Stardust by Neil Gaiman Page B

were slim, and dark, and amused. The hall they inhabited was many times the size of the cottage; the floor was of onyx, and the pillars were of obsidian. There was a courtyard behind them, open to the sky, and stars hung in the night sky above. A fountain played in the courtyard, the water rolling and falling from a statue of a mermaid in ecstasy, her mouth wide open. Clean, black water gushed from her mouth into the pool below, shimmering and shaking the stars.
    The three women, and their hall, were in the black mirror.
    The three old women were the Lilim—the witch-queen—all alone in the woods.
    The three women in the mirror were also the Lilim: but whether they were the successors to the old women, or their shadow-selves, or whether only the peasant cottage in the woods was real, or if, somewhere, the Lilim lived in a black hall, with a fountain in the shape of a mermaid playing in the courtyard of stars, none knew for certain, and none but the Lilim could say.
    On this day, one crone came in from the woods, carrying a stoat, its throat a splash of red.
    She placed it on the dusty chopping board and took a sharp knife. She cut it around at the arms and legs and neck, then, with one filthy hand, she pulled the skin off the creature, as if pulling a child from its pyjamas, and she dropped the naked thing onto the wooden chopping block.
    “Entrails?” she asked, in a quavering voice.
    The smallest, oldest, most tangle-headed of the women, rocking back and forth in a rocking chair, said, “Might as well.” The first old woman picked up the stoat by the head, and sliced it from neck to groin. Its innards tumbled out onto the cutting board, red and purple and plum-colored, intestines and vital organs like wet jewels on the dusty wood.
    The woman screeched, “Come quick! Come quick!” Then she pushed gently at the stoat-guts with her knife, and screeched once more.
    The crone in the rocking chair pulled herself to her feet. (In the mirror, a dark woman stretched and rose from her divan.) The last old woman, returning from the outhouse, scurried as fast as she could from the woods.
    “What?” she said. “What is it?”
    (In the mirror, a third young woman rejoined the other two. Her breasts were small and high, and her eyes were dark.)
    “Look,” gestured the first old woman, pointing with her knife.
    Their eyes were the colorless grey of extreme age, and they squinted at the organs on the slab.
    “At last,” said one of them, and “About time,” said another.
    “Which of us, then, to find it?” asked the third.
    The three women closed their eyes, and three old hands stabbed into the stoat-guts on the board.
    An old hand opened. “I’ve a kidney.”
    “I’ve his liver.”
    The third hand opened. It belonged to the oldest of the Lilim. “I’ve his heart,” she said, triumphantly.
    “How will you travel?”
    “In our old chariot, drawn by what I find at the crossroads.”
    “You’ll be needing some years.”
    The oldest one nodded.
    The youngest, the one who had come in from the outhouse, walked, painfully slowly, over to a high and ramshackle chest of drawers, and bent over. She took a rusting iron box from the bottommost drawer, and carried it over to her sisters. It was tied around with three pieces of old string, each with a different knot in it. Each of the women unknotted her own piece of string, then the one who had carried the box opened the lid.
    Something glittered golden in the bottom of the box.
    “Not much left,” sighed the youngest of the Lilim, who had been old when the wood they lived in was still beneath the sea.
    “Then it’s a good thing that we’ve found a new one, isn’t it?” said the oldest, tartly, and with that she thrust a clawed hand into the box. Something golden tried to avoid her hand, but she caught it, wiggling and glimmering, opened her mouth, and popped it inside.
    (In the mirror, three women stared out.)
    There was a shivering and a shuddering at the center of