Cloud's Rider

Chapter 11

It was blue sky and scattered clouds overhead, snow blowing off the trees and sunmelt glistening on the surface of the crags. was Burn’s occasional impression, and Flicker’s; but nothing close or threatening, nothing that would, Guil thought, make Burn jog, which he truly didn’t want this morning, considering the aches in his side.

The woman beside him was much more cheerful than she had been when they’d set out. Tara had begun to mope and to lose appetite yesterday—maybe understandable if she had never been anything except a village rider, and unaccustomed to lying snowbound all winter in an isolated cabin.

But she wasn’t; she’d been a free rider over on Darwin, and the ambient told him it wasn’t the closeness of the cabin that was bothering her. It was an occasional, uneasy, and angry despair that he didn’t want to invade with his advice or even his good will. Right now it felt like approaching storm.

He didn’t want to acknowledge it. She had a gun, an indispensable part of their job. He’d seen a crash coming—he knew it was inevitable, and when it came, it helped that they both had a place to go and something yet to do. It was a dangerous search, a perilous venture for a woman whose method of dealing with her loss had been to shut down and shut in for a while. He’d wanted to go up here from the hour they’d agreed they were going and she’d placed all sorts of interpretations on that haste, from his disapproval of her actions with the kids to a need to prove something to her on her mountain.

The latter had switched about to her need to prove something to him, and come down to an hours’-long fight, their first real partner-style disagreement.

But increasingly since their agreement to come up here she’d started thinking about those kids, and about Tarmin, and she was riding on a mission, not just tagging him. He could stay back in the cabin and she’d undertake this to prove something to herself, was what it sounded like to him.

Angry. She was that. It was an anger flying about and trying to find a place to nest. She blamed the Goss family, not the boys, by the rags and tags he picked out of the ambient. She was mad and she had no place to turn it.

And if there was one place that anger could still fasten it was the girl who’d opened the gates, whose selfish whim had ridden the streets of Tarmin, looking for satisfaction. That wasn’t just his guess. It was what they’d both gotten out of the ambient while the boys were there, it was what had roused Tara’s outrage even before the girl had waked, and that outrage had almost pulled the trigger in the instant when sensible fear had drawn the gun—and Danny Fisher had intervened to the hazard of his own life.

She’d put the brake on the temper—and lost her forward motion. Lost the moral justification to do what in her mind wanted doing.

Lost her way, in a world suddenly lacking everyone she’d known.

Well, and there was him, out of his head with painkillers.

And there was this chance, today, to try again to deal with those kids.

The blue sky and the cold air, though, could lighten anyone’s mood. He was too sore to have Burn frisking about like a fool and too sore to think about climbing up and down—but on a day like this Burn found it very hard to behave, and jolted him now and again. Tara’s Flicker had her mind divided between Tara’s purpose and the skittish self-awareness of a mare in heat—which just didn’t raise the common sense to any high level.

Hell of a set they were, as they trekked up the road.

“I’m fine,” Tara said shortly, so he knew she’d picked up—not the literal thoughts—but the mood and the images flitting about his brain.

“Good,” he said.

She didn’t say anything for a long, long space. Then: “Real quiet for a sunny day.”

“Might be the horses scaring them,” he said, because the little creatures that ordinarily filled the ambient with their flittery images, the minds that gave a sense of shape to the land, would shut down and lie quiet if a horse was hungry and hunting—or they’d all project being elsewhere, which could turn a whole section of the mountain queasy and treacherous.

But a while later he caught a number of strange, deliberate images he’d seen before, which at first he thought were wild creatures, and then he realized it was Tara right beside him, trying to call the lost horses out there, naming their names in the ambient, names not all of which he knew.

Flicker had a chancy, there-and-not-there kind of presence in the first place, light flashing through leaves, and Tara’s presence when she rode Flicker’s senses…

Hard sometimes to say what was due to the horse and what was the rider’s own difficult-to-corner nature. It wasn’t unusual for a horse and a rider to grow alike. It wasn’t unusual for two of the same disposition to pair up. And that was certainly what he had beside him.

While Burn, male, whose essence was with a in mating season, was no stable presence in the ambient himself. Guil thumped him occasionally in the ribs to keep his attention to what was going on in the visible world, not wishing and the consequent It was sharp enough as was.

But the curve on that part of the road that faced the rest of the Firgeberg Range was a cure for any glum mood, a glorious sight which he was seeing for the first time—Aby would like it, Guil thought, just as natural as breathing: the snow-covered peaks, the blue sky, and snow-brightened forest as far as the eye could see.

But the fact came down on him then like a hammer blow, that Aby’d known it very well. She’d died here, and sights like this were the last she’d looked on.

“Damn,” Tara said.

“What?” He thought she’d seen something and he cast about with his vision and his hearing, not horse-sense.

“Just damn,” Tara said, and he knew he’d been far too loud with that realization of his and tried to shut down.

