Cloud's Rider

Chapter 14

There were evergreen boughs on the altar, there were lamps burning with sweet-smelling oil, and after the social announcements from the various families, the preacher preached a sermon on the righteousness of God and His Mercy, and turned it into a kind of memorial for Tarmin.

Carlo liked the smells and the sights, and the church murals weren’t so fine as those in Tarmin, but they were amazing to his eyes—portraying creatures of the New World, which wouldn’t have pleased preacher Wales down in Tarmin, not by a long way.

And the preacher really got to him when he started talking about the kids down in Tarmin. He had a lump in his throat and noted people in the seats down the row were using handkerchiefs. The preacher proceeded to the old business of how nobody ever knew the hour or the day they’d die, which was predictably grim, and then segued into an exhortation to enjoy the world—which was so sharp a left turn from the expected path of doom and gloom that Carlo tried to reconstruct in his mind exactly how the preacher had gotten where he had from the point where preacher Wales had always concluded the world was the source of evil.

Enjoy life? He could get along with this preacher.

Randy fidgeted. He always had fidgeted in church. Carlo nudged his ankle and Randy slouched. Randy always would do that, too. Neither of them had ever favored church—but it was a comfortable and comforting thing this morning, after so much was out of joint, to be sitting in the smells of winter Sundays and hearing a sermon just like every week. Reverend Quarles went on, in his quiet manner, talking about right actions and not cheating your neighbor— and redeeming the damned world with good living and right dealing. That was a new twist, and it ought to have made the Mackeys squirm, but probably not, Carlo thought. Most everybody could feel comfortable with Reverend Quarles. Even he could. He thought if things worked out, he could very easily get along with this church.

The sermon didn’t conclude in hellfire. It meandered off into how there was a horse out there, but they had it on good information it wasn’t mad, or even particularly dangerous. Reverend Quarles praised the riders for going out to deal with it, praised the Lord that the world worked and the seasons happened on schedule, and segued somehow to the choir’s next social. There was, the preacher announced, a sign-up sheet for various projects in the foyer, and there followed more talk about a social and dinner the deacons were putting together in honor of some elder member’s seventieth birthday.

Then the preacher got up again. “Carlo and Randy Goss,” he said. “Would you come up to the front, please? Praise the Lord for that loose bell that night. Praise the Lord He guided you through the dark of the storm, lost sheep brought to His blessed fold.”

Carlo thought to himself that he’d just as soon the Lord had lightened the dark of the storm instead of guiding them through it, or at least dropped the wind a little or let them see that rider-shelter, but there were a lot of reasons, too, the Lord shouldn’t be too happy with him and didn’t owe him many favors. He stood up, taking Randy with him, and had a lot rather not stand up in front of the congregation, but he didn’t see any way out of it.

Randy was no happier than he was. But they stood in front of the altar while (the most embarrassing moment of his life) the preacher laid hands on them, prayed over them, and then invited the whole village to come by and welcome them to the congregation and introduce themselves.

“I don’t want to do this,” Randy said in anguish.

Their clothes weren’t church clothes. They didn’t own any church clothes. They only had one change, and something was always sooty and something was always drying in the heat of the forge. What they had on was what was clean.

And he wasn’t used to going to church dressed in work clothes. He was embarrassed. He thought Randy was going to die of embarrassment or bolt for the door—at that age when the whole world was looking at him constantly, anyway. But two old women were first in line, who called them heroic boys, and Randy shook hands and smiled—

Kid ought to run for office, Carlo thought, dealing with the same elderly women. Once Randy got into the swing of handshaking and being congratulated, he seemed to have discovered he liked being a hero, and positively blossomed under that much attention—so did the Mackeys, who were over in the aisle being congratulated right along with them, Carlo caught that fact out of the corner of his eye. Van Mackey and Mary Hardesty had maneuvered up to the front seats right where the outflow of congregation was going to pass them, and there they were, shaking hands, grinning and just enjoying the moment.

Sons of bitches, Carlo thought. For all the preacher’s talk about redeeming the world, he didn’t see Danny Fisher invited into the congregation. He didn’t see Danny Fisher being offered several new outfits by the owner of the general store, as had just happened, and he didn’t see Danny Fisher being told by the preacher that he was God’s chosen model of His mercy.

But then, Danny didn’t expect to be, either, by what he guessed.

