Stardust (21 page)

“What have you done?” Spittle flecked the old woman’s lips.

“I have done nothing; nothing that I did not do eighteen years ago. I was bound to you to be your slave until the day that the moon lost her daughter, if it occurred in a week when two Mondays came together. And my time with you is almost done.”

I
t was after three in the afternoon. The star sat upon the meadow grass beside Mr. Bromios’s wine-and-ale-and-food stall and stared across at the gap in the wall and the village beyond it. Upon occasion, the patrons of the stall would offer her wine or ale or great, greasy sausages, and always she would decline.

“Are you waiting for someone, my dear?” asked a pleasant-featured young woman, as the afternoon dragged on.

“I do not know,” said the star. “Perhaps.”

“A young man, if I do not mistake my guess, a lovely thing like you.”

The star nodded. “In a way,” she said.

“I’m Victoria,” said the young woman. “Victoria Forester.”

“I am called Yvaine,” said the star. She looked Victoria Forester up and down and up again. “So,” she said, “you are Victoria Forester. Your fame precedes you.”

“The wedding, you mean?” said Victoria, and her eyes shone with pride and delight.

“A wedding, is it?” asked Yvaine. One hand crept to her waist and felt the topaz upon its silver chain. Then she stared at the gap in the wall and bit her lip.

“Oh you poor thing! What a beast he must be, to keep you waiting so!” said Victoria Forester. “Why do you not go through, and look for him?”

“Because . . .” said the star, and then she stopped. “Aye,” she said. “Perhaps I shall.” The sky above them was striped with grey and white bands of cloud, through which patches of blue could be seen. “I wish my mother were out,” said the star. “I would say good-bye to her, first.” And, awkwardly, she got to her feet.

But Victoria was not willing to let her new friend go that easily, and she was prattling on about banns, and marriage licenses, and special licenses which could only be issued by archbishops, and how lucky she was that Robert knew the archbishop. The wedding, it seemed, was set for six days’ time, at midday.

Then Victoria called over a respectable gentleman, greying at the temples, who was smoking a black cheroot and who grinned as if he had the toothache. “And this is Robert,” she said. “Robert, this is Yvaine. She’s waiting for her young man. Yvaine, this is Robert Monday. And on Friday next, at midday, I shall be Victoria Monday. Perhaps you could make something of that, my dear, in your speech at the wedding breakfast—that on Friday there will be two Mondays together!”

And Mr. Monday puffed on his cheroot, and told his bride-to-be that he would certainly consider it.

“Then,” asked Yvaine, picking her words with care, “you are
not
marrying Tristran Thorn?”

“No,” said Victoria.

“Oh,” said the star. “Good.” And she sat down again.

*  *  *

S
he was still sitting there when Tristran came back through the gap in the wall, several hours later. He looked distracted, but brightened up when he saw her. “Hello, you,” he said, helping her to her feet. “Have a good time waiting for me?”

“Not particularly,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” said Tristran. “I suppose I should have taken you with me, into the village.”

“No,” said the star, “You shouldn’t have. I live as long as I am in Faerie. Were I to travel to your world, I would be nothing but a cold iron stone fallen from the heavens, pitted and pocked.”

“But I almost took you through with me!” said Tristan, aghast. “I tried to, last night.”

“Yes,” she said. “Which only goes to prove that you are indeed a ninny, a lackwit, and a . . . a clodpoll.”

“Dunderhead,” offered Tristran. “You always used to like calling me a dunderhead. And an oaf.”

“Well,” she said, “you are all those things, and more besides. Why did you keep me waiting like that? I thought something terrible had happened to you.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I won’t leave you again.”

“No,” she said, seriously and with certainty, “you will not.”

His hand found hers, then. They walked, hand in hand, through the market. A wind began to come up, flapping and gusting at the canvas of the tents and the flags, and a cold rain spat down on them. They took refuge under the awning of a book stall, along with a number of other people and creatures. The stallholder hauled a boxful of books further under the canvas, to ensure that it did not get wet.

“Mackerel sky, mackerel sky, not long wet nor not long dry,” said a man in a black silk top hat to Tristran and Yvaine. He was purchasing a small book bound in red leather from the bookseller.

Tristran smiled and nodded, and, as it became apparent that the rain was easing up, he and Yvaine walked on.

