“There’s a star...” Tristran began to explain, but his father hushed him to silence.
Mr. Bromios rubbed his chin, and ran a hand through his thatch of black curls. “Very well,” he
said. He turned and spoke to Harold in a low voice, saying things Tristran could not hear.
His father pressed something cold into his hand.
“Go on with you, boy. Go, and bring back your star, and may God and all His angels go with
you.”
And Mr. Bromios and Harold Crutchbeck, the guards on the gate, stood aside to let him pass.
Tristran walked through the gap, with the stone wall on each side of him, into the meadow on
the other side of the wall.
Turning, he looked back at the three men, framed in the gap, and wondered why they had
allowed him through.
Then, his bag swinging in one hand, the object his father had pushed into his hand in the other,
Tristran Thorn set off up the gentle hill, toward the woods.
As he walked, the chill of the night grew less, and once in the woods at the top of the hill
Tristran was surprised to realize the moon was shining brightly down on him through a gap in the
trees. He was surprised because the moon had set an hour before; and doubly surprised, because
the moon that had set had been a slim, sharp silver crescent, and the moon that shone down on
him now was a huge, golden harvest moon, full, and glowing, and deeply colored.
The cold thing in his hand chimed once: a crystalline tinkling like the bells of a tiny glass
cathedral. He opened his hand and held it up to the moonlight.
It was a snowdrop, made all of glass.
A warm wind stroked Tristran’s face: it smelled like peppermint, and blackcurrant leaves, and
red, ripe plums; and the enormity of what he had done descended on Tristran Thorn. He was
walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to
keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and fancied that he could see the lights of
Wall behind him, wavering and glimmering as if in a heat-haze, but still inviting.
And he knew that if he turned around and went back, no one would think any less of him for it—
not his father, nor his mother; and even Victoria Forester would likely as not merely smile at him
the next time she saw him, and call him “shop-
boy,” and add that stars, once fallen, often proved difficult in the finding.
He paused, then.
He thought of Victoria’s lips, and her grey eyes, and the sound of her laughter. He straightened
his shoulders, placed the crystal snowdrop in the top buttonhole of his coat, now undone. And, too
ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristran Thorn passed beyond the fields we know...
and into Faerie.
Chapter
Three
In Which We Encounter Several Other Persons,
Many of Them Still Alive, With an Interest in the
Fate of the Fallen Star
The Stormhold had been carved out of the peak of Mount Huon by the first lord of Stormhold,
who reigned at the end of the First Age and into the beginning of the Second. It had been
expanded, improved upon, excavated and tunneled into by successive Masters of Stormhold, until
the original mountain peak now raked the sky like the ornately carved tusk of some great, grey,
granite beast. The Stormhold itself was perched high in the sky, where the thunder clouds gathered
before they went down to the lower air, spilling rain and lightning and devastation upon the place
beneath.
The eighty-first Lord of Stormhold lay dying in his chamber, which was carved from the highest
peak like a hole in a rotten tooth. There is still death in the lands beyond the fields we know.
He summoned his children to his bedside and they came, the living and the dead of them, and
they shivered in the cold granite halls. They gathered about his bed and waited respectfully, the
living to his right side, the dead on his left.
Four of his sons were dead: Secundus, Quintus, Quartus and Sextus, and they stood unmoving,
grey figures, insubstantial and silent.
Three of his sons remained alive: Primus, Tertius and Septimus. They stood, solidly,
uncomfortably, on the right of the chamber, shifting from foot to foot, scratching their cheeks and
noses, as if they were shamed by the silent repose of their dead brothers. They did not glance
across the room toward their dead brothers, acting—as best they could—as if they and their father
were the only ones in that cold room, where the windows were huge holes in the granite through
which the cold winds blew. And whether this is because they could not see their dead brothers, or
because, having murdered them (one apiece, save Septimus, who had killed both Quintus and
Sextus, poisoning the former with a dish of spiced eels, and, rejecting artifice for efficiency and
gravity, simply pushing Sextus off a precipice one night as they were admiring a lightning storm far
below), they chose to ignore them, scared of guilt, or revelation, or ghosts, their father did not
know.
