Stardust

“The chain? It binds me to the stall. I am the personal slave of the witch-woman who owns the stall. She caught me many years ago—as I played by the waterfalls in my father’s lands, high in the mountains—luring me on and on in the form of a pretty frog always but a moment out of my reach, until I had left my father’s lands, unwittingly, whereupon she resumed her true shape and popped me into a sack.”

“And you are her slave forever?”

“Not forever,” and at that the faerie girl smiled. “I gain my freedom on the day the moon loses her daughter, if that occurs in a week when two Mondays come together. I await it with patience. And in the meantime I do as I am bid, and also I dream. Will you buy a flower from me now, young master?”

“My name is Dunstan.”

“And an honest name it is, too,” she said with a teasing grin. “Where are your pincers, Master Dunstan? Will you catch the devil by the nose?”

“And what is your name?” asked Dunstan, blushing a deep red.

“I no longer have a name. I am a slave, and the name I had was taken from me. I answer to ‘hey, you!’ or to ‘girl!’ or to ‘foolish slattern!’ or to many another imprecation.”

Dunstan noticed how the silken fabric of her robe pressed itself against her body; he was aware of elegant curves, and of her violet eyes upon him, and he swallowed.

Dunstan put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his kerchief. He could no longer look at the woman. He tumbled out his money onto the counter. “Take enough for this,” he said, picking a pure white snowdrop from the table.

“We do not take money at this stall.” She pushed the coins back toward him.

“No? What will you take?” For by now he was quite agitated, and his only mission was to obtain a flower for… for Daisy, Daisy Hempstock … to obtain his flower and to depart, for, truth to tell, the young lady was making him exceedingly uncomfortable.

“I could take the color of your hair,” she said, “or all of your memories before you were three years of age. I could take the hearing from your left ear—not all of it, just enough that you’d not enjoy music or appreciate the running of a river or the soughing of the wind.”

Dunstan shook his head.

“Or a kiss from you. One kiss, here on my cheek.”

“That I’ll pay with goodwill!” said Dunstan, and with that he leaned across the stall, amid the twinkling jingling of the crystal flowers, and planted a chaste kiss on her soft cheek. He smelled the scent of her then, intoxicating, magical; it filled the front of his head and his chest and his mind.

“There, now,” she said, and she passed him his snowdrop. He took it with hands that suddenly seemed to him to be huge and clumsy and not at all small and in every way perfect like the hands of the faerie girl. “And I’ll see you back here tonight, Dunstan Thorn, when the moon goes down. Come here and hoot like a little owl. Can you do that?”

He nodded, and stumbled away from her; he did not need to ask how she knew his surname; she had taken it from him along with certain other things, such as his heart, when he had kissed her.

The snowdrop chimed in his hand.

Why, Dunstan Thorn,” said Daisy Hemp-stock, when he encountered her by Mr. Bromios’s tent, sitting with her family and Dunstan’s parents, eating great brown sausages and drinking porter, “whatever is the matter?”

“I brought you a gift,” Dunstan muttered, and thrust the chiming snowdrop toward her; it glinted in the afternoon sunlight. She took it from him, puzzled, with fingers still shiny with sausage grease. Impulsively, Dunstan leaned forward and, in front of her mother and father and sister, in front of Bridget Comfrey and Mr. Bromios and all, he kissed her on her fair cheek.

The outcry was predictable; but Mr. Hempstock, who had not lived on the border of Faerie and the Lands Beyond for fifty-seven years for nothing, exclaimed, “Hush, now! Look at his eyes. Can’t you see the poor boy’s dazed in his wits, dazed and confused? He’s bespelled, I’ll wager you. Hoy! Tommy Forester! Come here; take young Dunstan Thorn back to the village and keep an eye on him; let him sleep if he wishes, or talk if it’s talk he needs…”

Tommy walked Dunstan out of the market and back to the village of Wall.

“There, now, Daisy,” said her mother, stroking her hair, “he’s just a little elf-touched, that’s all. No need to take on so.” And she pulled a lace kerchief from her capacious bosom, and dabbed at her daughter’s cheeks, which had suddenly become covered with tears.

Daisy looked up at her, and seized the handkerchief, and blew her nose upon it, and sniffled into it. And Mrs. Hemp-stock observed, with a certain perplexity, that Daisy appeared to be smiling through her tears.

“But Mother, Dunstan kissed me” said Daisy Hempstock, and she fixed the crystal snowdrop at the front of her bonnet, where it chimed and glistened.