Neil Gaiman: Stardust

“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, glaucous-blind 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.

“My sisters will be harsh, but cruel,” said the old witch-queen. “However, I appreciate the sentiment. You have a good heart, child. A pity it will not be mine.”

The star leaned down, then, and kissed the old woman on her wizened cheek, feeling the rough hairs on it scrape her soft lips.

Then the star and her true love walked away, toward the wall. “Who was the old biddy?” asked Tristran. “She seemed a bit familiar. Was anything wrong?”

“Nothing was wrong,” she told him. “She was just someone I knew from the road.”

Behind them were the lights of the market, the lanterns and candles and witch-lights and fairy glitter, like a dream of the night sky brought down to earth. In front of them, across the meadow, on the other side of the gap in the wall, now guardless, was the town of Wall. Oil lamps and gas lamps and candles glowed in the windows of the houses of the village. To Tristran, then, they seemed as distant and unknowable as the world of the Arabian Nights.

He looked upon the lights of Wall for what he knew (it came to him then with certainty) was the last time. He stared at them for some time and said nothing, the fallen star by his side. And then he turned away, and together they began to walk toward the East.

It was considered by many to be one of the greatest days in the history of the Stormhold, the day that Lady Una, long lost and believed to be dead (having been stolen, as an infant, by a witch), returned to the mountain land. There were celebrations and fireworks and rejoicings (official and otherwise) for weeks after her palanquin arrived in a procession led by three elephants.

The joy of the inhabitants of Stormhold and all its dominions was raised to levels hitherto unparalleled when the Lady

Una announced that, in her time away, she had given birth to a son, who, in the absence and presumed death of the last two of her brothers, was the next heir to the throne. Indeed, she told them, he already wore the Power of Stormhold about his neck.

He and his new bride would come to them soon, though the Lady Una could be no more specific about the date of their arrival than this, and it appeared to irk her. In the meantime, and in their absence, the Lady Una announced that she would rule the Stormhold as regent. Which she did, and did well, and the dominions on and about Mount Huon prospered and flourished under her command.

It was three more years before two travel-stained wanderers arrived, dusty and footsore, in the town of Cloudsrange, in the lower reaches of the Stormhold proper, and they took a room in an inn, and sent for hot water and a tin bath. They stayed at the inn for several days, conversing with the other customers and guests. On the last night of their stay, the woman, whose hair was so fair it was almost white, and who walked with a limp, looked at the man, and said, “Well?”

“Well,” he said. “Mother certainly seems to be doing an excellent job of reigning.”

“Just as you,” she told him, tartly, “would do every bit as well, if you took the throne.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted. “And it certainly seems like it would be a nice place to end up, eventually. But there are so many places we have not yet seen. So many people still to meet. Not to mention all the wrongs to right, villains to vanquish, sights to see, all that. You know.”

She smiled, wryly. “Well,” she said, “At least we shall not be bored. But we had better leave your mother a note.”

And so it was that the Lady Una of Stormhold was brought a sheet of paper by an innkeeper’s lad. The sheet was sealed with sealing wax, and the Lady Una questioned the boy closely about the travelers—a man and his wife—before she broke the seal and read the letter. It was addressed to her, and after the salutations, it read: