31_days: A Whisper's Worth of Secrets
Title: A Whisper's Worth of Secrets
Day/Theme: June 24 / they slip away, across the universe
Series: Stardust (book)
Character/Pairing: Yvaine/Tristran, Death, OFC
Rating: PG-13
A Whisper's Worth of Secrets
It was a very young witch who came, barely past a full half-century, by Yvaine’s reckoning. Admittedly, her reckoning of these things could sometimes be faulty, as in the incident regarding the Tinker of the Derelict Waste, though that had been an exceedingly lengthy period ago. Nevertheless, Yvaine believed her to be relatively young, as these things are accounted.
She wore a red cloak about her shoulders. Its hem held a pair of darker red splashes, but no other stains, despite the messy journey its wearer surely must have undertaken to reach the peak of Stormhold. Deceptively fragile golden tresses tumbled over her shoulders, misting around her face to frame an aquiline nose, slender blue eyes, and a smile whose hauteur set the confident arrogance arrested in her strong figure to context. Yvaine wondered suddenly, in an unrelated thought of the sort that tends to strike suddenly in moments inappropriate, whether Tristran would have thought her pretty.
“Perhaps from an objective view she may be called comely, but to my eye, beauty weareth stardust and a sharp tongue.”
Oh nitwitted fool, a sharp tongue’s full might is subject to the ear and not the eye. Yvaine snorted softly, and lifted her own eyes to look the witch full in the face. The sounds of battle, heard even on the lofty head of Stormhold’s keep, had already died to the wind and the echo of a triumphant horn unfamiliar to Yvaine. “I am to understand, then, that Stormhold has fallen,” said she to the witch.
“Not quite yet, Lady Stormhold,” said the witch in richly amused tones. She extended a hand to Yvaine. It seemed ice-tipped beneath the night. “Its final bastion stands before me.”
Yvaine sniffed in disdain. “I am afraid I make a poor bastion against which one might choose to avail oneself. I have never been in the habit of bearing weapons; had I one, my use of it would be poor. You and yours have robbed me of my keep. My leg is lame, and I do not wish to undergo an undignified death; any sudden advance you make would be most like to meet its mark.” Nevertheless, her back arched straighter, in resignation. “Unless you refer to the ruin of Stormhold’s head,” she added.
“Oh, Lady Stormhold,” said the witch, shaking her head merrily. “Your paltry attempts to dissuade me of my prize are futile.” A predatory smirk snaked across her lips. Her right hand lowered to the knife at her girdle, her foot stepping forth, once. Yvaine recognised the blade, having seen its twin once in a hastily constructed inn. “Your reputation is hardly easy to parallel, you know. You, a woman, have held Stormhold since time out of mind, taking none that any know of to husband.” Her black skirt rustled as the witch took another step. “Twice have you bested the armies of my Lord and Master, wise and cunning as you are.” A third step, almost to the base of the broken stairs; Yvaine stood at its peak, as close to the heavens as she could travel on her own cognisance. “And then, of course, there is the matter of your heart.”
“Naturally,” echoed Yvaine with a sarcastic curl to her lip, but as she gleamed of stardust, as surely as though a hand crusted in silver powders had moulded her form, there was little point in denying her birthright. “There is very little natural about eating another’s heart.”
“Well,” said the witch. “There is very little about natural that I wish to associate with my lifespan.”
“Naturally,” sighed Yvaine in dull acknowledgement. “You are hardly the first, you realise?”
“But I am the first who has beaten your fortress,” said the witch, which was hardly untrue. “As I am the last of Baba Yaga’s students, who died across the Wall, to use your laughable vernacular. That stupid old witch. She refused to give me a clawhold into my own story, you know. I completed my tasks, my tests, and I emerged the best, but she just had to keep all her power to herself.” Anger peeked contemptuously from the corner of her eyes, but no more; Yvaine admitted to herself that the girl-witch had truly remarkable control. “Well, that’s done with now. I’ve made my own story, and to seal the deal, I’ll have your heart for a double shot at eternity!” The witch tossed her hair and smirked. “Now, shall we get down to business? Perhaps you might feel more comfortable if you removed your dress? It’s rather fetching, and this whole business will be messy, I’m afraid.”
