Stardust- Neil Gaiman

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.

Epilogue

In Which Several Engings
May Be Discerned

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:

Have been unavoidably detained by the world.
Expect us when you see us.

It was signed by Tristran, and beside his signature was a fingerprint, which glittered and
glimmered and shone when the shadows touched it as if it had been dusted with tiny stars.

With which, there being nothing else that she could do about it, Una had to content herself.

It was another five years after that before the two travelers finally returned for good to the
mountain fastness. They were dusty and tired and dressed in rags and tatters, and were at first,

and to the shame of the entire land, treated as vagabonds and rogues; it was not until the man
displayed the topaz stone that hung about his neck that he was recognized as the Lady Una’s only
son.

The investiture and subsequent celebrations went on for almost a month, after which the young
eighty-second Lord of Stormhold got on with the business of ruling. He made as few decisions as

possible, but those he made were wise ones, even if the wisdom was not always apparent at the
time. He was valiant in battle, though his left hand was scarred and of little use, and a cunning
strategist; he led his people to victory against the Northern Goblins when they closed the passes to
travelers; he forged a lasting peace with the Eagles of the High Crags, a peace that remains in

place until this day.
His wife, the Lady Yvaine, was a fair woman from distant parts (although no one was ever

entirely certain quite which ones). When she and her husband first arrived at Stormhold, she took
herself a suite of rooms in one of the highest peaks of the citadel, a suite that had long been
abandoned as unusable by the palace and its staff; its roof had collapsed in a rock fall a thousand

years earlier. No one else had wished to use the rooms, for they were open to the sky, and the
stars and the moon shone down upon them so brightly through the thin mountain air that it seemed
one could simply reach out and hold them in one’s hand.

Tristran and Yvaine were happy together. Not forever-after, for Time, the thief, eventually

takes all things into his dusty storehouse, but they were happy, as these things go, for a long while.
And then Death came in the night, and whispered her secret into the ear of the eighty-second Lord
of Stormhold, and he nodded his grey head and he said nothing more, and his people took his
remains to the Hall of Ancestors where they lie to this day.

After Tristran’s death, there were those who claimed that he was a member of the Fellowship

of the Castle, and was instrumental in breaking the power of the Unseelie Court. But the truth of
that, as so much else, died with him, and has never been established, neither one way nor another.

Yvaine became the Lady of Stormhold, and proved a better monarch, in peace and in war, than
any would have dared to hope. She did not age as her husband had aged, and her eyes remained as

blue, her hair as golden-white, and—as the free citizens of the Stormhold would have occasional
cause to discover—her temper as quick to flare as on the day that Tristran first encountered her in
the glade beside the pool.

She walks with a limp to this day, although no one in the Stormhold would ever remark upon it,

any more than they dare remark upon the way she glitters and shines, upon occasion, in the
darkness.

They say that each night, when the duties of state permit, she climbs, on foot, and limps,
alone, to the highest peak of the palace, where she stands for hour after hour, seeming not to
notice the cold peak winds. She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and

watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, my thanks to Charles Vess. He is the nearest thing we have today to the
great Victorian fairy painters, and without his art as an inspiration none of these words would
exist. Every time I finished a chapter I phoned him up and read it to him, and he listened patiently
and he chuckled in all the right places.

My thanks to Jenny Lee, Karen Berger, Paul Levitz, Mer-rilee Heifetz, Lou Aronica, Jennifer
Hershey and Tia Maggini: each of them helped make this book a reality.

I owe an enormous debt to Hope Mirrlees, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell and C.S. Lewis,
wherever they may currently be, for showing me that fairy stories were for adults too.

Tori lent me a house, and I wrote the first chapter in it, and all she asked in exchange was that
I make her a tree.

There were people who read it as it was being written, and who told me what I was doing right
and what I was doing wrong. It’s not their fault if I didn’t listen. My thanks in particular to Amy
Horsting, Lisa Henson, Diana Wynne Jones, Chris Bell and Susanna Clarke.

My wife Mary and my assistant Lorraine did more than their share of work on this book, for they
typed the first few chapters from my handwritten draft, and I cannot thank them enough.

The kids, to be frank, were absolutely no help at all, and I truly don’t think I’d ever have it any
other way.

Neil Gaiman, June 1998