Cloud's Rider

Chapter 1

The sleet arrived on the wind that howled out of the Firgeberg, gray particles that abraded skin, stung eyes. Solid crystals sucked by a chance breath over the edge of the woolen scarf went down a throat already raw with altitude and exertion.

Heart hammered.

Knees ached.

To sweat into clothing that would hold moisture was to freeze. To sweat into what carried it away too efficiently was to give up vital moisture to the air—and one layered the clothing and gave up nothing, because a human in the High Wild couldn’t afford to give up any resource, not the warmth in his face, not the moisture in his breath, not the day’s ration of food he kept next his body, and not the nighthorse moving ahead of them on this upward road, breaking through the shallow drifts.

Especially not the horse.

You didn’t rely on anything in this world of ice and sudden slips but what you carried on your own person. That was what an experienced high-country rider had told him, and it was advice Danny Fisher now believed as an article of faith. What he’d learned and what he’d heard in a fast outpouring of detail from a senior rider in a rider shelter at the bottom of this road was going to bring him through this. It was going to get his horse through this. It was going to get the three kids behind him through this—

Or at least two of them. The hundred kilos of ironwood travois and supplies the boys were pulling up this icy road (his horse had better sense) was definitely not all resource. He personally didn’t give a cold damn for the thirteen-year-old girl constituting most of that weight, lying bundled and unconscious among their supplies: but he was fighting like hell for her brothers.

And what he knew to do to get them all to safety now was to climb at a steady pace, trying to track passing time and changing conditions on this winding road hung on the edge of the sky, in a reasoned, planned progress from the shelter they’d left this morning to the shelter they’d reach sometime before dark.

But with the wind getting up and the sleet continuing to come down, when the reasoned, calculated world slowly disappeared in a veil of sleet and when the posts that told truck drivers that used this road where the edge was were only lumps of white in a boil of sleet and old snow, he relied solely on that snow-veiled darkness, that living sense of shape, life, and that was moving ahead of all of them, to know where to set his feet. The most valuable asset he ordinarily had from Cloud was that inner sense of the mountain’s shape—the land-sense that a nighthorse rider gained from his horse at any distance under three meters.

But all the shape he could perceive right now was the location of himself relative to Cloud and the two boys, and that stretch of sleeted rubble between him and his horse and slightly ahead of them. The wildlife from which Cloud drew his location-sense was all hidden away in burrows, as anything of common sense was dug in and asleep for the duration of the storm. It took human beings to choose to trek up here.

Then in the blindness of a sudden gust his horse doubted for an instant where the road was. Cloud imaged, giddily, and as he shied back from what was or was not the edge.

It was enough to make a snow-blinded human who valued that horse above all human company want to sit down, grab onto the rocks and not budge for an hour.

But he was still standing. And it wasn’t white emptiness beneath Cloud’s three-toed hoof—but solid, sleeted rock. Danny’s heart was pounding, and that might be Cloud’s heart or his own or the boys’, but it was Cloud’s four feet that began walking first, driven by and impatience to be out of this cold. The boys with the travois hadn’t kept their footing through the scare: they had to pick themselves up off the ground to get moving, shaken, not wanting to be where they were any longer, that was for very damn certain.

But they couldn’t stop short of that shelter, not in this wind. Don’t try to camp on the high end of the Climb: more advice he took on faith from the rider who’d told him the route. It was autumn. The temperatures, bitter as they were in this gale-force wind, hadn’t fallen enough to create a dry cold—and if you ever let damp form around you in the day, if you sat down where you could pick it up from the ground or the rocks, or just dressed in such a way that dampness built up, the windchill would kill you, without argument or excuse.

Tonight’s stopping place, the shelter they were aiming for, could sustain them all winter if there weren’t the recourse of villages and civilization in front of them, a string of five such tucked against the mountain’s east face. But there was nothing in reach behind them but a small shelter that definitely couldn’t sustain them, not reliably so beyond a few days, and he’d felt compelled this morning to make a calculated bet on the weather—taking them on a climb that on a good summer day and with no wind he understood from that same rider as a couple of hours’ ride.

It hadn’t been just a couple of hours. He was sure of that—and it was a long, weary hike. Cloud wouldn’t—couldn’t—carry him up this steep grade in this kind of weather. The boys had the travois to pull, and from them he felt numbness and cold right now, along with a lingering flutter of fear. Cloud’s near-disaster had called up a rush of adrenaline, and the boys were using too much of their strength pulling the travois to endure many surprises like that.

Bloody hell—he was scared and shaky. He hadn’t fallen down because he was used to horse-images in all degrees of urgency and most times reflexively walled the confusion out. The boys weren’t used to a horse’s sending being that close to them, and they couldn’t sort it out or keep their feet under them in the crisis.

Or stop themselves from reliving the slip again and again. Cloud’s four-footed gait had confused their balance and they wouldn’t let the moment go: they’d confuse Cloud’s balance if they kept it up.

“Quiet,” he had to tell them out loud and in no uncertain terms. After a week together they knew he didn’t mean any audible noise.

They tried to be quiet and calm down after that—as quiet as two boys could be who’d thought they were falling off a mountain.

The road they were on, by what he knew of it, followed the folds and bends of the mountain upward supposedly a kilometer and a half vertical distance from their initial start on the east face of Rogers Peak—but he’d come to appreciate how a kilometer and a half vertical translated to walking distance on a mountain. He’d thought it a pretty straightforward climb. They’d come from the first-stage shelter across a portion of the south face to reach the midway shelter last night, and now they were east and up toward the settlements high on the forested slopes.

