Stardust

"Pick one," he said to Tristran.

Tristran picked a stone tile, and showed the symbol carved upon it to the man. "Hmm," was all the driver said. "Now pick another." Tristran did so. "And another." The man rubbed his chin once more. "Yes, you can come with me," he said. "The runes seem certain of that. Although there will be danger. But perhaps there will be more fallen branches to move. You can sit up front, if you wish, on the driver's seat beside me, and keep me company."

It was a peculiar thing, observed Tristran as he climbed up into the driver's seat, but the first time he had glanced into the interior of the coach he had fancied that he saw five pale gentlemen, all in grey, staring sadly out at him. But the next time he had looked inside, nobody had been there at all.

The carriage rattled and pounded over the grassy track beneath a golden-green canopy of leaves. Tristran worried about the star. She might be ill-tempered, he thought, but it was with a certain amount of justification, after all. He hoped that she could stay out of trouble until he caught up with her.

It was sometimes said that the grey-and-black mountain range which ran like a spine north to south down that part of Faerie had once been a giant, who grew so huge and so heavy that, one day, worn out from the sheer effort of moving and living, he had stretched out on the plain and fallen into a sleep so profound that centuries passed between heartbeats. This would have been a long time ago, if it ever happened, in the First Age of the world, when all was stone and fire, water and wind, and there were few left alive to put the lie to it if it was not true. Still, true or not, they called the four great mountains of the range Mount Head, Mount Shoulder, Mount Belly and Mount Knees, and the foothills to the south were known as the Feet. There were passes through the mountains, one between the head and the shoulders, where the neck would have been, and one immediately to the south of Mount Belly.

They were wild mountains, inhabited by wild creatures: slate-colored trolls, hairy wild-men, strayed wodwos, mountain goats and mining gnomes, hermits and exiles and the occasional peak-witch. This was not one of the really high mountain ranges of Faerie, such as Mount Huon, on the top of which is the Stormhold. But it was a hard range for lone travelers to cross nonetheless.

The witch-queen had crossed the pass south of Mount Belly in a couple of days, and now waited at the opening of the pass. Her goats were tethered to a thorn bush, which they chewed without enthusiasm. She sat on the side of the unhitched chariot and sharpened her knives with a whetstone.

The knives were old things: the hilts were made of bone, while the blades were chipped, volcanic glass, black as jet, with white snowflake-shapes frozen forever into the obsidian. There were two knives: the smaller, a hatchet-bladed cleaver, heavy and hard, for cutting through the rib cage, for jointing and segmenting; the other a long, daggerlike blade, for cutting out the heart. When the knives were so sharp that she could have drawn either blade across your throat, and you would never have felt more than the touch of the lightest hair, as the spreading warmth of your life's blood made a quiet escape, the witch-queen put them away and commenced her preparations.

She walked over to the goats and whispered a word of power to each of them.

Where the goats had been stood a man with a white chin-beard, and a boyish, dull-eyed young woman. They said nothing.

She crouched beside her chariot, and whispered several words to it. The chariot did nothing, and the witch-woman stamped her foot on the rock.

"I am getting old," she said to her two servants. They said nothing in reply, gave no indication that they even understood her. "Things inanimate have always been more difficult to change than things animate. Their souls are older and stupider and harder to persuade. If I but had my true youth again... why, in the dawn of the world I could transform mountains into seas and clouds into palaces. I could populate cities with the pebbles on the shingle. If I were young again..."

She sighed and raised a hand: a blue flame flickered about her fingers for a moment, and then, as she lowered her hand and bent down to touch her chariot, the fire vanished.

She stood up straight. There were streaks of grey now in her raven-black hair, and dark pouches beneath her eyes; but the chariot was gone, and she stood in front of a small inn at the edge of the mountain pass.

Far away the thunder rumbled, quietly, and lightning flickered in the distance.

The inn sign swung and creaked in the wind. There was a picture of a chariot painted upon it.