“No, I think not,” said Yvaine. “I believe I have informed you that I would prefer a dignified exit, which includes my person remaining clothed. I would be most comfortable dying in this dress; a sky pirate gave it to me long ago, and when I wore it, it was when I was closest to the sky after my fall.” Yvaine smoothed a hand along her blue-waisted side in reminiscence. It had truly been a very long time ago, though the witch was rather prone to exaggeration. Time out of mind? Certainly not. Yvaine remembered everything very well. It had been a long journey to the village of Wall, an even longer one from it, and the years after that had been a lesson in tedium. No, Yvaine held the time fast within the recesses of her memory, and oh, what a terribly long time it had been…
“Suit yourself,” the witch said faintly, and Yvaine was recalled to the present. “It probably wouldn’t fit me, any way. We’ll plunder the sky pirates and the ends of Faerie soon enough for me to get one in my size.”
She looked so very smugly stupid and unaware that a little worm of pity broke in Yvaine’s heart. “No, you shan’t.”
“Resistance at last?” said the witch, with a mocking uptilt of an immaculate brow. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t retaliate at all! Pray tell me, Lady Impregnable, how exactly would you know? Sitting high and mighty in ivoried Stormhold, far removed from the real world? Why, I’d bet you didn’t even know there was a war until we were right on your doorstep!” The witch laughed.
Yvaine sniffed again. “Faerie is a voracious beast, witch. It is beyond anything so paltry as the confines of imagination, eating and eating at anything that will feed its girth.” She smiled, and the starlight glittered strangely in her eyes. “The sky pirates know this as well as anyone, and they’ve the means to outrun you. You may take lifetimes to catch it all, sifting yourself from plane to plane (for Faerie exists on many planes, as I am sure you know yourself), but you’ll never see the whole of it conquered.
The witch rolled her eyes. “Do grow up,” she said. “I shall have an eternity to conquer it.”
Yvaine looked at the witch for a long while, but of course the old witch had also once been as young as this, though perhaps a little cannier. “Aye,” she said. “There’s the rub. Well, I see there’s little to be done about this temper tantrum you’ve decided to hammer against futility. Come, let us be done with this unpleasantry.”
And in a flash, Yvaine whipped out a knife from the sheath at her back, for it had been a pirate’s dress, and pirates are not creatures so stupid as to attend even a fancy ball without a knife. “My sisters,” she cried, turning her face to their soft light. “Watch, and beware, so that you may know the dangers when next another of our number falls into Faerie.” She sent her attention in the direction of the stupefied witch, who had at least the sense not to drop her blade. “Better cut my heart loose quickly,” she whispered, a half-sneer written in her eyes. “I wish you the best of a tale that does not end.” And with that, ignoring the whistling of her sisters’ surprise above and the shout of the witch below, Yvaine cut her throat from ear to ear, a final smile to warm the heart of a star who had never been quite as happy a lonely queen as she had been as half a wandering pair.
Small glimmers threw themselves across her narrowing vision as her hair fell into her eyes. Breath gurgled from her throat in a messy agony, but it was a quick death, and a dignified one.
’Ware, my sisters, she said to the sky, which only twinkled at an empty earth. The clouds had come out to hide her mother’s face. Yvaine thanked them for it.
Better hurry, she said to the witch, who had scrambled to the top of the stair, wildly racing to her body. The witch fell upon the body’s chest, her dagger a ravening tooth. Yes, Yvaine thought, the heart would surely last her a very long time indeed, if the witch proved frugal in its use.
And at that moment, when Yvaine’s still-beating heart was cut out of her chest, a voice whispered in her ear, “Hello, Yvaine.” It sounded kind.
“Hello,” Yvaine said, and did not turn, though she did tear her eyes away from the witch, whose red cloak had only grown bloodier. “May I bid my mother farewell?”
“Sure,” said the voice. “She said goodbye a while back.”
“I understood that to be so when she sent only the sole unicorn,” said Yvaine. The clouds had parted swiftly, as though a fog before the wind’s breath. She lifted her hand to trace the full of her mother’s shining face one last time.
