Stardust

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.

ChapterEight

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 Storm-hold,” said Tertius.

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