walked back into the hut, which was miraculously unburned, or restored, Septimus did not know
which and did not care.
His heart juddered and syncopated inside his chest, and if he could have screamed, he would. It
was dawn before the pain ended and, in six voices, his older brothers welcomed Septimus to their
ranks.
Septimus looked down, one last time, on the twisted, still-warm form he had once inhabited,
and at the expression in its eyes. Then he turned away.
“There are no brothers left to take revenge on her,” he said, in the voice of the morning
curlews, “and it is none of us will ever be Lord of Stormhold. Let us move on.”
And after he had said that, there were not even ghosts in that place.
The sun was high in the sky that day when Ma-dame Semele’s caravan came lumbering through
the chalk cut of Diggory’s Dyke.
Madame Semele noticed the soot-blackened wooden hovel beside the road and, as she
approached closer, the bent old woman in her faded scarlet dress, who waved at her from beside
the path. The woman’s hair was white as snow, her skin was wrinkled, and one eye was blind.
“Good day, sister. What happened to your house?” asked Madame Semele.
“Young people today. One of them thought it would be good sport to fire the house of a poor
old woman who has never harmed a soul. Well, he learned his lesson soon enough.”
“Aye,” said Madame Semele. “They always learn. And are never grateful to us for the lesson.”
“There’s truth for you,” said the woman in the faded scarlet dress. “Now, tell me, dear. Who
rides with you this day?”
“That,” said Madame Semele, haughtily, “is none of your never-mind, and I shall thank you to
keep yourself to yourself.”
“Who rides with you? Tell me truly, or I shall set harpies to tear you limb from limb and hang
your remains from a hook deep beneath the world.”
“And who would you be, to threaten me so?”
The old woman stared up at Madame Semele with one good eye and one milky eye. “I know you,
Ditchwater Sal. None of your damned lip. Who travels with you?
Madame Semele felt the words being torn from her mouth, whether she would say them or no.
“There are the two mules who pull my caravan, myself, a maid-servant I keep in the form of a
large bird, and a young man in the form of a dormouse.”
“Anyone else? Anything else?”
“No one and nothing. I swear it upon the Sisterhood.”
The woman at the side of the road pursed her lips. “Then get away with you, and get along with
you,” she said.
Madame Semele clucked and shook the reins and the mules began to amble on.
In her borrowed bed in the dark interior of the caravan the star slept on, unaware how close she
had come to her doom, nor by how slim a margin she had escaped it.
When they were out of sight of the stick-house and the deathly whiteness of Diggory’s Dyke, the
exotic bird napped up onto its perch, threw back its head and whooped and crowed and sang, until
Madame Semele told it that she would wring its foolish neck if it would not be quiet. And even
then, in the quiet darkness inside the caravan, the pretty bird chuckled and twittered and trilled,
and, once, it even hooted like a little owl.
The sun was already low in the western sky as they approached the town of Wall. The sun
shone in their eyes, half blinding them and turning their world to liquid gold. The sky, the trees,
the bushes, even the path itself was golden in the light of the setting sun.
Madame Semele reined in her mules in the meadow, where her stall would be. She unhitched
the two mules, and led them to the stream, where she hitched them to a tree. They drank deeply
and eagerly.
There were other market-folk and visitors setting up their stalls all over the meadow, putting
up tents and hanging draperies from trees. There was an air of expectation that touched everyone
and everything, like the golden light of the westering sun.
Madame Semele went into the inside of the caravan and unhooked the cage from its chain. She
carried it out into the meadow and put it down on a hillock of grass. She opened the cage door,
and picked out the sleeping dormouse with bony fingers. “Out you come,” she said. The dormouse
rubbed its liquid black eyes with its forepaws, and blinked at the fading daylight.
The witch reached into her apron and produced a glass daffodil. With it she touched Tristran’s
head.
Tristran blinked sleepily, and then he yawned. He ran a hand through his unruly brown hair and
looked down at the witch with fierce anger in his eyes. “Why, you evil old crone—” he began.
