unicorn; and, saddle sore and uncomfortable, she would have even
happily spent time away from the unicorn.
After a day of pelting rain, the lights of the inn were the most welcoming sight she had seen in
her time on the Earth. “Watch your step, watch your step,” pattered the raindrops on the stone.
The unicorn stopped, fifty yards from the inn, and would approach no closer. The door to the inn
was opened, flooding the grey world with warm yellow light.
“Hello there, dearie,” called a welcoming voice from the open doorway.
The star stroked the unicorn’s wet neck and spoke softly to the animal, but it made no move,
stood there frozen in the light of the inn like a pale ghost.
“Will you be coming in, dearie? Or will you be stopping out there in the rain?” The woman’s
friendly voice warmed the star, soothed her: just the right mixture of practicality and concern.
“We can get you food, if it’s food you’re after. There’s a fire blazing in the hearth, and enough hot
water for a tub that’ll melt the chill from your bones.”
“I... I will need help coming in...” said the star. “My leg...”
“Ach, poor mite,” said the woman. “I’ll have my husband Billy carry you inside. There’s hay and
fresh water in the stables, for your beast.”
The unicorn looked about wildly as the woman approached. “There, there, dearie. I won’t be
coming too close. After all, it’s been many a long year since I was maiden enough to touch a
unicorn, and many a long year since such a one was seen in these parts ...”
Nervously, the unicorn followed the woman into the stables, keeping its distance from her. It
walked along the stable to the furthest stall, where it lay down in the dry straw, and the star
scrambled off its back, dripping and miserable.
Billy turned out to be a white-bearded, gruff sort of fellow. He said little, but carried the star
into the inn, and put her down on a three-legged stool in front of a crackling log fire.
“Poor dear,” said the innkeeper’s wife, who had followed them inside. “Look at you, wet as a
water-nixie, look at the puddle under you, and your lovely dress, oh the state of it, you must be
soaked to the bone...” And, sending her husband away, she helped the star remove her dripping
wet dress, which she placed on a hook near the fire, where each drip hissed and fizzed when it fell
to the hot bricks of the hearth.
There was a tin tub in front of the fire, and the innkeeper’s wife put up a paper screen around
it. “How d’you like your baths?” she asked, solicitously, “warm, hot, or boil-a-lobster?”
“I do not know,” said the star, naked but for the topaz-stone on the silver chain about her
waist, her head all in a whirl at the strange turn that events had taken, “for I have never had a
bath before.”
“Never had one?” The innkeeper’s wife looked astonished. “Why, you poor duck; well, we won’t
make it too hot, then. Call me if you need another copperful of water, I’ve got some going over the
kitchen fire; and when you’re done with the bath, I’ll bring you some mulled wine, and some
sweet-roasted turnips.”
And, before the star could protest that she neither ate nor
drank, the woman had bustled off, leaving the star sitting in the tin tub, her broken leg in its
splints sticking out of the water and resting on the three-legged stool. Initially the water was
indeed too hot, but as she became used to the heat she relaxed, and was, for the first time since
she had tumbled from the sky, utterly happy.
“There’s a love,” said the innkeeper’s wife, returning. “How are you feeling now?”
“Much, much better, thank you,” said the star.
“And your heart? How does your heart feel?” asked the woman.
“My heart?” It was a strange question, but the woman seemed genuinely concerned. “It feels
happier. More easy. Less troubled.”
“Good. That’s good. Let us get it burning high and hot within you, eh? Burning bright inside
you.”
“I am sure that under your care my heart shall blaze and burn with happiness,” said the star.
The innkeeper’s wife leaned over and chucked the star under the chin. “There’s a pet, such a
duck it is, the fine things it says.” And the woman smiled indulgently, and ran a hand through her
grey-streaked hair. She hung a thick toweling robe on the edge of the screen. “This is for you to
wear when you are done with your bath—oh no, not to hurry, ducks—it’ll be nice and warm for you,
and your pretty dress will still be damp for a while now. Just give us a shout when you want to hop
out of the tub and I’ll come and give you a hand.” Then she leaned over, and touched the star’s
chest, between her breasts, with one cold finger. And she smiled. “A good strong heart,” she said.
There were good people on this benighted world, the star decided, warmed and contented.
Outside the rain and the wind pattered and howled through the mountain pass, but in the inn, at
the Sign of the Chariot, all was warm and comfortable.
