Cloud's Rider

Chapter 22

Run and run and run down the dark of the road, carrying only the rifle and a dozen shells—Danny ran by Cloud’s side as Tara ran by Flicker’s, the two of them, alone in the dark, ran and ran until the horses had caught their wind in this high altitude. It was swing up and ride until the horses were tiring under their weight, then run, then walk a distance, at last resort rest a moment, humans and horses alike, heads down, trying to warm the air they breathed. A rider knew the state of his horse’s body as a horse knew his rider’s. He knew what they could possibly do. He discovered reserves in both of them. And Guil had told them, go, run and ride, get there as fast as they could, stripped down to the absolute minimum they had to have in the Wild if something stranded one of them: a knife and a burning-glass, matches, Tara and him with rifles, the very least they could survive on and the lightest weight they could carry and make speed.

Guil and Carlo were coming behind them with the rest of their belongings at the best rate they could, a man healing of a wound and a new rider whose chief use to them was outright strength—carrying three riders’ ordinary gear.

It was up to them to get to the village with horses that might make the difference—to prevent another Tarmin.

The bells had gone silent an hour ago at least.

Slip reared, then lunged at invisible threat under his feet as the creature raced right under them, and the went flaring off toward the church.

At that place, by the light of lanterns hung on the village hall posts, two men stood on watch with shotguns.

But more volunteers were actually heading down into the passages, by the church front access, to try to get a shot at it point-blank. Hunters had volunteered for that harrowing post, village-siders accustomed to standing their ground in dicey situations, and Ridley entirely gave them their due: he didn’t want to be in their position at this precise instant.

Jennie was with him and Slip, ; and Callie and Shimmer were down almost at the church along the course of the tunnel. “Now!” he heard from Callie, signaling presence right under Shimmer’s feet, and “Now!” the shout came from the men on the porch, the signal for the hunters in the tunnel to open the door to the church access.

There was a muffled blast of shotgun fire below.

And for a moment the presence in the passages seemed to have split in four, behind them, ahead of them, under the church, under the row of houses—

Rain jumped sideways in startlement and Jennie was But Rain took up guard right over her, and Ridley, ignoring the temptation to look to his injured daughter, was trying to keep a view simultaneously of all the perimeter, no longer sure where it was and fearful of losing track of the thing.

Playing games with them, dammit. And he daren’t leave his view of the edges to help Jennie, who was which she couldn’t manage without something to stand on. Without leaving his scanning of the perimeters, he slid off Slip’s back, gave Jennie the boost she needed and delayed only a heartbeat to pat her arm.

“All right?”

“Yeah,” she said. The lamplight showed tears smeared on one cheek. Jennie was as well as and thinking about although she knew she wasn’t supposed to and they’d kept her away from that house. Rain was frothing at the mouth he was so mad, wanting his teeth into anything he could identify as the

And was there, here, all over the place, and Jennie and Rain alike were looking this way and that trying to find it.

“It lies,” Ridley said with a sense of desperation. Their trap hadn’t worked. They knew that by the simple fact that the thing hadn’t been sending for a moment, having conscious control of whether it did or didn’t: that was a larger brain at work, larger and cannier; he’d become increasingly sure how the creature imaged where it wasn’t, catching pictures from minds around it and just throwing those moments back at the hearer—a little different from a horse, that tended to displace terrain sideways to your vision—this thing imaged a scene without itself in it. What they hunted was dangerously intelligent in that regard—if he understood what it was doing—replacing land-now with land-as-it-was. It could go silent at times, and rarely got so confused it began to locate itself. There and then not there—and he didn’t know how long or with how much complexity coming at it in the ambient it could shut down like that. There were thirteen dead down at The Evergreen. There was Serge—dead. There was Earnest Riggs— dead; because he hadn’t any doubt now that the same creature had gotten in that night, too, with its uncanny gift for stalking absolutely silently. Carlo Goss had been innocent, and there couldn’t be any doubt of it, now, in anyone who’d seen both the Schaffer porch and the tavern a moment ago.

He wanted Jennie to come with him, and collected Callie to go up to the church and regroup, taking a course as far as possible across the broad uptown street from the Schaffer house, which all along they had avoided—the horses actively hated it, and Rain wanted to go over there and pick a fight, to harass Brionne Goss, out of reach mentally as well as physically. He’d never seen a horse that determined on giving a potential rider grief, and he was anxious all the time he had Jennie in any wise near that place, for fear she might not hold him.

He was relieved when Callie was by him again, the other side of their defense of Jennie and Rain; and the three of them went up toward the porch of the village hall, next to the church where the hunters, having failed to hit the beast, were coming up from the small enclosed access to the passages.

The ambient prickled then with coming outside the village hall in Peterson’s wife’s company, Randy and the wife and then the daughter all armed with shotguns, as the defense of the administrative buildings. Reverend Quarles came behind them, not so evidently a preacher in his snow-gear and carrying a rifle.

“Didn’t work.” Peterson said the obvious.

“It’s tricking us,” Ridley said. “It’s diverting us in what it sends.”

“Then move the horses back from us!” Peterson’s wife said.

“That won’t work,” Callie said. “This thing sends. This thing sends. You don’t need a horse near you to hear it—but it’s going to lie to you most when it isn’t sending at all. Hope it sends and we pass it to you, or you won’t know where it is.”

“That girl talks to it,” Jennie said, completely out of turn, but Jennie was as hell. So was the horse. “She wants it. I hear her.”

