Stardust

“Look at us,” he said. “A fine pair.

You with your broken leg, me with my hand.”

“Show me your hand.” He pulled it from the cool of the cloud: his hand was red, and blisters were coming up on each side of it and on the back of it, where the flames had licked against his flesh.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Quite a lot, really.”

“Good,” said Yvaine.

“If my hand had not been burned, you would probably be dead now,” he pointed out. She had the grace to look down, ashamed. “You know,” he added, changing the subject, “I left my bag in that madwoman’s inn. We have nothing now, save the clothes we stand up in.”

“Sit down in,” corrected the star.

“There’s no food, no water, we’re half a mile or so above the world with no way of getting down, and no control over where the cloud is going. And both of us are injured. Did I leave anything out?”

“You forgot the bit about clouds dissipating and vanishing into nothing,” said Yvaine. “They do that. I’ve seen them. I could not survive another fall.”Tristran shrugged. “Well,” he said. “We’re probably doomed, then. But we may as well have a look around while we’re up here.”He helped Yvaine to her feet, and, awkwardly, the two of them took several faltering steps on the cloud. Then Yvaine sat down again. “This is no use,” she told him. “You go and look around. I will wait here for you.”

“Promise?” he asked. “No running away this time?”

“I swear it. On my mother the moon I swear it,” said Yvaine, sadly. “You saved my life.”And with that Tristran had to content himself. Her hair was mostly grey, now, and her face was pouched, and wrinkled at the throat and eyes and at the corners of the mouth. There was no color to her face, although her skirt was a vivid, bloody splash of scarlet; it had been ripped at the shoulder, and beneath the rip could be seen, puckered and obscene, a deep scar. The wind whipped her hair about her face as she drove the black carriage on through the Barrens. The four stallions stumbled often: thick sweat dripped from their flanks and a bloody foam dripped from their lips. Still, their hooves pounded along the muddy path through the Barrens, where nothing grows.

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, as slowly as might be expected from any lady no longer in her first, or even her second, youth, she climbed down from the driver’s seat to the wet earth.

She walked around the coach and opened the door. The head of the dead unicorn, her dagger still in its cold eye-socket, flopped down as she did so. The witch clambered up into the coach and pulled open the unicorn’s mouth. Rigor mortis was starting to set in, and the jaw opened only with difficulty. The witch-woman bit down, hard, on her own tongue, bit hard enough that the pain was metal-sharp in her mouth, bit down until she could taste the blood. She swirled it around in her mouth, mixing the blood with spittle (she could feel that several of her front teeth were beginning to come loose), then she spat onto the dead unicorn’s piebald tongue. Blood flecked her lips and chin. She grunted several syllables that shall not be recorded here, then pushed the unicorn’s mouth closed once more. “Get out of the coach,” she told the dead beast.

Stiffly, awkwardly, the unicorn raised its head. Then it moved its legs, like a newborn foal or fawn just learning to walk, and twitched and pushed itself up onto all fours and, half climbing, half falling, it tumbled out of the carriage door and onto the mud, where it raised itself to its feet. Its left side, upon which it had lain in the coach, was swollen and dark with blood and fluids. Half-blind, the dead unicorn stumbled toward the green rock needle until it reached a depression at its base, where it dropped to the knees of its forelegs in a ghastly parody of prayer.

The witch-queen reached down and pulled her knife from out of the beast’s eye-socket. She sliced across its throat. Blood began to ooze, too slowly, from the gash she had made. She walked back to the carriage and returned with her cleaver. 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.

She took the unicorn’s head by the horn and placed it beside the body, on the rock; thereupon she looked with her hard, grey eyes into the red pool she had made. Two faces stared out at her from the puddle: two women, older by far in appearance than she was now.

“Where is she?” asked the first face, peevishly. “What have you done with her?”

“Look at you!” said the second of the Lilim. “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.”

“I came so close,” said the witch-woman to her sisters in the pool. “But she had a unicorn to protect her. Now I have the unicorn’s head, and I will bring it back with me, for it’s long enough since we had fresh ground unicorn’s horn in our arts.”

“Unicorn’s horn be damned,” said her youngest sister. “What about the star?”

“I cannot find her. It is almost as if she were no longer in Faerie.”There was a pause.

“No,” said one of her sisters. “She is still in Faerie. But she is going to the Market at Wall, and that is too close to the world on the other side of the wall. Once she goes into that world, she will be lost to us.”For they each of them knew that, were the star to cross the wall and enter the world of things as they are, she would become, in an instant, no more than a pitted lump of metallic rock that had fallen, once, from the heavens: cold and dead and of no more use to them.

“Then I shall go to Diggory’s Dyke and wait there, for all who go to Wall must pass that way.”The reflections of the two old women gazed disapprovingly out of the pool. The witch-queen ran her tongue over her teeth (that one at the top will be out by nightfall, she thought, the way it wobbles so) and then she spat into the bloody pool.

The ripples spread across it, erasing all traces of the Lilim; now the pool reflected only the sky over the Barrens and the faint white clouds far above them.

She kicked the headless corpse of the unicorn so it tumbled over onto its side.