“As you say.”
Tristran thought for a moment. He certainly did not trust the old woman. “I wish you to swear
that we shall arrive in Wall in the same manner and condition and state that we are in now, and
that you will give us board and lodging upon the way.”
The old woman clucked, then nodded. She clambered down from the caravan once more, and
hawked, then spat into the dust. She pointed to the glob of spittle. “Now you,” she said. Tristran
spat next to it. With her foot she rubbed both wet patches, so they conjoined. “There,” she said.
“A bargain’s a bargain. Give me the flower.”
The greed and hunger were so obvious in her face that Tristran was now certain he could have
made a better deal, but he gave the old woman his father’s flower. As she took it from him, her
face broke into a gap-toothed grin. “Why, I do think that this is the superior of the one that
damnable child gave away almost twenty years gone. Now, tell me young man,” she asked, looking
up at Tristran with her sharp old eyes, “do you know what manner of thing you have been wearing
in your buttonhole?”
“It is a flower. A glass flower.”
The old woman laughed so hard and so suddenly that Tristran thought that she was choking. “It
is a frozen charm,” she said. “A thing of power. Something like this can perform wonders and
miracles in the right hands. Watch.” She held the snowdrop above her head then brought it slowly
down, so it brushed Tristran’s forehead.
For but a heartbeat he felt most peculiar, as if thick, black treacle were running through his
veins in place of blood; then the shape of the world changed. Everything became huge and
towering. It seemed as if the old woman herself was now a giantess, and his vision was blurred and
confused.
Two huge hands came down and picked him up, gently. “ ‘Tain’t the biggest of caravans,” said
Madame Semele, her voice a low, slow liquid boom. “And I shall keep to the letter of my oath, for
you shall not be harmed, and you shall be boarded and lodged on your journey to Wall.” And then
she dropped the dormouse into the pocket of her apron and she clambered onto the caravan.
“And what do you propose to do to me?” asked Yvaine, but she was not entirely surprised when
the woman did not reply. She followed the old woman into the dark interior of the caravan. There
was but one room; along one wall was a large showcase made of leather and pine, with a hundred
pigeonholes in it, and it was in one of these pigeonholes, in a bed of soft thistledown, that the old
woman placed the snowdrop. Along the other wall was a small bed, with a window above it, and a
large cupboard.
Madame Semele bent down and pulled a wooden cage from the cluttered space beneath her
bed, and she took the blinking dormouse from her pocket and placed it into the cage. Then she
took a handful of nuts and berries and seeds from a wooden bowl and placed them inside the cage,
which she hung from a chain in the middle of the caravan.
“There we go,” she said. “Board and lodging.” STARDUS
Yvaine had watched all this with curiosity from her seat on the old woman’s bed. “Would I be
correct,” she asked politely, “in concluding from the evidence to hand (to wit, that you have not
looked at me, or if you have your eyes have slipped over me, that you have not spoken a word to
me, and that you have changed my companion into a small animal with no such provision for
myself) that you can neither see me nor hear me?”
The witch made no reply. She walked up to the driver’s seat, sat down and took up the reins.
The exotic bird hopped up beside her and it chirruped, once, curiously.
“Of course I have kept my word—to the letter,” said the old woman, as if in reply. “He shall be
transformed back at the market meadow, so shall regain his own form before he comes to Wall.
And after I have turned him back, I shall make you human again, for I still have to find a better
servant than you are, silly slut. I could not have been doing with him underfoot all the livelong day,
poking and prying and asking questions, and I’d’ve had to’ve fed him into the bargain, more than
nuts and seeds.” She hugged herself tightly, and swayed back and forth. “Oh, you’ll have to get up
pretty early in the morning to put one past me. And I do believe that that bumpkin’s flower was
even finer than the one you lost to me, all those years ago.”
She clicked her tongue, and shook the reins, and the mules began to amble down the forest
track.
