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. Then she took up its head, and she carried it with her up to the driver’s seat. She placed it beside her, picked up the reins and whipped the restive horses into a tired trot.
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. His stomach rumbled, and his hand hurt him so.
Adventures are all very well in their place, he thought, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.
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. Looking out over the world from above, he could never remember feeling so alive as he did at that moment. There was a shyness to the sky and a newness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.
He understood that he was, in some way, above his problems, just as he was above the world. The pain in his hand was a long way away. He thought about his actions and his adventures, and about the journey ahead of him, and it seemed to Tristran that the whole business was suddenly very small and very straightforward. He stood up on the cloud spire and called “Halloo!” several times, as loudly as he could. He even waved his tunic over his head, feeling a little foolish as he did so. Then he clambered down the spire; ten feet from the bottom he missed his footing and fell into the misty softness of the cloud.
“What were you shouting about?” asked Yvaine.
“To let people know we were here,” Tristran told her.
“What people?”
“You never know,” he told her. “Better I should call to people who aren’t there than that people who are there should miss us because I didn’t say anything.”
She said nothing in reply to this.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Tristran. “And what I’ve been thinking is this. After we’re done with what I need—got you back to Wall, given you to Victoria Forester—perhaps we could do what you need.”
“What I need?”
“Well, you want to go back, don’t you? Up into the sky. To shine again at night. So we can sort that out.”
She looked up at him and shook her head. “That doesn’t happen,” she explained. “Stars fall. They don’t go back up again.”
“You could be the first,” he told her. “You have to believe. Otherwise it will never happen.”
“It will never happen,” she told him. “No more than your shouting is going to attract anyone up here where there isn’t anyone. It doesn’t matter if I believe it or not, that’s just the way things are. How’s your hand?”
He shrugged. “Hurts,” he said. “How’s your leg?”
“Hurts,” she said. “But not as badly as it did before.”
“Ahoy!” came a voice from far above them. “Ahoy down there! Parties in need of assistance?” 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?”
“It was,” said Tristran. “And I think we are in need of assistance, yes.”
“Right-ho,” said the man. “Get ready to grab the ladder, then.”
“I’m afraid my friend has a broken leg,” he called, “and I’ve hurt my hand. I don’t think either of us can climb a ladder.”
“Not a problem. We can pull you up.” And with that the man tumbled a long rope ladder over the side of the ship. Tristran caught at it with his good hand, and he held it steady while Yvaine pulled herself onto it, then he climbed on below her. The face vanished from the side of the ship as Tristran and Yvaine dangled awkwardly on the end of the rope ladder.
The wind caught the sky-ship, causing the ladder to pull up from the cloud, and Tristran and Yvaine to spin, slowly, in the air.
“Now, haul!” shouted several voices in unison, and Tristran felt them being hauled up several feet. “Haul! Haul! Haul!” Each shout signaled them being pulled higher. The cloud upon which they had been sitting was now no longer below them; instead there was a drop of what Tristran supposed must be a mile or more. He held on tightly to the rope, hooking the elbow of his burned hand about the rope ladder.
Another jerk upwards and Yvaine was level with the top of the ship’s railing. Someone lifted her with care and placed her upon the deck. Tristran clambered over the railing himself, and tumbled down onto the oaken deck.
The ruddy-faced man extended a hand. “Welcome aboard,” he said. “This is the Free Ship Perdita, bound on a lightning-hunting expedition. Captain Johannes Alberic, at your service.” He coughed, deep in his chest. And then, before Tristran could say a word in reply, the captain spied Tristran’s left hand, and called “Meggot! Meggot! Blast you, where are you? Over here! Passengers in need of attention. There lad, Meggot’ll see to your hand. We eat at six bells. You shall sit at my table.”
Soon a nervous-looking woman with an explosive mop of carrot-red hair—Meggot—was escorting him belowdecks, and smearing a thick, green ointment onto his hand, which cooled it and eased the pain. 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).
Tristran did indeed get to eat at the captain’s table, although there was in fact no other table in the mess. 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.
The food was a thick soup of vegetables, beans and barley, and it filled Tristran and contented him. To drink, there was the clearest, coldest water Tristran had ever tasted.
The captain asked them no questions about how they came to find themselves high on a cloud, and they volunteered no answers. Tristran was given a berth with Oddness, the first mate, a quiet gentleman with large wings and a bad stammer, while Yvaine berthed in Meggot’s cabin, and Meggot herself moved into a hammock.
Tristran often found himself looking back on his time on the Perdita, during the rest of his journey through Faerie, as one of the happiest periods of his life. The crew let him help with the sails, and even gave him a turn at the wheel from time to time. Sometimes the ship would sail above dark storm clouds, as big as mountains, and the crew would fish for lightning bolts with a small copper chest. The rain and the wind would wash the deck of the ship, and he often would find himself laughing with exhilaration, while the rain ran down his face, and gripping the rope railing with his good hand to keep from being tumbled over the side by the storm.
Meggot, who was a little taller and a little thinner than Yvaine, had lent her several gowns, which the star wore with relief, taking pleasure in wearing something new on different days. Often she would climb out to the figurehead, despite her broken leg, and sit, looking down at the ground below.