But it didn’t do it by logic of what would get there fastest. It did it, he’d discovered, by the logic of where the builders could hang a road and make it stay and not slide. It was a road built solely to get the logging trucks and oxcarts up and down, and the road builders had patched in rubble fill and timber shorings wherever its precarious thread crossed a gap narrow enough for them to bridge over a split in the mountain instead of following the contour all the way back into a recess. Places like that were wind zones. And where the builders hadn’t found a bridgeable gap—he and his small party had to walk all the in and out contour of the mountain, sometimes a considerable distance, until the builders had found a place to make the road turn back the direction they actually wanted to go.

A couple of hours on a good day—hell. From the midway shelter they’d left at dawn this morning they could make solid walls again before they slept—that was what he intended: rest there a couple of days, and beyond that—

Beyond that, day after tomorrow, they’d start across the mountain toward the villages on a calm day when they could do it without struggle. There was a doctor in Evergreen, the first and largest of the five settlements. They’d get advice what to do about thirteen-year-old Brionne, ideally deliver Brionne into a doctor’s hands within the village proper, which would do as much for her as ever could be done; after that the boys could find work in Evergreen or one of the other villages and start their lives over, good luck to them and God help them if their sister lived.

That would mean he’d done all his conscience told him he had to do, and he would have carried out a job that had set Tara Chang free to take care of a friend of his who was wintering down in that cabin before this road. Guil wasn’t well enough to make this trip—having a hole through his side. While Tara—

Tara hadn’t wanted to have them snowed in with her and Guil. Danny’d been available to run escort to the next cabin over, which meant Tara didn’t have to do it. He’d saved her from that situation and gotten on her good side, in his fondest hopes, by taking the kids on—because if the kids were going to survive to reach the villages above—if the kids were going to leave that cabin for anywhere in the world—a rider had to escort them: no one, even experienced in the Wild and armed to the teeth, could get from one shelter to another without a rider to guard him—and village kids wouldn’t be safe even inside a shelter and with a gun if one of the larger, cleverer hunters got the notion there was food inside.

A horse was the protection. A gun was for the mental comfort of the gun owner, so far as he’d seen.

And guns were, unfortunately, also for human quarrels, in which horses were best off if they didn’t participate.

And that was the other half of the reason they were on this road in this weather: thanks to a human quarrel some days before their reaching the place, and not uninvolved with Guil and Tara, the situation at the first-stage cabin hadn’t been safe—and matters had combined to say that up the mountain might not only be their eventual intention, but their immediate necessity.

Because at first-stage a problem had moved in on them—a horse whose rider had died, a horse attempting to attach itself to any horseless humans in its reach. It wasn’t unnatural that a grief-stricken horse should do that—but the only horseless humans in reach happened to be the two boys he was escorting and, in his worst nightmares, their sister Brionne.

That had clinched his decision to move on. To hold that cabin otherwise he’d have had to shoot the horse, which wasn’t an easy choice for a rider. Or he could have run the gauntlet of its presence and taken them all back to Tara and Guil for help.

But the last thing in the world he wanted was to come running back for help as soon as a problem came up with a job Tara clearly, emotionally, didn’t want back on their doorstep. Next spring he had a rendezvous with her and Guil for a salvage job—a truck that hadn’t been lucky on these same curves. Guil had as good as hired him already, there was considerable pay involved from some company down in Anveney town, and for a junior rider with no working partner, no references, and no prospects of hire this spring, that was an incredibly good offer, one which he didn’t intend to foul up by destroying their confidence in him.

So with the weather seeming likely to hold fair, they’d moved for the next shelter, higher up the mountain, a barren, hard-rock place where the horse that had been haunting their vicinity would have no forage and to which it wouldn’t follow them.

They’d moved again this morning—because of the weather turning foul, on a choice in which he had less confidence he was right; though thank God they’d shaken the horse off their trail somewhere between first-stage and midway. It was lost and desperate—but not that desperate; and it might go back to harass Guil and Tara, whose two horses would drive it off, or it might finally find the other strayed horses on the lower skirts of the mountain and find safety with them. So that part of the problem he’d handled.

That left getting them to the top of this road.

Truth was, this job of escorting the Goss kids, through all the complications that had so far set in, was the first job he’d ever done completely on his own, and he didn’t know whether he’d ever actually told Tara so. Guil, who knew, hadn’t been tracking too well on anything for the time they’d been there, so the matter of his prior experience hadn’t actually, well, exactly come up. Tara, who knew this mountain, had been concentrating her efforts on giving him a mental map of the landmarks and problems involved.

So he didn’t think he’d made the fact of his inexperience quite clear—but he damn sure wasn’t going to meet two senior riders next spring to confess he’d let these kids die on the mountain. He’d do the job. He might know a great deal by now that he didn’t want to know about the Goss family—but he’d do it.

Then Guil and Tara would trust him next spring and give him the responsibility that would make him hireable by convoys that were only a distant, hard-won hope for a rider born to a town. He’d lived through enough up here to know he wanted the high country and that with several good tries it hadn’t killed him. He was high on his own survival, he saw a freedom for him and for Cloud he’d never known, never imagined, in town, and he saw a set of teachers he could otherwise only dream of—if he could deserve their confidence in him.