While the witch drove, Yvaine rested upon her musty bed. The caravan clacked and lurched its
way through the forest. When it stopped, she would awake, and rise. While the witch slept Yvaine
would sit on the roof of the caravan and look up at the stars. Sometimes the witch’s bird would sit
with her and then she would pet it and make a fuss of it, for it was good to have something about
that acknowledged her existence. But when the witch was about, the bird ignored her utterly.
Yvaine also cared for the dormouse, who spent most of his time fast asleep, curled up with his
head between his paws. When the witch was off gathering firewood or fetching water, Yvaine
would open up his cage, and stroke him, and talk to him, and, on several occasions, she sang to
him, although she could not tell whether anything of Tristran remained in the dormouse, who
stared up at her with placid, sleepy eyes, like droplets of black ink, and whose fur was softer than
down.
Her hip did not pain her, now that she was not walking every day, and her feet did not hurt her
so much. She would always limp, she knew, for Tristran was no surgeon when it came to mending a
broken bone although he had done the best he could. Meggot had acknowledged as much.
When, as happened infrequently, they encountered other people, the star did her best to stay
out of sight. However, she soon learned that, even should someone talk to her within the witch’s
hearing—should someone, as once a woodcutter did, point to her, and ask Madame Semele about
her—the witch never seemed able to perceive Yvaine’s presence, or even to hear anything
pertaining to her existence.
And so the weeks passed, in a rattling, bone-jarring sort of a way, in the witch’s caravan, for
the witch, and the bird, and the dormouse, and the fallen star.
Chapter
Nine
Which Deals Chiefly With the Events
At Diggory’s Dyke
Diggory’s Dyke was a deep cut between two chalk Downs—high, green hills, where a thin layer
of green grass and reddish earth covered the chalk, and there was scarcely soil enough for trees.
The Dyke looked, from a distance, like a white chalk gash on a green velvet board. Local legend
had it that the cut was dug, in a day and a night, by one Diggory, using a spade that had once been
a sword blade before Way-land Smith had melted it down and beaten it out, on his journey into
Faerie from Wall. There were those who said the sword had once been Flamberge, and others, that
it was once the sword Balmung; but there were none who claimed to know just who Diggory had
been, and it might all have been stuff and nonsense. Anyway, the path to Wall went through Dig-
gory’s Dyke, and any foot-traveler or any person going by any manner of wheeled vehicle went
through the Dyke, where the chalk rose on either side of you like thick white walls, and the Downs
rose up above them like the green pillows of a giant’s bed.
In the middle of the Dyke, beside the path, was what appeared at first glance to be little more
than a heaped pile of sticks and twigs. A closer inspection would have revealed it to be something
in nature partway between a small shed and a large wooden teepee, with a hole in the roof
through which grey smoke occasionally could be seen to trickle out.
The man in black had been giving the pile of sticks as close an inspection as he could for two
days now, from the top of the Downs far above and, when he dared chance it, from closer. The
hut, he had established, was inhabited by a woman of advanced years. She had no companions, and
no obvious occupation, apart from that of stopping each and every lone traveler and each
conveyance that passed through the Dyke, and passing the time of day.
She seemed harmless enough, but Septimus had not become the only surviving male member of
his immediate family by trusting appearances, and this old woman had, he was certain of it, slit
Primus’s throat.
The obligations of revenge demanded a life for a life; they did not specify any way that the life
should be taken. Now, by temperament, Septimus was one of nature’s poisoners. Blades and blows
and booby traps were well enough in their way, but a vial of clear liquid, any trace of taste or odor
gone when it was admixtured with food, that was Septimus’s metier.
Unfortunately the old woman seemed to take no food she STABJ did not gather or trap herself,
and while he contemplated leaving a steaming pie at the door to her house, made of ripe apples
and lethal baneberries, he dismissed it soon enough as impractical. He pondered rolling a chalk
boulder down from the hills above her, dropping it onto her little house; but he could not be
certain that he would hit her with it. He wished he was more of a magician—he had some of the
locating ability that ran, patchily, in his family line, and a few minor magics he had learned or
stolen over the years, but nothing that would be of use to him now, when he needed to invoke
floods or hurricanes or lightning strikes. So Septimus observed his victim-to-be as a cat watches a
mouse hole, hour after hour, by night and by day.