“She knew you had to grow up,” said the voice gently. “Like a baby bird who wasn’t meant to fly out of the nest, but fall out.”
“Hmph,” said Yvaine, but voice did not say another word, as though its owner knew Yvaine only said “Hmph” when she had nothing further to say.
Though the pain in her leg had abated, Yvaine shifted her weight. Habit, it seemed, dictated many things even in death. “What is to happen next?” she queried of the voice, for it seemed rather as though nothing were happening at all.
The voice chuckled. “I’m still working on a snappy comeback to that one. It’s the most popular question out there.”
“Oh,” said Yvaine, abashedly.
“But honestly?” the voice continued. “I don’t know. I’m only the process, not the outcome. What happens next depends entirely on you. What do you believe will happen next?
“What do you believe in?”
“Belief?” said Yvaine with a curiously look on her face. “I believe … in many things. I believe crossing the Wall would turn me heartless as surely as an unfortunate witch and her knife. I believe in my mother the Moon, and that the stars shall sing until time ends. I believe Faerie shall never truly be conquered, for you, Lady, are a creature of Faerie, and indeed, of the world beyond Wall, but you are not a creature to be tamed or conquered. I believe that an endless, unchaptered existence can be heartless thing, under the right circumstances. I believe in unicorns, and little hairy men, and, though he came to you long ago, my husband Tristran Thorne.”
“Do you?” said the voice. “Or do you just say you do?”
The glimmer of her hair was beginning to fade. “I do,” said Yvaine. “I do.”
“Aww,” said the voice. Yvaine raised her eyebrow in question.
“You know me,” said the voice. “I’m a sucker for happy endings.” And odd though it might seem, Yvaine did know.
She turned then, catching a glimpse of ebon hair; a spiralling teardrop under gentle eyes; a silver pendant rather like a cross, but looped on one end; and a smile chock full of cheek, stretching out from end to end…
The woman lifted a hand, fingers wagging lightly, and said, “Be seeing you, Yvaine.”
Yvaine took a step without turning away, and about her the world blurred away from intangibility, taking the Lady away with it. Another step, and the world zipped sidewise.
Think of home, and walk.
She turned her head finally, to watch the road before her. Her tongue for once was locked into silence, drawn into a temporary paralysis by the unexpected turn of things. She found it had been replaced from the ruined top of Stormhold to an utterly original road wrought of cloud puff. It wreathed away across an unfamiliar sky and into the distance, where a rather large castle glared forbiddingly down at her. All at once, she felt comforted -- Stormhold had a similarly brooding gaze -- when a new voice began to speak into her ear. It said, “Excuse me, miss, but I do not suppose you might have seen a star fall this way? It seems to have become rather necessary that I find her, lest the most beautiful girl in the world find fault with me.”
Yvaine’s mouth flapped open once, twice, like a rather ungainly goldfish, before she regained her faculties, and spun around, her eyes spitting with a furious light. “Tristran Thorne!” she snapped peevishly. “Only so very numbskullish an oaf as you could provoke me to name-calling after so protracted an absence!”
And there he stood, like a candleflame in the dusk, resplendent in his faded, fine clothes of so very long ago. Death had kept him well these past years; he looked to be about three score years and some, a far cry from the grizzled swarthy man he had been at the end of his life. He smiled at her, and held his hand out to her. “It is a rather bad habit of mine,” he admitted.
Grumpily, she took it, and allowed him to draw her close. “I trust you have not been waiting,” she said into his shoulder. “It would be a most clot-witted thing to do, as I was never quite crafted to hear Death’s secrets, in the natural way of things.”
“I am afraid I must confess,” Tristran said, “that I have, though not the entire time.”
“Then you are a most clot-witted ninny, Tristran Thorne,” said Yvaine severely. “What if I had never come?”
“Ah,” said Tristran. “But you see, Yvaine, all stories must some day end. Even yours, you see, and so I waited.”
Yvaine said, “Hmph. What have you done with yourself, while you were not waiting?”