“Listen,” Tara said. “You won’t let me alone. I won’t let you alone. Want to go back? Want to avoid this?”

“No.” He didn’t like the exposure of his thoughts—not when he was thinking how Aby had begged him to come up on this route with her. And he hadn’t.

“Yeah,” Tara said. “You can be standoffish and you’re fine.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Pretty view.”

“Just letting you know.”

“Had it coming.”

“Pretty day,” Tara said.

“Yeah.” The ambient was still quieter than it ought to be.

Maybe, they’d said to each other, the swarming that had taken Tarmin had dislodged wildlife from their territories and driven them further down the mountain.

Or onto the north face of the mountain, where the road wasn’t so well maintained—where the road wasn’t maintained at all, in fact: he’d come up that way, and he knew its deteriorating condition.

Burn took a moment to bump against Flicker and take a nip at her neck. Flicker gave a little kick. Guil imaged, and Tara: to calm it down.

They gave their horses’ legs a rest after the next turn of the road— slid down and sat down on the rocks, instead of walking as they usually would: he still wasn’t feeling up to a hike. The horses sniffed around the rocks and raked at a burrow where there might be vermin, and caused a minor rockfall onto the snow.

But there wasn’t any reaction in the ambient. There was nothing there. It was as lonely as it had been.

He needed a hand up when they were ready to move again. Tara made a stirrup of her gloved hands for him, and got up herself, rifle and all, with a skip on the snowy ground and a hand on Flicker’s back. Which was pretty to watch—but an annoyance to a man who was in the habit of doing that and knew any such move would have him lying flat on his back.

They rode sedately, words now and again, long silences, as the road climbed, as the sun passed overhead and finally began to sink behind the mountains.

The day lasted longer in this pass than it did where their cabin sat surrounded by tall trees. The gold of the departing sun crept up the snow, up tops of the rocks and the tips of the evergreens, and vanished altogether as all the world turned to blue shadows, snowy rocks, snow-blanketed evergreens and the untracked expanse of the road that had received a layer of honest snow.

And before the light was gone—they’d set their pace quite slow for his sake—a turning of the road brought them to the first-stage cabin, nestled against the mountain shoulder, set in among such trees, with snow blocking the door.

The ambient was utterly quiet as they rode up on it.

The kids weren’t there.

“Well,” Tara said, and the sigh went out into the world as a breath of steam and in the ambient as “They’re down or they’re up from here.”

He’d personally bet on up, and that they’d used the cabin. He was and Burn was too, picking up a scent of that blurred on the wind.

Bat at this hour they’d no choice but dig their way inside, unless they personally planned to spend the night in the open—and, borderer though he was, and accustomed to open-air camps, he really wasn’t averse to a warm fire and a decent supper and a warm, soft bed.

Burn and Flicker did a lot of the digging of that drift at the door. Tara had to do the last part with the shovel that was racked just under the eaves.

“You stay put,” she said when he thought he could take a turn. “God. Fool.”

The woman had a way with words.

And truth was, he couldn’t do much but sit there, with his side warning him he’d pushed the limit in the riding he’d done.

But when she’d gotten through the snow enough to get the door open, he got up. She used her boot heel to get the last of the ice away from the door edge—ice that indicated that door had been shoveled clear once—and pulled the latch-cord.

He wasn’t used to having partners do all the work. He walked in behind Flicker and ahead of Burn, who had their own right to look things over, and who would be in with them all night.

But not now. Burn and Flicker made one circuit of the place, sniffed it over as smelling nothing that was there now as a rival to what was most important on Burn’s mind, which was Flicker.

And out they went again, right past him with a scrape and thump of hooves and a thump and bang of the door they knocked into on their way out to their own winter antics.

He dodged. Even before he thought about fire or comfort or food or rest, he was interested in the rider board, the square of smoothed wood that sat atop the stone mantel. Tara had gone straight to it.

And sure enough, he saw a wealth of information. He’d had Danny Fisher tell him what he used for his own sign was a letter that started his name—the only letter he’d learned to read in his life, in identifying Danny’s mark—and it was there, that letter in the middle of what he could agree was a cloud. There was the sign that said Danny was convoying three people, and nothing that said anything about a death in their number, so he guessed the girl had lasted to get this far.

There was a sign that said village, there was some writing—unusual on a rider board—and the slash that meant dead: the kid was giving warning in case no other message got to some of the villagers who might come down this road expecting to get help at Tarmin.

The kids could have gone on down the mountain without wasting time here—and that would have taken them on to Shamesey and the help of senior riders who in no way would allow that girl near the camp. They’d take her deep inside the town, where sendings didn’t happen. But he’d never been easy with that notion. Shamesey was just too unstable.

And sure enough that wasn’t the way they’d gone. The directional sign said they were going up the road, not down.

There was one more sign: danger coupled with bad horse.

“One of the horses came in here,” he said. “Damn.”