Wind blasted into their faces of a sudden. He’d been able to see the rocks on the right just a second ago and he felt Cloud walking ahead of them, so he wasn’t disoriented; but suddenly it was just—white, with an abrading blast of sleet that made him duck his head and shut his eyes.

So had Cloud. That didn’t help his orientation.

“God,” he heard from Carlo, a voice half-drowned in the wind.

“It’s getting worse!” Randy cried.

The boys had stopped walking. Cloud hadn’t. “Keep going!” Danny shouted at the boys. “It’s probably just this stretch! Snow coming off the height up there!”

“I think it’s coming out of the sky!” Randy cried. Randy was fourteen, two years younger than Carlo, a year older than Brionne, and the kid had been gutsy and all right until now—but now was loud and clear in the ambient of emotions and images that came at them relayed from Cloud.

was suddenly feeding on its own substance, upsetting Cloud, upsetting Randy as his own panic flooded back at him. Danny clamped down on the accelerating distress with calm images:

And: “Move!” Danny yelled in a ragged voice that didn’t come out of his throat half so fierce or so low as he intended. He pushed at Carlo, who was on the right-hand pole of the travois as Randy was pulling the left, and they struggled into motion—they were starting across one of those rubble-and-shorings sections, by the disorganized way the wind was coming at them.

And soon enough the wind was battering their right sides with a vengeance, pushing them toward the left, where there wasn’t anything but empty air.

Cloud was Cloud had Cloud was not pleased with humans lagging back and distracting him with their stupid arguments in a cold wind. Cloud wasn’t panicked about the situation, but he was definitely struggling for footing now, sending more strongly than usual, feeling his way through the whiteout and using senses that even his rider wasn’t used to having at the top of the broth of thoughts that was the ambient. Cloud was feeling and getting a vague from it somehow, Cloud was and knowing with a range of discriminations the human brain might not even have categories for. Humans being sky-fallen strangers to the world and horses being native to it, sometimes a rider just had to take the little information he could get in his own peculiar way of understanding and otherwise cast himself on his horse’s sense of direction and his horse’s four-footed stability.

Sink too deep into Cloud’s sending and he could look out of Cloud’s side-set eyes and see the tilt and pitch of his head and end up with two feet too few for the catch of balance Cloud made in the gusts. Randy slipped and fell, or lost his balance in Cloud’s noisy sending, Danny didn’t know. He grabbed the kid’s coat and got the kid on his feet again, travois and all, still letting the brothers do the physical labor.

A nighthorse didn’t wear harness or carry cargo. Neither did a rider. It was his job to know where they were—and not to be distracted by a travois bumping along and resisting. He had no possessions in the world but his guns, his emergency supplies, the life-and-death stuff like waterproof matches, knife, hatchet, pans, a little food, cord, bandages, most of which made a very compact tin-cased package, his last kit having proven unmanageable; and hell, no, he didn’t trust his personal kit to their damn travois. Carlo had the shotgun and a pistol— but the ammunition, which was heavy, Danny had most of, plus the rifle.

And when this morning the boys had wanted to pile everything including his kit on the travois, they’d had sharp and angry words about it.

Oh, but they were pulling it anyway for Brionne, Carlo and Randy had protested. And it was easier to pull their supplies on it than carry them on their backs. It only made sense.

Listen to me, he’d said, and laid the law down as best he could.

They’d ignored his advice at least as regarded their personal supplies. He’d heard the maxim down in Shamesey, Don’t ever get friendly with the convoy. Don’t make friends of anybody you have to guide. And he knew why, now. He was close to friendship with Carlo, as close as a rider and a villager could come—and having clearly and in front of both brothers gotten his orders from Guil and Tara, he didn’t seem to have the credible authority to tell Carlo no. Carlo was on a mission. Carlo was doing a Good Thing. That meant God was with them in getting up this mountain and getting away from that stray horse that wanted his sister.

That was the villager mentality. God was with them and gravity didn’t count.

Maybe a lot of things else didn’t count in Carlo’s head either. Damn sure some of them didn’t add. Danny had a good idea what was driving Carlo, and it wasn’t love for his sister.

Guilt, maybe. Atonement. There had been a village called Tarmin at the bottom of the road. It wasn’t there now. Every man, woman, child and sleeping baby in that town had died the worst death imaginable on Carlo’s sister’s account.

That was the news they carried toward the villages above, and the girl responsible for it all was the burden they’d lugged up this road.

For what? Danny asked himself—and thought as he’d thought more than once on this trek upward that Tara Chang had been right in the first place: there was nothing particularly sacred about a thirteen-year-old life that wasn’t equally sacred about a person who’d proved himself a decent human being for twice that number of years.

And three human lives and a good horse were damn sure more valuable than a self-willed girl with only a remote chance of recovering—but here they were, and they tried, and they hung on.

The light had gone to that murky gray that heralded a thick spot in the clouds directly overhead. Sleet scoured off the rubble surface of the road in the windy zones and piled up in banks where the wind gave it up. Where it lay thick it afforded traction—but yesterday’s sun had created melt off a previous fall that had already frozen. Worse—there’d been high humidity this morning and the temperature had fluctuated. They were dealing with patches of ice, and those patches were growing more frequent on this stretch of the road.

Then—then by the pitch of a twenty-percent grade and a sudden shift in what Cloud felt and smelled of the wind, he knew a picture he’d gotten from Tara, that right-angled turn in the road that led around flat before it climbed—that point where if they walked straight ahead and didn’t bend very abruptly to the right, they’d go over the rim and into white nowhere, straight down, no barriers, no warning.

