Stardust

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.