He didn’t know what Tara thought about it. They were getting a lot of horsey loveplay and chasing at the moment: the ambient was muddy with it and they weren’t hearing each other except with words.

But Tara just sank down by the fireplace as if the wind had gone out of her, and ducked her head against the heels of her hands.

It wasn’t a time to push. He knew clearly what he wanted. But he didn’t say it. He could at least lift the kindling from the stack. He brought that over and knelt and got a fire going, one match, with the tinder the shelter offered in a hanging box by the fire.

Light began to glow in the hearth. She’d turned her head and the light showed a dry and composed face.

“Kid’s got a horse giving him trouble,” she said in a level voice. “He’s taken his party out of here, he’s gone up in the theory it won’t follow him up, but it might follow him down. He wouldn’t come back to us.” She had a dry stick in her hands, broke it and tossed the ends into the fire.

It cost him to get up or down. He didn’t want to get up and move away if he was going to need to sit down to talk to her. Trying to solve things without the horses to carry feeling and memory was like dealing blindfolded and half mute.

And he knew what he’d make up his mind to do in a second if he were in one piece. And he asked himself whether he had a chance in hell of making it on his own.

With her help—he could. But he was in a position of asking for the help of someone he knew wasn’t happy about the situation she’d created and who was very likely going to take it as a criticism from someone who’d twice intervened to stop her from shooting Brionne Goss, for reasons about which he now felt very queasy.

“Kids could be in trouble,” was his opening bid. “They pushed it getting out of here. No question they’ve been caught in the storm.”

“In which case they froze or they made it.”

“Danny’s pretty levelheaded.”

She ducked his opinions for a moment by ducking her head down, knees drawn up, elbows on knees. She was sorting things out. He knew. He waited.

And the head came up. She shook her hair back and set her jaw. “You’re saying go up there.”

He didn’t answer for his own long moment. The fire beside them grew. Tinder went red and dropped down as ashes.

“We didn’t figure on one of the horses coming this way,” he said then. “That’s forced them out of here. That’s put them on the road.”

“Danny understood,” Tara said slowly, “that the real chance was in his waiting here. And that eventually—as kindly as possible— she’d die. But if a horse called—if she woke up—”

“A healthy horse won’t come near her. One that isn’t—”

“They’ve gone up. To Evergreen.”

There was a truck off the mountain, where Aby had died. There was a box of gold in that truck, that a company down in Anveney wanted really bad—a company that had hired him to recover it and to get it on to Anveney. But he’d stopped caring about it. He’d revised a lot of things in his head when Aby’d died, and when he’d found out what had happened up here.

A lot of death—around him and Tara both.

Meanwhile Tara had become important to him, just a constant amazement to him to see her, to look at another living being in all this isolation and see the firelight on her hands, on her face, to discover, day by day, another set of living thoughts in the void where Aby’d been—and to know that if she rode off from him—he’d feel he’d lost—hell, he didn’t know.

He thought Aby would approve of her.

And he knew he was being stupid and too cautious. He’d not felt nearly so anxious about Aby’s risks as he did about risk to Tara—Aby having been there, left hand to his right, a fact of the world since they both were kids, and capable of taking care of herself. God, yes, he’d loved her—there’d always be a hole in his world the shape and size and duration of Aby. But the matter with Tara was here and urgent, because the woman was apt to do any damn thing—and he wanted her safe, and didn’t want her to have done things she’d be sorry for, and meanwhile he had things he needed to do and she’d be up here by herself rather than see him go—it had a very Aby-like feel, her stubbornness did. And he wanted to protect her from that—

The way he hadn’t done with Aby.

His thinking was in a real mess, was what it was.

Horseplay outside had come near the cabin. Attention had turned to them, and they were aware of each other like a light switch going on.

“Dammit!” he said to Burn, caught, and knew it was going to be

A hand came to rest on his knee, took on weight, patted it hard.

And the ambient said that Tara wasn’t mad.

“You aren’t going up there,” she said. “I will.”

“No. I’ll go.”

“I said I’d do it. Go by yourself, hell. This is my mountain. You sit here.”

“No.” They were back to that argument.

“There’s a short way up there. But it’s a lot of walking, a lot of climbing, and rough ground. You can’t make it.”

“The kids are on the long way. If I can’t make it, I’ll know it. I’ll stop. I can camp and stay warm.”

“Listen to me.” The hand on his knee shook at him. “You hear anything?”

“You and two horses.”

“And nothing else. Nothing else.”

He took the point. Soberly.

“The mountain isn’t over with what happened,” Tara said. “It’s not safe out there. For someone who maybe gets sick, can’t move—”

“Or just as well somebody that travels alone. With you or behind you, woman. Take your pick.”

“Your life. Over those kids. They can damn well take care of themselves or they’ve got no business up here.”

“The kids didn’t have much damn choice about being out of the village,” Guil said. “And can the village up there take care of itself? They could need help. We sent our problem up there.”