Truckers’ hell, the sharp turn and the abrupt up or down grade that led to it. That was where the truck had gone off that Guil and Tara meant to salvage. That was where Guil’s partner had lost her life—Tara had warned him of it, and, God, it had to be. A lot of the landmarks Tara had imaged to him he couldn’t find with the sleet coming down like this, but she’d dwelt heavily on this one image, and the hell of it was—the thing that made him suddenly sick at his stomach—

He’d thought they’d passed this essential landmark turn a long time back.

So they weren’t as far up the mountain as he’d thought they were. The whole scale of the problem shifted on him. They weren’t making the time he’d thought. And that affected—

Everything. Every estimate. Every hope.

Midway was hours behind them. If this was in fact the infamous turn—that meant everything he’d been sure he knew the position of was completely off.

And if his reckoning where they were on the mountain was off— he wasn’t sure of the elapsed time, either, and he couldn’t find the sun: it could have passed behind the mountain into afternoon, for all he could tell. Light spread through the storm with no distinction.

He caught from the boys, who’d surely picked up his distress. He caught A lot of that. He caught and and from up ahead, where Cloud negotiated that dreadful turn—and the damned travois, that had cost them so much time, bucked and bumped over the uneven surface beside him.

Two hours for this damn trek in high summer.

Dammit, he didn’t know how he could be that far wrong—except if midway wasn’t at all mid-way from first-stage—and, he recollected with a sinking feeling, he’d learned already that the road crews put things not where they’d like to have them but where they could put them. One set of expectations was skewed by processes he hadn’t thought about, and other expectations could be, reason told him in this thunderstruck moment, thrown off by the same logic. He’d assumed by the name of midway—where he had no business to assume.

But panic didn’t serve anybody. They’d make the shelter. Just—maybe—not before dark.

A little beyond that turn a fold of the mountain came between them and the worst gusts. Cloud stopped and turned his tail to the wind that did reach them, taking a breather on his own schedule and at his opportunity, which Cloud did when his needs exceeded the rests they took.

At such moments Danny and the Goss boys had generally stopped standing—but a pileup of sleet against the mountain afforded them a brake on the travois’ tendency to skid downhill and afforded a chance for a rest. Danny saw it, turned his own back to the gale and stood there just breathing, with the wind battering the back brim of his hat flat up against his head, and waited as a living signpost in the haze until the two muffled figures overtook him with the travois.

Then he squatted down, and fell the last bit onto his rump, his knees beyond pain and refusing such delicate adjustments. He got up into a crouch his legs didn’t want to hold, but did, as Carlo had sat down after much the same fashion—he’d taken to heart the lesson about not sitting on the ground, but Randy just collapsed helplessly downward and stayed.

Blacksmith’s kids, both, and Carlo had the height and the arms Randy had yet to grow to. Carlo shoved his brother, said simply, “Squat,” and Randy managed to get up off the ground and hold the position, with Carlos strong arm around him.

After that no one had the energy to talk, just sat huddled up against the wind, the boys probably with the same sick headache, Danny thought, that increasingly pounded behind his sinuses and behind his eyes and around his skull.

It was altitude causing that. He’d felt it a little down at the cabin with the senior riders, and Guil had warned him it could get debilitating—which he couldn’t afford right now. Mouth was dry. They hadn’t eaten all day. He didn’t think he could swallow the thawed food he carried; eating snow relieved the dryness but chilled the bones, so he just took a little mouthful, after which he shut his eyes—partly to ease the headache and partly just to warm them from the wind.

But even with his eyes shut, he saw them all from Cloud’s senses, a moving sort of vision as Cloud came trudging back.

He had so much rather have nursed his headache and caught his breath undisturbed, but he couldn’t let that annoyance go on. He bestirred himself to check over Cloud’s feet for ice-cuts: the threefold hooves had a soft spot high up between the juncture of the three bones, just behind the middle and largest toe. If a horse didn’t feel a buildup of ice freezing on the scant hairs of the inside, developed an ice lump and went on walking on it, so he’d had from experienced senior riders, the horse could go lame. He had to take off his glove and put a knee on the snow, and take armfuls of wet, chilled horse-foot into his embrace, one after the other, probing a bare finger into the crevice, finding no blood.

So he put his glove back on and broke the ice lumps out of Cloud’s tail—three big sharp ones—by bashing them against his knee with his gloved fist and the hilt of his boot-knife. The way the weather was going they’d form again off the melt that Cloud’s own body heat made, and dealing with Cloud was getting him damp, when that was what he was most trying to avoid.

Cloud paid him when he was done with a warm rough tongue across the cheek and a whuff of hot nighthorse breath in his face where his scarf had slipped. swam across his vision like a view of heaven. Cloud wanted him to get up and leave the boys. Cloud thought of

Cloud loved ham with all his omnivorous heart. It was so vivid he could taste it.

But so was Cloud’s own case of altitude-generated dry mouth, and when Danny took his glove off to fish for a morsel in the packet he had against his ribs, Cloud couldn’t more than lick it into his mouth and work his jaws about trying to find a that eluded him.

No words between Danny and his clients, nothing but breathing, a try at massaging the legs, a thump of gloved hands at one’s boot-toes to be sure the feet still picked up sensation. They stayed down so long as Cloud rested, hunkered down in a knot sheltering Randy in Cloud’s wind-shadow, warming the kid and slowly warming up the backs and fronts of their legs.