He hoped Danny was still speaking to him.

They had to stay through absolutely everybody coming by and shaking their hands, including some of the girls—the boys on their own weren’t so inclined. The younger girls—there were three—giggled. Two older ones showed better sense.

After that, they could escape, except a last handshaking with preacher Quarles and an actually friendly embrace, out to the foyer to get their hats and coats.

Then it was out to the street where the Mackeys were lying in wait. Mary Hardesty immediately took Carlo’s arm and beamed and prattled on and on how they were their own personal miracles.

Amazing, Carlo thought, wishing he knew how to break that hold with some kind of grace. Truly amazing, the depth of godly enthusiasm the Mackeys found when the neighbors were watching.

Totally oblivious, apparently, to the shading of lips with gloved hands, as certain village folk spotted the show and talked about it, Carlo could just imagine—the Mackeys not being universally believed as saints.

But neighbors were neighbors. Two hundred permanent neighbors in a village, and you couldn’t afford open feuds with anybody. Even if you’d like to shoot them. You shook hands and you smiled.

God, they could put off going to see Brionne until tomorrow. Today was full enough, public enough. People were paying attention to what they did, the whole village was paying attention to what they did, and he kept walking. They passed the doctor’s house and Randy kept walking beside him, not, thank God, reminding him in front of the Mackeys.

They walked back to the end of town in the company they had to keep, sanctified, prayed over, written down in the church rolls, and gossiped about all the way, till the most of the traffic left in the general outflow from the church was miners and loggers on their way to The Evergreen for a pint of philosophy.

Behind them, the church bell rang. Sometimes down in Tarmin after a snow-fall, when there were few sounds on the mountain but nature and when the wind was just exactly right, you could hear bells in the winter air. The bells of heaven, he’d thought when he was a little boy.

He’d never known that sound had come from here.

The year past was a bad dream, but this morning with the church bells ringing out through the village and echoing off the mountain, Darcy had put on one of her prettiest winter outfits—Mark had brought her the blue wool sweater from the store before she’d ever seen the shipment up from Tarmin that summer, that happy summer before Faye’s accident, and she’d hired Angie Wheeler to sew up a pair of gray wool slacks out of a book of patterns.

She hadn’t had occasion to wear them until now. She scarcely went out except for groceries.

Still, it was the sort of day to think about the condition of things. She wiped the year’s accumulation of dust off the bureau and swept the carpet. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been aware of the dust piling up and the passage of a spring and a summer and a fall—because she wasn’t crazy. She knew how much time had passed that the sweater had lain in a drawer. She knew Mark was dead. She knew Faye hadn’t waked from her drowned, chilled sleep. She’d cleaned the office herself of Mark’s blood and she hadn’t greatly blamed him for deserting her. Faye had just cost him too much, and she with the relationship they’d had, all revolving around Faye, couldn’t make that loss up.

The dust just hadn’t mattered after that.

But today she found herself thinking that the dust had gotten too thick on the downstairs table and remembering that it had had a nice sheen and a pretty grain.

And once she’d done that, she saw the curtains, how dingy the white had become.

She started around the office polishing the tables and Mark’s bookshelves.

But straightened bookshelves had made her notice the rugs there needed sweeping.

Then she took out Faye’s pretty things from the chest and bathed the girl and arranged her golden curls—they were so like Faye’s— and changed the sheets and dressed her in Faye’s fine lace-collared gown.

Clean sheets meant putting on a washing, of course, which meant heating up the kitchen, and firing up the boiler for the washing machine, which she only did on Sunday afternoons, but there hadn’t been the volume of washing in the house in, oh, a long time.

And those curtains were due a laundering.

That took a good deal of time, and when the sun had gotten to the window in Faye’s room she made hot soup and arranged a napkin to protect Faye’s pretty gown, and ever so carefully fed the girl. The sun came through, bright and blinding, and made the white sheets into snowbanks and the girl’s hair into golden glass. Darcy fed her young patient, and the girl ate as she would eat if she was coaxed.

But at the second sip the girl blinked, and blinked again and passed a glance around the room.

“Where is this?” she asked then.

“Evergreen, honey. You’re all right.”

“How did I get here?” she asked. She was porcelain and gold, wind-blushed and delicate despite the signs of exposure. Darcy scarcely dared breathe, feared to say something that might drive her back into that silent world and shatter this tenuous contact.