Privately, the eighty-first lord had hoped that by the time his end came upon him, six of the
seven young lords at Storm-hold would be dead, and but one still alive. That one would be the
eighty-second Lord of Stormhold and Master of the High Crags; it was, after all, how he had
attained his own title several hundred years before.
But the youth of today were a pasty lot, with none of the get-up-and-go, none of the vigor and
vim that he remembered from the days when he was young...
Somebody was saying something. He forced himself to concentrate.
“Father,” repeated Primus in his deep boom of a voice. “We are all here. What would you do
with us?”
The old man stared at him. With a ghastly wheezing he pulled a breath of the thin, chill air into
his lungs, and then said, in high, cold tones, like the granite itself, “I am dying. Soon my time will
be done, and you will take my remains deep into the mountain, to the Hall of Ancestors, and you
will place them—me—in the one-and-eightieth hollow you come to, which is to say, the first that is
not occupied, and there you shall leave me. If you do not do this thing, you will each be cursed,
and the tower of Stormhold shall tumble and fall.”
His three living sons said nothing. A murmur ran through the four dead sons, though: regret,
perhaps, that their remains had been gobbled up by eagles, or carried away by the fast rivers,
tumbled down waterfalls and off to the sea, never to rest in the Hall of Ancestors.
“Now. The matter of succession.” The lord’s voice wheezed out of him, like the wind being
squeezed from a pair of rotten bellows. His living sons raised their heads: Primus, the oldest, with
white hairs in his thick brown beard, his nose aquiline, his eyes grey, looked expectant; Tertius, his
beard red-and-golden, his eyes a tawny brown, looked wary; Septimus, his black beard still coming
in, tall and crowlike, looked blank, as he always looked blank.
“Primus. Go to the window.”
Primus strode over to the opening in the rock wall and looked out.
“What do you see?”
“Nothing, sire. I see the evening sky above us, and clouds below us.”
The old man shivered beneath the mountain-bear skin that covered him.
“Tertius. Go to the window. What do you see?”
“Nothing, Father. It is as Primus told you. The evening sky hangs above us, the color of a bruise,
and clouds carpet the world beneath us, all grey and writhing.”
The old man’s eyes twisted in his face like the mad eyes of a bird of prey. “Septimus. You.
Window.”
Septimus strolled to the window and stood beside, although not too close to, his two elder
brothers.
“And you? What do you see?”
He looked out of the opening. The wind was bitter on his face, and it made his eyes sting and
tear. One star glimmered, faintly, in the indigo heavens.
“I see a star, Father.”
“Ahh,” wheezed the eighty-first lord. “Bring me to the window.” His four dead sons looked at
him sadly as his three living sons carried him to the window. The old man stood, or almost stood,
leaning heavily on the broad shoulders of his children, staring into the leaden sky.
His fingers, swollen-knuckled and twiglike, fumbled with the topaz that hung on a heavy silver
chain about his neck. The chain parted like a cobweb in the old man’s grip. He held the topaz out
in his fist, the broken ends of silver chain dangling.
The dead lords of Stormhold whispered amongst themselves, in the voices of the dead which
sound like snow falling: the topaz was the Power of Stormhold. Who wore it would be Stormhold’s
master, as long as he was of the blood of Storm-hold. To which of the surviving sons would the
eighty-first lord give the stone?
The living sons said nothing, but looked, respectively, expectant, wary, and blank (but it was a
deceptive blankness, the blankness of a rock face that one only realizes cannot be climbed when
one is halfway up, and there is no longer any way down).
The old man pulled free of his sons, and stood straight and tall, then. He was, for a heartbeat,
the lord of Stormhold who had defeated the Northern Goblins at the battle of Crag-land’s Head;
who had fathered eight children—seven of them boys—on three wives; who had killed each of his
four brothers in combat, before he was twenty years old, although his oldest brother had been
almost five times his age and a mighty warrior of great renown. It was this man who held up the
topaz and said four words in a long-dead tongue, words which hung on the air like the strokes of a
huge bronze gong.
