there is something about me that is, by nature, a brightly colored bird. It is something to which I
have given much thought, but about which I have come to no conclusions.”
Tristran muttered something unintelligible, and stirred in his sleep. Then he began, gently, to
snore.
The woman walked around Tristran, and sat down beside him. “He seems good-hearted,” she
said.
“Yes,” admitted the star. “I suppose that he is.”
“I should warn you,” said the woman, “that if you leave these lands for ... over there ...” and
she gestured toward the village of Wall with one slim arm, from the wrist of which a silver chain
glittered, “... then you will be, as I understand it, transformed into what you would be in that
world: a cold, dead thing, sky-fallen.”
The star shivered, but she said nothing. Instead, she reached across Tristran’s sleeping form to
touch the silver chain which circled the woman’s wrist and ankle and led off into the bushes and
beyond.
“You become used to it, in time,” said the woman.
“Do you? Really?”
Violet eyes stared into blue eyes, and then looked away. “No.”
The star let go of the chain. “He once caught me with a chain much like yours. Then he freed
me, and I ran from him. But he found me and bound me with an obligation, which binds my kind
more securely than any chain ever could.”
An April breeze ran across the meadow, stirring the bushes and the trees in one long chilly sigh.
The cat-eared woman tossed her curly hair back from her face, and said,”You are under a prior
obligation, are you not? You have something that does not belong to you, which you must deliver to
its rightful owner.”
The star’s lips tightened. “Who are you?” she asked.
“I told you. I was the bird in the caravan,” said the woman. “I know what you are, and I know
why the witch-woman never knew that you were there. I know who seeks you and why she needs
you. Also, I know the provenance of the topaz stone you wear upon a silver chain about your waist.
Knowing this, and what manner of thing you are, I know the obligation you must be under.” She
leaned down, and, with delicate fingers, she tenderly pushed the hair from Tristran’s face. The
sleeping youth neither stirred nor responded.
“I do not think that I believe you, or trust you,” said the star. A night bird cried in a tree above
them. It sounded very lonely in the darkness.
“I saw the topaz about your waist when I was a bird,” said the woman, standing up once more.
“I watched, when you bathed in the river, and recognized it for what it was.”
“How?” asked the star. “How did you recognize it?”
But the dark-haired woman only shook her head and walked back the way that she had come,
sparing but one last glance for the sleeping youth upon the grass. And then she was taken by the
night.
Tristran’s hair had, obstinately, fallen across his face once more. The star leaned down and
gently pushed it to one side, letting her fingers dwell upon his cheek as she did so. He slept on.
Tristran was woken a little after sunrise by a large badger walking upon its hind legs and
wearing a threadbare heliotrope silk dressing-gown, who snuffled into his ear until Tristran sleepily
opened his eyes, and then said, self-importantly, “Party name of Thorn? Tristran of that set?”
“Mm?” said Tristran. There was a foul taste in his mouth, which felt dry and furred. He could
have slept for another several hours.
“They’ve been asking about you,” said the badger. “Down by the gap. Seems there’s a young
lady wants to have a word with you.”
Tristran sat up and grinned widely. He touched the sleeping star on her shoulder. She opened
her sleepy blue eyes and said, “What?”
“Good news,” he told her. “Do you remember Victoria Forester? I might have mentioned her
name once or twice on our travels.”
“Yes,” she said. “You might have.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m off to see her. She’s down by the gap.” He paused. “Look. Well. Probably
best if you stay here. I wouldn’t want to confuse her or anything.”
The star rolled over and covered her head with her arm, and said nothing else. Tristran decided
that she must have gone back to sleep. He pulled on his boots, washed his face and rinsed out his
mouth in the meadow stream, and then ran pell-mell through the meadow, toward the village.
The guards on the wall this morning were the Reverend Myles, the vicar of Wall, and Mr.
Bromios, the innkeeper. Standing between them was a young lady with her back to the meadow.
“Victoria!” called Tristran in delight; but then the young lady turned, and he saw that it was not
Victoria Forester (who, he remembered suddenly, and with delight in the knowing, had grey eyes.
