Cloud's Rider

Chapter 12

Van Mackey had been at the tavern all afternoon. Van Mackey had drunk quite a damn lot, as fairly well seemed his habit in the afternoon, and was a fire hazard around the forge when he came down to have a look around and criticize what those who had worked during the day had done.

Fact was, Carlo said to himself, watching this inspection, and with Danny’s warning racketing all day in his consciousness, there wasn’t any fault to find. He’d worked hard and he’d stayed later than he was agreed to stay, and he was ready to go out to the tavern to catch a cheap bite of supper with his brother, when Van Mackey came in showing the effects of having been there for some time. He’d worked till his shoulders ached and his hands hurt like very hell. He’d hammered and shaped and finished the whole pending job for Mackey’s inspection, a job for which Mackey would get paid a lot more than he’d see. He’d done a day’s work in anybody’s book out of a great deal of pain, and if after he was through and after Randy had cleaned up the place, Van Mackey was going to find any fault or mess up what he’d done, he was going to—

He was going to have to sit on his temper and not say a thing, that was what, figuring that any other course was going to get them bounced out of the shop and put on Danny’s tab. He’d been building up a real head of resentment where it regarded the Mackeys— and he held it under an especially tight lid, watching the man poke into this and that.

But after looking it all over, Van Mackey came over to him and said, cheerfully, “Come inside. Have a drink.”

He really didn’t want to. In two ticks of his heart he knew for dead certain what the deal was, but he didn’t see a way to duck it.

“My brother, too,” he said. “I don’t want him knocking around the street alone. It’s our suppertime.”

“All right,” Mackey said, and the way he didn’t object also said a lot.

So they all went inside the house like good friends, Rick clumping after them, clearly out of sorts and maybe, at least Carlo thought so, puzzled.

The wife met them in the hallway, a narrow wooden hall with torn and sooty rugs, and they all went into the sitting room, where the rugs were new and not cheap but only slightly cleaner. The wife had a bottle of spirits on the table, and she set out five glasses and started pouring.

“Not for my brother,” Carlo said, “thank you.” A glass of that and Randy would be flat on the rug. Randy knew it, and didn’t more than sulk.

“There’s tea,” the wife said, and waved a hand at Rick, who hulked on the fringes. “Tea.”

Wouldn’t trust him not to spit in it, Carlo thought: he kept an eye on the process through the open door to the kitchen adjacent, and in the midst of a short course of small talk, watched Rick Mackey carry the ready teapot and a cup to the sitting room and the wife pour it. Rick went and slouched in the doorway, a picture of grace, with his hands in his pockets below a sagging belt.

“I have to tell you,” Van Mackey said for openers as he and his wife sat down with them, “it’s fine work you’re doing. Just gave you a couple of days to prove it and, I tell you boys, I’m real happy with what I’m seeing. Fine work, real fine eye.”

For damn sure the Mackeys knew what had come out of that meeting. And steam was all but coming out Rick Mackey’s ears, but he was keeping quiet under threat of his father’s hand, Carlo would lay odds on it.

Mackey poured the drinks, and the wife offered spiced crackers. “Hey,” Randy said, surprised at the change in things. “First-rate stuff.”

And after that, for half an hour at least, Van Mackey and his wife sat and chattered idly and in detail about shop business, neighbors, the mayor, the marshal, the whole situation down on the Ridge, and orders they expected and who they dealt with.

As if they were going into partnership—which, Carlo began to think queasily, just might be the game the Mackey household had in mind, a third possibility that Danny hadn’t named.

The Mackeys downed two rounds of drinks and poured his glass full the instant it emptied, and considering he hadn’t eaten, Carlo downed crackers at an equally rapid rate. If he and Randy had remotely dreamed of a warm and cordial reception in the village, right down to the crocheted doilies and the tea, the polite asking after their sister and the sympathy the wife—Mary was her first name and the last name turned out to be Hardesty—offered for the demise of their village, they couldn’t have concocted anything as extravagant.

Right down to the offer of an inside bedroom, as soon as they could refit the pantry and install beds.

“We’re pretty comfortable out there,” he said, and Randy, with his mouth full of cracker and another in his hand, looked at him in indignation. He went on regardless: “Might rig a couple of cots out there, though. The floor’s warm, but—”

“I don’t know why we should,” Rick said, which clearly said he didn’t know exactly what was going on, or was stupid enough to ignore it.

“Shut up.” Van Mackey said to his son, and to them, in a different tone of voice, “You can’t go sleeping on the floor, good God, boy. I tell you, I was just real suspicious Peterson had fallen for some story, until I saw the work you do. And you’re just real fine. Real fine, praise the Lord and His mercy you boys made it in.”

“Yeah, I could see your position. I could really see that.” Carlo controlled his temper and his bellyful of alcohol and crackers real well, in his own opinion. He didn’t walk out, or even come close.

“I mean,” Mackey said, “a village goes under, you just don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Carlo said. “You couldn’t.”

Mackey might have spread the news around to the neighbors about Tarmin’s going. He wished he hadn’t had to tell the man anything; and it might be why they’d been left out of the information Danny had gotten, that the marshal knew he’d talked to someone and had decided they couldn’t be trusted.

Mackey for an ally wasn’t an attractive prospect.

Meanwhile Randy was darting glances at him—mindful of his strict order to shut up and not to talk back to the Mackeys ever, and not to talk to the Mackeys most especially if he was talking to them. Randy was doing all right so far, and held his silence on a mouthful of crackers while the wife said,

“We’d still be pleased if you boys would move inside while we fix up the place.”