“Honey, your brothers brought you. They carried you up the mountain.”

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Darcy. This is my house. I’m the village doctor.”

“Are you?” The eyes drifted shut again. And opened, and wandered across the details of the room. “Can I stay here?”

“Honey, you can stay here as long as you want to. Would you like some cereal?”

A thin, pale hand explored the crocheted white roses. “It’s a pretty room.”

“It was my daughter’s room. Now it’s yours.”

“Did your daughter grow up?”

“No. She died. So you see—” Darcy set the bowl and the spoon down on the table. And the girl didn’t slip away. She touched the white coverlets and explored a ribbon in an eyelet cutaway. Darcy couldn’t resist the curls. And Darcy found she could say the hard truth about Faye without a lump in her throat now. She wound a curl around her finger and made it perfect. “There’s no one to use the room now. I’d like you to stay, sweet. I would.”

“I want my mama,” the girl said. “I want my mama.” But white-gowned arms reached for her and hugged her, the way no one had since Faye died. Not even Mark. And the girl was so thin, so weak. “I want to go home,”‘ the girl said.

Not Faye. Brionne Goss. From Tarmin. Which didn’t exist anymore.

“Honey, I don’t think you can go home. This is Evergreen. I’m afraid nobody’s left in Tarmin. That’s what they say. So you can stay here as long as you like.”

“Where’s my mama?”

“I think she must be dead, honey, like my daughter. Like my husband. —Like your papa.”

“Not my papa!” It was an angry voice. Terribly angry, weak as it was. “Not like my papa!”

“I think everybody’s gone, honey, except your brothers. They brought you here.”

Darcy watched tears start. She sat down on the edge of the bed and brushed the wind blushed cheek with a gentle finger and let the tears run for a moment before she gathered the frail body against her and let the child cry her eyes dry.

Then she mopped the child’s wet lashes and gave her a handkerchief from Faye’s bureau and let her blow her nose.

“I could make you a bowl of cereal,” she said, “if you don’t want soup.”

The blond head turned away.

“A sandwich.”

“No.” A frail fist wiped at a tear.

“Do you want me to bring your brothers?”

“No!”

“There might be cookies. I might have some.”

The girl turned her head toward her. Sniffed.

“Would you like some cookies, sweet?”

A nod.

“All right. I think I could do that, sweet. I certainly could. It’ll take me a bit. But you’ll have cookies.”

She hadn’t the makings of cookies. It meant a trip outside and asking the shopkeepers on a Sunday afternoon, at which time some were open and some weren’t. But she was willing. She put on her coat and her scarf and went out to the bakers’ house and roused Alice Raigur out and bought cookies, as the fastest course to produce them. She went and called on the grocer’s house and bought dried beef, ferociously expensive, and pasta and sugar-sweets, which the grocer just happened to have. She went back with her arms full of groceries and to her own surprise found herself nodding and being pleasant to one of her less-liked neighbors in the passage coming back.

The child was asleep when she got back. When Brionne waked to her urging she seemed listless as before and didn’t remember her name, but all the same Darcy kept her word and served Brionne the cookies with hot tea—Brionne ate half of a cookie.

Danny couldn’t say exactly there was peace in the barracks, or that the business with the horse was settled. It hadn’t come around last night. Maybe it had been scared off by the shot Ridley had fired. < Gunfire> was part of its personal nightmare; and maybe with guns going off it just hadn’t wanted to stay.

But Ridley hadn’t proposed going out on a Sunday, maybe village custom: Danny didn’t ask. He spent a lot of time out in the den, taking the occasion to do some clean-up around the place, raking and turning the bedding, doing a lot of things that weren’t needful, exactly, but they’d have to be done later, if he didn’t do them sooner, and he really wanted to make Ridley and Callie happier with him than he’d merited.

He didn’t know what Ridley might have said to Callie. His spending time out at the den at least gave Ridley and Callie a chance to talk matters over without him hearing it in any sense, and he figured if he’d moderately won Ridley’s better opinion, he couldn’t have a better lawyer with Callie.

He hadn’t heard any explosions.

Cloud followed him about, getting him to and finally to of which Cloud never, ever tired.

Jennie came outside to tend to Rain, and brushed Rain—well, as high as Jennie could reach.