Couldn’t do anything about the cold knees except the extra cloth they’d wrapped around—Tara had told them that trick: lots of air space and extra woolen padding. But Randy’s wraps kept coming loose and gathering around his calves. Danny tugged his up again, tugged at Randy’s left one and Carlo fixed the right.

Then Cloud decided it was time to walk and they lost their windbreak.

“Kid can’t do it anymore. ” Carlo’s voice was all but gone as they got up. “I need help, Danny. ”

“You and me,” Danny said. Talking over the wind hurt his throat, and if neither of them had understood during that moment of physical closeness that his distance estimate was off, he didn’t want to tell them yet the trouble they were in. Randy was light-boned and chilling faster than they were in the gale-force wind. Carlo, sixteen, Danny reckoned as stronger than he was at a travel-hardened year older—and maybe with the two of them really putting effort into it they could make the cabin up there not too long after dark.

So Carlo took the left-hand pole of the travois and Danny took the right one. The spot where they’d rested had had only a slight incline, which tended to be true at turns, for very sensible reasons for the truckers.

But the next stretch was a hellish steep that began on the inside curve for a downhill-bound truck, the kind of place where the builders had tended to do their worst: this turned out to be the worst grade yet, up to yet another wandering road and into the teeth of an icy damp wind.

(“The mountain can surprise you. ” Tara Chang had even said it in words, plain as she could make it. “Don’t commit to that road unless you’re sure you’ve got several days running of clear weather. Ring around the greater moon means stay put. If you don’t see cloud in the east—” (“She means a weather system past us,” Guil Stuart had interjected at that point. And Tara had said: “The troughs from the west and over the mountains run about four days apart. ” And Guil: “But sometimes they lie, too. ”) “If you don’t see clouds in the east,” Tara had said without looking at Guil, “and not too far east— don’t budge from that shelter. ”)

Well, he’d seen no ring around the moon when they’d left the first-stage shelter. He’d seen clouds just past them in the east.

This morning when they’d left—hell’s bells, he hadn’t been able to see the moon, in a sleet-storm that his other source of advice, Carlo and Randy, who had spent their lives on the mountain, said could be the leading edge of a real blizzard coming down.

He’d listened most to Tara telling him how to move when the choice was move—and not enough, he realized now, to both Guil and Tara telling him he should wait for a clear, established trough between major storms—that was what Guil had meant, not any stupid counting. He’d known all his life that there tended to be a four-day gap between storms that reached Shamesey.

But down there you saw them coming. He’d not imagined that up here you didn’t see the weather. They were almost on the continental divide—and the consequence of being on the east of the mountain ridge meant the weather came up hidden by the mountain until it broke right over your head.

The direct consequence was that a storm which hadn’t even been a cloud-line on the horizon yesterday morning at first-stage had set in hard during the night of their stay at midway. They’d seen it first boiling above the distant peaks of the central massif when, coming up from that first-stage shelter at dusk last night, they’d rounded that last curve. The midway shelter had been there in front of them and, a fact with which he reproached himself now, he’d never thought to turn around and go back right then, when, yes, they were tired, and they’d walked all day; and, yes, there was a horse down below they didn’t want to deal with—but it might have been better than this.

Last night the wind had howled about the midway cabin, literally shaking the walls of a structure poised on the edge of nothing at all. Their fire had refused to stay lit against the draft coming down the chimney. His information from Tara as well as Carlo and Randy said the road above midway and below was subject to deep, impassable drifting once winter set in. After the small stack of wood ran out in that barren, treeless steep the snow might block them from leaving, and they could freeze to death in a cabin that even with the intermittent fire last night had been colder than hell’s attic.

Even knowing that he’d not seriously thought of turning them around and leading them back to first-stage—because he’d been unwilling to face that damned stray horse.

He’d had too much sympathy for it—since it was itself a refugee from the Tarmin disaster, lost, bereaved, more desperate than they were. Riders had died down on the lower reaches of the mountain, and horses had survived—meaning hurt horses, horses missing riders—and the one haunting the vicinity of the first-stage cabin when they’d arrived hadn’t been too sane to start with, if it was the horse he most feared—a good chance it was that horse, considering where it was hanging out, where a rider had died who was, no question, crazy.

And the chance of Brionne waking up when it was prowling around the outside of their cabin—or worse, intercepting them on the trail—and having a crazy girl and a crazy horse on his hands— along with Cloud, who’d fight it for their protection—

He’d felt the darting, fragmented—thing—that was the rogue the night Tarmin had gone down. He’d seen and felt her half-waking in the cabin with Guil and Tara, and he had no desire whatever to deal with her awake and within reach of a horse that could carry her thoughts outside herself. She’d gone out cold after that brief incident the night they’d joined Guil and Tara—and nobody, not even her brothers, invited her to come to again. If it had been Tara who’d gone with the Goss kids to the first-stage shelter, he suspected now that Brionne wouldn’t have lived past midnight; for the horse, Tara might have had pity. But Tara had taken him aside for a moment before he left and said, aloud and in private, that if Brionne died, he should come back.

He’d been—not horrified, but at least disturbed, and knew right then he was talking to a rider forged in a fire he’d no concept of.

But after a handful of nights at first-stage with that horse outside he’d begun to weigh what one life was really worth relative to all the others. He didn’t at all have the cold-heartedness to have shot her; he didn’t right now have the conviction to see that travois take a plunge down the mountain; but he’d gotten scared enough by now that the thought did come to his mind.