And he said,

“Oh, no. We’re just real comfortable out there, a lot of room, all of that.”

“You boys have got to have some more blankets,” sweet wife Mary insisted, while Rick burned and Randy stuffed his mouth and his pockets with crackers. “Would you like the rest of the crackers, son?”

“Sure,” Randy said.

And on that, it seeming they’d gone about far enough, Carlo set his glass down and pocketed a fistful of crackers himself.

“Join us for Sunday dinner,” Van Mackey said.

“No, no,” Carlo said. “We don’t want to disturb you. You have your lives. We’re not here to intrude on your house. We’re grateful enough for a place to stay.” Then he decided to push it, about the time they stood up, taking their leave. “Could use a little extra cash for meals at the tavern, though. Growing kid there. —If we’re worth it. Sure be nice to have the seconds.”

“Hell,” Rick said from the doorway.

But Van Mackey said, “You just put meals on our tab over at the tavern. We’ll work it out.”

“That’s real kind. That’s real kind, sir.” He meant to make it fair-sized tabs and hide away things like crackers and other stuff that did all right on the trail—supplies were mobility, and mobility for him and Randy might be real necessary on short notice. Feed up real well on Sundays, when they had a real good table—

And maybe take the actual cash he got and put it with Danny Fisher, who wouldn’t rob him.

Rick would turn his bunk inside out looking for it. He’d lay odds on it. And if Rick was a real fool—might try outright strong-arm robbery. Rick was bigger than any guy he’d seen in Evergreen, including the loggers. Rick was used to having his way—he’d seen Rick elbow his way in the tavern. And he saw the look Rick had now.

“You sure you won’t come to dinner,” wife Mary said.

“No,” Carlo said, thinking he’d as soon snuggle up to a nest of lorrie-lies. “We’re fine. Our papa always said, Don’t get personal on a business deal.”

If he was right it was only going to make them twice as determined, and sure enough, they took no offense at all. He could have tossed his glass onto the floor and they’d have smiled. Except Rick.

“Well, we understand,” the wife said. “We appreciate your attitude. But you boys won’t mind if I bring out some roast tomorrow.”

“That’d be real kind,” Carlo said, and with Van and Mary in close attendance all the way down the sooty, worn rug of the hall, got Randy out the door before he exploded.

“What’s that for?” Randy asked when they were in the forge and far enough from the shut door of the house.

“Hush,” he said, and got himself and Randy across the forge to collect their coats and go out to supper.

“Why in hell’d you turn them down?” Randy said, getting his coat on. “You crazy?”

“Tell you later,” he said. “Let’s go to supper, all right?” He buttoned his own coat and took his brother out into the snow, by the outside door, not by the passages.

There he could be relatively sure nobody was eavesdropping. And then he told Randy—while they were walking toward the tavern, in the trampled snow of a lot of traffic headed the same direction—as much as he was sure Randy was apt to hear, meaning the whole thing.

“People are going down to Tarmin come spring,” he said, “and redo the whole village. We own the forge down there, and the house, and grandma’s house and maybe aunt Libby’s shop and her house, do you get it? They just figured out who we are. People from Evergreen are going to claim the houses and everything there’s nobody to speak for. And we’re all that’s left. We’re rich, kid, and we can kick ’em in the ankles and they’ll grit their teeth and smile at us.”

“That’s why they’re being nice.”

“First prize. The only way they’re going to get anything is if we make a deal with ’em, and I’m not ready. So you watch it. You keep your mouth shut and let me handle it.” He wished he hadn’t said that about kicking them in the ankles. “First thing, kid, we could end up dead. This is real serious.”

Randy got a strange look. “You think they’d poison us?”

He hadn’t thought of that. And wished he had. But it was one more reason not to take Sunday dinners at the Mackey table. “It’d be pretty obvious to everybody. But they might do about anything else. Like an accident in the forge. Like something happening to you. Or threats to you. So you stay out of dark places and stay where I know where you are. That’s an order. Hear?”

Randy’s eyes were big as saucers as he stopped at the tavern steps and looked up at him. “Yeah,” Randy said.

“I think we’re going to hear some deal out of them about the property down in Tarmin. Real soon.”

“Danny say so?” Randy asked.

“Yeah. He heard it in a meeting. He came over to tell us.”

“You know what I think? The Mackeys are scum.”

“I’d say so. But you don’t. Just don’t say anything. Especially anywhere the Mackeys can hear you.”

“You should get him. Rick can’t beat you.”

He didn’t think. He grabbed Randy’s arm and then knew he’d grabbed too hard and hurt the kid. He let go.

“You don’t talk like that. —Kid, I’m sorry. But you be careful what you say.”

Randy looked scared. And rubbed his arm.

“This is a public place,” Carlo said. “And you behave. You behave, brother. Or I’ll knock you in the head when I get you home. I mean it.”

“This isn’t our home!”

“Yeah, well, that’s fine. This is what we’ve got, kid. Quiet. Quiet! Hear me?”

“Yeah.”

He clapped Randy on the shoulder then and they went the rest of the way up the steps, opened the door—there was a glass pane with The Evergreen painted on it and a white tree below it, with light coming from inside, lamps and a couple of fires.

You weren’t ever cold in The Evergreen. Overheated, maybe. The food was good.

