Stardust

Septimus returned to the door of the hut, hefting his wooden club on high. For, he had reasoned, either the hag will burn with her house, in which case my task is done; or, she will smell the smoke and wake, affrighted and distracted, and she will run from the house, whereupon I shall beat her head with my club, staving it in before she can utter a word. And she will be dead, and I will be revenged.

"It is a fine plan," said Tertius in the crackling of the dry wood. "And once he has killed her, he can go on to obtain the Power of Stormhold."

"We shall see," said Primus, and his voice was the wail of a distant night bird.

Flames licked at the little wooden house, and grew and blossomed on its sides with a bright yellow-orange flame. No one came to the door of the hut. Soon, the place was an inferno, and Septimus was forced to take several steps backwards, from the intensity of the heat. He smiled, widely and triumphantly, and he lowered his club.

There came a sharp pain to the heel of his foot. He twisted, and saw a small bright-eyed snake, crimson in the fire's glow, with its fangs sunk deep into the back of his leather boot. He flung his club at it, but the little creature pulled back from his heel, and looped, at great speed, away behind one of the white chalk boulders.

The pain in his heel began to subside. If there was poison in its bite, thought Septimus, the leather will have taken much of it. I shall bind my leg at the calf, and then I shall remove my boot, and make a cross-shaped incision in the place where I was bitten, and I shall suck out the serpent's venom. So thinking, he sat down upon a chalk boulder in the fire's light, and he tugged at his boot. It would not come off. His foot felt numb, and he realized that the foot must be swelling fast. Then I shall cut the boot off, he thought. He raised his foot to the level of his thigh; for a moment he thought his world was going dark, and then he saw that the flames, which had illuminated the Dyke like a bonfire, were gone. He felt chilled to the bone.

"So," said a voice from behind him, soft as a silken strangling-rope, sweet as a poisoned lozenge, "you thought that you would warm yourself at the burning of my little cottage. Did you wait at the door to beat out the flames should they prove not to my liking?"

Septimus would have answered her, but his jaw muscles were clenched, his teeth gritted hard together. His heart was pounding inside his chest like a small drum, not in its usual steady march but in a wild, arrhythmic abandon. He could feel every vein and artery in his body threading fire through his frame, if it was not ice that they pumped: he could not tell.

An old woman stepped into his view. She looked like the woman who had inhabited the wooden hut, but older, so much older. Septimus tried to blink, to clear his tearing eyes, but he had forgotten how to blink, and his eyes would not close.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," said the woman. "Attempting arson and violence upon the person of a poor old lady living upon her own, who would be entirely at the mercy of every passing vagabond, were it not for the kindness of her little friends."

And she picked something up from the chalky ground and placed it about her wrist, then she walked back into the hut, which was miraculously unburned, or restored, Septimus did not know which and did not care.

His heart juddered and syncopated inside his chest, and if he could have screamed, he would. It was dawn before the pain ended and, in six voices, his older brothers welcomed Septimus to their ranks.

Septimus looked down, one last time, on the twisted, still-warm form he had once inhabited, and at the expression in its eyes. Then he turned away.

"There are no brothers left to take revenge on her," he said, in the voice of the morning curlews, "and it is none of us will ever be Lord of Stormhold. Let us move on."

And after he had said that, there were not even ghosts in that place.

The sun was high in the sky that day when Madame Semele's caravan came lumbering through the chalk cut of Diggory's Dyke.

Madame Semele noticed the soot-blackened wooden hovel beside the road and, as she approached closer, the bent old woman in her faded scarlet dress, who waved at her from beside the path. The woman's hair was white as snow, her skin was wrinkled, and one eye was blind.

"Good day, sister. What happened to your house?" asked Madame Semele.