“Hush your silly mouth,” said Madame Semele, sharply. “I got you here, safely and soundly, and
in the same condition I found you. I gave you board and I gave you lodging—and if neither of them
were to your liking or expectation, well, what is it to me? Now, be off with you, before I change
you into a wiggling worm and bite off your head, if it is not your tail. Go! Shoo! Shoo!”
Tristran counted to ten, and then, ungraciously, walked away. He stopped a dozen yards away
beside a copse, and waited for the star, who limped down the side of the caravan steps, and came
over to him.
“Are you all right?” he asked, genuinely concerned, as she approached.
“Yes, thank you,” said the star. “She did not ill-use me.
Indeed, I do not believe that she ever knew that I was there at all. Is that not peculiar?”
Madame Semele had the bird in front of her now. She touched its plumed head with her glass
flower, and it flowed and shifted and became a young woman, in appearance not too much older
than Tristran himself, with dark, curling hair and furred, catlike ears. She darted a glance at
Tristran, and there was something about those violet eyes that Tristran found utterly familiar,
although he could not recall where he had seen them before.
“So, that is the bird’s true form,” said Yvaine. “She was a good companion on the road.” And
then the star realized that the silver chain that had kept the bird a captive was still there, now
that the bird had become a woman, for it glinted upon her wrist and ankle, and Yvaine pointed this
out to Tristran.
“Yes,” said Tristran. “I can see. It is awful. But I’m not sure there’s much that we can do about
it.”
They walked together through the meadow, toward the gap in the wall. “We shall visit my
parents first,” said Tristran, “For I have no doubt that they have missed me as I have missed
them”—although, truth to tell, Tristran had scarcely given his parents a second thought on his
journeyings—”and then we shall pay a visit to Victoria Forester, and—” It was with this and that
Tristran closed his mouth. For he could no longer reconcile his old idea of giving the star to Victoria
Forester with his current notion that the star was not a thing to be passed from hand to hand, but a
true person in all respects and no kind of a thing at all. And yet, Victoria Forester was the woman
he loved.
Well and all, he would burn that bridge when he came to it, he decided, and for now he would
take Yvaine into the village, and deal with events as they came. He felt his spirits lift, and his time
as a dormouse had already become nothing more in his head than the remnants of a dream, as if he
had merely taken an afternoon nap in front of the kitchen fire and was now wide awake once
more. He could almost taste in his mouth the memory of Mr. Bromios’s best ale, although he
realized, with a guilty start, he had forgotten the color of Victoria Forester’s eyes.
The sun was huge and red behind the rooftops of Wall when Tristran and Yvaine crossed the
meadow and looked down on the gap in the wall. The star hesitated.
“Do you really want this?” she asked Tristran. “For I have misgivings.”
“Don’t be nervous,” he said. “Although it’s not surprising that you have nerves; my stomach
feels as if I had swallowed a hundred butterflies. You shall feel so much better when you are sitting
in my mother’s parlor, drinking her tea—well, not drinking tea, but there will be tea for you to
sip—why, I swear that for such a guest, and to welcome her boy back home, my mother would
break out the best china,” and his hand sought hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze.
She looked at him, and she smiled, gently and ruefully. “Whither thou goest...” she whispered.
Hand in hand the young man and the fallen star approached the gap in the wall.
Chapter
Ten
Stardust
It has occasionally been remarked upon that it is as easy to overlook something large and
obvious as it is to overlook something small and niggling, and that the large things one overlooks
can often cause problems.
Tristran Thorn approached the gap in the wall, from the Faerie side, for the second time since
his conception eighteen years before, with the star limping beside him. His head was in a whirl
from the scents and the sounds of his native village, and his heart rose within him. He nodded
politely to the guards on the gap as he approached, recognizing them both. The young man shifting
idly from foot to foot, sipping a pint of what Tristran supposed to be Mr. Bromios’s best ale, was
Wystan Pippin, who had once been Tristran’s schoolfellow, although never his friend; while the
older man, sucking irritably upon a pipe, which appeared to have gone out, was none other than
Tristran’s former employer at Monday and Brown’s, Jerome Ambrose Brown, Esquire. The men had
their backs to Tristran and Yvaine, and were resolutely facing the village as if they thought it sinful
to observe the preparations occurring in the meadow behind them.
