How It All Goes Down
In Which There is Much Fighting for the Crown
- In the morning, Tristran cuts a crutch and a splint for the young woman. He reassures her that it's nothing personal, and he's doing it for love. They hobble out of the glen, but they don't find a path until the starasks Tristran where one is—then his spider senses tingle and he figures it out.
- At one point he asks the star how she fell out of the sky. She says she was hit by something, and pulls out a large yellow-looking stone, saying that she now has to lug the thing around with her.
- They reach a clearing where there's a jeweled crown. Suddenly a unicorn and a lion burst into the clearing, fighting madly.
- The star begs Tristran to stop them from fighting, and—remembering a nursery rhyme about a lion and a unicorn fighting for the crown—he picks up the crown and offers it to the lion (which currently has the unicorn between its jaws).
- Once crowned, the lion leaves; the star insists they stay by the unicorn. Night falls, and the star glistens.
- In another part of Faerie, the witch-queen drives her goat-powered cart until she reaches a little gypsy caravan, where she stops for the night. The grey-haired woman at the fire invites her to share her fire, so long as she doesn't mean any harm.
- The witch-queen swears not to harm the grey-haired woman, vowing by the Lilim. Interesting…
- The grey-haired woman introduces herself as Mistress Semele, and observes that one of the goats once had two legs. The witch-queen says the same about the bird, and Mistress Semele says it's as a punishment for giving away one of her best items almost twenty years ago.
- Mistress Semele feeds the witch-queen dinner, but spikes it with limbus grass, which makes the eater tell the truth for the next few hours.
- The witch-queen says that she's off to find the fallen star, in order to cut out her heart, while she lives and while it is her own, so that she and her sisters can use it to turn back time and be young again.
- Mistress Semele says she'll take the heart for herself, but the witch-queen says nope, she'll lay a spell on her: If she should encounter the star, she'll be blind and deaf to her presence. In other words, Mistress Semele will never benefit from this information she tricked out of the witch-queen, no matter how close she gets to the star.
- The witch-queen also reveals that she is one of the Lilim, thought to be long dead. Mistress Semele (whom the witch-queen also addresses as Ditchwater Sal) is now afraid, but the witch-queen plucks the memory of the incident from her mind.
- Suddenly, Mistress Semele is alone, wondering why she's gotten out two plates for dinner.
- Now we move to a port town called Scaithe's Ebb. Primus holes up there for a bit, and secretively hires a ship to take him East.
- There's a last-minute crew change, and someone who looks kind of like Septimus is on the ship when it sails at dawn. Primus, however, is not on the ship, and so he rides off, hopefully without his murderous brother following.
- Tristran and the star continue to make their way toward Wall. They eventually ask the unicorn to carry the star, which works sort of okay; Tristran ends up riding, too, once he becomes faint with hunger.
- They find a nearby village, but Tristran doesn't want to drag the star with him into it, seeing as she's still limping and they're fastened together by the silver chain.
- Tristran figures out how to unclasp the chain, and asks her not to run away. She says she won't. He goes into the village, trades some of his stuff for food, and goes back to the star.
- But guess what? She's gone. And so is the unicorn. Tristran feels dumb, you know, like he should.
- Somewhere, the witch-queen pauses. She realizes that the star is coming toward her. Somewhere else, Primus casts runes to look for the topaz stone. It is moving, and quickly.