“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 Stormhold. 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 Stormhold, 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 Stormhold 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).
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 hall they inhabited was many times the size of the cottage; the floor was of onyx, and the pillars were of obsidian. There was a courtyard behind them, open to the sky, and stars hung in the night sky above.
A fountain played in the courtyard, the water rolling and falling from a statue of a mermaid in ecstasy, her mouth wide open. Clean, black water gushed from her mouth into the pool below, shimmering and shaking the stars.
The three women, and their hall, were in the black mirror. The three old women were the Lilim—the witch-queen—all alone in the woods.
The three women in the mirror were also the Lilim: but whether they were the successors to the old women, or their shadow-selves, or whether only the peasant cottage in the woods was real, or if, somewhere, the Lilim lived in a black hall, with a fountain in the shape of a mermaid playing in the courtyard of stars, none knew for certain, and none but the Lilim could say.
On this day, one crone came in from the woods, carrying a stoat, its throat a splash of red.
She placed it on the dusty chopping board and took a sharp knife. She cut it around at the arms and legs and neck, then, with one filthy hand, she pulled the skin off the creature, as if pulling a child from its pyjamas, and she dropped the naked thing onto the wooden chopping block.
