Stardust

The light of the inn was the happiest and best thing Tristran had seen on his journey through Faerie. While Primus bellowed for assistance, Tristran unhitched the exhausted horses, and led them one by one into the stables on the side of the inn. There was a white horse asleep in the furthest stall, but Tristran was too busy to pause to inspect it.

He knew—somewhere in the odd place inside him that knew directions and distances of things he had never seen and the places he had never been—that the star was close at hand, and this comforted him, and made him nervous. He knew that the horses were more exhausted and more hungry than he was. His dinner—and thus, he suspected, his confrontation with the star—could wait. "I'll groom the horses," he told Primus. "They'll catch a chill otherwise."

The tall man rested his huge hand on Tristran's shoulder. "Good lad. I'll send a pot-boy out with some burnt ale for you."

Tristran thought about the star as he brushed down the horses and picked out their hooves. What would he say? What would she say? He was brushing the last of the horses when a blank-looking pot-girl came out to him with a tankard of steaming wine.

"Put it down over there," he told her. "I'll drink it with goodwill as soon as my hands are free." She put it down on the top of a tack box, and went out, without saying anything. It was then that the horse in the end stall got to its feet and began to kick against the door.

"Settle down, there," called Tristran, "settle down, fellow, and I'll see if I cannot find warm oats and bran for all of you." There was a large stone in the stallion's front inside hoof, and Tristran removed it with care. Madam, he had decided he would say, please accept my heartfelt and most humble apologies. Sir, the star would say in her turn, that I shall do with all my heart. Now, let us go to your village, where you shall present me to your true love, as a token of your devotion to her...

His ruminations were interrupted by an enormous clattering, as a huge white horse—but, he realized immediately, it was not a horse—kicked down the door of its stall, and came charging, desperately, toward him, its horn lowered.

Tristran threw himself onto the straw on the stable floor, his arms about his head.

Moments passed. He raised his head. The unicorn had stopped in front of the tankard, was lowering its horn into the mulled wine.

Awkwardly, Tristran got to his feet. The wine was steaming and bubbling, and it came to Tristran then—the information surfacing from some long-forgotten fairy tale or piece of children's lore—that a unicorn's horn was proof against... "Poison?" he whispered, and the unicorn raised its head, and stared into Tristran's eyes, and Tristran knew that it was the truth. His heart was pounding hard in his chest. Around the inn the wind was screaming like a witch in her madness. Tristran ran to the stable door, then he stopped, and thought. He fumbled in his tunic pocket, finding the lump of wax, which was all that remained of his candle, with a dried copper leaf sticking to it. He peeled the leaf away from the wax with care. Then he raised the leaf to his ear, and listened to what it told him.

Wine, milord?" asked the middle-aged woman in the long red dress, when Primus had entered the inn.

"I am afraid not," he said. "I have a personal superstition that, until the day I see my brother's corpse cold on the ground before me, I shall drink only my own wine, and eat only food I have obtained and prepared myself. This I shall do here, if you have no objection. I shall, of course, pay you as if it were your own wine I was drinking. If I might trouble you to put this bottle of mine near the fire to take the chill from it? Now, I have a companion on my journey, a young man who is attending to the horses; he has sworn no such oath, and I am sure that if you could send him a mug of burnt ale it would help take the chill from his bones...?"

The pot-maid bobbed a curtsey, and she scuttled back to the kitchens.

"So, mine host," said Primus to the white-bearded innkeeper, "how are your beds here at the back of beyond? Have you straw mattresses? Are there fires in the bedrooms? And I note with increasing pleasure that there is a bathtub in front of your fireplace—if there's a fresh copper of steaming water, I shall have a bath later. But I shall pay you no more than a small silver coin for it, mind."

The innkeeper looked to his wife, who said, "Our beds are good, and I shall have the maid make up a fire in the bedroom for you and your companion."