That was what they were: grey. How could he ever have allowed himself to forget?). But who this
young lady could have been in her fine bonnet and shawl, Tristran could not say; although her eyes
flooded with tears at the sight of him.
“Tristran!” she said. “It is you! They said it was! Oh Tristran! How could you? Oh, how could
you?” and he realized who the young lady reproaching him must be.
“Louisa?” he said to his sister. And then, “You have certainly grown while I was away, from a
chit of a girl into a fine young lady.”
She sniffed, and blew her nose into a lace-edged linen handkerchief, which she pulled from her
sleeve. “And you,” she told him, dabbing at her cheeks with the handkerchief, “have turned into a
mop-haired raggle-taggle gypsy on your journeyings. But I suppose you look well, and that is a good
thing. Come on, now,” and she motioned, impatiently, for him to walk through the gap in the wall,
and come to her.
“But the wall—” he said, eyeing the innkeeper and the vicar a little nervously.
“Oh, as to that, when Wystan and Mister Brown finished their shift last night they repaired to
the saloon bar at the Seventh Pie, where Wystan happened to mention their meeting with a
ragamuffin who claimed to be you, and how they blocked his way. Your way. When news of this
reached Father’s ears, he marched right up to the Pie and gave the both of them such a tongue-
lashing and a telling-of-what-for that I could scarcely believe it was him.”
“Some of us were for letting you come back this morning,” said the vicar, “and some were for
keeping you there until midday.”
“But none of the ones who were for making you wait are on Wall duty this morning,” said Mr.
Bromios. “Which took a certain amount of jiggery-pokery to organize—and on a day when I should
have been seeing to the refreshment stand, I could point out. Still, it’s good to see you back. Come
on through.” And with that he stuck out his hand, and Tristran shook it with enthusiasm. Then
Tristran shook the vicar’s hand.
“Tristran,” said the vicar, “I suppose that you must have seen many strange sights upon your
travels.”
Tristran reflected for a moment. “I suppose I must have,” he said.
“You must come to the Vicarage, then, next week,” said the vicar. “We shall have tea, and you
must tell me all about it. Once you’re settled back in. Eh?” And Tristran, who had always held the
vicar in some awe, could do nothing but nod.
Louisa sighed, a little theatrically, and began to walk, briskly, in the direction of the Seventh
Magpie. Tristran ran along the cobbles to catch her up, and then he was walking beside her.
“It does my heart good to see you again, my sister,” he said.
“As if we were not all worried sick about you,” she said, crossly, “what with all your
gallivantings. And you did not even wake me to say good-bye. Father has been quite distracted
with concern for you, and at Christmas, when you were not there, after we had eaten the goose
and the pudding, Father took out the port and he toasted absent friends, and Mother sobbed like a
babe, so of course I cried too, and then Father began to blow his nose into his best handkerchief
and Grandmother and Grandfather Hempstock insisted upon pulling the Christmas crackers and
reading the jolly mottoes and somehow that only made matters worse, and, to put it bluntly,
Tristran, you quite spoiled our Christmas.”
“Sorry,” said Tristran. “What are we doing now? Where are we going?”
“We are going into the Seventh Pie” said Louisa. “I should have thought that was obvious.
Mister Bromios said that you could use his sitting room. There’s somebody there who needs to talk
to you.” And she said nothing more as they went into the pub. There were a number of faces
Tristran recognized, and the people nodded at him, or smiled, or did not smile, as he walked
through the crowds and made his way up the narrow stairs behind the bar to the landing with
Louisa by his side. The wooden boards creaked beneath their feet.
Louisa glared at Tristran. And then her lip trembled, and, to Tristran’s surprise, she threw her
arms about him and hugged him so tightly that he could not breathe. Then, with not another word,
she fled back down the wooden stairs.
He knocked at the door to the sitting room, and went in. The room was decorated with a
number of unusual objects, of small items of antique statuary and clay pots. Upon the wall hung a
stick, wound about with ivy leaves, or rather, with a dark metal cunningly beaten to resemble ivy.
Apart from the decorations the room could have been the sitting room of any busy bachelor with
little time for sitting. It was furnished with a small chaise longue, a low table upon which was a
well-thumbed leather-bound copy of the sermons of Laurence Sterne, a pianoforte, and several
leather armchairs, and it was in one of these armchairs that Victoria Forester was sitting.