“Where there’s a lot more resources than we’ve got.”

“And a mountain that’s still in an upheaval. What do they know about it? I want to know where that horse went that drove them out of here.”

“Damn you, Guil.”

“Yeah, well.”

He sat there beside her at the fireside, and then—then the horses outside were mating, and they sat there bundled in their thick clothes, receiving that.

“Doesn’t help the thinking,” he said on a heavy breath.

“Not damn much,” she said.

But the horses wanted in, at that point. Having had their fling they wanted to get warm and muddy up the floor.

He made supper for the two of them plus horse-treats. He figured he could do that: she’d done everything in the day including putting him on his horse.

“They’d have gotten caught by weather at the midway shelter,” he said during supper. “They could be holed be there. Suppose we ought to try the road?”

“Windchill on those high turns is too fierce. Uphill’s easier. Longer. But easier. They can come back down a lot easier than they can go up. Surely they’ve got that sense, if they’re stuck there.”

“No sign of it yet,” he said.

“Maybe they made it up before the weather. Just pushed on.”

Maybe they didn’t make it. He had to think that, too.

In that case he’d be sorrier than he could say. And he and Tara would be wintering in Evergreen.

But they had to go there anyway.

There was nothing right now in the ambient but themselves. There was that silence all around them, a mountain swept clean of life. Or life gone underground, gone into hibernation, as happened in deep, foodless winter.

But there’d been more food on Tarmin Height, grisly thought, than anywhere he’d ever heard of.

“You suppose,” he said, “everything’s eaten so much they’ve all gone to burrows?”

“Possible,” she said. “Possible, too, they remember the rogue, and they’re scaring each other, one to the next. Or possibly—that horse is out there. I don’t think it belonged to my partners. I’d know.”

“Harper’s horse,” Guil said.

“Yeah,” she said. “No question in my mind.”

And long, long after they’d settled down to sleep, tucked down by the fire, in all the blankets they’d brought and found, came a strange, spooky sending that drew an alarm from the horses.

Ghosty thing, just a shiver over the nerves. Guil lay still, but Tara sat up, and got up, and he stirred onto the side that didn’t hurt and sat up, too.

The horses were upset.

“Something’s wrong,” Tara said, with her hands on Flicker’s neck.

Burn came over and stood right over him,

Burn was going to defend him, that was clear. A shiver ran up Burn’s leg and over his hide and Burn snorted and hissed at an unseen enemy.

“Can you make it out?” Tara asked. “It’s not a swarm.”

“Don’t think so.” He made an effort to get up and did, leaning on Burn’s shoulder. From Burn there was another snort and a violent shake of his mane.

Not good, whatever it was.

Tara was came from her and from Flicker, he couldn’t mistake that.

They were armed. They had supplies. But there was that notice on the board that Danny Fisher had written, that warning.

The kid hadn’t been a rider that long. The kid hadn’t ever been into the High Wild. And if he’d heard something real damn confusing—he might not know what he heard. But two experienced riders and their horses—

—didn’t know, either.

It was a moral question to Danny—whether his responsibility for Carlo and Randy continued or ought to continue; and it was still a common-sense kind of question whether he could get Carlo in some kind of trouble by running over there to inform Carlo on what lawyers were doing, and including Carlo into matters that obviously involved the rich and powerful people in the village. Such people weren’t as rich and powerful as they might be down in Shamesey, granted, but seeing Carlo was accidentally between these people and a lot of money, he’d spent some extensive worry on the matter, at some times concluding he shouldn’t go, then thinking that while some were for protecting Carlo’s rights, some weren’t. And then again thinking—if Carlo was seen not to know, Carlo had a certain amount of protection, in that ignorance—if ignorance was ever protection, and his own experience said it wasn’t as much as the ignorant thought it was.

Most of all he didn’t know at what point of their own morality these people from the pretty blue-muraled church would conclude they were doing wrong. He was scared of lawyers. He was scared of courts.

Most of all he didn’t want to mess up Carlo’s future by making a decision that he didn’t have the information to make, and he’d held off till this morning hoping he’d hear some kind of wisdom out of Ridley or Callie during their evening talks.

“You suppose they’re going to treat the Goss boys all right?” he’d asked finally in desperation. “Are the lawyers honest?”

“They’re fools,” was all he’d been able to get out of Ridley last night. Ridley was mad about the situation, and that was what Ridley had on his mind: losing people from his village. And to the question of the lawyers being honest— “At poker,” Callie said, which didn’t tell him much about Carlo’s chances with them.

“You suppose I ought to tell Carlo?” he’d asked Ridley then, deciding on the direct approach.

“Don’t know what he could do about it,” was Ridley’s answer.

That put him in mind of what his father had always said about the law, which seemed the only wisdom that applied—just don’t sign anything.

He’d slept with it, and waked with it, and worried over it.

