It had taken a while - and a good deal of cursing to herself - to maneuver the sleeping boy from on top of her, fingers curling sleepily at her waist, and into a far more respectable position without waking him. She did, however, allow his head to remain resting in her lap, her own fingers carding lightly through his hair as she watches him sleep ( Read more... )

The sun is slowly setting, lit up huge and red behind the rooftops that are now visible behind the great stone Wall in front of them, and the meadow that lies between them and their destination suddenly seems much too small. There is hardly any space between here and there and she feels suffocated with something that manages to be entirely worse ( Read more... )

The time passes slowly as Sal's caravan creaks its way back toward Wall, and Yvaine has lost track of the exact passing of days and hours and minutes. They seem to blend indecipherably into each other - resting as the woman drives and making her careful way up onto the wagon's roof while the woman sleeps, head tilted up at the sky and nighttime ( Read more... )

( Alternatively the First. )

"... Tristran and Yvaine were forced to sneak out of the town at the dead of night, and they only escaped because Yvaine persuaded (by some means, on which Tristran was never entirely clear) the dogs of the town not to bark as they left."

-- Stardust, p.248

"We would so love to keep you, Master Tristran," she mocks - voice a high-pitched falsetto ( Read more... )

In a tavern in Fulkeston, Tristran gained great renown by reciting from memory Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," the Twenty-Third Psalm, the "Quality of Mercy" speech from The Merchant of Venice, and a poem about a boy who stood on the burning deck where all be he had fled, each of which he had been obliged to commit to memory in his school days. He ( Read more... )

"In the town of Simcock-Under-Hill, Tristran and Yvaine had an encounter with a goblin press-gang that might have ended unhappily, with Tristran spending the rest of his life fighting the goblins' endless wars beneath the earth, had it not been for Yvaine's quick thinking and her sharp tongue."

-- Stardust, p.247
"I think," he announces almost ( Read more... )

There's still only a certain amount of sunlight that Yvaine is willing to be exposed to at any given time - so when she steps out of the relative darkness of the kitchen it's only under the shade of a rather ridiculously wide-brimmed hat with an equally ridiculous feather sticking out of the top. She can't say that she is particularly fond of ( Read more... )

( Of Pastries. )

There have been, on select earlier ocassions, times when Yvaine has claimed - rather vehemently in fact - that she most certainly was not, by any means, sulking. This is not one of those times ( Read more... )