“Good evening,” said Tristran, politely, “Wystan. Mister Brown.”
The two men started. Wystan spilled his beer down the front of his jacket. Mr. Brown raised his
staff and pointed the end of it at Tristran’s chest, nervously. Wystan Pippin put down his ale,
picked up his staff, and blocked the gap with it.
“Stay where you are!” said Mr. Brown, gesturing with the staff, as if Tristran were a wild beast
that might spring at him at any moment.
Tristran laughed. “Do you not know me?” he asked. “It is me, Tristran Thorn.”
But Mr. Brown, who was, Tristran knew, the senior of the guards, did not lower his staff. He
looked Tristran up and down, from his worn brown boots to his mop of shaggy hair. Then he stared
into Tristran’s sun-browned face, and sniffed, unimpressed. “Even if you are that good-for-nothing
Thorn,” he said, “I see no reason to let either of you people through. We guard the wall, after all.”
Tristran blinked. “I, too, have guarded the wall,” he pointed out. “And there are no rules
about not letting people through from this direction. Only from the village.”
Mr. Brown nodded, slowly. Then he said, as one talks to an idiot, “And if you are Tristran
Thorn—which I’m only conceding for the sake of argument here, for you look nothing like him, and
you talk little enough like him either—in all the years you lived here, how many people came
through the wall from the meadow side?”
“Why, none that ever I knew of,” said Tristran.
Mr. Brown smiled the same smile he had been used to use when he docked Tristran a morning’s
wages for five minutes’ lateness. “Exactly,” he said. “There was no rule against it because it
doesn’t happen. No one comes through from the other side. Not while I’m on duty, any road. Now,
be off with you, before I take my stick to your head.”
Tristran was dumbfounded. “If you think I have gone through, well, everything I’ve gone
through, only to be turned away at the last by a self-important, penny-pinching grocer and by
someone who used to crib from me in History...” he began, but Yvaine touched his arm and said,
“Tristran, let it go for now. You shall not fight with your own people.”
Tristran said nothing. Then he turned, without a word, and together they walked back up the
slope of the meadow. Around them a hodgepodge of creatures and people erected their stalls,
hung their flags and wheeled their barrows. And it came to Tristran then, in a wave of something
that resembled homesickness, but a homesickness comprised in equal parts of longing and despair,
that these might as well be his own people, for he felt he had more in common with them than
with the pallid folk of Wall in their worsted jackets and their hobnailed boots.
They stopped and watched a small woman, almost as broad as she was high, do her best to put
up her stall. Unasked, Tristran walked over and began to help her, carrying the heavy boxes from
her cart to the stall, climbing a tall stepladder to hang an assortment of streamers from a tree
branch, unpacking heavy glass carafes and jugs (each one stoppered with a huge, blackened cork
and sealed with silvery wax, and filled with a slowly swirling colored smoke), and placing them on
the shelves. As he and the market-woman worked, Yvaine sat on a nearby tree stump and she sang
to them in her soft, clean voice the songs of the high stars, and the commoner songs she had heard
and learnt from the folk they had encountered on their journeyings.
By the time Tristran and the little woman were done, and the stall was set out for the morrow,
they were working by lamplight. The woman insisted on feeding them; Yvaine barely managed to
convince her that she was not hungry, but Tristran ate everything he was offered with enthusiasm
and, unusually for him, he drank the greater part of a carafe of sweet canary wine, insisting that it
tasted no stronger than freshly squeezed grape juice and that it had no effect upon him of any
kind. Even so, when the stout little woman offered them the clearing behind her cart to sleep in,
Tristran was sleeping drunkenly in moments.
It was a clear, cold night. The star sat beside the sleeping man, who had once been her captor
and had become her companion on the road, and she wondered where her hatred had gone. She
was not sleepy.
There was a rustle in the grass behind her. A dark-haired woman stood next to her, and
together they stared down at Tristran.
“There is something of the dormouse in him still,” said the dark-haired woman. Her ears were
pointed and catlike, and she looked little older than Tristran himself. “Sometimes I wonder if she
transforms people into animals, or whether she finds the beast inside us, and frees it. Perhaps
