is hard to regret a moment of it, although I missed soft beds from time to time, and I shall never
be able to look at another dormouse in quite the same way ever again. But you did not promise me
your hand if I came back with the star, Vicky.” “I didn’t?”
“No. You promised me anything I desired.” Victoria Forester sat bolt upright then, and looked
down at the floor. A red spot burned in each pale cheek, as if she had been slapped. “Do I
understand you to be—” she began, but Tristran interrupted her. “No,” he said. “I don’t think you
do, actually. You said you would give me whatever I desire.” “Yes.”
“Then...” He paused. “Then I desire that you should marry Mister Monday. I desire that you
should be married as soon as possible—why, within this very week, if such a thing can be arranged.
And I desire that you should be as happy together as ever a man and woman have ever been.”
She exhaled in one low shuddering breath of release. Then she looked at him. “Do you mean
it?” she asked.
“Marry him with my blessing, and we’ll be quits and done,” said Tristran. “And the star will
probably think so, too.”
There was a knock at the door. “Is all well in there?” called a man’s voice.
“Everything is very well,” said Victoria. “Please come in, Robert. You remember Tristran Thorn,
do you not?”
“Good morning, Mister Monday,” said Tristran, and he shook Mr. Monday’s hand, which was
sweaty and damp. “I understand that you are to be married soon. Permit me to tender my
congratulations.”
Mr. Monday grinned, though it made him look as if he had a toothache. Then he held out a hand
for Victoria, and she rose from the chair.
“If you wish to see the star, Miss Forester ...” said Tristran, but Victoria shook her head.
“I am delighted that you came home safely, Mister Thorn. I trust that I shall see you at our
wedding?”
“I’m sure that nothing could give me greater pleasure than to be there,” said Tristran, although
he was sure of no such thing.
On a normal day it would have been unheard-of for the Seventh Magpie to have been so
crowded before breakfast, but this was market day, and the Wall-folk and the strangers were
crowded into the bar, eating heaped plates of lambchops and bacon and mushrooms and fried eggs
and black pudding.
Dunstan Thorn was waiting for Tristran in the bar. He stood up when he saw him, walked over
and clasped him on the shoulder, without speaking. “So you made it back without hurt,” he said,
and there was pride in his voice.
Tristran wondered if he had grown while he was away; he remembered his father as a bigger
man. “Hello Father,” he said. “I hurt my hand a bit.”
“Your mother has breakfast waiting for you, back at the farm,” said Dunstan.
“Breakfast would be wonderful,” admitted Tristran. “And seeing Mother again, of course. Also
we need to talk.” For his mind was still on something that Victoria Forester had said.
“You look taller,” said his father. “And you are badly in need of a trip to the barber’s.” He
drained his tankard, and together they left the Seventh Magpie and walked out into the morning.
The two Thorns climbed over a stile into one of Dunstan’s fields, and, as they walked through
the meadow in which he had played as a boy, Tristran raised the matter that had been vexing him,
which was the question of his birth. His father answered him as honestly as he was able to during
the long walk back to the farmhouse, telling his tale as if he were recounting a story that had
happened a very long time ago, to someone else. A love story.
And then they were at Tristran’s old home, where his sister waited for him, and there was a
steaming breakfast on the stove and on the table, prepared for him, lovingly, by the woman he had
always believed to be his mother.
Madame Semele adjusted the last of the crystal flowers on the stall, and eyed the market with
disfavor. It was a little past noon, and the customers had just started to wander through. None of
them had yet stopped at her stall.
“Fewer of them and fewer of them, every nine-year,” she said. “Mark my words, soon enough
this market will be just a memory. There’s other markets, and other marketplaces, I am thinking.
This market’s time is almost over. Another forty, fifty, sixty years at the most, and it will be done
for good.”
“Perhaps,” said her violet-eyed servant, “but it does not matter to me. This is the last of these
markets I shall ever attend.”
Madame Semele glared at her. “I thought I had long since beaten all of your insolence out of
you.”