Real good, if you’d gone hungry.

They walked in with not near the silence and the stares there’d been the first night they’d come. But the ducked heads and hushed comments from the gathering there did notice them—again and in a different way. News had gotten around; and now people were re-interested, in a way that warned there was something in the undercurrents, and that there were people here who’d really like a chance at exactly what the Mackeys would.

But hell if he’d spook, or let Randy spook. The kid was picking it up, not knowing what to do with it and on the verge of showing out like a fool.

“They’re looking at us,” Randy said, being at that age: but the fact was, everybody was looking at them.

“Yeah,” Carlo said. “You wanted to be famous, right?”

“Shut up! They’re staring.”

“Fine.”

By now they knew where things were and how they were. There was a set-fee buffet. What they’d been spending gave you one serving. But if you laid down double it was all you could eat up to three bowls, which was more than fair: the bowls were large. He and Randy went to the line, which was none by this time, found a table and sat down to stew and, at the bar help’s order, a short beer for him, a cup of tea for Randy.

Then a shadow fell across their table, and a big miner or logger (devil a way to tell when both were in their tavern best) loomed across the light and sat down at the table with them.

“Hear you’re the Tarmin kids.”

“Yeah,” Carlo said, and nudged Randy with his foot under the table, a signal for Randy to keep his mouth shut.

“Hear you saw what happened down there.”

“Yeah.” He refused to let the guy ruin his supper. He and Randy had had supper in the middle of the carnage, in the store which was the only safe place with food, and he didn’t intend to be spooked. “I was there. It was a mess. Lost my whole family.”

“Hear so,” the guy said. “Real sorry. Stand you a drink?”

“Yeah, suppose so.”

The guy—he turned out to be the head of the miner’s union— seemed bound to talk. And after a little chatter about the oddness of the winter so far, and how spooky the Wild had been—asked the lay of the village, the size of the buildings in a jump so fast Carlo didn’t even see it coming.

He answered, having no reason not to.

Then other miners began to gather round. Pretty soon a good many of them were asking questions, or repeating information they’d heard, and a couple of men said they’d been there years ago but they didn’t know the place now.

“Not many would,” Carlo said without thinking, and didn’t intend to let emotion color his statement. But it did, and he saw Randy twitch to it and he saw a shifting-back among the crowd.

At that moment he saw Danny Fisher coming through the crowd—long fringes on his coat, gun on his hip: rider and no question of it, from the cut of the boots to the battered hat with the braided cording around the crown.

“Dan,” he said, half-rising—Dan or Danny had gotten confused in his head down in Guil and Tara’s cabin. But either way it was, he offered Danny a seat at the table as the one this time in his element, as Danny had been elsewhere.

There was a mild fuss made, and a beer gotten—Carlo wasn’t even sure who’d ordered it. But Danny was mildly famous, folk immediately drawing the conclusion that this was the rider who’d come up with them.

And folk wanted to buy Danny drinks.

“On me,” Carlo said, and with a wicked thought, got up and ordered at the bar: “What the rider drinks is on the tab.”

By the time he got back through the crowd to the table, there was a dish of the stew, a mug of beer, and a cluster of miners and loggers.

“You taking hire?” one was asking.

“Not yet,” Danny said. “Lord, I just got up here.”

“Fool,” someone said to the asker, and shoved his way in to introduce himself as Frank Remere, and head of a small mine.

Which could be real small.

“Excuse me,” Carlo said, and Danny pulled the chair back for him one-handed, so he could get past the guy trying to sit down. “Let the man have his supper, all right?”

“What about the Tarmin riders?” someone asked. “Why didn’t they stop it?”

“Because somebody ignored the rules,” Danny said. “Somebody was an exception. ’Scuse me. I came to have supper with my friends. Excuse me.”

“Move away,” someone said, “move away, let the man be.”

“So what did happen?” a logger asked.

“Shut up!” another man said, and there was nearly a fight among the crowd drawing off.

But Danny was quite calm about it, and began talking, between bites, about how he’d figured there’d be a to-do, and how he’d told Ridley, who was camp-boss, where he was going and Ridley said there wasn’t anything against his coming here.

“Different than Shamesey,” Danny said.

“Everybody wants to talk to you,” Randy said, clearly impressed.

“Yeah, well, I’d just as soon not.” Danny met his eyes past the kid and had a much more sober expression. “Just kind of got worried about you guys.”

“Doing all right,” Carlo said, and picked skin off a peeling hand.

“No trouble from the jerk.”

“Not as much as he’d like,” Carlo said. And caught sight of Rick Mackey over by the door. “He’s here, actually.”

“He’s a pig,” Randy said.

“Yeah, well, don’t say it too loud.”

“Pig,” Randy said.

Danny might have kicked the kid under the table. Danny moved and Randy jerked and looked sober.

“Be smart,” Danny said.

Amazing, Carlo thought. There was actually sobriety from the kid. And hero-worship.

He didn’t have that on his side.

But they made a kind of pie for dessert, and he thought if the Mackeys were buying, it might do real well for finishers. “Pie,” he said to Randy. And while Randy was gone on that errand, he filled Danny in on the essentials.

“No offer yet, but, funny thing, Mackey wanted to be real nice to us today.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Danny, watch your back. Just watch your own back.”

“I’m not worried,” Danny said. “But I do. I will. Do you like their offer?”

“They haven’t made one. But they’d sure like me to be in debt.”

