Stardust

"Might I have the honor of knowing what you are called?" asked Yvaine, wondering if she was laying it on a bit thickly. Tristran's mother preened, and Yvaine knew that she was not. "I am the Lady Una of Stormhold," she said. Then she reached into a small bag, which hung from her side, and produced a rose made of glass, of a red so dark that it was almost black in the flickering firelight. "It was my payment," she said. "For more than sixty years of servitude. It galled her to give it to me, but rules are rules, and she would have lost her magic and more if she had not settled up. Now, I plan to barter it for a palanquin to take us back to the Stormhold, for we must arrive in style. Oh, I have missed the Stormhold so badly. We must have bearers, and outriders, and perhaps an elephant— they are so imposing, nothing says 'Get out of the way' quite like an elephant in the front..." "No," said Tristran. "No?" said his mother.

"No," repeated Tristran. "You may travel by palanquin, and elephant, and camel and all that, if you wish to, Mother. But Yvaine and I will make our own way there, and travel at our own speed."

The Lady Una took a deep breath, and Yvaine decided that this argument was one that she would rather be somewhere else for, so she stood up, and told them that she would be back soon, that she needed a walk, and that she would not go wandering too far. Tristran looked at her with pleading eyes, but Yvaine shook her head: this was his fight to win, and he would fight it better if she were not there.

She limped through the darkening market, pausing beside a tent from which music and applause could be heard, and from which light spilled like warm, golden honey. She listened to the music, and she thought her own thoughts. It was there that a bent, white-haired old woman, glaucousblind in one eye, hobbled over to the star, and bade her to stop a while and talk.

"About what?" asked the star.

The old woman, shrunk by age and time to little bigger than a child, held onto a stick as tall and bent as herself with palsied and swollen-knuckled hands. She stared up at the star with her good eye and her blue-milk eye, and she said, "I came to fetch your heart back with me."

"Is that so?" asked the star.

"Aye," said the old woman. "I nearly had it, at that, up in the mountain pass." She cackled at the back of her throat at the memory. "D'ye remember?" She had a large pack that sat like a hump on her back. A spiral ivory horn protruded from the pack, and Yvaine knew where she had seen that horn before.

"That was you?" asked the star of the tiny woman. "You, with the knives?"

"Mm. That was me. But I squandered away all the youth I took for the journey. Every act of magic lost me a little of the youth I wore, and now I am older than I have ever been."

"If you touch me," said the star, "lay but a finger on me, you will regret it forevermore."

"If ever you get to be my age," said the old woman, "you will know all there is to know about regrets, and you will know that one more, here or there, will make no difference in the long run." She snuffled the air. Her dress had once been red, but it seemed to have been much patched and taken up and faded over the years. It hung down from one shoulder, exposing a puckered scar that might have been many hundreds of years old. "So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o' the wisp. Not long ago you burned—your heart burned—in my mind like silver fire. But after that night in the inn it became patchy and dim, and now it is not there at all."

Yvaine realized that she felt nothing but pity for the creature who had wanted her dead, so she said, "Could it be that the heart that you seek is no longer my own?"

The old woman coughed. Her whole frame shook and spasmed with the retching effort of it.

The star waited for her to be done, and then she said, "I have given my heart to another."

"The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?"

"Yes."

"You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do."

"Nonetheless," said the star, "he has my heart. I hope that your sisters will not be too hard on you, when you return to them without it."

It was then that Tristran walked across to Yvaine, and took her hand, and nodded to the old woman. "All sorted out," he said. "Nothing to worry about."

"And the palanquin?"

"Oh, Mother will be traveling by palanquin. I had to promise that we'd get to the Stormhold sooner or later, but we can take our time on the way. I think we should buy a couple of horses, and see the sights."

"And your mother acceded to this?"

"In the end," he said blithely. "Anyway, sorry to interrupt."

"We are almost done," said Yvaine, and she turned back to the little old woman.