It was past the mid-hour of the night, and was quite moonless and dark, when Septimus finally
crept to the door of the house of sticks, with a firepot in one hand and a book of romantic poetry
and a blackbird’s nest, into which he had placed several fircones, in the other. Hanging from his
belt was a club of oak-wood, its head studded with brass nails. He listened at the door, but could
hear nothing but a rhythmic breathing, and, once in a while, a sleeping grunt. His eyes were used
to the darkness, and the house stood out against the white chalk of the Dyke. He crept around to
the side of the building, where he could keep the door in sight.
First he tore the pages from the book of poems, and crumpled each poem into a ball or a paper
twist, which he pushed into the sticks of the shack’s wall, at ground level. On top of the poems he
placed the fircones. Next, he opened the firepot, and with his knife he fished a handful of waxed
linen scraps from the lid, dipped them into the glowing charcoal of the pot and, when they were
burning well, he placed them on the paper twists and the cones, and he blew gently on the
flickering yellow flames until the pile caught. He dropped dry twigs from the bird’s nest onto the
little fire, which crackled in the night and began to blossom and grow. The dry sticks of the wall
smoked gently, forcing Septimus to suppress a cough, and then they caught fire, and Septimus
smiled.
Septimus returned to the door of the hut, hefting his wooden club on high. For, he had
reasoned, either the hag will burn with her house, in which case my task is done; or, she will
smell the smoke and wake, affrighted and distracted, and she will run from the house, whereupon
I shall beat her head with my club, staving it in before she can utter a word. And she will be dead,
and I will be revenged.
“It is a fine plan,” said Tertius in the crackling of the dry wood. “And once he has killed her, he
can go on to obtain the Power of Stormhold.”
“We shall see,” said Primus, and his voice was the wail of a distant night bird.
Flames licked at the little wooden house, and grew and blossomed on its sides with a bright
yellow-orange flame. No one came to the door of the hut. Soon, the place was an inferno, and
Septimus was forced to take several steps backwards, from the intensity of the heat. He smiled,
widely and triumphantly, and he lowered his club.
There came a sharp pain to the heel of his foot. He twisted, and saw a small bright-eyed snake,
crimson in the fire’s glow, with its fangs sunk deep into the back of his leather boot. He flung his
club at it, but the little creature pulled back from his heel, and looped, at great speed, away
behind one of the white chalk boulders.
The pain in his heel began to subside. If there was poison in its bite, thought Septimus, the
leather will have taken much of it. I shall bind my leg at the calf, and then I shall remove my
boot, and make a cross-shaped incision in the place where I was bitten, and I shall suck out the
serpent’s venom. So thinking, he sat down upon a chalk boulder in the fire’s light, and he tugged at
his boot. It would not come off. His foot felt numb, and he realized that the foot must be swelling
fast. Then I shall cut the boot off, he thought. He raised his foot to the level of his thigh; for a
moment he thought his world was going dark, and then he saw that the flames, which had
illuminated the Dyke like a bonfire, were gone. He felt chilled to the bone.
“So,” said a voice from behind him, soft as a silken strangling-rope, sweet as a poisoned
lozenge, “you thought that you would warm yourself at the burning of my little cottage. Did you
wait at the door to beat out the flames should they prove not to my liking?”
Septimus would have answered her, but his jaw muscles were clenched, his teeth gritted hard
together. His heart was pounding inside his chest like a small drum, not in its usual steady march
but in a wild, arrhythmic abandon. He could feel every vein and artery in his body threading fire
through his frame, if it was not ice that they pumped: he could not tell.
An old woman stepped into his view. She looked like the woman who had inhabited the wooden
hut, but older, so much older. Septimus tried to blink, to clear his tearing eyes, but he had
forgotten how to blink, and his eyes would not close.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” said the woman. “Attempting arson and violence upon
the person of a poor old lady living upon her own, who would be entirely at the mercy of every
passing vagabond, were it not for the kindness of her little friends.”
And she picked something up from the chalky ground and placed it about her wrist, then she