Eventually the innkeeper’s wife, assisted by her dull-faced daughter, helped the star out of her
bath. The firelight glinted on the topaz set in silver which the star wore on a knotted silver chain
about her waist, until the topaz, and the star’s body, vanished beneath the thick toweling of her
robe.
“Now my sweet,” said the innkeeper’s wife, “you come over here and make yourself
comfortable.” She helped the star over to a long wooden table, at the head of which were laid a
cleaver and a knife, both of them with hilts of bone and blades of dark glass. Leaning and limping,
the star made it to the table, and sat down at the bench beside it.
Outside there was a gust of wind, and the fire flared up green and blue and white. Then a deep
voice boomed from outside the inn, over the howl of the elements. “Service! Food! Wine! Fire!
Where is the stableboy?”
Billy the innkeeper and his daughter made no move, but only looked at the woman in the red
dress as if for instructions. She pursed her lips. And then she said, “It can wait. For a little. After
all, you are not going anywhere, my dearie?” This last to the star. “Not on that leg of yours, and
not until the rain lets up, eh?”
“I appreciate your hospitality more than I can say,” said the star, simply and with feeling.
“Of course you do,” said the woman in the red dress, and her fidgeting fingers brushed the
black knives impatiently, as if there were something she could not wait to be doing. “Plenty of
time when these nuisances have gone, eh?”
The light of the inn was the happiest and best thing Tristran had seen on his journey through
Faerie. While Primus bellowed for assistance, Tristran unhitched the exhausted horses, and led
them one by one into the stables on the side of the inn. There was a white horse asleep in the
furthest stall, but Tristran was too busy to pause to inspect it.
He knew—somewhere in the odd place inside him that knew directions and distances of things
he had never seen and the places he had never been—that the star was close at hand, and this
comforted him, and made him nervous. He knew that the horses were more exhausted and more
hungry than he was. His dinner—and thus, he suspected, his confrontation with the star—could
wait. ‘Til groom the horses,” he told Primus. “They’ll catch a chill otherwise.”
The tall man rested his huge hand on Tristran’s shoulder. “Good lad. I’ll send a pot-boy out with
some burnt ale for you.”
Tristran thought about the star as he brushed down the horses and picked out their hooves.
What would he say? What would she say? He was brushing the last of the horses when a blank-
looking pot-girl came out to him with a tankard of steaming wine.
“Put it down over there,” he told her. “I’ll drink it with goodwill as soon as my hands are free.”
She put it down on the top of a tack box, and went out, without saying anything. It was then that
the horse in the end stall got to its feet and began to kick against the door.
“Settle down, there,” called Tristran, “settle down, fellow, and I’ll see if I cannot find warm
oats and bran for all of you.” There was a large stone in the stallion’s front inside hoof, and
Tristran removed it with care. Madam, he had decided he would say, please accept my heartfelt
and most humble apologies. Sir, the star would say in her turn, that I shall do with all my heart.
Now, let us go to your village, where you shall present me to your true love, as a token of your
devotion to her...
His ruminations were interrupted by an enormous clattering, as a huge white horse—but, he
realized immediately, it was not a horse—kicked down the door of its stall, and came charging,
desperately, toward him, its horn lowered.
Tristran threw himself onto the straw on the stable floor, his arms about his head.
Moments passed. He raised his head. The unicorn had stopped in front of the tankard, was
lowering its horn into the mulled wine.
Awkwardly, Tristran got to his feet. The wine was steaming and bubbling, and it came to
Tristran then—the information surfacing from some long-forgotten fairy tale or piece of children’s
lore—that a unicorn’s horn was proof against... “Poison?” he whispered, and the unicorn raised its
head, and stared into Tristran’s eyes, and Tristran knew that it was the truth. His heart was
pounding hard in his chest. Around the inn the wind was screaming like a witch in her madness.
Tristran ran to the stable door, then he stopped, and thought. He fumbled in his tunic pocket,
finding the lump of wax, which was all that remained of his candle, with a dried copper leaf
sticking to it. He peeled the leaf away from the wax with care. Then he raised the leaf to his ear,
and listened to what it told him.
Wine, milord?” asked the middle-aged woman in the long red dress, when Primus had entered
the inn.
“I am afraid not,” he said. “I have a personal superstition that, until the day I see my brother’s
corpse cold on the ground before me, I shall drink only my own wine, and eat only food I have
obtained and prepared myself. This I shall do here, if you have no objection. I shall, of course, pay
you as if it were your own wine I was drinking. If I might trouble you to put this bottle of mine near
the fire to take the chill from it? Now, I have a companion on my journey, a young man who is at-
