Opening Acts

House of the Star

  by Caitlin Brennan

  Between the lake of fire and the river of ice, Elen faced the truth. She was lost. The road that had been so wide and straight when she began had dwindled into the faint line of a footpath. Now even that was gone. Her stolen map showed neither the world ahead nor the world behind. Whenever she tried to turn back, the baying of hounds sent her stumbling forward again.

  As the road melted away to nothing in front of her, the hounds' cries faded away. She stood on the barren hillside, exhausted and footsore and weak with hunger and thirst. Long hours ago when there was still a road to follow, she had stumbled as she ran, and a bone-white hound had sprung upon her. Its snapping jaws had torn the pack of provisions from her back and the talisman from around her neck, the worn silver medallion that should have guided and protected her.

  She pressed her hands to her eyes. The ice had frozen the tears, and the fire had burned them away. She kept seeing things on the edge of vision, skeletal horses and ghostly riders, watching, hovering, making no sound. Sometimes, if she slanted her glance just so, she saw the one who led them: a tall shape with a crown of spreading antlers. His eyes on her were dark and still.

  Above her, winged things circled, waiting for her to fall. Those, she saw clearly. They looked as small as songbirds, but one had come down when she first stumbled onto the hill, and its wings had shadowed the whole of the summit.

  It tilted its scaly head and fixed her with a cold yellow eye, and clashed its long hooked beak. She tensed to run, as if anything could escape that monstrous thing, but it turned and beat upward in a swirl of leathery wings.

  Its stench nearly felled her- and it told her why the creature waited. It fed on dead things. She was alive.

  It would wait, its eye had said.

  She was not going to die. She clung to that. She was going to live.

  In her head she held a picture of a barn, a pasture, a herd of horses. It was green and quiet, peaceful- safe. She only had to find it.