Stardust

The front door of the inn banged open.

“Primus!” called Tristran, running in. “They have tried to poison me!”

The Lord Primus reached for his short-sword, but even as he went for it the witch-queen took the longest of the knives, and drew the blade of it, in one smooth, practical movement, across his throat…

For Tristran, it all happened too fast to follow. He entered, saw the star and Lord Primus, and the innkeeper and his strange family, and then the blood was spurting in a crimson fountain in the firelight.

“Get him!” called the woman in the scarlet dress. “Get the brat!”

Billy and the maid ran toward Tristran; and it was then that the unicorn entered the inn.

Tristran threw himself out of the way. The unicorn reared up on its hind legs, and a blow from one of its sharp hooves sent the pot-maid flying.

Billy lowered his head and ran, headlong, at the unicorn, as if he were about to butt it with his forehead. The unicorn lowered its head also, and Billy the Innkeeper met his unfortunate end.

“Stupid!” screamed the innkeeper’s wife, furiously, and she advanced upon the unicorn, a knife in each hand, blood staining her right hand and forearm the same color as her dress.

Tristran had thrown himself onto his hands and knees, and had crawled toward the fireplace. In his left hand he had hold of the lump of wax, all that remained of the candle that had brought him here. He had been squeezing it in his hand until it was soft and malleable.

“This had better ought to work,” said Tristran to himself. He hoped that the tree had known what she was talking about.

Behind him, the unicorn screamed in pain.

Tristran ripped a lace from his jerkin and closed the wax around it.

“What is happening?” asked the star, who had crawled toward Tristran on her hands and knees.

“I don’t really know,” he admitted.

The witch-woman howled, then; the unicorn had speared her with its horn, through the shoulder. It lifted her off the ground, triumphantly, preparing to hurl her to the ground and then to dash her to death beneath its sharp hooves, when, impaled as she was, the witch-woman swung around and thrust the point of the longer of the rock-glass knives into the unicorn’s eye and far into its skull.

The beast dropped to the wooden floor of the inn, blood dripping from its side and from its eye and from its open mouth. First it fell to its knees, and then it collapsed, utterly, as the life fled. Its tongue was piebald, and it protruded most pathetically from the unicorn’s dead mouth.

The witch-queen pulled her body from the horn, and, one hand gripping her wounded shoulder, the other holding her cleaver, she staggered to her feet.

Her eyes scanned the room, alighting on Tristran and the star huddled by the fire. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, she lurched toward them, a cleaver in her hand and a smile upon her face.

“The burning golden heart of a star at peace is so much finer than the flickering heart of a little frightened star,” she told them, her voice oddly calm and detached, coming, as it was, from that blood-bespattered face. “But even the heart of a star who is afraid and scared is better by far than no heart at all.”

Tristran took the star’s hand in his right hand. “Stand up,” he told her.

“I cannot,” she said, simply.

“Stand, or we die now,” he told her, getting to his feet. The star nodded, and, awkwardly, resting her weight on him, she began to try to pull herself to her feet.

“Stand, or you die now?” echoed the witch-queen. “Oh, you die now, children, standing or sitting. It is all the same to me.” She took another step toward them.

“Now,” said Tristran, one hand gripping the star’s arm, the other holding his makeshift candle, “now, walk!”

And he thrust his left hand into the fire.

There was pain, and burning, such that he could have screamed, and the witch-queen stared at him as if he were madness personified.

Then his improvised wick caught, and burned with a steady blue flame, and the world began to shimmer around them. “Please walk,” he begged the star. “Don’t let go of me.”

And she took an awkward step.

They left the inn behind them, the howls of the witch-queen ringing in their ears.

They were underground, and the candlelight flickered from the wet cave walls; and with their next halting step they were in a desert of white sand, in the moonlight; and with their third step they were high above the earth, looking down on the hills and trees and rivers far below them.

And it was then that the last of the wax ran molten over Tristran’s hand, and the burning became impossible for him to bear, and the last of the flame burned out forever.

Chapter Eight which Treats of Castles in the Air, and Other Matters

It was dawn in the mountains. The storms of the last few days had passed on and the air was clean and cold.

Lord Septimus of Stormhold, tall and crowlike, walked up the mountain pass, looking about him as he walked as if he were seeking something he had lost. He was leading a brown mountain pony, shaggy and small. Where the pass grew wider he stopped, as if he had found what he was looking for beside the trail. It was a small, battered chariot, little more than a goat-cart, which had been tipped onto its side. Nearby it lay two bodies. The first was that of a white billy goat, its head stained red with blood. Septimus prodded the dead goat experimentally with his foot, moving its head; it had received a deep and fatal wound to its forehead, equidistant between its horns. Next to the goat was the body of a young man, his face as dull in death as it must have been in life. There were no wounds to show how he had died, nothing but a leaden bruise upon his temple.

Several yards away from these bodies, half-hidden beside a rock, Septimus came upon the corpse of a man in his middle years, facedown, dressed in dark clothes. The man’s flesh was pale, and his blood had pooled upon the rocky floor below him. Septimus crouched down beside the body, and, gingerly, lifted its head by the hair; its throat had been cut, expertly, slit from one ear to the other. Septimus stared at the corpse in puzzlement. He knew it, yet…

And then, in a dry, hacking cough of a noise, he began to laugh. “Your beard,” he told the corpse, aloud. “You cut your beard. As if I would not have known you with your beard gone, Primus.”

Primus, who stood, grey and ghostly, beside his other brothers, said, “You would have known me, Septimus. But it might have bought me a few moments, wherein I might have seen you before you knew me,” and his dead voice was nothing but the morning breeze rattling the thorn bush.

Septimus stood up. The sun began to rise, then, over the easternmost peak of Mount Belly, framing him in light. “So I am to be the eighty-second Lord of the Stormhold,” he said to the corpse on the ground, and to himself, “not to mention the Master of the High Crags, Seneschal of the Spire-Towns, Keeper of the Citadel, Lord High Guardian of Mount Huon and all the rest of it.”

“Not without the Power of Stormhold about your neck you’re not, my brother,” said Quintus, tartly.

“And then there’s the matter of revenge,” said Secundus, in the voice of the wind howling through the pass. “You must take revenge upon your brother’s killer before anything else, now. It’s blood-law.”

As if he had heard them, Septimus shook his head. “Why could you not have waited just a few more days, brother Primus?” he asked the corpse at his feet. “I would have killed you myself. I had a fine plan for your death. When I discovered you were no longer on the Heart of a Dream, it took me little enough time to steal the ship’s boat and get on your trail. And now I must revenge your sad carcass, and all for the honor of our blood and the Stormhold.”

“So Septimus will be the eighty-second Lord of Stormhold,” said Tertius.

“There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks,” pointed out Quintus.

Septimus walked away from the body to piss against a grey boulder. Then he walked back to Primus’s