Sleet kept coming at them, falling from the sky, swept up off the road, blown down on them—he didn’t know, but thunder above them suggested it wasn’t all blowing off the heights. The light was a gray and sickly color, and he didn’t like to look to the left, because there wasn’t any dimension to it. They reached a place where the darkness of Cloud’s tail streamed first sideways and up and around and sideways again—and when they reached it in Cloud’s wake, wind literally blew him and Carlo a little sideways on the icy surface.

He found traction in patches of snow. He began counting thirty, forty steps in that struggle against the wind. It was an effort to keep his knees pulling straight. His scarf slid down. He grabbed it and stuffed it into place as best he could.

Carlo jolted down to one knee. Wind straight off the backbone of the continent had scoured the roadway here to bare, frozen, lumpy rubble, and there they were, braced, not at a good angle, on what looked and felt like ice.

“Are you all right?” Randy’s thin shout came from behind, and Danny didn’t want to look back for fear of losing the scarf, maybe his hat, which he had tied down as hard as he could. Carlo carefully got back to both feet.

Treacherous ground, treacherous wind. “Change hands!” Carlo yelled against the blast, and if Carlo was losing his grip on that side, Danny wasn’t going to question it, no matter the difficulty of making that changeover here. He was losing feeling in his own fingers. He began, as Carlo asked, to effect the change of sides, reaching for the far pole, edging across on slick ground.

The travois bucked up under a gust, spun, half over, girl and supplies and all, and tried to sail up and out of their hands as Carlo struggled to hold it.

“Look out!” Randy cried against the deafening buffet of the wind, and Carlo desperately elbowed aside his brother’s help with: “Dammit, get out of the way! I can handle it!”

Randy bid fair to get himself, Brionne, and Carlo blown off the roadway. The kid tried to grab the side pole, Carlo tried instead to kneel and bear the travois down to the ground with his weight; in the crossed signals, thinking to the last instant he was going to see the whole thing and both boys go spinning down the icy incline toward the cliff edge, Danny kicked Randy’s leg from under him and yelled, “Sit on it, dammit!” in what voice he had left.

Randy flung himself atop Brionne and coincidentally the travois as he fell—as Danny and Carlo both fought the travois flat with their weight across him, all three of them atop.

It skidded.

Danny dug his boot-toes in and it kept going until his toe hit a lump of icy rock on the roadway.

He didn’t move for a minute after that, just panted a series of deep breaths through the icy and soggy scarf, lying on Carlo, lying on Randy, lying on Brionne.

Then, waiting his time between the blasts of wind and bracing first his other toe and then the foot carefully on the surface, he got up, let Carlo up, and snarled “Stay down,” at Randy.

And again, when Randy tried to get up, “I said stay down, dammit!”

Randy and his stubborn helpfulness was ballast. Carlo was real help. Danny took one pole, Carlo took the other, and with Randy’s weight safely disposed on the travois, they struggled upslope.

There’d stopped being sky and earth and this time he couldn’t tell himself they’d just walked into a gusty area. This was the wind picking up and sleet coming down so thick they breathed it.

There was one thing—one thing Tara hadn’t known: that there’d been a horse loose that Brionne could have latched onto—and that fear of it would send them out of the safety she’d planned and into a rush up the mountain. On his best judgment.

Now look where he was.

What in hell were two senior riders expecting him to do with the job he’d been handed?

Not what he was doing, damn sure.

“Lousy, lousy weather,” Guil Stuart said from the vantage of the cabin he shared with Tara Chang and two nighthorses. His horse, Burn, and Tara’s Flicker (two names having nothing to do with each other, since Burn imaged himself as fire and dark and Flicker’s name was sunlight in rapid flashes) were out cavorting in the storm, chasing some hapless creature they’d roused out of hiding—hapless since it had fallen afoul of nighthorses looking for fresh meat. Guil limped back to stand at the fireside where Tara was mending the bullet hole in his coat and, staring at the embers of a comfortable fire, he thought about a handful of kids he’d rather have counseled stay put, maybe back at Tarmin rather than first-stage.

He and Tara had disagreed on that point. But the village down the road (or what was left of it) might not have been much safer for the boys to hole up in than the first-stage shelter.

Tarmin would have been readily accessible and closer to them, there was that.

But Tara might have been right to insist the kids move out of their vicinity altogether. Cloud was a young male. With Burn possessive of Flicker and Cloud in the mix—there was no telling. But the fact of winter and horses in rut had been only a part of the consideration: the other part was a girl who could trigger an explosion out of all three of the horses, a girl Tara for both considered and unconsidered reasons didn’t want near her.

That was the part of the reasoning that weighed on his mind.

It was remotely possible that the kids hadn’t gone on to first-stage, that they’d trekked on down toward Shamesey before the snows came and were down by now and making their way across the flatlands.

And that, in cold clear consideration, scared hell out of him.

Tara didn’t need Flicker’s attention to know, not what he was thinking, but the subject he was thinking about. She frowned at him and glanced up. The next stitch pushed too hard and sent the needle through into her finger. She sucked the wound, scowling.

But she didn’t ask and he didn’t say anything—or intend to dwell on it in range of the horses. He wasn’t usually one for recriminations. A decision was a decision was a decision, as they said down south, which was his usual range.

He didn’t know as much as he wished he knew about Tara Chang or her mountain. But that was the way of winters. You ended up in some small cabin or in some encampment, pinned down and pent in for the season with whatever other rider, sane or not, known or not, was in the vicinity, and on many points of his present situation he couldn’t complain, especially considering that otherwise he’d have been flat on his back, wounded, and alone.

