tending to the horses; he has sworn no such oath, and I am sure that if you could send him a mug of
burnt ale it would help take the chill from his bones... ?”
The pot-maid bobbed a curtsey, and she scuttled back to the kitchens.
“So, mine host,” said Primus to the white-bearded innkeeper, “how are your beds here at the
back of beyond? Have you straw mattresses? Are there fires in the bedrooms? And I note with
increasing pleasure that there is a bathtub in front of your fireplace—if there’s a fresh copper of
steaming water, I shall have a bath later. But I shall pay you no more than a small silver coin for it,
mind.”
The innkeeper looked to his wife, who said, “Our beds are STARDU 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.
Chapter
Eight
Which Treats of Castles in the Air, and Other Matters
It 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 Storm-hold,” said Tertius.
“There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the
numerical value of un-hatched 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.
They 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.” STARDU
“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.”