“They’d sure like to have my help,” Danny said. “That’s why I came. I was going to say earlier—watch your back. Watch the kid.”

“I tell you—”

Said kid came back with the pie, three helpings, with his thumb in one.

“Thanks,” Carlo said, and, “Did you wash that thumb?”

Randy made a face, sucked the thumb clean and sat down. “Carlo thinks he’s smart.”

“Generally he is,” Danny said.

“So do you like it over there?”

“In the camp? It’s all right.” Danny didn’t sound enthusiastic. “Nice people. Not too much to do. But we’ve been talking about going hunting. If the game weren’t so spooky.”

“How—spooky?”

“Just not out there. There’s been some village hunters clamoring to go. But nothing’s there. Horses know. And there isn’t. So we sit. Wait for the weather to get better. Everything’s likely in burrows.”

“We could go hunting,” Randy said.

“I don’t think so,” Carlo said.

“Meanwhile,” Danny said, “we’re bored.”

“Could do with a little boredom,” Carlo said.

“Yeah,” Danny agreed.

“So what are they like over there?” Still, things weren’t quite right—Carlo felt so, anyway. And Danny took a swig of beer and sighed.

“Real tight, together, you know. Nice folk.”

That might, Carlo thought, be the complaint. He wasn’t sure. But Danny had himself a second beer, and they sat and talked about Danny’s family down in Shamesey, and where he’d met Guil Stuart, and about Danny’s first trip on the road. Just idle stuff. Danny was circumspect, and didn’t drink more than the two beers.

He had his dinner, declared he should get back because his horse didn’t like his long absence—and stuffed some of the biscuits in his pockets, to make amends, he said: Cloud wasn’t as fond of yeast bread as of biscuits.

After that—Danny left.

And the curious closed in, the miner who’d bought him a drink, among others. “So what was that about?” the fellow wanted to know, little that it was his business.

“Friend of mine,” Carlo said, seeing exactly what all that idle talk had been about. “Friend of ours, got us up the mountain—”

“Yeah, but what did he want?”

“Just passing the time of day,” Carlo said. “Talking. Promised each other a drink when we got through.”

“Amen,” said one. “That’s due.”

“After which,” Carlo said, “I’d better get home.”

“No, no,” the guy said. “Have a drink. You got it coming. The kid, too.”

“My name’s Randy,” Randy said.

“He drinks tea,” Carlo said. And beers arrived. “Tea,” Carlo insisted, and that was what Randy got.

Himself, he’d just the one more. And talked to the miners and loggers about Tarmin until that ran to the bottom. Then he got up, took Randy, and said that he had to get back to the forge.

“Give old Van Mackey hell,” one said. “The lazy clod.” Ordinarily talk like that was a joke. But he picked up that Danny was right and the Mackeys weren’t favored in the least. Rick had been there during the time Danny was; Rick had left after a quick supper, and hadn’t waited around to make a case of anything with Danny. Off to tell the household, Carlo would bet, that he’d had someone else on the tab, and to tell them who he’d had on the tab.

He didn’t personally give a damn, not for gossip in the Mackey household and not for gossip at his back in the tavern, of which there was considerable. He didn’t have to give a damn, he said to himself.

And he made it most of the way to the door before a drunken miner grabbed his arm, introduced himself as Earnest something-or-another Riggs and said he’d be glad to look out for—his words— “two nice kids like you” and keep away the “bad lot, real bad lot,” that would otherwise move in.

“That’s real kind,” Carlo said, and maneuvered himself and Randy out the door minus the offered escort.

“Damn!” Randy said. “They’re crazy!”

“Wait till spring,” Carlo muttered as they went down the porch steps from the tavern. The Riggs encounter had persuaded him they weren’t as safe as he’d hoped. That there’d be numerous offers of that ilk, and it wasn’t going to be easy to figure out other interests. He halfway expected another offer to follow him, after the rest saw Riggs’ move.

But no one accosted them. Snow was coming down thick, haloed in the lanterns they’d hung on poles to keep patrons from breaking their necks. It looked peaceful. He wanted to think of it that way.

“So what are they going to do?” Randy asked as they walked home. “Those guys—they’ll strip the place for nails. That’s our stuff down there! I mean, I didn’t think we’d go back for it and it’s pretty godawful, but I don’t want those guys carrying off my stuff and getting into mama’s stuff—”

“You know how the phone lines go down every winter?”

“Yeah.”

“No way any other village up here can find out about what happened down there until somebody hikes there from here or Tarmin doesn’t come on-line in the spring. Evergreen, all by themselves, is going to swarm down there at first thaw, bet on it. That’s what Danny’s here for. He’s making a point—showing he’s our friend. Because otherwise we’re in real sincere danger ourselves. You hear me?”

“Why? Of what?”

“Because there’s folks here poor as poor, there’s miners don’t own anything but a no-pay claim and owe the suppliers their shirts and the nails in their boots. It’s the chance of their lifetimes. These are rough people, kid. And that guy who stopped us on the way out—”

“Mister Earnest Riggs?”

“Listen, you. Take it seriously. We’re in their way. We’re owners, you figure it? And more than the Mackeys might want us for partners.”

“Why?”

“Kid, figure it. We’re the only way that the Mackeys or somebody else could have a real, legitimate claim to the forge and the house and everything down there. If we sold it to them or if we partnered with them somehow—”

“Not with the Mackeys!”

