Stardust

And then she sighed, and made herself as comfortable as she could, under the circumstances. The pain from her leg was dull but continual. She tested the chain about her wrist, but it was tight and fast, and she could neither slip from it nor break it. “Cretinous, verminous oaf,” she muttered. And then she, too, slept.

Chapter Five in Which There is Much Fighting for the Crown

In the morning’s bright light the young lady seemed more human and less ethereal. She had said nothing since Tristran had woken.

He took his knife and cut a fallen treebranch into a Y-shaped crutch while she sat beneath a sycamore tree and glared at him and glowered at him and scowled at him from her place on the ground. He peeled the bark from a green branch and wound it around the upper fork of the Y.

They had had no breakfast yet, and Tristran was ravenous; his stomach rumbled as he worked. The star had said nothing about being hungry. Then again, she had done nothing at all but look at him, first reproachfully, and then with undisguised hatred.

He pulled the bark tight, then looped it under itself and tugged on it once more. “This is honestly nothing personal,” he said, to the woman and to the grove. With the full sunlight shining down she scarcely glittered at all, save for where the darkest shadows touched her.

The star ran one pale forefinger up and down the silver chain that went between them, tracing the line of it about her slim wrist, and made no reply.

“I did it for love,” he continued. “And you really are my only hope. Her name—that is, the name of my love —is Victoria. Victoria Forester. And she is the prettiest, wisest, sweetest girl in the whole wide world.”

The girl broke her silence with a snort of derision. “And this wise, sweet creature sent you here to torture me?” she said.

“Well, not exactly. You see, she promised me anything I desired—be it her hand in marriage or her lips to kiss—were I to bring her the star that we saw fall the night before last. I had thought,” he confessed, “that a fallen star would probably look like a diamond or a rock. I certainly wasn’t expecting a lady.”

“So, having found a lady, could you not have come to her aid, or left her alone? Why drag her into your foolishness?”

“Love,” he explained.

She looked at him with eyes the blue of the sky. “I hope you choke on it,” she said, flatly.

“I won’t,” said Tristran, with more confidence and good cheer than he actually felt. “Here. Try this.” He passed her the crutch, and, reaching down, tried to help her to her feet. His hands tingled, not unpleasantly, where his skin touched hers. She sat on the ground like a tree stump, making no effort stare to get up.

“I told you,” she said, “that I would do everything in my power to frustrate your plans and devices.” She looked around the grove. “How very bland this world does look by day. And how dull.”

“Just put your weight on me, and the rest on the crutch,” he said. “You’ll have to move sometime.” He tugged on the chain and, reluctantly, the star began to get to her feet, leaning first against Tristran, and then, as if proximity to him disgusted her, on the crutch.

She gasped, then, in a hard intake of breath, and tumbled to the grass, where she lay with her face contorted, making small noises of pain. Tristran knelt down beside her. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Her blue eyes flashed, but they were swimming with tears. “My leg. I can’t stand on it. It must really be broken.” Her skin had gone as white as a cloud, and she was shivering.

“I’m sorry,” said Tristran, uselessly. “I can make you a splint. I’ve done it for sheep. It’ll be all right.” He squeezed her hand, and then he went to the brook, and dipped his handkerchief in it, and gave it to the star to wipe her forehead.

He split more fallen wood with his knife. Then he removed his jerkin, and took off his shirt, which he proceeded to tear into strips which he used to bind the sticks, as firmly as he could, about her injured leg. The star made no sounds while he did this, although, when he pulled the last knot tight, he thought he heard her whimper to herself.

“Really,” he told her, “we ought to get you to a proper doctor. I’m not a surgeon or anything.”

“No?” she said dryly. “You astonish me.”

He let her rest for a little, in the sun. And then he said, “Better try again, I suppose,” and he raised her to her feet.

They left the glade at a hobble, the star leaning heavily on her crutch and on Tristran’s arm, wincing at every step. And every time she winced or flinched Tristran felt guilty and awkward, but he calmed himself by thinking of Victoria Forester’s grey eyes. They followed a deer path through the hazel-wood, while Tristran—who had decided that the right thing to do was to make conversation with the star—asked how long she had been a star, whether it was enjoyable to be a star and whether all stars were women, and informed her that he had always supposed stars to be, as Mrs. Cherry had taught them, flaming balls of burning gas many hundreds of miles across, just like the sun only further away.

To all of these questions and statements she made no answer.

“So why did you fall?” he asked. “Did you trip over something?”

She stopped moving, and turned, and stared at him, as if she were examining something quite unpleasant a very long way away.

“I did not trip,” she said at length. “I was hit. By this.” She reached into her dress, and pulled out a large yellowish stone, which dangled from two lengths of silver chain. “There’s a bruise on my side where it hit me and knocked me from the sky. And now I am obligated to carry it about with me.”

“Why?”

She seemed as if she were about to answer, and then she shook her head, and her lips closed, and she said nothing at all. A stream rilled and splashed to their right, keeping pace with them. The noonday sun was overhead, and Tristran found himself getting increasingly hungry. He took the heel of the dry loaf from his bag, moistened it in the stream, and shared it out, half and half.

The star inspected the wet bread with disdain, and did not put it in her mouth.

“You’ll starve,” warned Tristran.

She said nothing, just raised her chin a little higher.

They continued through the woodland, making slow progress. They were laboring up a deer path on the side of a hill, which led them over fallen trees, and which had now become so steep it threatened to tumble the stumbling star and her captor down to the bottom. “Is there not an easier path?” asked the star, at length. “Some kind of road, or a level clearing?”

And once the question was asked, Tristran knew the answer. “There is a road half a mile that way,” he told her, pointing, “and a clearing over there, beyond that thicket,” he said, turning to motion in another direction.

“You knew that?”

“Yes. No. Well, I only knew it once you asked me.”

“Let us make for the clearing,” she said, and they pushed through the thicket as best they could. It still took them the better part of an hour to reach the clearing, but the ground, when they got there, was as level and flat as a playing field. The space seemed to have been cleared with a purpose, but what that purpose was Tristran could not imagine.

In the center of the glade, on the grass some distance from them, was an ornate golden crown, which glittered in the afternoon sunlight. It was studded with red and blue stones: rubies and sapphires, thought Tristran. He was about to walk over to the crown when the star touched his arm and said, “Wait. Do you hear drums?”

He realized that he did: a low, throbbing beat, coming from all around them, near at hand and far away, which echoed through the hills. And then there came a loud crashing noise from the trees at the far side of the clearing, and a high, wordless screaming. Into the glade came a huge white horse, its flanks gashed and bloody. It charged into the middle of the clearing, and then it turned, and lowered its head, and faced its pursuer—which