Neil Gaiman - Stardust

He locked the door behind him, and led her to the bed, where, having first made her remove her chemise, and having examined her face and body by candlelight, and having kissed her on the forehead, lips, nipples, navel and toes, and having extinguished the candle, he made love to her, without speaking, in the pale moonlight.

After some time, he grunted, and was still.

“There, lovey, was that good, now?” asked Letitia.

“Yes,” said Tertius, warily, as if her words guarded some trap. “It was.”

“Would you be wanting another turn, before I leave?”

In reply, Tertius pointed between his legs. Letitia giggled. “We can have him upstanding again in a twinkling,” she said.

And she pulled out the cork from the bottle of wine she had carried in, and had placed beside the bed, and passed it to Tertius.

He grinned at her, and gulped down some wine, then pulled her to him.

“I bet that feels good,” she said to him. “Now, lovey, this time let me show you how I like it… why, whatever is the matter?” For Lord Tertius of Stormhold was writhing back and forth on the bed, his eyes wide, his breathing labored.

“That wine?” he gasped. “Where did you get it?”

“Your brother,” said Letty. “I met him on the stairs. He told me it was a fine restorative and stiffener, and it would provide us with a night we should never forget.”

“And so it has,” breathed Tertius, and he twitched, once, twice, three times, and then was stiff. And very still.

Tertius heard Letitia begin to scream, as if from a very long way away. He was conscious of four familiar presences, standing with him in the shadows beside the wall.

“She was very beautiful,” whispered Secundus, and Letitia thought she heard the curtains rustle.

“Septimus is most crafty,” said Quintus. “That was the self-same preparation of baneberries he slipped into my dish of eels,” and Letitia thought she heard the wind, howling down from the mountain crags.

She opened the door to the household, woken by her screams, and a search ensued. Lord Septimus, however, was nowhere to be found, and one of the black stallions was gone from the stable (in which the coachman slept and snored and could not be wakened).

Lord Primus was in a foul mood when he arose the next morning.

He declined to have Letitia put to death, stating she was as much a victim of Septimus’s craft as Tertius had been, but ordered that she accompany Tertius’s body back to the castle of Stormhold.

He left her one black horse to carry the body, and a pouch of silver coins. It was enough to pay a villager of Nottaway to travel with her—to ensure no wolves made off with the horse or his brother’s remains—and to pay off the coachman when finally he awoke.

And then, alone in the coach, pulled by a team of four coal-black stallions, Lord Primus left the village of Nottaway, in significantly worse temper than he had arrived there.

Brevis arrived at the crossroads tugging at a rope. The rope was attached to a bearded, horned, evil-eyed billy goat, which Brevis was taking to market to sell.

That morning, Brevis’s mother had placed a single radish upon the table in front of him and had said, “Brevis, son. This radish was all I was able to pull from the ground today. All our crops have failed, and all our food has gone. We’ve nothing to sell but the billy goat. So I want you to halter the goat, and take him to the market, and sell him to a farmer. And with the coins you get for the goat—and you’ll take nothing less than a florin, mark you—buy a hen, and buy corn, and turnips; and perhaps we shall not starve.”

So Brevis had chewed his radish, which was woody, and peppery to the tongue, and spent the rest of the morning chasing the goat about its pen, sustaining a bruise to the rib and a stare bite to the thigh in the process, and, eventually, and with the help of a passing tinker, he had subdued the goat enough to have it haltered, and, leaving his mother to bandage the tinker’s goat-inflicted injuries, he dragged the billy goat toward the market.

Sometimes the goat would take it into his head to charge on ahead, and Brevis would be dragged behind him, the heels of his boots grinding into the dried mud of the roadway, until the goat would decide—suddenly and without warning, for no reason Brevis was able to discern—to stop. Then Brevis would pick himself up and return to dragging the beast.

He reached the crossroads on the edge of the wood, sweaty and hungry and bruised, pulling an uncooperative goat. There was a tall woman standing at the crossroads. A circlet of silver sat in the crimson headpiece that surrounded her dark hair, and her dress was as scarlet as her lips.

“What do they call you, boy?” she asked, in a voice like musky brown honey.

“They call me Brevis, ma’am,” said Brevis, observing something strange behind the woman. It was a small cart, but there was nothing harnessed between the shafts. He wondered how it had ever got there.

“Brevis,” she purred. “Such a nice name. Would you like to sell me your goat, Brevis-boy?”

Brevis hesitated. “My mother told me I was to take the goat to the market,” he said, “and to sell him for a hen, and some corn, and some turnips, and to bring her home the change.”

“How much did your mother tell you to take for the goat?” asked the woman in the scarlet kirtle.

“Nothing less than a florin,” he said.

She smiled, and held up one hand. Something glinted yellow. “Why, I will give you this golden guinea,” she said, “enough to buy a coopful of hens and a hundred bushels of turnips.”

The boy’s mouth hung open.

“Do we have a deal?”

The boy nodded, and thrust out the hand which held the billy goat’s rope halter. “Here,” was all he could say, visions of limitless wealth and turnips beyond counting tumbling through his head.

The lady took the rope. Then she touched one finger to the goat’s forehead, between its yellow eyes, and let go of the rope.

Brevis expected the billy goat to bolt for the woods or down one of the roads, but it stayed where it was, as if frozen into position. Brevis held out his hand for the golden guinea.

The woman looked at him then, examining him from the soles of his muddy feet, to his sweaty, cropped hair, and once more she smiled.

“You know,” she said, “I think that a matched pair would be so much more impressive than just one. Don’t you?”

Brevis did not know what she was talking about, and opened his mouth to tell her so. But just then she reached out one long finger, and touched the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, and he found he could not say anything at all.

She snapped her fingers, and Brevis and the billy goat hastened to stand between the shafts of her cart; and Brevis was surprised to notice that he was walking on four legs, and he seemed to be no taller than the animal beside him.

The witch-woman cracked her whip, and her cart jolted off down the muddy road, drawn by a matched pair of horned white billy goats.

The little hairy man had taken Tristran’s ripped coat and trousers and waistcoat, and, leaving him covered by a blanket, had walked into the village which nestled in the valley between three heather-covered hills.

Tristran sat under the blanket, in the warm evening, and waited.

Lights flickered in the hawthorn bush behind him. He thought they were glow-worms or fireflies, but, on closer inspection, he perceived they were tiny people, flickering and flitting from branch to branch.

He coughed, politely. A score of tiny eyes stared down at him. Several of the little creatures vanished. Others retreated high into the hawthorn bush, while a handful, braver than the others, flitted toward him.