Stardust: Chapters 7–8

There was a tin tub in front of the fire, and the innkeeper's wife put up a paper screen around it. "How d'you like your baths?" she asked, solicitously, "warm, hot, or boil-a-lobster?"

"Why, you poor duck; well, we won't make it too hot, then. Call me if you need another copperful of water, I've got some going over the kitchen fire; and when you're done with the bath, I'll bring you some mulled wine, and some sweet-roasted turnips."

The innkeeper's wife leaned over and chucked the star under the chin. "There's a pet, such a duck it is, the fine things it says." And the woman smiled indulgently and ran a hand through her grey-streaked hair.

There were good people on this benighted world, the star decided, warmed and contented.

Madam, he had decided he would say, please accept my heartfelt and most humble apologies.

His ruminations were interrupted by an enormous clattering, as a huge white horse—but, he realized immediately, it was not a horse—kicked down the door of its stall and came charging, desperately, toward him, its horn lowered.

The wine was steaming and bubbling, and it came to Tristran then—the information surfacing from some long-forgotten fairy tale or piece of children's lore—that a unicorn's horn was proof against...

"Well-met, milady, in this noxious weather."

In his left hand he had hold of the lump of wax, all that remained of the candle that had brought him here. He had been squeezing it in his hand until it was soft and malleable.

It lifted her off the ground, triumphantly, preparing to hurl her to the ground and then to dash her to death beneath its sharp hooves, when, impaled as she was, the witch-woman swung around and thrust the point of the longer of the rock-glass knives...

Its tongue was piebald, and it protruded most pathetically from the unicorn's dead mouth.

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, she lurched toward them, a cleaver in her hand and a smile upon her face.

"Now," said Tristran, one hand gripping the star's arm, the other holding his makeshift candle, "now, walk!"

There was pain, and burning, such that he could have screamed, and the witch-queen stared at him as if he were madness personified.

Septimus prodded the dead goat experimentally with his foot, moving its head; it had received a deep and fatal wound to its forehead, equidistant between its horns.

Septimus prodded the dead goat experimentally with his foot, moving its head; it had received a deep and fatal wound to its forehead, equidistant between its horns.

Septimus crouched down beside the body and, gingerly, lifted its head by the hair; its throat had been cut, expertly, slit from one ear to the other.

"There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks," pointed out Quintus.

"Because," she told him, her voice taut, "now that you have saved my life, you are, by the law of my people, responsible for me, and I for you. Where you go, I must also go."

He helped Yvaine to her feet and, awkwardly, the two of them took several faltering steps on the cloud.

The witch-queen, oldest of the Lilim, reined in the horses beside a pinnacle of rock the color of verdigris, which jutted from the marshy soil of the Barrens like a needle.

Then she began to hack at the unicorn's neck, until she had separated it from the body, and the severed head tumbled into the rock hollow, now filling with a dark red puddle of brackish blood.

"You took the last of the youth we had saved—I tore it from the star's breast myself, long, long ago, though she screamed and writhed and carried on ever-so. From the looks of you, you've squandered most of the youth already."

Tristran sat at the top of the spire of cloud and wondered why none of the heroes of the penny dreadfuls he used to read so avidly were ever hungry.

Still, he was alive, and the wind was in his hair, and the cloud was scudding through the sky like a galleon at full sail.

Glinting golden in the sunlight was a small ship, its sails billowing, and a ruddy, mustachioed face looked down at them from over the side. "Was that you, young feller-me-lad, a-leaping and cavorting just now?"

Glinting golden in the sunlight was a small ship, its sails billowing, and a ruddy, mustachioed face looked down at them from over the side. "Was that you, young feller-me-lad, a-leaping and cavorting just now?"

And then he was being led into the mess, which was a small dining room next to the kitchen (which he was delighted to discover they referred to as the galley, just as in the sea stories he had read).

In addition to the captain and Meggot there were five other members of the crew, a disparate bunch who seemed content to let Captain Alberic do all the talking, which he did, with his ale-pot in one hand, and the other hand alternately concerned with holding his stubby pipe and conveying food into his mouth.

It was inhabited by people and dwarfs, by gnomes and sylvans and other, even queerer, folk.

Sometimes they would stop in the towns and villages upon the way, to wash, and eat—or, in the star's case, to feign eating—and to room, whenever they could afford it, at the town's inn.

He blessed Mrs. Cherry for her efforts in making him memorize verse, until it became apparent that the townsfolk of Fulkeston had decided that he would stay with them forever and become the next bard of the town...

One evening, camped at the edge of a deep wood, Tristran heard something he had never heard before: a beautiful melody, plangent and strange.

It was a remarkable bird, as large as a pheasant, but with feathers of all colors, garish reds and yellows and vivid blues.

"There is no need to belabor your point," said Tristran to the old woman.

The old woman's eyes narrowed. "Well, perhaps what you say is not a complete pack of lies," she admitted, extremely grudgingly.

The old woman squinted at it for a heartbeat, looking at its green leaves and its tight white petals, then she let out a screech: it might have been the anguished cry of some bereft bird of prey.

Madame Semele seemed torn between her desire to threaten and to cajole, and the emotions chased each other so nakedly across her face that she seemed almost to vibrate with the effort of keeping them in check.

And then she took herself in hand and said, in a voice that cracked with self-control, "Now, now. No need to be hasty. I am certain that a deal can be struck between us."

"Oh," said Tristran, "I doubt it. It would need to be a very fine deal, to interest me, and it would need certain guarantees of safe-conduct and such safeguards as to assure that your behavior and actions toward me and my companion remained at all times benign."