“Very little of note,” said Tristran. “Everyone from the old days has arrived, you know, from the Order, and the crews of the Free Ships, and other sundry people we met while we were travelling. I spent some time with my family. As I expected, I still rather like my uncle Primus, though my uncles Tertius and Quintus are rather fond of baiting him when they can, and my uncle Septimus occasionally attempts a discreet poisoning, though there is very little actual poison for him to lay hands on. My uncle Secundus tells me he does so merely to keep his hand in. I can now claim acquaintance with my grandfather (to whom Mother was not particularly anxious to introduce me). Lately, we’ve been planning our counterattack.”
“Cloak and dagger machination,” Yvaine said. “Are not such things rather dated?”
“Not to my family,” Tristran said.
“I find that I grow less and less fond of certain aspects in your family as time whiles,” said Yvaine. “Against whom might this counterattack be directed?”
“Why,” said Tristran. “The invaders of Faerie, of course. They will eventually turn their ravening here, as much to sustain the bloodlust of their troops as for the glory of conquest. As far as we have been able to ascertain, this aspect of Faerie lies somewhere between the Lair of the Incontinent Dragon and the Untenable Marshes.”
“I take it that we no longer reside in a mapped portion of Faerie,” Yvaine said dryly.
“Quite so,” said Tristran. “Will you come? We’ve set the war room in the highest tower of the castle. Mother says it is tradition, and you know how she is about these things. I’m rather afraid it isn’t as open as your favourite haunt was, but we are surrounded by the sky.”
Yvaine sent him a look of singular exasperation. “Recall, my own clodpoll: whither thou goest…”
“Ah,” said Tristran, with a smile spread across his face like a good butter. “Come then, Yvaine. It is a long walk back.”
“Is it,” said Yvaine, as he tugged her along, her footsteps falling easily behind his leading arm.
“Well,” admitted Tristran Thorne. “The long way is.”
Yvaine sighed, but she acquiesced in deed if not in word, and they followed the long way across the horizon to the war room in the castle on the clouds, though if they stopped here and there to watch the odd tempers of the sky or to steal an embrace or two, none were wiser save the dark sky and the stardust that lingered in the air behind them, inimitable finger marks as though to say, ‘Tristran and Yvaine once passed by here’.
Day/Theme: June 24 / they slip away, across the universe
Series: Stardust (book)
Character/Pairing: Yvaine/Tristran, Death, OFC
Rating: PG-13
A Whisper's Worth of Secrets
It was a very young witch who came, barely past a full half-century, by Yvaine’s reckoning. Admittedly, her reckoning of these things could sometimes be faulty, as in the incident regarding the Tinker of the Derelict Waste, though that had been an exceedingly lengthy period ago. Nevertheless, Yvaine believed her to be relatively young, as these things are accounted.
She wore a red cloak about her shoulders. Its hem held a pair of darker red splashes, but no other stains, despite the messy journey its wearer surely must have undertaken to reach the peak of Stormhold. Deceptively fragile golden tresses tumbled over her shoulders, misting around her face to frame an aquiline nose, slender blue eyes, and a smile whose hauteur set the confident arrogance arrested in her strong figure to context. Yvaine wondered suddenly, in an unrelated thought of the sort that tends to strike suddenly in moments inappropriate, whether Tristran would have thought her pretty.
“Perhaps from an objective view she may be called comely, but to my eye, beauty weareth stardust and a sharp tongue.”
Oh nitwitted fool, a sharp tongue’s full might is subject to the ear and not the eye. Yvaine snorted softly, and lifted her own eyes to look the witch full in the face. The sounds of battle, heard even on the lofty head of Stormhold’s keep, had already died to the wind and the echo of a triumphant horn unfamiliar to Yvaine. “I am to understand, then, that Stormhold has fallen,” said she to the witch.
“Not quite yet, Lady Stormhold,” said the witch in richly amused tones. She extended a hand to Yvaine. It seemed ice-tipped beneath the night. “Its final bastion stands before me.”
Yvaine sniffed in disdain. “I am afraid I make a poor bastion against which one might choose to avail oneself. I have never been in the habit of bearing weapons; had I one, my use of it would be poor. You and yours have robbed me of my keep. My leg is lame, and I do not wish to undergo an undignified death; any sudden advance you make would be most like to meet its mark.” Nevertheless, her back arched straighter, in resignation. “Unless you refer to the ruin of Stormhold’s head,” she added.