“Was that girl bad?” Jennie wanted to know, and the ambient carried thoughts of and

“That girl didn’t mind the way she was supposed to,” Danny said. Having a kid brother, he knew the tracks an eight-year-old mind wandered, and knew not to make it too complicated—or too lacking in detail. “A rider who knew told her to stay inside the gate and she went out anyway. And that’s what happened.”

“I wouldn’t go out the gate,” Jennie said.

“You’re smart.” Compliments never hurt. In his experience. Once you were praised as good for one thing, you didn’t so readily do the opposite. “That horse out there is dangerous. If a gate got open Rain might go out to fight him.”

“Why?”

“Because boy horses do that. And if Rain got in a fight, that’s a big mean horse, and he might hurt Rain real bad. So we have to be real careful that one of the boy horses doesn’t get out the gate.”

“What about Shimmer?”

“Shimmer, too. The horse out there might try to come inside where Shimmer’s den is, and she’d fight him, and she might lose the baby.”

“I’d get the hoe. I’d hit him.”

“If that horse ever gets in here, you get into the barracks and you bolt the door and you let the horses handle it. Our three boy horses together can put a strange horse out of the yard. And they would. But Shimmer could still get hurt. That’s why your papa and I want that horse to leave.”

“Would you shoot him?”

Delicate question. “Wouldn’t you shoot him,” he asked, “if he was going to kill Rain?”

“Yeah.” A reluctant and unhappy yeah, that was, but Jennie did agree to the premise.

“Your papa would never shoot anything if he didn’t have to. He’s real smart. So if he ever did, you’d know he did the right thing.”

“Yeah.” Not enthusiastically.

He applied himself to a vigorous brushing of Cloud’s far side in hopes Jennie and her questions would go inside the barracks again.

But in the same moment Slip went outside, and from there Jennie caught an impression of and

“Where’s your papa going?” Danny wondered.

“To the hunters,” Jennie said.

“To go out?”

“To the village,” Jennie said. “To talk to the hunters.”

Ridley hadn’t asked him to go along. Which said something, he supposed. He hoped that it didn’t say Ridley was filling the hunters in on his and Carlo’s problems.

He applied his frustration to the tangles that crept into Cloud’s mane. He kept quiet in the ambient and was aware of Ridley leaving it, the other side of the wall.

Jennie flitted off. And he eventually ran out of tangles.

He thought—maybe he should go to the barracks and try to talk to Callie, personally, reasonably. Nothing worse could happen to him than what had happened yesterday with Ridley.

Well… on the other hand, she might pull the trigger.

Cloud wasn’t enthusiastic. He didn’t want

“It’s all right, silly.” Danny gave Cloud a pat on the shoulder, put away the brushes and went out into the yard.

But Callie had come out onto the porch, dressed for a stay in the cold, and had called Shimmer to her.

Callie spotted him, then, and the ambient went—tense, if not foreboding. Callie, he was sure, didn’t want the meeting with him; but there he was, and Callie knew he was there and knew he was looking to deal with her, he was also reasonably sure. Shimmer, maybe because she was pregnant or maybe because she was protective of Callie with Slip upset, was touchy and standoffish. Slip was occupied trotting up and down along a track beside the village wall, listening for what he could hear out of that strange full-of-people place Ridley went that a horse couldn’t. Slip was frustrated and anxious. But Shimmer was wary in particular of

So was Callie.

Danny walked toward the barracks, necessarily on a course to intercept Callie and Shimmer.

“I’d like to talk,” he said. “Mind?”

“About what?”

“About my being here. About my not telling the truth first off.”

“What about it?”

“That I’m sorry. You knew I was holding back. And I knew I was in trouble, but fact was—”

Jennie came running up. “I finished my problems,” she said. “I’m going to brush Rain.”

“That’s fine,” Callie said.

“Can I go over to the grocery and get some candy?”

“No.”

“Just one piece?”

“It’s Sunday and the grocery’s closed.”

“But papa went to the village!”

“That’s fine. Papa’s talking to some people. I’m talking to Dan. All right? Run away.”

“Papa’s talking about shooting that horse. Isn’t he?”

“Jennie, do you have lessons to do?”

“I don’t want him to shoot that horse!”

“Jennie—”

“I don’t want him to!”

“I’ll bet I can find you something to do inside if you’ve nothing better to do.”

“I’ll brush Rain.”

