Home and Belonging Theme Analysis

Mr. Bromios had set up a wine-tent and was selling wines and pasties to the village folk, who were often tempted by the foods being sold by the folk from Beyond the Wall but had been told by their grandparents, who had got it from their grandparents, that it was deeply, utterly wrong to eat fairy food, to eat fairy fruit, to drink fairy water and sip fairy wine.

For every nine years, the folk from Beyond the Wall and over the hill set up the stalls, and for a day and a night the meadow played host to the Faerie market; and there was, for one day and one night in nine years, commerce between the nations.

He thought of Victoria’s lips, and her grey eyes, and the sound of her laughter. He straightened his shoulders, placed the crystal snowdrop in the top buttonhole of his coat, now undone. And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristran Thorn passed beyond the fields we know...

...and into Faerie.

They certainly were fine new clothes. While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe. And Tristran Thorn in Crimson and canary was not the same man that Tristran Thorn in his overcoat and Sunday suit had been. There was a swagger to his steps, a jauntiness to his movements, that had not been there before. His chin went up instead of down, and there was a glint in his eye that he had not possessed when he had worn a bowler hat.

“Not without the Power of Stormhold about your neck you’re not, my brother,” said Quintus, tartly.

“And then there’s the matter of revenge,” said Secundus, in the voice of the wind howling through the pass. “You must take revenge upon your brother’s killer before anything else, now. It’s blood-law.”

As if he had heard them, Septimus shook his head. “Why could you not have waited just a few more days, brother Primus?” [...] “And now I must revenge your sad carcass, and all for the honor of our blood and the Stormhold.

“So Septimus will be the eighty-second Lord of Stormhold,” said Tertius.

“There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks,” pointed out Quintus.

[...]

“May you choke on [the rune stones] if you do not take revenge on the bitch who slit my gullet,” said Primus [...]

And it came to Tristran then, in a wave of something that resembled homesickness, but a homesickness comprised in equal parts of longing and despair, that these might as well be his own people, for he felt he had more in common with them than with the pallid folk of Wall in their worsted jackets and their hobnailed boots.

“What have you done?” Spittle flecked the old woman’s lips.

“I have done nothing; nothing I did not do eighteen years ago. I was bound to you to be your slave until the day that the moon lost her daughter, if it occurred in a week when two Mondays came together. And my time with you is almost done.”

“And if it does not suit you, you may leave, you know. There is no silver chain that will be holding you to the throne of Stormhold.”

And Tristran found this quite reassuring. Yvaine was less impressed, for she knew that silver chains come in all shapes and sizes; but she also knew that it would not be wise to begin her life with Tristran by arguing with his mother.

Yvaine realized that she felt nothing but pity for the creature who had wanted her dead, so she said, “Could it be that the heart that you seek is no longer my own?”

The old woman coughed. Her whole frame shook and spasmed with the retching effort of it.

The star waited for her to be done, and then she said, “I have given my heart to another.”

“The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?”

“Yes.”

“You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do.”

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.