“Oh, Lady Stormhold,” said the witch, shaking her head merrily. “Your paltry attempts to dissuade me of my prize are futile.” A predatory smirk snaked across her lips. Her right hand lowered to the knife at her girdle, her foot stepping forth, once. Yvaine recognised the blade, having seen its twin once in a hastily constructed inn. “Your reputation is hardly easy to parallel, you know. You, a woman, have held Stormhold since time out of mind, taking none that any know of to husband.” Her black skirt rustled as the witch took another step. “Twice have you bested the armies of my Lord and Master, wise and cunning as you are.” A third step, almost to the base of the broken stairs; Yvaine stood at its peak, as close to the heavens as she could travel on her own cognisance. “And then, of course, there is the matter of your heart.”
“Naturally,” echoed Yvaine with a sarcastic curl to her lip, but as she gleamed of stardust, as surely as though a hand crusted in silver powders had moulded her form, there was little point in denying her birthright. “There is very little natural about eating another’s heart.”
“Well,” said the witch. “There is very little about natural that I wish to associate with my lifespan.”
“Naturally,” sighed Yvaine in dull acknowledgement. “You are hardly the first, you realise?”
“But I am the first who has beaten your fortress,” said the witch, which was hardly untrue. “As I am the last of Baba Yaga’s students, who died across the Wall, to use your laughable vernacular. That stupid old witch. She refused to give me a clawhold into my own story, you know. I completed my tasks, my tests, and I emerged the best, but she just had to keep all her power to herself.” Anger peeked contemptuously from the corner of her eyes, but no more; Yvaine admitted to herself that the girl-witch had truly remarkable control. “Well, that’s done with now. I’ve made my own story, and to seal the deal, I’ll have your heart for a double shot at eternity!” The witch tossed her hair and smirked. “Now, shall we get down to business? Perhaps you might feel more comfortable if you removed your dress? It’s rather fetching, and this whole business will be messy, I’m afraid.”
“No, I think not,” said Yvaine. “I believe I have informed you that I would prefer a dignified exit, which includes my person remaining clothed. I would be most comfortable dying in this dress; a sky pirate gave it to me long ago, and when I wore it, it was when I was closest to the sky after my fall.” Yvaine smoothed a hand along her blue-waisted side in reminiscence. It had truly been a very long time ago, though the witch was rather prone to exaggeration. Time out of mind? Certainly not. Yvaine remembered everything very well. It had been a long journey to the village of Wall, an even longer one from it, and the years after that had been a lesson in tedium. No, Yvaine held the time fast within the recesses of her memory, and oh, what a terribly long time it had been…
“Suit yourself,” the witch said faintly, and Yvaine was recalled to the present. “It probably wouldn’t fit me, any way. We’ll plunder the sky pirates and the ends of Faerie soon enough for me to get one in my size.”
She looked so very smugly stupid and unaware that a little worm of pity broke in Yvaine’s heart. “No, you shan’t.”
“Resistance at last?” said the witch, with a mocking uptilt of an immaculate brow. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t retaliate at all! Pray tell me, Lady Impregnable, how exactly would you know? Sitting high and mighty in ivoried Stormhold, far removed from the real world? Why, I’d bet you didn’t even know there was a war until we were right on your doorstep!” The witch laughed.
Yvaine sniffed again. “Faerie is a voracious beast, witch. It is beyond anything so paltry as the confines of imagination, eating and eating at anything that will feed its girth.” She smiled, and the starlight glittered strangely in her eyes. “The sky pirates know this as well as anyone, and they’ve the means to outrun you. You may take lifetimes to catch it all, sifting yourself from plane to plane (for Faerie exists on many planes, as I am sure you know yourself), but you’ll never see the whole of it conquered.
The witch rolled her eyes. “Do grow up,” she said. “I shall have an eternity to conquer it.”
Yvaine looked at the witch for a long while, but of course the old witch had also once been as young as this, though perhaps a little cannier. “Aye,” she said. “There’s the rub. Well, I see there’s little to be done about this temper tantrum you’ve decided to hammer against futility. Come, let us be done with this unpleasantry.”