“Good. Go do that,” Callie said, frowning, and Jennie ran off to the den.

“I,” Danny said carefully, “just wanted to explain. I don’t know how much Ridley told you about what I said. But I did offer to go out and deal with the horse. I know I shouldn’t have brought the girl here. I knew it then and I didn’t plan to go all the way to the village until I was in a position to talk to the riders here and find out what I didn’t know. I made a mistake. A lot of mistakes. I don’t know that does anything—”

“You’re full of dark spots, aren’t you?”

“I don’t intend to be. I know you’d have been within your rights to have tossed me out. I just—”

“Just kind of miscalculated.”

“More than once. But—”

He could see Jennie making another try at Rain, off in the doorway of the den. Jennie was using the manger wall to stand on and the support post to hold on to in case Rain moved out from under her.

But this time Rain didn’t move.

This time Jennie slid on, and got a fistful of mane, and sat there. Cloud, out in the yard, turned his head. The ambient went full of and Danny held his breath between fear that Rain would pitch her off on her head and fear that Callie, catching the scene first from the ambient and from him and then from was going to explode in a shouting fit that wouldn’t help junior nerves at all.

Callie didn’t. Callie was very quiet. He caught intense and enough to upset the neighborhood if it broke loose, but she remained very, very quiet. So did Shimmer.

“Look!” Jennie crowed, and out she rode into the yard, no great burst of speed at all, just an easy amble across the well-tracked snow.

Cloud (Danny remembered those first wild dashes across the hills near Shamesey) had dumped him from a flying run twice the first night he’d met him. The memory made his bones ache and made Cloud dance and throw his head.

But Rain had certainly dumped Jennie the requisite number of times during the last several days, and now the young fool of a nighthorse seemed to have figured out that his own wild moves were dumping the youngster off and hurting Jennie—which was a difficult thought for a nighthorse. Trying to get and all sorted out taxed a nighthorse concept of location to the limit.

Rain moved sedately, now, skittish at the same time, and Callie stood there—upset that this was happening at all, Danny was well sure, and upset that something so important was happening while Ridley wasn’t there, and upset with all that going with a colt horse meant to young Jennie’s future.

Shimmer gave out a challenge call that was part and part mirroring Callie’s restrained distress, and at that, her offspring Rain set into a jog trot, not a nighthorse’s best gait, but comfortable—until the horse in question had forty kilos of human bouncing unskillfully on his back.

But Jennie stayed on. Jennie even wanted while other humans could only hold their breath and hope Jennie stayed undamaged. Rain obliged, running a circle around the den while Jennie clung like a burr.

Danny let go a breath. He didn’t know if his opinion was welcome to Callie, but he knew the hellish quandary Ridley and Callie were in in the matter of that colt and Jennie: he couldn’t live that closely with them and the kid for this number of days without picking up parental worry and their resolution not to have this pairing— and an initial year which they couldn’t conveniently supervise, if Rain did the ordinary young male nighthorse foray out and away from the local group—out the gate next spring and off in a giddy exploration of the whole mountain, nosing into everything. Spring—spring called to a new pair like them in a way that was just one sensation after another.

He knew. Every rider had to have known, at some point in his life, that first sense-ridden spring—the smells, the colors, the life that was breaking on both horse and rider after the long white days of ice and enclosure. And coupled with a winter pairing—when there were so many, many new sensations to get used to—

“Mama! Dan! See me?”

Oh, he A rider could drown all his good sense in it. He found gooseflesh on his arms that had nothing to do with the cold; he felt Callie

But wasn’t just a visual picture. Not any longer. It was an accomplishment. It was a new creature. It had to be dealt with as rider and horse—even a fool junior could understand there was no redoing or undoing it, not now.

“We see you!” Callie called back. “Try not to break your neck!”

Callie was crying. There were tears on her face. But Callie was holding the ambient very quiet, and he gave her all the help he could in that.

“Slow it down,” Callie shouted to her besotted offspring. “You’re going to take a spill!”

But about that moment washed through the ambient with all the noisy force of a pair of youngsters—God, it deafened. It had to reach Ridley. It had to reach Guil and Tara at the bottom of the mountain. And Danny laughed. He couldn’t help it. Cloud kicked up his heels, and pregnant Shimmer gave a little hop— there was nothing in the whole world like that happiness, and he couldn’t but remember the way came to him—and from clear across the wall.