“Which is all the thanks I shall ever get from them, I’ll wager,” said the tall man in the top hat to the bookseller, who had not the slightest idea what he was speaking about, and did not care.

“I have said my good-byes to my family,” said Tristran to the star, as they walked. “To my father, and my mother—my father’s wife, perhaps I should say—and to my sister, Louisa. I don’t think I shall be going back again. Now we just need to solve the problem of how to put you back up again in the sky. Perhaps I shall come with you.”

“You would not like it, up in the sky,” the star assured him. “So . . . I take it you will not be marrying Victoria Forester.”

Tristran nodded. “No,” he said.

“I met her,” said the star. “Did you know that she is with child?”

“What?” asked Tristran, shocked and surprised.

“I doubt that she knows. She is one, perhaps two moons along.”

“Good lord. How do you know?”

It was the star’s turn to shrug. “You know,” she said, “I was happy to discover that you are not marrying Victoria Forester.”

“So was I,” he confessed.

The rain began once more, but they made no move to get under cover. He squeezed her hand in his. “You know,” she said, “a star and a mortal man . . .”

“Only half mortal, actually,” said Tristran, helpfully. “Everything I ever thought about myself—who I was, what I am—was a lie. Or sort of. You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that feels.”

“Whatever you are,” she said, “I just wanted to point out that we can probably never have children. That’s all.”

Tristran looked at the star, then, and he began to smile, and he said nothing at all. His hands were on her upper arms. He was standing in front of her, and looking down at her.

“Just so you know, that’s all,” said the star, and she leaned forward.

They kissed for the first time then in the cold spring rain, though neither one of them now knew that it was raining. Tristran’s heart pounded in his chest as if it were not big enough to contain all the joy that it held. He opened his eyes as he kissed the star. Her sky-blue eyes stared back into his, and in her eyes he could see no parting from her.

T
he silver chain was now nothing but smoke and vapor. For a heartbeat it hung on the air, then a sharp gust of wind and rain blew it out into nothing at all.

“There,” said the woman with the dark, curling hair, stretching like a cat, and smiling. “The terms of my servitude are fulfilled, and now you and I are done with each other.”

The old woman looked at her helplessly. “But what shall I do? I am old. I cannot manage this stall by myself.You are an evil, foolish slattern, so to desert me like this.”

“Your problems are of no concern to me,” said her former slave, “but I shall never again be called a slattern, or a slave, or anything else that is not my own name. I am Lady Una, first-born and only daughter of the eighty-first Lord of Stormhold, and the spells and terms you bound me with are over and done. Now, you will apologize to me, and you will call me by my right name, or I will—with enormous pleasure—devote the rest of my life to hunting you down and destroying every thing that you care for and every thing that you are.”

They looked at each other, then, and it was the old woman who looked away first.

“Then I must apologize for having called you a slattern, Lady Una,” she said, as if each word of it were bitter sawdust that she spat from her mouth.

Lady Una nodded. “Good. And I believe that you owe me payment for my services, now my time with you is done,” she said. For these things have their rules. All things have rules.

T
he rain was still falling in gusts, then not falling for just long enough to lure people out from underneath their makeshift shelters, then raining on them once more. Tristran and Yvaine sat, damp and happy, beside a campfire, in the company of a motley assortment of creatures and people.

Tristran had asked if any of them knew the little hairy man he had met upon his travels, and had described him as well as he could. Several people acknowledged that they had met him in the past, although none had seen him at this market.

He found his hands twining, almost of their own volition, into the star’s wet hair. He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize how much he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.

“So, where are we going once the market is done?” Tristran asked the star.

“I do not know,” she said. “But I have one obligation still to discharge.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” she said. “The topaz thing I showed you. I have to give it to the right person. The last time the right person came along, that innkeeper woman cut his throat, so I have it still. But I wish it were gone.”

A woman’s voice at his shoulder said, “Ask her for what she carries, Tristran Thorn.”

He turned and stared into eyes the color of meadow-violets. “You were the bird in the witch’s caravan,” he told the woman.

“When you were the dormouse, my son,” said the woman. “I was the bird. But now I have my own form again, and my time of servitude is over. Ask Yvaine for what she carries. You have the right.”

He turned back to the star. “Yvaine?”

She nodded, waiting.

“Yvaine, will you give me what you are carrying?”

She looked puzzled; then she reached inside her robe, fumbled discreetly, and produced a large topaz stone on a broken silver chain.