Stardust

forehead.

For but a heartbeat he felt most peculiar, as if thick, black treacle were running through his veins in place of blood; then the shape of the world changed. Everything became huge and towering. It seemed as if the old woman herself was now a giantess, and his vision was blurred and confused.

Two huge hands came down and picked him up, gently. “ ‘Tain’t the biggest of caravans,” said Madame Semele, her voice a low, slow liquid boom. “And I shall keep to the letter of my oath, for you shall not be harmed, and you shall be boarded and lodged on your journey to Wall.” And then she dropped the dormouse into the pocket of her apron and she clambered onto the caravan.

“And what do you propose to do to me?” asked Yvaine, but she was not entirely surprised when the woman did not reply. She followed the old woman into the dark interior of the caravan. There was but one room; along one wall was a large showcase made of leather and pine, with a hundred pigeonholes in it, and it was in one of these pigeonholes, in a bed of soft thistledown, that the old woman placed the snowdrop. Along the other wall was a small bed, with a window above it, and a large cupboard.

Madame Semele bent down and pulled a wooden cage from the cluttered space beneath her bed, and she took the blinking dormouse from her pocket and placed it into the cage. Then she took a handful of nuts and berries and seeds from a wooden bowl and placed them inside the cage, which she hung from a chain in the middle of the caravan.

“There we go,” she said. “Board and lodging.”

Yvaine had watched all this with curiosity from her seat on the old woman’s bed. “Would I be correct,” she asked politely, “in concluding from the evidence to hand (to wit, that you have not looked at me, or if you have your eyes have slipped over me, that you have not spoken a word to me, and that you have changed my companion into a small animal with no such provision for myself) that you can neither see me nor hear me?”

The witch made no reply. She walked up to the driver’s seat, sat down and took up the reins. The exotic bird hopped up beside her and it chirruped, once, curiously.

“Of course I have kept my word—to the letter,” said the old woman, as if in reply. “He shall be transformed back at the market meadow, so shall regain his own form before he comes to Wall. And after I have turned him back, I shall make you human again, for I still have to find a better servant than you are, silly slut. I could not have been doing with him underfoot all the livelong day, poking and prying and asking questions, and I’d’ve had to’ve fed him into the bargain, more than nuts and seeds.” She hugged herself tightly, and swayed back and forth. “Oh, you’ll have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one past me. And I do believe that that bumpkin’s flower was even finer than the one you lost to me, all those years ago.”

She clicked her tongue, and shook the reins, and the mules began to amble down the forest track.

While the witch drove, Yvaine rested upon her musty bed. The caravan clacked and lurched its way through the forest. When it stopped, she would awake, and rise. While the witch slept Yvaine would sit on the roof of the caravan and look up at the stars. Sometimes the witch’s bird would sit with her and then she would pet it and make a fuss of it, for it was good to have something about that acknowledged her existence. But when the witch was about, the bird ignored her utterly.

Yvaine also cared for the dormouse, who spent most of his time fast asleep, curled up with his head between his paws. When the witch was off gathering firewood or fetching water, Yvaine would open up his cage, and stroke him, and talk to him, and, on several occasions, she sang to him, although she could not tell whether anything of Tristran remained in the dormouse, who stared up at her with placid, sleepy eyes, like droplets of black ink, and whose fur was softer than down.

Her hip did not pain her, now that she was not walking every day, and her feet did not hurt her so much. She would always limp, she knew, for Tristran was no surgeon when it came to mending a broken bone although he had done the best he could. Meggot had acknowledged as much.

When, as happened infrequently, they encountered other people, the star did her best to stay out of sight. However, she soon learned that, even should someone talk to her within the witch’s hearing—should someone, as once a woodcutter did, point to her, and ask Madame Semele about her—the witch never seemed able to perceive Yvaine’s presence, or even to hear anything pertaining to her existence.

And so the weeks passed, in a rattling, bone-jarring sort of a way, in the witch’s caravan, for the witch, and the bird, and the dormouse, and the fallen star.

Chapter Nine which Deals Chiefly With the Events at Diggory’s Dyke

Diggory’s Dyke was a deep cut between two chalk Downs—high, green hills, where a thin layer of green grass and reddish earth covered the chalk, and there was scarcely soil enough for trees. The Dyke looked, from a distance, like a white chalk gash on a green velvet board. Local legend had it that the cut was dug, in a day and a night, by one Diggory, using a spade that had once been a sword blade before Way-land Smith had melted it down and beaten it out, on his journey into Faerie from Wall. There were those who said the sword had once been Flamberge, and others, that it was once the sword Balmung; but there were none who claimed to know just who Diggory had been, and it might all have been stuff and nonsense. Anyway, the path to Wall went through Diggory’s Dyke, and any foot-traveler or any person going by any manner of wheeled vehicle went through the Dyke, where the chalk rose on either side of you like thick white walls, and the Downs rose up above them like the green pillows of a giant’s bed.

In the middle of the Dyke, beside the path, was what appeared at first glance to be little more than a heaped pile of sticks and twigs. A closer inspection would have revealed it to be something in nature partway between a small shed and a large wooden teepee, with a hole in the roof through which grey smoke occasionally could be seen to trickle out.

The man in black had been giving the pile of sticks as close an inspection as he could for two days now, from the top of the Downs far above and, when he dared chance it, from closer. The hut, he had established, was inhabited by a woman of advanced years. She had no companions, and no obvious occupation, apart from that of stopping each and every lone traveler and each conveyance that passed through the Dyke, and passing the time of day.

She seemed harmless enough, but Septimus had not become the only surviving male member of his immediate family by trusting appearances, and this old woman had, he was certain of it, slit Primus’s throat.

The obligations of revenge demanded a life for a life; they did not specify any way that the life should be taken. Now, by temperament, Septimus was one of nature’s poisoners. Blades and blows and booby traps were well enough in their way, but a vial of clear liquid, any trace of taste or odor gone when it was admixtured with food, that was Septimus’s metier.

Unfortunately the old woman seemed to take no food she did not gather or trap herself, and while he contemplated leaving a steaming pie at the door to her house, made of ripe apples and lethal baneberries, he dismissed it soon enough as impractical. He pondered rolling a chalk boulder down from the hills above her, dropping it onto her little house; but he could not be certain that he would hit her with it. He wished he was more of a magician—he had some of the locating ability that ran, patchily, in his family line, and a few minor magics he had learned or stolen over the years, but nothing that would be of use to him now, when he needed to invoke floods or hurricanes or lightning strikes. So Septimus observed his victim-to-be as a cat watches a mouse hole, hour after hour, by night and by day.

It was past the mid-hour of the night, and was quite moonless and dark, when Septimus finally crept to the door of the house of sticks, with a firepot in one hand and a book of romantic poetry and a blackbird’s nest, into which he had placed several fircones, in the other. Hanging from his belt was a club of oak-wood, its head studded with brass nails. He listened at the door, but could hear nothing but a rhythmic breathing, and, once in a while, a sleeping grunt. His eyes were used to the darkness, and the house stood out against the white chalk of the Dyke. He crept around to the side of the building, where he could keep the door in sight.

First he tore the pages from the book of poems, and crumpled each poem into a ball or a paper twist, which he pushed into the sticks of the shack’s wall, at ground level. On top of the poems he placed the fircones. Next, he opened the firepot, and with his knife he fished a handful of waxed linen scraps from the lid, dipped them into the