“I’m not going to sell and I’m not partners with them. Just let me handle it. Danny said don’t sign anything. And that’s real good advice, because, to tell you the truth, right now I’m not sure where we’re better off. There’s no guarantee there’ll even be an Evergreen if half the village moves down the mountain and there’s nothing here but miners.”

“You think they would?”

“Maybe.” They’d almost reached the forge-shed. He stopped Randy where he and Danny had talked, by the scrap-heap and the big tree. “Listen,” he said. “If they’re up to anything they’ll be eavesdropping on us, especially Rick. So if for some reason you have to talk to me about something Rick shouldn’t hear, you say, ‘I think I’ll go outside.’ Just exactly those words. Hear?”

“ ‘I think I’ll go outside.’ That’s stupid.”

“It’s smarter than ‘I want to talk secrets’!”

“Maybe we could go over to the rider camp. Maybe they’d let us live there till spring. I mean, we’re not afraid of the horses, are we?”

“Forget it.”

“If I was a rider we’d have money. And you could be.”

“I’m a blacksmith. That’s what I want to be. That’s what I want to do. And forget this stupid notion. We’ve got rights to a hell of a lot of property down in Tarmin.”

“We could sell it and go to Shamesey.”

“What’d we sell it for? Smiths here have got everything tied up in their property. What’s this business about Shamesey all of a sudden? What’s wrong with here on the mountain?”

“Rick’s a pig.”

“Yeah, well, and if we don’t go to Tarmin and take our stuff back pig Rick is going to get our house and live there till he dies of stupidity. I don’t want them to be rummaging through our stuff, either. I don’t want them living in our house. You want that?”

“No.”

“Then don’t talk stupid. You only go to the rider camp if something happens to me—”

“Nothing’ll happen to you.”

“Oh, ‘nothing will happen.’ ‘Nothing will happen.’ God! Did we look for anything to happen down in Tarmin?”

“I’m not stupid! Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.”

“Then don’t talk like it! You’re a minor! You’re fourteen! If something happened to me, the Mackeys could get custody of you and the property down there, you understand? I don’t want that!”

Randy ducked his head. “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” he muttered, not because he was stupid, Carlo thought, but because Randy had lost enough, that was what he was trying to say; he didn’t want to go down to Tarmin where everybody was dead; and Carlo hugged him hard.

“Not if I can help it, no. I’ll take care of you.”

Randy cried. Randy wasn’t in the habit. And he couldn’t go into the shop like that: Rick would make capital on it, for sure, if Rick happened to be lurking about inside.

So they stood out in the snow with no one around them until Randy got himself in order.

It was a chancy evening. Maybe it was the spookiness of a strange place. Maybe it was just suddenly realizing the person he was trying to do everything for was justifiably upset with the choices he was being handed. He pushed the latch up and went with Randy into the warmth and the firelight, our of the wind and the cold—but not clear of the leaden upset in his stomach and the feeling that shivered along his nerves.

He needed Danny, not just for his professional services, but—because he needed someone who wasn’t his kid brother. Foolish that it was, he’d been vastly surprised Danny had really come across to warn him in the first place.

And that Danny had crossed all the lines to come tonight.

He still felt warmed by that gesture, in ways no fire could touch. He looked forward to getting together with Danny maybe next Saturday—and he’d gladly have gone over to the rider camp himself this evening—if he didn’t have Randy and his silly notions in tow.

But Randy—Randy just didn’t have anybody else. Fourteen was a hell of an age. Everybody was looking at you (as if they had the time), you were obsessed with your own stupidity and you were just so damn knowledgeable about what other people were thinking— fact was, nobody was interested in your opinions and it was a hell of a time to lose every friend you owned. Randy was going through his own grief, and it hurt, too.

Randy sat down and sulked on the stone wall where the heat was, and he could just walk over and hit the kid. That was what he felt like. God, he hated that expression.

“I could be a rider,” Randy muttered.

It was the one thing that just sent whiteout over his reasoning. “No,” he said for the hundredth time. “No. You can’t.”

“You won’t even talk about it!”

“I just told you not to talk in here!”

“It’s not about that. It’s about what I want to do!”

“Well, you’re not going to.”

“Who made you my papa?”

He crossed the intervening space in two strides and grabbed the kid by the shirt.

And didn’t—didn’t hit the kid. Their father had done far too much of that. For a lifetime.

Randy stared at him, surly, full of his own notions, full of confidence he could go out there and tame a horse that might be a killer like the last one.

“Damn fool is all,” he said, and walked off and got a rag and wiped soot off the water barrel. There was always soot in this place. The chimney didn’t draw as well as theirs down in Tarmin. They breathed it. It got on their clothes, on everything they touched.

“You’re always so damn right!” Randy said. “You aren’t, you know? Somebody else knows something besides you.”

He didn’t say a thing, even an advisement to shut up. He didn’t go back and hit the kid. That was what Randy was following him, begging for—so he’d be in the right.

That was the kind of argument Randy had grown up understanding.

Now he was the villain. He didn’t know what to do about that.

He truly didn’t know what to do.

Danny sat by the fire and braided leather coil for Ridley’s leather-work—which was really very good. He’d mastered round-braiding now, himself, though he still counted and got confused if Jennie interrupted him.

Jennie thought she’d learn, and after a while of his instruction, turned out to have more fingers than she thought.

Jennie was growing discouraged, and short-tempered, about the time Callie decided to send the kid to bed.

“I want to stay up,” the refrain began. Which didn’t work.