Ridley knew. Ridley had heard—God, who in all creation hadn’t? Danny had trouble breathing. And an unexpected attack of tears. Jennie and Rain had just that instant gotten—there weren’t words for it—but it was a coming together that made total sense of each other—or at least as far as which body had four feet and which one had two, which one was jogging about the yard and which one was sitting where Jennie had known for weeks she belonged and where Rain wanted her to be. He saw Callie take a surreptitious wipe at her eyes.

“She’s still a baby,” Callie complained aloud, he guessed to him. “So’s the damn horse.”

“A good horse. He’ll take care of her.”

“A damn colt!”

“A smart one.”

Then—came a feeling from somewhere outside the walls that was and and

There was —Danny couldn’t pin it down. Couldn’t figure it, though it—it wasn’t Ridley.

Which said to him that was the comparison he’d instinctively made.

Another rider.

Another horse.

And not one that was supposed to be here.

Rain had stopped still, head lifted, nostrils flared. Shimmer looked toward the wall. Cloud did.

“Damn!” Callie cried, fists clenched. <“Get out of here! Damn you! Go away!”>

Rain was protecting Jennie: was clear from that quarter, a horse that would fight—no doubt of it, not by Rain’s action or Cloud’s or Shimmer’s. Slip was with all his considerable force. There was no way, no way, Danny thought suddenly, that Jennie could be tempted by the stray, now.

But Brionne could, and Danny started toward the village gate to know whether the ambient was as threatening there as here.

But before he could get there, Ridley was coming back, at a dead run if he could judge. Slip was and Danny stopped, figuring that whatever there was to hear on that side of the wall and near that house where Brionne lodged Ridley would have heard and would tell them.

Jennie slid down as Rain came near the gate and Ridley came through.

“Are you all right?” was Ridley’s first question to his daughter.

“I rode Rain, I rode Rain and he let me!”

Ridley picked his daughter up and hugged her tight.

Rain was throwing out the same that would underlay every communication to a riderless horse from now on— and whatever was wrong out there went away.

Danny didn’t know for sure what had just flared through the ambient. But in the preoccupation of two overwhelmed parents he didn’t know whether they’d heard it at all.

Next thing, papa said at supper that night, Jennie had to learn to mount without the manger wall—

“Just can’t depend on those mangers being everywhere available,” papa said, and Jennie, knowing she was being teased, swatted at her father’s arm.

“You’ll learn,” papa said then. “Got to grow a bit first, though. Eat those potatoes.”

“I want to go out to the den.”

“It’s dark out,” mama said, and then—then there was a difference in mama’s tone. “Well, —finish your potatoes first.” Jennie couldn’t mama. Rain was drowning everything out but him. But there was a difference all the same, and mama was going to let her do something alone she’d never been allowed to do.

Because she belonged where Rain was. It was a thought so wonderful she didn’t linger at all complaining about the potatoes. She bolted them down as fast as she could, got up from table—said, “Excuse me,” the way mama and papa were always scolding her to say. Tonight when she was grown up, she said it just because she wanted to, and tonight all the rules weren’t walls around her, they were part of the familiar way things were and she hadn’t any interest in being a kid and doing things the wrong way. She was Jennie Sabotay, Rain’s rider, and the whole world was different.

She went and got her coat and her scarf, her hat and her gloves, she wrapped up and snugged down her cuffs herself, while her family and Dan sat at the table eating and trying not to watch her too obviously.

But there wouldn’t be a thing in the world mama could find fault with in the way she dressed or acted, not a thing.

“I’ll come back before I get chilled,” she announced, because mama always said that, and tonight she was handling everything for herself.

She hadn’t expected the relief she saw, like everybody at the table had let go a breath all at once, even when the ambient wasn’t including them, just her and Rain and the other horses. She was puzzled.

But she had Rain and it was a clear night. She went out the outside door, and shut it tight, and walked down the porch—mama was always saying not to run on the steps, she’d slip on the ice. So she got all the way down to the yard. But by that time Rain was outside the den, coming to meet her, and she hadn’t another thought but Rain’s thoughts, the way snow smelled and the way things looked—Rain had never really seen the stars, either, that she thought were wonderful, and Rain seemed a little confused where and what they were.

