Stardust Read online

  Tristran walked over to her slowly and steadily, and then he went down upon one knee in front of her, as once he had gone down on his knees before her in the mud of a country lane.

  “Oh, please don’t,” said Victoria Forester, uncomfortably. “Please get up. Why don’t you sit down over there. In that chair? Yes. That’s better.” The morning light shone through the high lace curtains and caught her chestnut hair from behind, framing her face in gold. “Look at you,” she said. “You became a man. And your hand.What happened to your hand?”

  “I burnt it,” he said. “In a fire.”

  She said nothing in response, at first. She just looked at him. Then she sat back in the armchair and looked ahead of her, at the stick on the wall, or one of Mr. Bromios’s quaint old statues perhaps, and she said, “There are a number of things I must tell you, Tristran, and none of them will be easy. I would appreciate it if you said nothing until I have had a chance to say my piece. So: firstly, and perhaps most importantly, I must apologize to you. It was my foolishness, my idiocy, that sent you off on your journeyings. I thought you were joking . . . no, not joking. I thought that you were too much the coward, too much of a boy, ever to follow up on any of your fine, silly words. It was only when you had gone, and the days passed, and you did not return, that I realized that you had been in earnest, and by then it was much too late.

  “I have had to live . . . each day . . . with the possibility that I had sent you to your death.”

  She stared ahead of herself as she spoke, and Tristran had the feeling, which became a certainty, that she had conducted this conversation in her head a hundred times in his absence. It was why he could not be permitted to say anything; this was hard enough on Victoria Forester, and she would not be able to manage it if he caused her to depart from her script.

  “And I did not play you fair, my poor shop-boy . . . but you are no longer a shop-boy, are you? . . . since I thought that your quest was just foolishness, in every way . . .” She paused, and her hands gripped the wooden arms of the chair, grasping them so tightly her knuckles first reddened, then went white. “Ask me why I would not kiss you that night, Tristran Thorn.”

  “It was your right not to kiss me,” said Tristran. “I did not come here to make you sad, Vicky. I did not find you your star to make you miserable.”

  Her head tipped to one side. “So you did find the star we saw that night?”

  “Oh yes,” said Tristran. “The star is back in the meadow, though, right now. But I did what you asked me to do.”

  “Then do something else for me now. Ask me why I would not kiss you that night. I had kissed you before, when we were younger, after all.”

  “Very well, Vicky. Why would you not kiss me, that night?”

  “Because,” she said, and there was relief in her voice as she said it, enormous relief, as if it were escaping from her, “the day before we saw the shooting star, Robert had asked me to marry him. That evening, when I saw you, I had gone to the shop hoping to see him, and to talk to him, and to tell him that I accepted, and he should ask my father for my hand.”

  “Robert?” asked Tristran, his head all in a whirl.

  “Robert Monday. You worked in his shop.”

  “Mister Monday?” echoed Tristran. “You and Mister Monday?”

  “Exactly.” She was looking at him now. “And then you had to take me seriously and run off to bring me back a star, and not a day would go by when I did not feel as if I had done something foolish and bad. For I promised you my hand, if you returned with the star. And there were some days, Tristran, when I honestly do not know which I thought worse, that you would be killed in the Lands Beyond, all for the love of me, or that you would succeed in your madness, and return with the star, to claim me as your bride. Now, of course, some folks hereabouts told me not to take on so, and that it was inevitable that you would have gone off to the Lands Beyond, of course, it being your nature, and you being from there in the first place, but, somehow, in my heart, I knew I was at fault, and that, one day, you would return to claim me.”

  “And you love Mister Monday?” said Tristran, seizing on the only thing in all this he was certain he had understood.

  She nodded, and raised her head, so her pretty chin pointed toward Tristran. “But I gave you my word, Tristran. And I will keep my word, and I have told Robert this. I am responsible for all that you have gone through—even for your poor burned hand. And if you want me, then I am yours.”

  “To be honest,” he said, “I think that I am responsible for all that I have done, not you. And it is hard to regret a moment of it, although I missed soft beds from time to time, and I shall never be able to look at another dormouse in quite the same way ever again. But you did not promise me your hand if I came back with the star, Vicky.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “No. You promised me anything I desired.”