Instead he was recovering tolerably quickly, situated with plenty of supplies on the forested bottom road of Tarmin Climb, with someone willing to cut firewood and shovel the door clear till he mended enough to take his turn. He’d be here, he supposed, and fairly content, till water ran downhill again.

He could have had the kids for help. That was true. But instead of that, he was holed up with a woman who’d been a good fill-in partner to him in a bad situation, a woman who’d saved his life, as happened, and the only actual fault he’d seen in her was an ironclad notion of what was sensible and what wasn’t—well, that and a slight unwillingness to change her mind.

“If they stayed in that first shelter on the Climb,” Tara said out of long silence, “they’re fine. ”

“I hope they did. ” He didn’t say that Danny Fisher was a lowland kid from the biggest town in the world, and that the things Danny Fisher didn’t know not only about this mountain, but about any mountain at all, were frightening. Tara’s instruction to the kids, her giving them a map of the way up, had been sensible. Charitable. Responsible.

And the foresight of riders who’d helped make the roads up here had provided ample shelters for riders, summer and winter. If you didn’t use them for as long as they were designed for, and didn’t use caution in leaving them, you had yourself to blame, no one else.

Problem was—they were kids. And kids didn’t notoriously do well with waiting things out.

But stupidity wouldn’t have carried Fisher as far as he’d gotten, and he trusted the kid’s resourcefulness and common sense—as far as the kid’s knowledge went.

That was a warm snow going on.

He decided he would sit down. With a hand on the fireplace stones he flexed his knees gingerly and did that.

The horses had just caught their prey. They’d begun a game of tag that had everything of humor and blood and wicked behavior about it, but that was Burn for you. Burn was from the borders of inhabited land. So was he. Flicker would have killed their supper. Burn played games with it.

In that, they were different. He found he had a soft heart for some things. He didn’t admit to it, exactly, but Flicker’s rider was a far harsher judge of humans and horses. Tara would have shot the girl—in the heat of the moment, granted, and Tara hadn’t in fact shot her. But she nearly had. And the day she’d pitched those kids out the door with a map of the higher road he’d been putting up a pretense of sanity right up to their leaving. Now he couldn’t entirely reconstruct what had happened or what he’d urged them to do.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Tara said.

They were deaf to the ambient—or at least their share of it. They might be hearing the horses, but the horses weren’t paying any attention at all to them. Which meant two humans trying to figure each other out just went by guesswork.

“Thinking Burn’s a son of a bitch. ”

“Bushdevil. ” That was Tara’s guess about the prey. It might be that. It was small and dark and fast in the snowy brush, and it dug fast, but a horse’s tri-hooved feet dug fast, too. Even match.

There was a little silence.

“They’ll have dug in,” Tara said. “The kids will. ”

“Probably,” he said. “The kid’s resourceful. ”

Tara had bloodied her finger. Third time.

He reached out and stopped further carnage.

“Give yourself a break. Easy. ”

“Dammit,” she said.

He really didn’t do well at argument. He carried the hand to his mouth and nipped the finger himself.

“Ow!”

When maybe she’d expected tender sympathy. No luck. She jerked to get loose.

Didn’t work. His hand was stronger.

“I’ve got the needle,” she said, and held it up.

And stuck it away in the mending and rose onto her knees and gently against him as he tugged her other hand.

They’d been lovers.

They might be again, testing the extent of his healing, —except Flicker caught the bushdevil and there was the distinct taste of blood in their mouths.

Burn caught the prize then and threw it with a toss of his head.

“Ugh,” Tara said.

Horse mood was contagious. Outrageous play was one thing. Carnivorous mischief was a difficult but not impossible background for lovemaking.

Next thing, the two would want to be let in from the storm.

It seemed to Carlo Goss that it had taken more than an hour for them just to make the next switchback on the road, walking mostly on ice. He couldn’t always figure out whether they were turning or going straight—he couldn’t see Cloud right now—couldn’t see a black nighthorse, the whiteout was so total in the patch of roadway they were climbing. He couldn’t see Danny next to him or even the ground under his own feet until the gray shadow of a crag on their left side hove up between them and the wind.

Then he could make out Cloud’s rump, snow-spattered shadow horse, tail sprinkled with honest snowflakes, materializing slowly in front of them in a world otherwise white. He could feel Cloud all along. But except for Danny on the other pole of the travois and Randy atop it, and the ends bumping heavily along the roadway, he couldn’t have sworn where the ground was.

“Get off,” he said to his brother, then, because the wind wouldn’t catch the travois during the transaction here and his knees were growing rubbery with fighting both the slope and the constant slippage.

Randy slowly took his weight off the rig, so the load was lighter by him, at least.

“Breath,” Carlo requested, then.

“Minute,” Danny said.

The grade was too steep to do other than stand, but he needed the rest. His legs were shaking under him, and he tried to ease the strain on them as they stopped and stood on an icy steep where if they once entirely let go of the travois where it was, it and his sister would toboggan down a giddy stretch of rubble and ice and soar high and wide on the winds before it fell.

But in all this trek Brionne had never waked.

Never would wake, in his guilt-ridden thoughts and guiltier hope. His sister had been a rider for a brief number of days—she’d been a rider on a horse the whole district and clear down to Shamesey had known had to die—the horse Guil Stuart and others had come up here to get before it took a village out.

They hadn’t been in time.