But mostly Rain wanted with him, and wanted everyone else away.>

Callie was trying not to be disturbed about the situation. She was doing, Danny thought, a very fine job of holding it in, and he wasn’t about to disturb what he perceived as a delicate balance.

“I’ll go to bed,” he said quietly, that being the only refuge he’d discovered where he could take his influence out of the family.

“No,” Callie said. “You were trying to say something this afternoon. What?”

He honestly couldn’t reconstruct where he’d been in his approach to Callie. Or what he’d said. “Just that—I hoped not to disrupt your lives. That I never meant to.”

“She’s gone,” Callie said. “She’s made her choice. There’s nothing to do about it.”

“Seems to me,” Ridley said quietly, “she isn’t gone, and the colt was on his way to making a choice. She’s that age. So’s the horse. Fisher, you’ve probably seen more pairings than either of us have. Seventeen and all.”

Shamesey being the huge camp that it was, Ridley was right: you saw about everything in every combination of human and horse there’d ever been—some good, some you wondered about. “Good horse,” Danny said ever so faintly. “That’s just a real good young horse.” He had another notion, realizing as he did tonight that neither Ridley nor Callie might ever have seen another pairing besides their own. “What I know—begging your pardon—if I could say—”

“What?” Callie snapped.

“It—sort of indicates to me that when Spook showed up… Rain might have gotten just a little more protective of her. I think it would have happened. But when an older horse came around looking for a rider, I think that pushed Rain into claiming his before he could risk losing her—and so he had a rider to help him fend this other horse off.” The last thing he wanted was to lecture seniors regarding horses and their daughter. It was real dangerous territory to venture.

“Damn glad it’s not the other horse,” Ridley muttered.

“What in hell are we going to do?” Callie asked. “What are we going to do this spring?”

“Split up if we have to. You go with her. Or I do.”

Meaning if—almost when—young Rain took out with wanderlust.

And it didn’t call for a junior’s opinion at all. But he had at least an alternative. And Callie had asked him to stay at the table.

“There’s also me,” he said, and waited a half a breath for an explosion. He didn’t want to make the offer he made—he didn’t want to tie Cloud down even to a village and even for the summer: he felt like a traitor in that regard. But he was at least partly responsible for the danger he’d brought, and he saw at least a small way to patch it. “I know you think I’m the devil, but if she goes out this spring, I’d stay here through the summer. Or I’d ride with her and you stay here. I’ve got a little brother. I know kids her age. I’d stay with her and see she got back here safe before winter.”

He wasn’t getting any reaction from them. He decided he’d said enough and maybe enough to offend them. Callie looked like a thundercloud. Ridley—he wasn’t sure.

There was an ambient. But it was all

“It’s to think about,” Callie said. And then added: “It’s not you in question. It’s that horse out there. It tried to get Jennie.”

“It didn’t,” Ridley said. “It can’t, now.”

“It’s still got to be stopped.”

“I agree,” Danny said. “It has to be.”

They hadn’t said what they’d do about Jennie this spring when horses started to wander or whether they even accounted his offer as serious or other than self-serving. But he didn’t entirely expect they would say anything. It was an eventuality they didn’t want to think about, and he wasn’t the person Callie would want with her daughter, not at all.

He got up to refill the teapot.

The ambient stayed as it was, a contented kid, contented horse, both silly, both louder than anything on the mountain. That horse if it was out there had to know it had lost Jennie as a prospect.

Maybe it would be discouraged. But it had lost Rain as a rival, too. And that might well figure in the situation.

“There’s something you can do now,” Ridley said. “Which is asking a bit. But there’s three riders at Mornay—that’s the next village down the road—and they could spare one.”

“You want me to ride to Mornay.”

“If,” Ridley said, “if we don’t get that horse in the next couple of days, weather permitting. And supposing it comes back. We could go out with the hunters—escort you out to the first shelter between us and them and you make the trek over to Mornay and come back with help.”

So Ridley wasn’t just getting him to go winter over at the next village.

Counting that one of them had a pregnant mare, one was a stranger to the area and one of them was an eight-year-old just this week trying to figure out how to get onto her horse—getting help from another village was a real good notion.

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’ll do that.”

“That’s saying we have to,” Ridley said. “Chances are—Rain’s settling with Jennie may put an end to it. I hope so.”

“Drink to that,” Callie said, and got up and got the spirits bottle. She poured three glasses, gave one to Ridley, second to him—which she sipped beforehand. Third for herself.

