Opening Acts

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  The cooks were so busy with dinner that they barely noticed the bits of bread and meat and fruit and cheese that Elen plucked from passing bowls and platters. The hardest part was taking it all and packing it in a knapsack and walking away from the only home she had ever known.

  She had to do it. She kept telling herself that.

  She went on foot. Brychan would have carried her; he was brave and he loved her. But she could not do it to him. He was no worldrunner; he was not born and bred to travel the worldroads.

  She went out alone into the storm. Her mind was set on the road she needed to find and the place where she wanted to go. The medallion proved useful after all: it helped to serve as a focus. She could see her starting point as the wheel's hub, and the track she needed as one of the spokes. She was careful not to let her vision waver, and not to get distracted.

  She could have taken one of the roads that ran straight out from the palace itself, but that was too public, even at night and in a snowstorm. Instead she went back to the place where she had first seen the white mare.

  The worldroad was still there, as if it waited for the mare to come back to it. If Elen had been paying close enough attention, she would have been suspicious, but it took most of her strength of will to keep her mind fixed on what she needed to do and where she needed to go.

  Worldroads were things of Faerie, of wild and untamed magic, and like all wild magic, they were full of snares and deceptions. Elen was too busy keeping her wish in her mind to notice much else. She only had to stay on the straight track, she told herself, and take care to know, all the way down to the bone, where she wanted to go.

  Worlds like pearls strung on a string, oases of order and safety and, mostly, peace, surrounded by the wildness that was Faerie. Far down the string from Ymbria, and far away from either Earth or Caledon, a world called Hesperia. Far, fair, and green. And horses. Above all, horses.

  Instead, the road gave her ice and fire and a pack of harrying hounds, and cast her on a hillside in Faerie, in the most dangerous and treacherous of all realms that were.

  She would die here. Her soul would wander the borderlands of Faerie forever, lost and forgotten. She would never see her mother or her people or her world again.

  After a moment or an hour or an age, hooves clattered on stone. Elen lowered her hands from her eyes, blinking. The light of this place was dazzling bright and yet had no source: no sun or moon or star.

  The shape that loomed over her was as white as the sky. It lowered its long head and warmed her with its sweet-scented breath. She was safe now, it said without words: a feeling so deep it sank all the way to the bottom of her. She wrapped her arms around the grey mare's neck and clung for her life's sake.