“To bed,” Callie said. “Or you don’t go outside tomorrow.”

Jennie got up, put away her leatherwork and solemnly kissed Ridley, and Callie, and then, new idea, came over and put a big kiss on Danny’s cheek.

“Good night,” he said calmly, aware that Callie was vastly upset at that inclusion. “Pleasant dreams.”

“Night,” Jennie said, and flitted off with Callie hot on her track.

Ridley didn’t say a thing. And Callie might have, to Jennie, but when the door shut and Callie came back, things were quiet—give or take horses out at the wall, bickering with something in the dark. Wasn’t unusual, Ridley had said on an earlier night. It kept the horses from being bored.

“Might do some hunting tomorrow,” Ridley commented. “Feels more normal out there tonight.”

“Normal’s come and gone all season,” Callie said. “Everything on the mountain still feels upset.” Callie was pouring vodka, two glasses, and a third one ready.

“None for me, thanks,” Danny said. “Had my limit tonight over at the tavern.”

Callie frowned a little, and didn’t pour the third. She and Ridley had theirs.

So Callie couldn’t doubt, now, that he knew very well why he’d gone out so thoroughly the moment he went to bed every night. But he tried to act oblivious to any hard feelings over it. He didn’t look in Callie’s direction.

“So how are the boys doing?” Ridley asked cheerfully—Ridley was very much the peace-maker in the house, and if he’d headed at the matter of the yellowflower in the drink every night he was sure Ridley would have a perfectly cheerful way of putting it that they’d feared he might slip around the barracks at night and threaten sleeping children.

“Mackey’s found out there’s money to be had,” Danny said, and added with not quite double meaning regarding his own situation in their company, with drugs dropped nightly—but politely—in his drink: “and Mackey’s being real nice to them.”

“Man’s not to trust,” Ridley said, as if there wasn’t a double meaning in the village, and as if they trusted him implicitly. “Between you and us.”

They talked a while, mostly about hunting. And Callie was quiet.

Callie certainly wasn’t happy he hadn’t drunk the vodka, Callie wasn’t happy about him being included in Jennie’s good night. He didn’t know what to do about it, except to make sure he didn’t have wicked dreams strayed horses could carry and that whatever Callie’s fears he didn’t walk in his sleep and shoot up the barracks tonight.

He wished Callie trusted him. It was very hard to keep Ridley’s kind of cheerfulness when he knew all the while Callie was probably planning to know right where her gun was from her side of the bed tonight.

And maybe a little of his thinking leaked out, the horses being stirred up. He wasn’t sure. But Callie frowned the darker and Ridley talked on about last year and the hunting.

It was the craziest kind of conversation he’d ever tried to navigate.

Go at Callie’s distrust head-on? Say, —Callie, I swear to you, I won’t murder people in their beds?

Not if he didn’t want a confrontation. And he didn’t.

That got around to serious wondering—like—what had he missed while he was out cold, and had that horse been hanging around, and was there a solid reason for Callie to hate him and Ridley to be nice to him?

“Going to bed,” he said. “Ridley, if you want to go hunting, I’d sure like to exercise Cloud, before he takes to digging under the wall.”

“Hope it stays quiet out there,” Ridley said. “Yeah, hunting would be a relief.”

“Yeah.” On the thought that there was still more being said while things were being said than any sane person could track, Danny got up and quietly left for his own barracks room, shut the door and started undressing in the dark by the light that came down the hall and under the door.

He’d liked dealing with Carlo. He’d liked being where he was appreciated. Didn’t any human being?

He was getting out of his shirt when he heard

A cold sweat came over him. He reached after his gun—he’d disposed his pistol on the bench beside the head of the bed when he came back from the yard, as he usually did, and he caught it up the instant he’d gotten his shirt back on. His rifle was over in the corner next the shelves—and he knew at the same time his brain was handling those locations that Cloud was that it was a sending and that it wasn’t one of their horses.

“Mama? Papa?”

Scared kid, in another room. He didn’t blame her. He heard a door opened and bare feet running down the passage—Jennie was ahead of him as, mostly into his shirt and carrying his gunbelt in one hand and his rifle in the crook of the same arm, he opened the door onto the hall and followed the kid to the main room.

“It’s not Cloud,” he said as he found Ridley and Callie putting on coats.

“That damn horse is back!” Callie picked up the shotgun. “It didn’t go downhill! I told you it never went downhill!”

“Let me see if I can deal with it,” Danny said. “Maybe I can get its attention.”

“Don’t you dare open that gate!” Callie said.

He didn’t say, I’m not a total fool. Or, What do you think? I won’t risk my horse.

He just went for his sweaters and his coat, against the cold out there.

“Funny damn thing,” he heard Callie say to Ridley, “that it shows up the night he’s wide awake.”

He was stunned. He tried to cover it, but he knew he’d stopped moving for a heartbeat.

Then he flung open the main door and went out onto the porch, beset with a image.

His waking wasn’t the question on his mind: Brionne’s was.

Carlo sat in the glow of a banked fire, blanket hugged about him. His teeth were chattering and he couldn’t find the presence of mind to get back under the covers.

It might have been a particularly vivid nightmare—except it was still going on.

As if it was its name, for God’s sake. As if that was what it called itself. The way Cloud was storms, or summer puffs of white.

As if in the reaches of a shocked and grieved mind, it had been born anew there, in that place, at that moment.