And in a flash, Yvaine whipped out a knife from the sheath at her back, for it had been a pirate’s dress, and pirates are not creatures so stupid as to attend even a fancy ball without a knife. “My sisters,” she cried, turning her face to their soft light. “Watch, and beware, so that you may know the dangers when next another of our number falls into Faerie.” She sent her attention in the direction of the stupefied witch, who had at least the sense not to drop her blade. “Better cut my heart loose quickly,” she whispered, a half-sneer written in her eyes. “I wish you the best of a tale that does not end.” And with that, ignoring the whistling of her sisters’ surprise above and the shout of the witch below, Yvaine cut her throat from ear to ear, a final smile to warm the heart of a star who had never been quite as happy a lonely queen as she had been as half a wandering pair.
Small glimmers threw themselves across her narrowing vision as her hair fell into her eyes. Breath gurgled from her throat in a messy agony, but it was a quick death, and a dignified one.
’Ware, my sisters, she said to the sky, which only twinkled at an empty earth. The clouds had come out to hide her mother’s face. Yvaine thanked them for it.
Better hurry, she said to the witch, who had scrambled to the top of the stair, wildly racing to her body. The witch fell upon the body’s chest, her dagger a ravening tooth. Yes, Yvaine thought, the heart would surely last her a very long time indeed, if the witch proved frugal in its use.
And at that moment, when Yvaine’s still-beating heart was cut out of her chest, a voice whispered in her ear, “Hello, Yvaine.” It sounded kind.
“Hello,” Yvaine said, and did not turn, though she did tear her eyes away from the witch, whose red cloak had only grown bloodier. “May I bid my mother farewell?”
“Sure,” said the voice. “She said goodbye a while back.”
“I understood that to be so when she sent only the sole unicorn,” said Yvaine. The clouds had parted swiftly, as though a fog before the wind’s breath. She lifted her hand to trace the full of her mother’s shining face one last time.
“She knew you had to grow up,” said the voice gently. “Like a baby bird who wasn’t meant to fly out of the nest, but fall out.”
“Hmph,” said Yvaine, but voice did not say another word, as though its owner knew Yvaine only said “Hmph” when she had nothing further to say.
Though the pain in her leg had abated, Yvaine shifted her weight. Habit, it seemed, dictated many things even in death. “What is to happen next?” she queried of the voice, for it seemed rather as though nothing were happening at all.
The voice chuckled. “I’m still working on a snappy comeback to that one. It’s the most popular question out there.”
“Oh,” said Yvaine, abashedly.
“But honestly?” the voice continued. “I don’t know. I’m only the process, not the outcome. What happens next depends entirely on you. What do you believe will happen next?
“What do you believe in?”
“Belief?” said Yvaine with a curiously look on her face. “I believe … in many things. I believe crossing the Wall would turn me heartless as surely as an unfortunate witch and her knife. I believe in my mother the Moon, and that the stars shall sing until time ends. I believe Faerie shall never truly be conquered, for you, Lady, are a creature of Faerie, and indeed, of the world beyond Wall, but you are not a creature to be tamed or conquered. I believe that an endless, unchaptered existence can be heartless thing, under the right circumstances. I believe in unicorns, and little hairy men, and, though he came to you long ago, my husband Tristran Thorne.”
“Do you?” said the voice. “Or do you just say you do?”
The glimmer of her hair was beginning to fade. “I do,” said Yvaine. “I do.”
“Aww,” said the voice. Yvaine raised her eyebrow in question.
“You know me,” said the voice. “I’m a sucker for happy endings.” And odd though it might seem, Yvaine did know.
She turned then, catching a glimpse of ebon hair; a spiralling teardrop under gentle eyes; a silver pendant rather like a cross, but looped on one end; and a smile chock full of cheek, stretching out from end to end…
The woman lifted a hand, fingers wagging lightly, and said, “Be seeing you, Yvaine.”
Yvaine took a step without turning away, and about her the world blurred away from intangibility, taking the Lady away with it. Another step, and the world zipped sidewise.