Proof enough, Danny said to himself, and didn’t hesitate to drink it when Ridley proposed, “To the Offspring and the horse.”

“We did it,” was Callie’s second. “She’s still alive and we are.”

Jennie was staying out in the den and she might be out there the whole night. He didn’t think Callie would get a wink of sleep. Maybe not Ridley. At the least they’d take turns.

And they talked about having gotten Jennie to a major turning in her life.

But he didn’t think they expected it would be easy after this.

Nor that they wanted help waiting up for the kid. So he excused himself to his bed and lay there listening to an ambient as new and full of foolishness as could be.

Thinking of Cloud and himself. And beginnings of life and not endings for a change.

Darcy had made supper that evening and Brionne ate half a dish of beef pasta and a whole cookie and half of another for dessert.

But Brionne said very little—or what she said was so quiet that Darcy couldn’t hear.

Once it sounded like, “I want to go home.”

And another time, “Go away!”

But when Darcy started to leave Brionne said, “Where are you going?”

Darcy came back and sat down by the side of the bed. The girl had been dreaming awake, she thought. Not really sleeping, but not entirely aware, either. There was a strange feeling to the night—her own elation with the child’s waking, or the unaccustomed feeling of life in this room, or just the knowledge that the days would change now. Everything had stopped at some time around Mark’s death, and no day had brought anything different from the last. And now every day brought a possibility of things changing.

Now she went to bed at night thinking about tomorrow, and what she’d do, and what she’d try. She hadn’t done that kind of planning in—a long time.

And tonight she lay abed thinking of Mark as she sometimes did, just thinking about him in the dark and the things she’d tell him— and wanting to tell him about all the things that had happened.

But there was so much, there was so very much she’d done that thinking about it became a job in itself, and made her sleepy.

Her edge-of-sleep thought seemed infected with cheerfulness. With recklessness and sheer anticipation that just wasn’t like her.

She felt equal to anything. That in itself was unprecedented.

If the girl had come a year ago Mark wouldn’t have died. Mark would have wanted to live if he’d seen this child, if he’d seen how much she was like Faye. But more, if Mark had felt the things she felt tonight, he’d never have wanted to die.

Right at the edge of sleep she pretended that Mark had seen her and that Mark was sleeping in the bed beside her. She knew better, of course, but she could think that for the night, the way she could tell herself that the empty room had a child again and that mistakes were all revised, and that she had a chance to do right all the things that had for a year been so wrong.

There was a tomorrow again. She’d run to the very edge of the money she had on account. She’d not collected fees for things she’d done on call, or at least not pursued any of the late ones—because she’d not cared.

But tomorrow she’d open the lower-floor shutters and open her office again, and she’d take patients. The miners always had complaints and aches and pains. Miners always had money on account.

And she’d buy Brionne such pretty things.

Things felt better. Maybe it was going to church. Maybe it was just getting another number of days between them and disaster and church days were markers.

But, sleeping in a proper cot alongside his brother in the warmest place in Evergreen village, with the banked coals making a comfortable glow and the stones lending warmth to a peaceful night, Carlo let go a sigh that seemed to stand for so much that had been piled up on him, so much debt, so much fear, so much anxiety.

Things were working out. Rick wasn’t happy—least of all in the public scene this morning, with them being welcomed by the congregation and all. Ordinarily he’d have found it excruciating notice on himself, and had, for the duration, but it meant something. It meant something vitally important, to have the preacher’s backing and to know that they weren’t to blame for that horse that had scared hell out of the village.

Rider business. A horse didn’t come within his responsibility. Wasn’t fair for Danny to get tagged with it—but if the preacher didn’t see blaming him and Randy for that horse, that left Rick Mackey as the only one with that notion. And precarious as his and Randy’s situation was, he wasn’t about to rush forward to claim the blame.

He just—just hoped to God it went away.

He didn’t want to be listening to it when they shot it.

He had a fistful of pillow, doing violence to it without realizing it, and let it go, and let go another sigh, this time consciously, purposefully releasing all the pent-up worry.

He ought to take care of the rest of the pending business he had in town, pay off all the emotional debts and pin down the uncertainties.

Meaning going finally and finding out about their sister, what the doctor thought of her chances, what the outlook was, what the debt might be that she’d accumulated. He was responsible for her. He had to be. There was no one else.