The world wasn’t flat anymore. He could see and hear—the way he had on the Climb, and he sat there and shook—

Then it was gone. Just gone.

And the world flattened out again—crashed into flatness and dullness that left his heart beating hard. He sat there thinking of the journey up the mountain, thinking how that sense had been their guide in such desperate, blind moments—recalling how Cloud had beaconed them up that road and they’d known there was mortal danger every time that sense went out.

Danger of losing their way.

Danger of freezing to death.

He found himself with a lump in his throat, vision blurred in tears that just—spilled over and ran down his face. He wiped at them with a hand shaking so he almost couldn’t find his face.

Randy hadn’t wakened at that sending. Thank God. But he wasn’t sure—wasn’t at all sure about Brionne.

He’d thought he’d been able to hear Danny and Cloud, and maybe others they were near. It was that loud. It went that far. Danny said there was a limit and you couldn’t hear that far, but if it reached him it might reach Brionne.

God! he didn’t want that.

Spook-horse was gone, Danny was all but sure—headed away from the village before he and Ridley ever got out to the walls. The horses were all out in the yard, upset, lifting their heads with nostrils flared, sending into the night.

Meanwhile nobody at the village gate had fired a shot. Danny had his rifle. Ridley had his. But they’d had no target. Danny knew he had to shoot it if he couldn’t get it to come to hand and become part of the herd—and he had a sense, with Rain as much disturbance as he already was, that it wasn’t going to be practical to do that.

Cloud and Slip and Rain came near them, and pregnant Shimmer kept sending until the nerves shivered with it.

“Too late,” Ridley said in distress.

“Listen,” Danny said. “Callie’s right: I don’t want to open this gate—Cloud would take after him for sure. I’m going to go over to the village, the little door—there is a little gate, isn’t there?”

“Yes. But you’d be a fool to go out there on foot.”

“Been one before this. My horse will back me up from inside the camp, with a wall between us so he can’t get out—and he’ll keep my head clear. Damn if I’ll shoot that horse without a try to bring him in—if it’s the horse I think it is, he knows me. I might have a chance to get him to come to me—”

Ridley caught his arm. “No.” And when he made an effort to break that hold: “Don’t take what Callie says as against you. She’s worried about Jennie, understand?”

Ridley was worried about Jennie. Ridley, like Callie, would rather not have had Brionne Goss over in the village, which Danny knew was his fault—and he didn’t want to discuss it, now of all times.

“Just let me go. I know what I’m doing! I know that horse, I knew his rider. He may just be coming to Cloud, to a horse he knows— or to me. I don’t want that horse shot if there’s a chance otherwise—”

“Neither do I!” Ridley yelled at him, but he let go his hold, and Danny took the chance and ran, with the notion of in his wake.

A wall of darkness darted in front of him, came up on hind legs and plunged aside with Cloud was beyond upset, and more so when he dodged and ran from Cloud’s intervention. Cloud chased him clear to the rider gate, close enough to breathe on him as he ducked through where Cloud couldn’t go, and Cloud let out an indignant squeal and hit the post.

He didn’t know if Cloud understood that he wanted Cloud to go toward the rider camp’s outside gate—he heard a nighthorse squall of outright rage and a sending that burned out into the dark full of and against any horse that harmed his rider.

Danny ran for the village main street, rifle in hand—pulled a sharp right by a big pile of shoveled snow and ran down a deserted snow-veiled street toward the village main gates.

“Here!” the gate-guard exclaimed, running down the wooden steps from the watch-tower. And maybe the guard had expected Ridley. He seemed momentarily confounded.

“Need outside!” Danny gasped. “Loose horse—outside! Little gate! Watch my back—just—don’t shoot—don’t fire a gun!”

The guard didn’t look wholly convinced—but he maintained a defensive position against any unexpected inrush of vermin as, fully sure vermin weren’t there, Danny flung up the weighted bar of the little gate, inward opening, wide enough only for a single human being, no more. It was for crews to go out to clear the outward-opening main gates. A horse might make it. Barely.

But there was no horse.

No vermin, either, just a gate-sheered wall of waist-deep snow blocking his path. He had to hold his rifle up and fight his way through it to get out, half climbing, half kneeling, until in calf-deep snow he could go along the outside wall toward the rider camp’s outer gate.

The snow beyond, the forest, the road that had brought him—all of that was at his left and in front of him, deep in night and falling snow. He could see the deep snow disturbed on an approach and retreat that the horse had used. It went off into the trees and it wasn’t a place to go afoot. He had to trust the guard for his back and proceed with no time to attend to self-defense, aware of Cloud’s loud sending now, aware of Cloud’s outrage at the camp wall separating two who weren’t made to be separated.

But Cloud’s sending was what he relied on for safety as he took a stance facing the woods and called out in his mind, letting Cloud carry it—

“Spook!” he yelled aloud, hoping it was still in range. He never had known its real name. Harper had never said.

It was a lonely voice, going out over all of a mountainside on the very edge of human habitation, and searching into a deep evergreen woods.

“Spook!” he called—telling himself if a sane horse did answer him Cloud would know where it was with a nighthorse sense that wasn’t as easily confused as a human mind.

And he wanted it to come to him. He had the rifle against everything else that might answer a hail into the snowy dark, but he wanted that lost, lonely horse to know he was a rider from the low plains, that it was Danny Fisher, Cloud’s rider—calling him, another rider, who wasn’t the enemy. He wouldn’t harm Spook. Spook-horse might remember they’d traveled together, might come to him quietly, peaceably, for food, for human help. He’d escort it to the next village or wherever someone might want it as much, as desperately, as this horse wanted human help.

