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.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, my thanks to Charles Vess. He is the nearest thing we have today to the great Victorian fairy painters, and without his art as an inspiration none of these words would exist. Every time I finished a chapter I phoned him up and read it to him, and he listened patiently and he chuckled in all the right places.

My thanks to Jenny Lee, Karen Berger, Paul Levitz, Mer-rilee Heifetz, Lou Aronica, Jennifer Hershey and Tia Maggini: each of them helped make this book a reality.

I owe an enormous debt to Hope Mirrlees, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell and C.S. Lewis, wherever they may currently be, for showing me that fairy stories were for adults too.

Tori lent me a house, and I wrote the first chapter in it, and all she asked in exchange was that I make her a tree.

There were people who read it as it was being written, and who told me what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. It’s not their fault if I didn’t listen. My thanks in particular to Amy Horsting, Lisa Henson, Diana Wynne Jones, Chris Bell and Susanna Clarke.

My wife Mary and my assistant Lorraine did more than their share of work on this book, for they typed the first few chapters from my handwritten draft, and I cannot thank them enough.

The kids, to be frank, were absolutely no help at all, and I truly don’t think I’d ever have it any other way.

Neil Gaiman, June 1998