His sister had ridden a rogue horse home; she’d gotten it through the gates that defended Tarmin from the Wild. And in the confusion of that horse’s maddened sending, sane villagers had opened doors, rushed to the aid of stricken children, dying neighbors— abandoning their only defenses in the process. In the confusion and the threat the rogue sent into the ambient, the best and the bravest impulses that humans owned had sent neighbors running, blinded by things they thought they saw and cries they already heard—running, some in panic, some to save others—while a swarm of vermin, coming through those opened gates and those doors no one had the sanity left to shut, gnawed them down to bone. The swarm had made the whole village prey; the virtuous, and the fools, and the innocent. Brionne had ridden through it, immune to the swarm, on the deadliest killer of all—wanting them, wanting revenge, wanting—God knew what—

And after the carnage, after the horse was gone, his sister had just started slipping away, not eating, not speaking, eventually not reacting to the world at all. For a few days down at first-stage, they’d been able to make her drink—but last night at midway she hadn’t even done that for them. The horses down below wouldn’t tolerate her. Cloud wouldn’t. They imaged whenever they had to deal with her, and it was nothing—nothing—a sane mind wanted to feel again.

Right now his sister didn’t move, didn’t think, didn’t know and probably wouldn’t care if she went off that edge. Not only would she not drink since last night, she wouldn’t blink this morning to save her eyes from the cold. That was how fast she was sinking. They’d tied a bandage around her face to keep her eyes from freezing— Danny’s idea—and a scarf around that, and then folded the skins around her with the fur side in. He could sense Danny and Randy through Cloud’s sendings plain as plain, constant and alive—but his sister wasn’t there. Just wasn’t there.

And he didn’t know whether he even grieved for her.

He wanted to. But maybe that was only to prove he could, after so much death.

He wanted to get her safely to Evergreen.

But he most of all wanted to get her to the doctor in Evergreen, so that if there was a scrap of a human mind left in her that could be suffering, he’d have brought her to die in a civilized and comprehensible environment, not in some bare-boards cabin on ground too frozen to bury her—where—he didn’t want to think about it— the scavengers would leave of her… nothing more than was left in Tarmin now.

Beyond getting her to the doctor, he didn’t know. God forgive him, he wished every night since they’d gotten her back that she’d just drift peacefully deeper and not wake up the next morning. Even unconscious, she’d driven them out of every refuge they had—and when that lost horse had shown up down at first-stage, the last place where they could have been safe, he’d known it was his sister it had come for.

He hated her—and he couldn’t let her go. There was the whole story in those two facts. Danny was probably asking himself how he’d ever gotten them for his responsibility. This morning Danny had been uncertain about setting out, and he’d argued with him—

He didn’t remember all that he’d said, but he’d bent every argument to get them on their way before that horse found them, —the way he’d wanted them to get out of first-stage, because that horse haunting the fringes of the woods down there had come up near the cabin walls that last night, calling and calling for a hapless, foolish girl who’d, please God, passed beyond answering it or any horse.

Because what in hell did they do if Brionne came to and they were in that little cabin with a horse who—Danny tried to keep the lid on that feeling, but he knew—might kill her and maybe him and Randy in spite of everything they could do to stop it? He couldn’t blame Cloud for protecting his rider. And he didn’t want Brionne to wake and answer that lost horse down there, either. He’d felt her stirring, down at first-stage, that last night.

And, God, he didn’t want her near a horse.

He knew, too, he shouldn’t be thinking about it. He tried to stop. He’d learned from Danny how to listen to Cloud and see not just flashes of damning illusion but clear pictures in his head.

The preacher down in Tarmin had always said if you listened to the Wild you’d be attracted to thoughts of sex and blood that came and went for no reason. And he’d felt them—but he wasn’t even sure what the preacher feared: he couldn’t have explained to anyone how noisy the world was when he was around Cloud—and how scarily quiet it was, even in the howling wind, when Cloud was out of range. He’d gotten to depend on that presence for safety—and it wasn’t just hearing some ravening Beast, as the preachers called it— it was hearing everything, it was an intensity of smells he didn’t smell, colors he didn’t see—most of all a sense of whereness that he couldn’t explain in words, a jumble at first that made you think you were off balance alt the time, but that just—slowly turned into a sense of where things were and how far everybody was from each other and who they were and how they felt—that in this place was an assurance you were still on the mountain and not walking off it.

That was the sense you could really get hooked on, and the preachers didn’t know that one—or maybe they did and weren’t telling you that because it was just too attractive, the way Brionne had gone off into it and gotten herself into a place she couldn’t— maybe didn’t want to—get out of.

That was the other side of it—you were bound to a creature that wasn’t human. And if it should die—

The world began to flatten out: Cloud had begun to pull out of range, growing more vague as the snow came between them. He knew then he’d been thinking very dangerous, scary things.

“Pull, dammit,” came from out of the fog beside him.

He pulled harder, and as they came closer to Cloud the world re-expanded. That was the way it seemed.

At the same moment came a sudden shove in what Danny called the ambient, a flash of and an awareness of

Danny wanted him quiet. Danny didn’t want him interfering with his horse. Danny was

Foot skidded. Body reacted. Heart caught up late. He was too tired, too out of breath. He’d never walked this far in his life, never imagined what it did to feet and legs to walk up incline after incline with no letup.

The wind came at them from the side in a sudden gust. They couldn’t see Cloud, but Cloud was still there, still aware of them—

Two hours on a good day, Danny had said. He couldn’t be that wrong.