“It is not insolence,” said her slave. “Look.” She held up the silver chain which bound her. It
glinted in the sunlight, but still, it was thinner, more translucent than ever it had been before; in
places it seemed as if it were made not of silver but of smoke.
“What have you done?” Spittle flecked the old woman’s lips.
“I have done nothing; nothing that I did not do eighteen years ago. I was bound to you to be
your slave until the day that the moon lost her daughter, if it occurred in a week when two
Mondays came together. And my time with you is almost done.”
It was after three in the afternoon. The star sat upon the meadow grass beside Mr. Bromios’s
wine-and-ale-and-food stall, and stared across at the gap in the wall and the village beyond it.
Upon occasion, the patrons of the stall would offer her wine or ale or great, greasy sausages, and
always she would decline.
“Are you waiting for someone, my dear?” asked a pleasant-featured young woman, as the
afternoon dragged on.
“I do not know,” said the star. “Perhaps.”
“A young man, if I do not mistake my guess, a lovely thing like you.”
The star nodded. “In a way,” she said.
“I’m Victoria,” said the young woman. “Victoria Forester.”
“I am called Yvaine,” said the star. She looked Victoria Forester up and down and up again.
“So,” she said, “you are Victoria Forester. Your fame precedes you.”
“The wedding, you mean?” said Victoria, and her eyes shone with pride and delight.
“A wedding, is it?” asked Yvaine. One hand crept to her waist, and felt the topaz, upon its silver
chain. Then she stared at the gap in the wall, and bit her lip.
“Oh you poor thing! What a beast he must be, to keep you waiting so!” said Victoria Forester.
“Why do you not go through, and look for him?”
“Because...” said the star, and then she stopped. “Aye,” she said. “Perhaps I shall.” The sky
above them was striped with grey and white bands of cloud, through which patches of blue could
be seen. “I wish my mother were out,” said the star. “I would say good-bye to her, first.” And,
awkwardly, she got to her feet.
But Victoria was not willing to let her new friend go that easily, and she was prattling on about
banns, and marriage licenses, and special licenses which could only be issued by archbishops, and
how lucky she was that Robert knew the archbishop. The wedding, it seemed, was set for six days’
time, at midday.
Then Victoria called over a respectable gentleman, greying at the temples, who was smoking a
black cheroot and who grinned as if he had the toothache. “And this is Robert,” she said. “Robert,
this is Yvaine. She’s waiting for her young man. Yvaine, this is Robert Monday. And on Friday next,
at midday, I shall be Victoria Monday. Perhaps you could make something of that, my dear, in your
speech at the wedding breakfast—that on Friday there will be two Mondays together!”
And Mr. Monday puffed on his cheroot, and told his bride-to-be that he would certainly consider
it.
“Then,” asked Yvaine, picking her words with care, “you are not marrying Tristran Thorn?”
“No,” said Victoria.
“Oh,” said the star. “Good.” And she sat down again.
She was still sitting there when Tristran came back through the gap in the wall, several hours
later. He looked distracted, but brightened up when he saw her. “Hello, you,” he said, helping her
to her feet. “Have a good time waiting for me?”
“Not particularly,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” said Tristran. “I suppose I should have taken you with me, into the village.”
“No,” said the star, “You shouldn’t have. I live as long as I am in Faerie. Were I to travel to your
world, I would be nothing but a cold iron stone fallen from the heavens, pitted and pocked.”
“But I almost took you through with me!” said Tristan, aghast. “I tried to, last night.”
“Yes,” she said. “Which only goes to prove that you are indeed a ninny, a lackwit, and a ... a
clodpoll.”
“Dunderhead,” offered Tristran. “You always used to like calling me a dunderhead. And an
oaf.”
“Well,” she said, “you are all those things, and more besides. Why did you keep me waiting like
that? I thought something terrible had happened to you.”
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I won’t leave you again.”
“No,” she said, seriously and with certainty, “you will not.”
His hand found hers, then. They walked, hand in hand, through the market. A wind began to
come up, flapping and gusting at the canvas of the tents and the flags, and a cold rain spat down
on them. They took refuge under the awning of a book stall, along with a number of other people
and creatures. The stallholder hauled a boxful of books further under the canvas, to ensure that it
did not get wet.