His first trip this morning had to be out to the den, and he left the breakfast table, dressed for the cold—a light snow was falling— and took Cloud a biscuit from breakfast. The other horses, crowding him as he came into the den from the open-air approach, were obliged to wait: Ridley encouraged him to do that, saying that waiting their turn was good for them: they’d gotten out of their summer manners, meaning when they regularly had strange horses in the den, and they could learn they hadn’t a right to every biscuit that came into their sight.

So while Ridley was helping Callie clear the dishes, he fed Cloud his treat and rubbed him down from head to tail and oiled his feet, quiet in his mind for the first time since he’d come to Evergreen.

Cloud was satisfied, making that curious contentment sound, enjoying the importance of the first and only biscuit of the day. Cloud ducked his head around while he was working and licked the inside of his ear, which Cloud knew he hated.

Both of them were moving a little more freely now, on feet less tender and joints less sore, and, able to go to Cloud and do such basic, ordinary things, Danny felt a great knot of tension that had been in him unravel. Conclusions hard to come to in the guarded ambient in the barracks were far clearer to him when he’d gotten out here to ordinary work.

The truly difficult things were over and done with, the emergencies were all settled, and there was almost nothing to do but brush Cloud’s tail and feed Cloud and bring him biscuits.

Cloud liked that idea. If there’d been females available, the winter would be absolutely perfect. But, next best thing to please his horse, Danny thought about and expected Cloud to approve that idea.

Cloud wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as he might have been. Cloud lifted his head and looked toward the walls and shivered.

Danny found that very odd. He stopped the brushing with his fist still full of Cloud’s tail, and he looked in that direction without even thinking he’d done it.

He’d never been wintered-in anywhere before. Shamesey didn’t have weather to require it, although a lot of riders arrived there to winter-over and the trade died down: Shamesey never felt isolated.

But Evergreen village suddenly seemed very small and very fragile against the mountain shoulder. It dawned on him then for the first time that there just wasn’t any human civilization in the world farther out on the edge than Evergreen and the little string of villages down its lonely road. Over on the other side of the mountain— there was just the Wild, where humans who’d dropped down from the sky had never visited, not on their farthest rides. No villages, no trails, no camps, no riders. Civilization just stopped—maybe just around the shoulder of the rock outcrops on the road they’d ridden. Civilization stopped in the mountains he’d not been able to see from his whited-out vantage on that high turn. Nobody had been out there. Ever.

Cloud’s skin twitched. Cloud snorted and the other horses acted bothered, but the ambient was otherwise quiet, and Cloud settled to being brushed again, rocking gently to the strong strokes Danny put into it.

A rider just shouldn’t think about spooky things, he told himself, not up here, not when the wind had started to blow out of the unsettled Wild.

The snow was coming down thick and hard when he walked out of the den with the notion increasingly sure that in this edge-of-the-world place friends were hard come by.

The end of winter might not see him better settled in the barracks than the beginning had: he had every legitimate right to be in the rider camp for the winter, but he still found himself in an awkward position as an intrusion in the common room of the barracks— which turned out to be a family’s living room: not that it was supposed to be that, but there just wasn’t another child Jennie could play with—even as easy as the rider camp’s relationship with the village seemed, that line was one people wouldn’t send their children across—and the barracks that in some places was a very rough and careless environment, was unquestionably a family living arrangement in Evergreen, an arrangement in which a teenaged visitor of outside origins was undeniably suspect in motives and personal habits. He didn’t think even Callie thought he’d do something so awful as have designs on Jennie; but clearly Callie didn’t leave him alone with Jennie, He wasn’t friends with Callie. He never would be, he strongly suspected. He probably would never be friends with Ridley, on Callie’s account.

He didn’t know what his relationship was with Carlo, and why he hesitated so long and resisted so much going over there, whether he didn’t want to get the rebuff he’d had from some of his old townside friends, or whether he was beginning to believe Callie that he was a fool in the path of rational people, and he was scared to give Carlo advice on something he really didn’t understand any more than Carlo did.

He was spooked about the law, was one thing. His early association with it hadn’t been that of an honest and upright citizen

And he held too damn many secrets to sleep sound at night—Callie not even trusting him to keep to his bed. He’d tried turning down the vodka last evening.

Funny thing, Callie had said her feelings would be hurt if he didn’t drink it. So he had drunk it, all but certain now his very deep sleep and morning lethargy had something to do with it. People who’d do that to you—maybe they didn’t want you wandering across the line between camp and village. That was the other matter that had him spooked—but at least this morning he knew for sure what he’d suspected about his nights there.

And they were the source of all the advice he had.

Maybe they had their own set of problems. He had his.

So he found no need to tell them he was going.

He cast a look toward the barracks veiled in blowing snow, and no one was stirring—he’d given the excuse of going out to the den—he didn’t have to give them excuses, and there was no reason he couldn’t go over villageside on his own, absolutely no reason. Ridley was camp-boss, and could forbid him, but then he’d be out that gate and elsewhere.