Then he threw the stone into the air. The living brothers caught their breath, as the stone arced
up over the clouds. It reached what they were certain must be the zenith of its curve, and then,
defying all reason, it continued to rise into the air.
Other stars glittered in the night sky, now.
“To he who retrieves the stone, which is the Power of Storm-hold, I leave my blessing, and the
Mastership of Stormhold and all its dominions,” said the eighty-first lord, his voice losing power as
he spoke, until once again it was the creak of an old, old man, like the wind blowing through an
abandoned house.
The brothers, living and dead, stared at the stone. It fell upwards into the sky until it was lost
to sight.
“And should we capture eagles, and harness them, to drag us into the heavens?” asked Tertius,
puzzled and annoyed.
His father said nothing. The last of the daylight faded, and the stars hung above them,
uncountable in their glory.
One star fell.
Tertius thought, although he was not certain, that it was the first star of the evening, the one
that his brother Septimus had remarked upon.
The star tumbled, a streak of light, through the night sky, and it tumbled down somewhere to
the south and west of them.
“There,” whispered the eighty-first lord, and he fell to the stone floor of his chamber, and he
breathed no more.
Primus scratched his beard, and looked down at the crumpled thing. “I’ve half a mind,” he said,
“to push the old bastard’s corpse out of the window. What was all that idiocy about?”
“Better not,” said Tertius. “We don’t want to see Storm-hold tumble and fall. Nor do we want a
curse on our heads, for that matter. Better just place him in the Hall of Ancestors.”
Primus picked his father’s body up, and carried him back to the furs of his bed. “We will tell the
people he is dead,” he said.
The four dead brothers clustered with Septimus at the window.
“What do you think he’s thinking?” asked Quintus of Sextus.
“He’s wondering where the stone fell, and how to reach it first,” said Sextus, remembering his
fall down the rocks and into eternity.
“I damned well hope so,” said the late eighty-first master of Stormhold to his four dead sons.
But his three sons who were not yet dead heard nothing at all.
A question like “How big is Faerie?” does not admit of a simple answer.
Faerie, after all, is not one land, one principality or dominion. Maps of Faerie are unreliable,
and may not be depended upon.
We talk of the kings and queens of Faerie as we would speak of the kings and queens of
England. But Faerie is bigger than England, as it is bigger than the world (for, since the dawn of
time, each land that has been forced off the map by explorers and the brave going out and proving
it wasn’t there has taken refuge in Faerie; so it is now, by the time that we come to write of it, a
most huge place indeed, containing every manner of landscape and terrain). Here, truly, there be
Dragons. Also gryphons, wyverns, hippogriffs, basilisks, and hydras. There are all manner of more
familiar animals as well, cats affectionate and aloof, dogs noble and cowardly, wolves and foxes,
eagles and bears.
In the middle of a wood so thick and so deep it was very nearly a forest was a small house, built
of thatch and wood and daubed grey clay, which had a most foreboding aspect. A small, yellow
bird in a cage sat on its perch outside the house. It did not sing, but sat mournfully silent, its
feathers ruffled and wan. There was a door to the cottage, from which the once-white paint was
peeling away.
Inside, the cottage consisted of one room, undivided. Smoked meats and sausages hung from
the rafters, along with a wizened crocodile carcass. A peat fire burned smokily in the large
fireplace against one wall, and the smoke trickled out of the chimney far above. There were three
blankets upon three raised beds—one large and old, the other two little more than truckle beds.
There were cooking implements, and a large wooden cage, currently empty, in another corner.
There were windows too filthy to see through, and over everything was a thick layer of oily dust.
The only thing in the house that was clean was a mirror of black glass, as high as a tall man, as
wide as a church door, which rested against one wall.
The house belonged to three aged women. They took it in turns to sleep in the big bed, to make
the supper, to set snares in the wood for small animals, to draw water up from the deep well
behind the house.
The three women spoke little.
There were three other women in the little house. They were slim, and dark, and amused. The