“Mackerel sky, mackerel sky, not long wet nor not long dry,” said a man in a black silk top hat
to Tristran and Yvaine. He was purchasing a small book bound in red leather from the bookseller.
Tristran smiled and nodded, and, as it became apparent that the rain was easing up, he and
Yvaine walked on.
“Which is all the thanks I shall ever get from them, I’ll wager,” said the tall man in the top hat
to the bookseller, who had not the slightest idea what he was speaking about, and did not care.
“I have said my good-byes to my family,” said Tristran to the star, as they walked. “To my
father, and my mother—my father’s wife, perhaps I should say—and to my sister, Louisa. I don’t
think I shall be going back again. Now we just need to solve the problem of how to put you back up
again in the sky. Perhaps I shall come with you.”
“You would not like it, up in the sky,” the star assured him. “So ... I take it you will not be
marrying Victoria Forester.”
Tristran nodded. “No,” he said.
“I met her,” said the star. “Did you know that she is with child?”
“What?” asked Tristran, shocked and surprised.
“I doubt that she knows. She is one, perhaps two moons along.”
“Good lord. How do you know?”
It was the star’s turn to shrug. “You know,” she said, “I was happy to discover that you are not
marrying Victoria Forester.”
“So was I,” he confessed.
The rain began once more, but they made no move to get under cover. He squeezed her hand in
his. “You know,” she said, “a star and a mortal man ...”
“Only half mortal, actually,” said Tristran, helpfully. “Everything I ever thought about myself—
who I was, what I am— was a lie. Or sort of. You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that
feels.”
“Whatever you are,” she said, “I just wanted to point out that we can probably never have
children. That’s all.”
Tristran looked at the star, then, and he began to smile, and he said nothing at all. His hands
were on her upper arms. He was standing in front of her, and looking down at her.
“Just so you know, that’s all,” said the star, and she leaned forward.
They kissed for the first time then in the cold spring rain, though neither one of them now knew
that it was raining. Tristran’s heart pounded in his chest as if it were not big enough to contain all
the joy that it held. He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into
his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her.
The silver chain was now nothing but smoke and vapor. For a heartbeat it hung on the air, then
a sharp gust of wind and rain blew it out into nothing at all.
“There,” said the woman with the dark, curling hair, stretching like a cat, and smiling. “The
terms of my servitude are fulfilled, and now you and I are done with each other.”
The old woman looked at her helplessly. “But what shall I do? I am old. I cannot manage this
stall by myself. You are an evil, foolish slattern, so to desert me like this.”
“Your problems are of no concern to me,” said her former slave, “but I shall never again be
called a slattern, or a slave, or anything else that is not my own name. I am Lady Una, firstborn
and only daughter of the eighty-first Lord of Storm-hold, and the spells and terms you bound me
with are over and done. Now, you will apologize to me, and you will call me by my right name, or I
will—with enormous pleasure— devote the rest of my life to hunting you down and destroying every
thing that you care for and every thing that you are.”
They looked at each other, then, and it was the old woman who looked away first.
“Then I must apologize for having called you a slattern, Lady Una,” she said, as if each word of
it were bitter sawdust that she spat from her mouth.
Lady Una nodded. “Good. And I believe that you owe me payment for my services, now my time
with you is done,” she said. For these things have their rules. All things have rules.
The rain was still falling in gusts, then not falling for just long enough to lure people out from
underneath their makeshift shelters, then raining on them once more. Tristran and Yvaine sat,
damp and happy, beside a campfire, in the company of a motley assortment of creatures and
people.
Tristran had asked if any of them knew the little hairy man he had met upon his travels, and
had described him as well as he could. Several people acknowledged that they had met him in the
past, although none had seen him at this market.
He found his hands twining, almost of their own volition, into the star’s wet hair. He wondered
how it could have taken him so long to realize how much he cared for her, and he told her so, and
she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been
called.
“So, where are we going once the market is done?” Tristran asked the star.
“I do not know,” she said. “But I have one obligation still to discharge.”