They’d say later, Where did you go and what did you do? not as if they had a right to ask.

And he supposed, as he walked toward the camp gate and toward the village, that if he told Carlo what he knew, things were going to get out that could speed up the gold-rush mentality that was working among the rich. And that could rouse a little of the anger he knew was stored up and waiting for him when he finally did let loose what he knew about the Goss kids.

It wasn’t a happy situation he’d landed in. In some measure he’d like to walk up to the barracks, fling open the door and lay out in two minutes everything he had to say.

But once you let a matter out of the proverbial bottle, it was out.

And panic wasn’t at all a thing to let loose in a place like this, with all the High Wild around them—at least that was the only wisdom on a situation like this he’d ever gotten from anyone. Panic in the ambient was like blood-smell on the wind.

There were two other people who knew everything he knew. And Carlo began to be not only somebody he owed the truth to—Carlo began to be the only human being in Evergreen that he’d rely on.

So never mind what the village marshal wanted, or what Ridley expected. With a quiet walk through thick snow-fell over to the gate of the camp and past the restraining post into the village side, he was gone, on his first foray into the village alone, into the quiet of the villageside ambient, this time without Ridley’s voice to fill the silence.

He found it spooky to walk among utter strangers. He felt cut off, deaf in a very important sense. Passersby became a threat to him in a way merchants and chance encounters in his own neighborhood in Shamesey town had never been. He didn’t know these people. For the first time in his life he was in a place where he didn’t know people either by long experience or by the thoughts they shed.

Which was stupid. He wasn’t in danger and neither was Cloud.

But he’d sure felt safer when Ridley were with him.

Right now—he’d feel safer with eight-year-old Jennie for a guide, which told him how entirely silly he was being: the street was mostly deserted, and while a rider in his leather breeches and fringed jacket was as conspicuous as a horse walking down the street, he was in a mostly deserted neighborhood in heavy snow, and it wasn’t exactly as if he was walking among hostile crowds.

The few venturers outside their passage system did stare. One man even said hello. A couple of girls—he thought they were girls—walking along bundled into shapeless coats talked behind their hands while they approached and giggled as they came close. “Hello,” he said, defiantly taking the offensive in the deadness of the ambient; “hello,” one said, and then they went into a spasm of teenaged giggles and raced off down the street.

Very young, he said to himself in all the maturity he’d assumed. Too silly. He wasn’t interested. Much.

He passed the public tavern Ridley had mentioned—Ridley hadn’t said whether in so small a camp he and Callie ever crossed over for an evening of what his father called ale and riot—or whether it was going to be a dry winter. It looked like a comfortable sort of building, with lights glowing behind glass windows, with tracks on the snow going up onto the porch and inside.

Then, next to a rusting and untidy stack of iron scrap and old truck parts mostly buried under snow, was a huge evergreen tree, and the smiths’ shop.

The double doors were shut, as came as no surprise. But he took the handle and turned it and pushed, testing whether the place was open, and as it proved to be, walked from the snowy outside white into the shadowy, smoky heat of a large, low forge-shed.

“Yeah?” said a burly young piece of trouble who turned up standing right beside him.

In the same moment, across a low stone wall, he’d seen the ones he was after. Carlo and Randy were working at the forge, Randy with his hand on the bellows lever and Carlo with a set of tongs in his gloved hand—which, if Carlo’s fingers felt like his, Carlo wouldn’t find comfortable.

“Looking for the Goss boys,” he said. “Hello,” he said cheerfully, walking past the surly, close-clipped kid, him with his hair growing long and a knife in his boot. “How’s it going, guys?”

The burly kid said, from behind him, “You the new rider, huh?”

He stopped so as to include the guy in his field of view—not inclined to ignore a provocation behind him, not in Shamesey alleys and not here. “Yeah,” he said. The guy was big, but there was soft fat over the memory of muscle. The gut argued for more acquaintance with the bar than the bellows. “Wintering over, at least.” He didn’t like the tone. At all. And Carlo hadn’t answered his hail—Carlo hadn’t given him a clue what the situation was except to say something low and fast to Randy. But he was getting bored with the threat, and walked on.

“So what do you want?” the big kid asked, not satisfied with one look back.

“Friendly call,” he said, just about hoping the guy would pick up one of those iron bars and come at him. He’d not been a thoroughly good kid back in Shamesey streets. He’d been very good since. He’d learned to be smart. But God should give him some satisfaction for his reformation.

Carlo came to meet him, and Randy stayed. Quiet, real quiet, for Randy.

“How’s it going for you?” Carlo took his gloves off and offered a handshake.

“Fine. Want to talk to you. Private. Got a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Place to talk?”

“I’ll get my coat. —Randy, you just keep the heat on. Be back in a minute.”

“Wait a minute!” Randy began.