Tristran walked over to her slowly and steadily, and then he went down upon one knee in front
of her, as once he had gone down on his knees before her in the mud of a country lane.
“Oh, please don’t,” said Victoria Forester, uncomfortably. “Please get up. Why don’t you sit
down over there. In that chair? Yes. That’s better.” The morning light shone through the high lace
curtains and caught her chestnut hair from behind, framing her face in gold. “Look at you,” she
said. “You became a man. And your hand. What happened to your hand?”
“I burnt it,” he said. “In a fire.”
She said nothing in response, at first. She just looked at him. Then she sat back in the armchair,
and looked ahead of her, at the stick on the wall, or one of Mr. Bromios’s quaint old statues
perhaps, and she said, “There are a number of things I must tell you, Tristran, and none of them
will be easy. I would appreciate it if you said nothing until I have had a chance to say my piece. So:
firstly, and perhaps most importantly, I must apologize to you. It was my foolishness, my idiocy,
that sent you off on your journeyings. I thought you were joking... no, not joking. I thought that
you were too much the coward, too much of a boy, ever to follow up on any of your fine, silly
words. It was only when you had gone, and the days passed, and you did not return, that I realized
that you had been in earnest, and by then it was much too late.
“I have had to live... each day... with the possibility that I had sent you to your death.”
She stared ahead of herself as she spoke, and Tristranhad the feeling, which became a
certainty, that she had conducted this conversation in her head a hundred times in his absence. It
was why he could not be permitted to say anything; this was hard enough on Victoria Forester, and
she would not be able to manage it if he caused her to depart from her script.
“And I did not play you fair, my poor shop-boy... but you are no longer a shop-boy, are you?...
since I thought that your quest was just foolishness, in every way...” She paused, and her hands
gripped the wooden arms of the chair, grasping them so tightly her knuckles first reddened, then
went white. “Ask me why I would not kiss you that night, Tristran Thorn.”
“It was your right not to kiss me,” said Tristran. “I did not come here to make you sad, Vicky. I
did not find you your star to make you miserable.”
Her head tipped to one side. “So you did find the star we saw that night?”
“Oh yes,” said Tristran. “The star is back in the meadow, though, right now. But I did what you
asked me to do.”
“Then do something else for me now. Ask me why I would not kiss you that night. I had kissed
you before, when we were younger, after all.”
“Very well, Vicky. Why would you not kiss me, that night?”
“Because,” she said, and there was relief in her voice as she said it, enormous relief, as if it
were escaping from her, “the day before we saw the shooting star, Robert had asked me to marry
him. That evening, when I saw you, I had gone to the shop hoping to see him, and to talk to him,
and to tell him that I accepted, and he should ask my father for my hand.”
“Robert?” asked Tristran, his head all in a whirl.
“Robert Monday. You worked in his shop.”
“Mister Monday?” echoed Tristran. “You and Mister Monday?”
“Exactly.” She was looking at him now. “And then you had to take me seriously and run off to
bring me back a star, and not a day would go by when I did not feel as if I had done something
foolish and bad. For I promised you my hand, if you returned with the star. And there were some
days, Tristran, when I honestly do not know which I thought worse, that you would be killed in the
Lands Beyond, all for the love of me, or that you would succeed in your madness, and return with
the star, to claim me as your bride. Now, of course, some folks hereabouts told me not to take on
so, and that it was inevitable that you would have gone off to the Lands Beyond, of course, it being
your nature, and you being from there in the first place, but, somehow, in my heart, I knew I was
at fault, and that, one day, you would return to claim me.”
“And you love Mister Monday?” said Tristran, seizing on the only thing in all this he was certain
he had understood.
She nodded, and raised her head, so her pretty chin pointed toward Tristran. “But I gave you
my word, Tristran. And I will keep my word, and I have told Robert this. I am responsible for all
that you have gone through—even for your poor burned hand. And if you want me, then I am
yours.”
“To be honest,” he said, “I think that I am responsible for all that I have done, not you. And it