  Victoria Forester sat bolt upright then, and looked down at the floor. A red spot burned in each pale cheek, as if she had been slapped. “Do I understand you to be—” she began, but Tristran interrupted her.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think you do, actually. You said you would give me whatever I desire.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then . . .” He paused. “Then I desire that you should marry Mister Monday. I desire that you should be married as soon as possible—why, within this very week, if such a thing can be arranged. And I desire that you should be as happy together as ever a man and woman have ever been.”

  She exhaled in one low shuddering breath of release. Then she looked at him. “Do you mean it?” she asked.

  “Marry him with my blessing, and we’ll be quits and done,” said Tristran. “And the star will probably think so, too.”

  There was a knock at the door. “Is all well in there?” called a man’s voice.

  “Everything is very well,” said Victoria. “Please come in, Robert. You remember Tristran Thorn, do you not?”

  “Good morning, Mister Monday,” said Tristran, and he shook Mr. Monday’s hand, which was sweaty and damp. “I understand that you are to be married soon. Permit me to tender my congratulations.”

  Mr. Monday grinned, though it made him look as if he had a toothache. Then he held out a hand for Victoria, and she rose from the chair.

  “If you wish to see the star, Miss Forester . . .” said Tristran, but Victoria shook her head.

  “I am delighted that you came home safely, Mister Thorn. I trust that I shall see you at our wedding?”

  “I’m sure that nothing could give me greater pleasure than to be there,” said Tristran, although he was sure of no such thing.

  On a normal day it would have been unheard-of for the Seventh Magpie to have been so crowded before breakfast, but this was market day, and the Wall-folk and the strangers were crowded into the bar, eating heaped plates of lambchops and bacon and mushrooms and fried eggs and black pudding.

  Dunstan Thorn was waiting for Tristran in the bar. He stood up when he saw him, walked over and clasped him on the shoulder, without speaking. “So you made it back without hurt,” he said, and there was pride in his voice.

  Tristran wondered if he had grown while he was away; he remembered his father as a bigger man. “Hello Father,” he said. “I hurt my hand a bit.”

  “Your mother has breakfast waiting for you, back at the farm,” said Dunstan.

  “Breakfast would be wonderful,” admitted Tristran. “And seeing Mother again, of course. Also we need to talk.” For his mind was still on something that Victoria Forester had said.

  “You look taller,” said his father. “And you are badly in need of a trip to the barber’s.” He drained his tankard, and together they left the Seventh Magpie and walked out into the morning.

  The two Thorns climbed over a stile into one of Dunstan’s fields, and, as they walked through the meadow in which he had played as a boy, Tristran raised the matter that had been vexing him, which was the question of his birth. His father answ
ered him as honestly as he was able to during the long walk back to the farmhouse, telling his tale as if he were recounting a story that had happened a very long time ago, to someone else. A love story.

  And then they were at Tristran’s old home, where his sister waited for him, and there was a steaming breakfast on the stove and on the table, prepared for him, lovingly, by the woman he had always believed to be his mother.

  Madame Semele adjusted the last of the crystal flowers on the stall and eyed the market with disfavor. It was a little past noon, and the customers had just started to wander through. None of them had yet stopped at her stall.

  “Fewer of them and fewer of them, every nine-year,” she said. “Mark my words, soon enough this market will be just a memory. There’s other markets, and other marketplaces, I am thinking. This market’s time is almost over. Another forty, fifty, sixty years at the most, and it will be done for good.”

  “Perhaps,” said her violet-eyed servant, “but it does not matter to me. This is the last of these markets I shall ever attend.”

  Madame Semele glared at her. “I thought I had long since beaten all of your insolence out of you.”

  “It is not insolence,” said her slave. “Look.” She held up the silver chain which bound her. It glinted in the sunlight, but still, it was thinner, more translucent than ever it had been before; in places it seemed as if it were made not of silver but of smoke.

  “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.”

  It 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.

  * * *

  She 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.

  The 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.