“Back in a minute, hear me?” Carlo tossed the gloves at him and Randy caught them, still not happy.

“You better get your ass back here,” the other kid said. “Pretty quick. You don’t get paid for talking.”

“Yeah,” Carlo said. “—Come on.” He nodded toward the door and shot a look at Randy before he picked up his coat off a peg near the door, grabbed his hat, and the two of them went out into the milky white of a snowy morning, near the big evergreen. Carlo led the way over beside it and stopped.

“Just a real pleasant fellow in there,” Danny said. “Is that the owner’s kid?”

“Yeah,” Carlo said. “Son of a bitch.” And more cheerfully: “How are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m doing fine. Nice family folk I’m with. Nice kid. Pleasant place. —Is that guy somebody who stays around? You have any trouble with him?”

There was a small silence. Carlo ducked his head, arms tucked, then looked up with his jaw tight. “I tell you I’m getting out of here come spring. Me and Randy, we want to go with you when you leave downland, upland, I don’t care. Anywhere we can get work. I’ll have a little by then to pay you with—or owe you. Whatever it takes. I never hired a rider. I don’t know—”

“Save it. I won’t take your money, long as you don’t want to go off the road I’d take—which is down by east or down by west. Anything else, you’d fell off the mountain.”

“I swear—” Carlo began.

“No big favor. I’m going anyway. Might as well have good company-”

Carlo let go a huge breath. “This guy,” Carlo said. “It’s not just me, understand. I’ve tried.”

“This Mackey guy—the senior—I don’t gather he’s got a good reputation in town, clear out to the rider camp. Ridley sure doesn’t think much of him.”

“I tell you,” Carlo said, thin-lipped, “I’d like to pound his head in. But he’ll take it out on Randy. So will the old man. We wouldn’t have a roof over our heads. And I could end up in jail.”

“I think people in the village know—”

“I’m the stranger here. This guy has property. Listen—I want to ask you. If it ever got real bad—I mean real bad—or if something happens to me, could Randy come over to the camp? And you take care of him?”

“If it gets bad—both of you come over. There’ll be breaks in the weather. I can get you on to Mornay or somewhere no matter the weather. Winter’s bad. But it doesn’t mean a horse can’t move.”

Carlo drew several slow breaths. “That’s real generous.”

“I’d take you this week if the weather clears. But—” He suddenly remembered the whole reason he’d come—and it dawned on him the import of what he knew and the village’s ambitions, and maybe that it wasn’t a real safe thing for Carlo and Randy to try to leave the village with their news. Respectable people could do some damn dirty things—for less money than was involved—and while there might be some who’d take a chance to see there weren’t any heirs to Tarmin property but themselves—there might also be those who’d kill to be sure no other village heard about it.

Carlo could be living with one of the chief suspects in either eventuality, to judge by Mackey’s blowhard son and the fact Carlo was talking about refuge.

But the plain fact was, riders weren’t in great abundance up here. All of Evergreen had better reckon they couldn’t get ten meters through the Wild without a rider to guide them, and that came down to him, and Ridley and Callie—with an eight-year-old they didn’t want in rough circumstances. Things came crystal clear to him of a sudden, just being over here in this environment, that if he made it real clear to the village at large that he and Carlo were close friends, it might be the best protection for Carlo and Randy he could arrange. Nobody had better piss off the only rider-for-hire there was up here.

“Has the marshal talked with you yet?” he asked Carlo in his new sense of immunity. “About your rights to property?”

Carlo squinted at him through the blowing snow and went very, very sober. “No.”

“There’s lawyers involved,” Danny said. “There’s lawyers talking about how you’ve got inheritance rights down in Tarmin. That you own the smith’s shop and the house and all. And there’s a lot of people talking about going down there, families here just sort of homesteading all those vacant buildings.”

“You’re serious. They’re going to do it.”

“No joke.” He felt keenly the lack of the ambient that would have made him aware what Carlo was thinking. “And it might work out all right. There’d be plenty of neighbors. Plenty of work fixing up. If you could stand to go back and live there—you’d own your papa’s forge, the shop and the house and maybe more than that. Anything you’d legitimately inherit. Anything your papa’s or your mama’s relatives had. You could be the richest guy in Tarmin.”

Carlo looked disturbed. He raked a hand through his hair, which had been damp with sweat and which was developing ice crystals in the snowy cold. “Mama’s property. And the forge. And the house.”

“You could be real comfortable—if you can be comfortable down there. This village has to have Tarmin operating. Only place they can really warehouse goods. You know that better than I do. And until they can get oxen, or trucks and fuel to haul whatever they normally get from Tarmin, they’re probably going to have to port supplies up the Climb on hand-carts. That means it’s going to be a real lean spring up here. Prices are going to go sky-high. Just immediately as soon as the snow melts this village or somebody on the High Loop has got to get somebody down to Shamesey and buy oxen, hire drivers and get some truckloads of hay up here to the top of the treeline, or the Anveney truckers are going to gouge them for everything they’ve got. Not saying what Shamesey will charge—if they get wind of it before they’ve made a deal. They’re not going to wait around. These people have to move fast before word gets out.”