Think of home, and walk.
She turned her head finally, to watch the road before her. Her tongue for once was locked into silence, drawn into a temporary paralysis by the unexpected turn of things. She found it had been replaced from the ruined top of Stormhold to an utterly original road wrought of cloud puff. It wreathed away across an unfamiliar sky and into the distance, where a rather large castle glared forbiddingly down at her. All at once, she felt comforted -- Stormhold had a similarly brooding gaze -- when a new voice began to speak into her ear. It said, “Excuse me, miss, but I do not suppose you might have seen a star fall this way? It seems to have become rather necessary that I find her, lest the most beautiful girl in the world find fault with me.”
Yvaine’s mouth flapped open once, twice, like a rather ungainly goldfish, before she regained her faculties, and spun around, her eyes spitting with a furious light. “Tristran Thorne!” she snapped peevishly. “Only so very numbskullish an oaf as you could provoke me to name-calling after so protracted an absence!”
And there he stood, like a candleflame in the dusk, resplendent in his faded, fine clothes of so very long ago. Death had kept him well these past years; he looked to be about three score years and some, a far cry from the grizzled swarthy man he had been at the end of his life. He smiled at her, and held his hand out to her. “It is a rather bad habit of mine,” he admitted.
Grumpily, she took it, and allowed him to draw her close. “I trust you have not been waiting,” she said into his shoulder. “It would be a most clot-witted thing to do, as I was never quite crafted to hear Death’s secrets, in the natural way of things.”
“I am afraid I must confess,” Tristran said, “that I have, though not the entire time.”
“Then you are a most clot-witted ninny, Tristran Thorne,” said Yvaine severely. “What if I had never come?”
“Ah,” said Tristran. “But you see, Yvaine, all stories must some day end. Even yours, you see, and so I waited.”
Yvaine said, “Hmph. What have you done with yourself, while you were not waiting?”
“Very little of note,” said Tristran. “Everyone from the old days has arrived, you know, from the Order, and the crews of the Free Ships, and other sundry people we met while we were travelling. I spent some time with my family. As I expected, I still rather like my uncle Primus, though my uncles Tertius and Quintus are rather fond of baiting him when they can, and my uncle Septimus occasionally attempts a discreet poisoning, though there is very little actual poison for him to lay hands on. My uncle Secundus tells me he does so merely to keep his hand in. I can now claim acquaintance with my grandfather (to whom Mother was not particularly anxious to introduce me). Lately, we’ve been planning our counterattack.”
“Cloak and dagger machination,” Yvaine said. “Are not such things rather dated?”
“Not to my family,” Tristran said.
“I find that I grow less and less fond of certain aspects in your family as time whiles,” said Yvaine. “Against whom might this counterattack be directed?”
“Why,” said Tristran. “The invaders of Faerie, of course. They will eventually turn their ravening here, as much to sustain the bloodlust of their troops as for the glory of conquest. As far as we have been able to ascertain, this aspect of Faerie lies somewhere between the Lair of the Incontinent Dragon and the Untenable Marshes.”
“I take it that we no longer reside in a mapped portion of Faerie,” Yvaine said dryly.
“Quite so,” said Tristran. “Will you come? We’ve set the war room in the highest tower of the castle. Mother says it is tradition, and you know how she is about these things. I’m rather afraid it isn’t as open as your favourite haunt was, but we are surrounded by the sky.”
Yvaine sent him a look of singular exasperation. “Recall, my own clodpoll: whither thou goest…”
“Ah,” said Tristran, with a smile spread across his face like a good butter. “Come then, Yvaine. It is a long walk back.”
“Is it,” said Yvaine, as he tugged her along, her footsteps falling easily behind his leading arm.
“Well,” admitted Tristran Thorne. “The long way is.”
Yvaine sighed, but she acquiesced in deed if not in word, and they followed the long way across the horizon to the war room in the castle on the clouds, though if they stopped here and there to watch the odd tempers of the sky or to steal an embrace or two, none were wiser save the dark sky and the stardust that lingered in the air behind them, inimitable finger marks as though to say, ‘Tristran and Yvaine once passed by here’.