He’d see it fed, warmed, treated if it was hurt—he’d make a place for it outside the camp, and bring hay and biscuits—

was Cloud’s indignant sending.

That aspect of his plan wouldn’t help attract a stray male, and if he went further away from the wall to entice it to trust him, Cloud would go absolutely frantic to reach him—with good cause. Wade around out here with no protection but a rifle and put a foot down into some burrow, and a nest of willy-wisps would eat his foot off to the knee before Ridley’s help could reach him.

Bang! Cloud hit the gate, wanting out.

“Get back in here!” That was a human voice. Ridley’s. Urgent and angry. “You’ve done enough! It’s not going to listen to you! Get in here!”

“Fisher!” Another one, higher-pitched, which could only be Callie. “Dammit! You don’t have to prove anything! Get back inside!”

“It’s no problem,” he began to say—and stepped into a hole.

Damn near jumped out of it, scrambled on hands and knees—the gate-guard was witness, and Callie and Ridley and Jennie were, because of Cloud, who hit the wall again in outright panic.

“I’m all right,” he yelled back. “I’m all right—it’s only a hole! Don’t open the gate! I’m all right.”

He turned toward the track he’d floundered and waded across, finding it the course of least resistance back to the village gate, and not at all wanting Ridley to open the camp gate, for fear Cloud would be out it in an instant.

Then anything could happen if that horse was here, lurking, and cannily quiet.

He reached the gates, out of breath and having worked up a sweat despite the cold, and in the little time it took the guard inside to get down the steps from his rifle-slot and to open the gate—for that moment he could feel how all the snowbound wilderness and darkness at his back waited for an outcome.

The latch didn’t open fast enough. He really, badly wanted in.

Now.

There were hunters in the Wild that could image not being there. Or make a foolish human think that safety was right toward its jaws.

The gate opened.

“Figure it’s long gone,” the gate-guard said.

“Figure so, too,” he said, trying to be calm—the guard likely couldn’t figure all that was in the sendings. But he was embarrassed to be shaking as he was. “Thanks,” he managed to say and, after his moment of panic, set out down the street, slowly, feeling the long run he’d made getting over here in sore feet, aching joints.

He passed the smith’s place, the tavern, the miners’ barracks. Everything there was dark and still. It was possible no one had noticed—but down the street he saw some few lights.

The doctor’s house wasn’t one.

Horses were disturbed. Burn sent a feeling of and Flicker got on her feet with a sudden thump of hooves on boards that would have wakened the sleeping dead.

The just plain sleeping were an easier scare, and Guil reached instinctively for the gun he always kept to his right.

Right now there was Tara, who was suddenly up on one elbow, a feat of flexibility Guil didn’t quite manage. He lay still to do his listening. So did Burn, for some few moments, while Flicker was up on her feet, a living shadow against the wall.

“Damn!”

For himself, Guil couldn’t swear to what was ordinary or not in a given area. The lay of the land and the mix of creatures that lived there made a lot of differences from one mountain to the next and down to various zones of the plains. He’d been in a lot of them, at one time and another.

He’d never heard this particular flux of panic—except when a piece of a mountain snowbank dissolved and creatures died in a boil of snow and air, giving off their I’m-not-here and I’m-over-there that was their ordinary defense of their burrows.

There was death up there.

“You have a slide zone up there?”

“No,” Tara said. “Feels like it, doesn’t it?”

She got down in the blankets, cold from the air, and he put his arms around her. She shivered, then.

“Second thoughts,” she said.

She might well have them. But he thought about and that being all the image that would come to his mind for what they’d felt.

“You’re crazy,” Tara said. But she was thinking something far worse. She was thinking about her in total white, with the whole world in flux.

That was the closest to what they’d felt. And from Flicker came an answering that was Flicker’s camouflage in direst straits. She’d spooked her horse—he hoped that was all it was.

“I wish you’d stay here,” she said. “Something’s real wrong up there.”

He hadn’t looked for that, for her to be thinking in the midst of this to be going alone.

So did he, except for knowing he’d be a total fool. Tara didn’t have a hole in her side. Tara didn’t have any debt to the kids.

Or maybe she did. She thought of And right along with it was

She was thinking about She was thinking about He didn’t know what that was. He thought it might be something to do with the church, but had gone with it.

“You don’t know, do you,” Tara asked him, “what I’m remembering.”

“No.”

“Don’t recognize it?”

He didn’t. But for some reason that was an impetus to hold him close and kiss him on the cheek. It wasn’t sex she meant. Just— friendliness. Just—something kind. He wasn’t sure. He held her, she held him, Burn got up in a fair racket, and Flicker lay down again with a noisy exhalation.

Burn lay down.

The place was quiet, then.

“Wind’s fallen,” he said finally. “Snow might stop soon.”

“Good traction,” she said. “Anything but ice.”

At which point she burrowed close, and he shut his eyes, never having figured what she was talking about, but he knew she was bent on going up there, and that somewhere in her battered sense of loyalties and obligations, she’d remembered her village and a couple of boys she’d known for years before the disaster.

She’d remembered a closeness with the village he’d never felt for anything made of boards and nails and involving roofs over his head.

But then—the things she remembered weren’t just buildings, either.