“Where’d you hear this?”

“There was a meeting. Actually a couple of meetings. I—should have come sooner—but—” He was embarrassed in the face of Carlo’s questioning look. “I wasn’t sure. Wasn’t sure who’d be watching. I get the feeling they haven’t come here to tell you you’ve got rights. I’ll expect they’re going to talk to you. They better talk to you.”

“They haven’t. I figured—I figured they’d do something about getting the warehouses down there going. But—”

“I get the idea a lot of people are thinking about claims down there. And you have rights. So’s Randy.” He hesitated. “—How’s your sister?”

“Don’t know.” Carlo’s whole body said he didn’t want to think about it.

“You could take care of her. And Randy. This Mackey guy is the only one that would be interested in the forge down there. He might try to buy you out, trade you here for what’s down there.”

“That wouldn’t be a bad deal—”

“No. Don’t take it. That’s what I’m hearing: there’s a chance—a real chance—that this village could go under—if the important people, all the people who know how to do anything, head downhill at the first thaw. It’d leave just miners and loggers up here— unless, I guess, people from the next village over decided to come over here and the next claims them—it’s going to be a scramble, is what.”

Carlo bit his lip. “I could go back down there. I would. Dammit, I would. I could set us up proper. Hell if I couldn’t. Damn Mackey!”

“If they come to you don’t sign anything. There’s lawyers involved.”

“Yeah. I hear you plain.” Carlo looked then as if he’d just been stung. “I got to get back to the forge.”

“Sure. I didn’t tell Ridley I was coming over here and Callie thinks I’m the devil on her doorstep. I didn’t tell ’em I was going.”

“I owe you a drink. At least. Several, in fact.”

“No difficulty. Anytime. You can come to the rider camp. No reason not. You get some time off—I can come across. I guess I can. Nobody seemed shocked I was here. —Suppose they’d serve riders in the tavern there?”

Carlo looked embarrassed. “I don’t know. I’ll ask.”

“Hey.” It dawned on him that was one of a set of things more that he could do. They needed him. The village might have yet to figure it. But they needed him. The Evergreen riders needed him—or it was going to be an ugly scene, people wanting escort and Ridley and Callie with a kid they wouldn’t want involved. He suddenly resolved he wasn’t as down-and-under the local situation as he’d assumed— and that his situation was in some respects like Carlo’s. “Who’d guide anyone anywhere but me? And there’s horses painted in the church. This isn’t too bad a place. We should have a drink.”

“I’m supposed to get paid the rest of my wages. He better pay me.”

Cash money was a problem he hadn’t solved—having not a penny to his name. Villageside, it mattered.

“Sure,” he said. He had a time to do something. He had somewhere to go. Amazing how that pinned the world down. “Sundown?”

“We’ll be there.”

He went with Carlo back to the door, and when it opened the heat inside was stifling and the inside was obscured with shadows and fire.

The heavyset kid was standing real near that outside door. Randy was still keeping the bellows going, looking their way the while. “See you,” Carlo said, tight and careful. And shut the door between them.

Danny turned and walked back up the street, through the veiling snow.

Pretty town, all the evergreens, shadows in the white. Pointed roofs. Nice place.

He was still a little worried about Carlo. He didn’t know what he personally could do until the day Carlo and Randy showed up and said Get us out of here.

Well, he did. He could go in there, let a fight start, and beat hell out of Mackey’s offspring. He could tell the whole village to swallow it or choke, so long as they wanted his help. He’d not been a good kid, in town. He had what his Father called real bad tendencies when somebody shoved him.

But—pushing back too hard and trying to deal his own hand in this apart from Ridley could make him a target for those who didn’t for one reason or another want a rush down to Tarmin. That included Ridley, it included Callie, and probably the marshal and the judge and maybe even people who’d like to go but who didn’t want certain other people to go.

It could get just real complicated.

One thing was sure: with gold, furs, and timber and all, Tarmin village wasn’t going to die. Tarmin was going to rise from a bloody grave. He hoped—hoped Carlo and the kid could benefit, and that they wouldn’t get robbed. Or hurt.

And he hoped Carlo kept the lid on Randy. When the news got out, and it was, he was sure, all over town—except near Carlo and Randy, which he found troubling—it was going to be just real uncomfortable in the Mackey household.

Because if the rest of the town was going to benefit from claiming free property in Tarmin, the smith couldn’t. Not while Carlo and Randy and Brionne were alive.

But Carlo wasn’t a fool. Carlo was far from a fool. Carlo had understood everything from the first hint of what was going on.

And Carlo, who’d swung a hammer for his living, wasn’t defenseless, either. That surly guy crowding him was running a real risk.