“It’s the truth,” Ridley said, and an uncomfortable silence followed—broken by another young voice.

“She rode the rogue, down in Tarmin.”

“No,” someone began to say, but Randy’s voice overrode it.

“She’s my sister! She killed the whole village—but she couldn’t get the door open to get us!”

Shock followed. Deep, unsettling shock. And the thing seemed to ricochet around the street, here, here, here, with no settling point.

“Lord save us.” That from the preacher. “The child’s only thirteen.”

“So I’m fourteen!” Randy cried indignantly. “She blames us! She wants Carlo dead!”

“It is the truth,” Ridley said. “I think it is the truth, preacher, as true as I can tell.”

There was, surprisingly, no panic about the matter, just a settling of a very uneasy regard toward that house with the large wraparound porch, with its shutters thrown, with, in the ambient— which he wasn’t sure anyone but Callie understood—a ravening hunger for presence, a hunger for the ambient it—she—couldn’t ever satisfy, because no sane horse would have her.

Dammit, he thought—it took a fourteen-year-old and an eight-year-old to understand the reasons behind what it did: it wasn’t adult desires they were fighting. It wasn’t a hunter after food or a beast after a lair. It was a thirteen-year-old kid supplying its ideas and playing damnable, bloody pranks down at the tavern and through the passages while it mapped the place, damned well mapped the village the girl had never seen with her own eyes.

That accounted for the occasionally true and occasionally skewed direction-sense: it was frolicking around, exploring the village and getting the upper hand over everyone trying to stop it.

Never ask how Earnest Riggs had crossed the girl’s notice.

“Wait for daylight,” the marshal said into the silence. “Just let it settle down. We’ve got about—what time is it?—it’s got to be toward dawn.”

“I can go look,” his daughter offered.

“No!” Peterson said sharply. And more quietly, “No. Not a good idea.” Peterson didn’t want his family scattering out, and neither did Ridley.

“That thing is running us wherever it likes,” Jeff Burani said. “We’ve got people down there at the bottom end of the street. Miners in barracks. Loggers in the hostel. The riders don’t want to split up, but we can’t be everywhere and we can’t move fast enough. We can’t protect just our houses and our families, the miners’ll lynch us!”

All those things were true. But those things were only half their danger. The marshal was advising they wait for daylight—but Ridley didn’t think it was going to hole up, if he had his guess. It might go right over the wall again and come back for more mischief tomorrow night.

Which might give them time to do something about Brionne Goss—but they had as close to agreement in present company as they were going to get on that issue, tonight: the key people knewnow—and the panic he had feared if they knew the danger in Brionne Goss wasn’t, thank God, happening. The event was with them, and this one select group of villagers were at least willing to use their heads and try to out-think the beast that had come in on them—

Which wasn’t a horse, wasn’t Carlo Goss, and wasn’t a rogue cat. This thing was a better climber. It was smarter around structures, very fast—which might be human intelligence feeding images into it—but it also figured out the tunnels as a means to play a hideous game of hide-and-seek so that they hadn’t gotten a clear shot at it. That was smart. And a rogue of whatever species didn’t by all he knew acquire abilities, it just lost all sane braking on the abilities it had until it killed itself. So this thing wasn’t a rogue. It wasn’t any threat Rogers Peak had ever seen, and the only reasonable conclusion was that a stray from the outback, maybe attracted by the crisis in the ambient, had come into the area like a willy-wisp to the smell of blood.

“It’s attracted to the girl in Darcy’s house,” he said. “It’s concentrating its mischief up at this end. But never there—because it’s being elusive and that would give it away. That’s what I’m thinking. The girl’s attracted it and the girl’s guiding it, consciously or unconsciously. She’s got to be silenced. Stopped. Put out cold.”

“That’s pretty hard-minded,” John Quarles said. “That poor child, rider-boss, —”

“I don’t say do her any lasting harm, but if we quiet Brionne Goss it might forget why it was here. At least it won’t have a human mind steering it. Slip her something. Darcy’s a doctor, for God’s sake. She’s got to have something in the office that won’t hurt her. This thing’s mapping the village for that girl. It’s going all around the village, but not there. It will. And then what happens?”

“You can’t even tell us what it is,” the marshal’s wife said.

“I can tell you it’s not from this side of the mountains. I can tell you it’s damn smart. I can tell you while we’re arguing, it’s picking up our intentions in the ambient and telling a thirteen-year-old girl what we’re apt to do, and it’s only begun to do its work on this mountain if we don’t stop it here, Lucy. I’ll swear that to you.”

“I’ll go put it to Darcy,” John Quarles said. “She’ll listen to me.”

“Not alone,” Ridley said. “Line of sight. Rifles lined up and us watching.”

“I’m aware the beast is dangerous,” the preacher said. “But if your theory is right, diminishing the threat to the girl and the beast might actually lessen the danger.”

“I’ll have that porch in my rifle sights. —Listen to me, preacher. I’m asking you, don’t endanger anybody including that girl. Trust my good wishes and if you hear anything untoward on that porch, drop flat instantly and I’ll shoot right over you. Don’t confuse our aim. Trust us. All right?“

“I’ve every confidence,” Quarles said, and handed his shotgun to the marshal. “But most of all, I’ll trust in the Lord.”

Quarles walked out through the falling snow, then.

Brave, Ridley gave him that, as he slid down from Slip’s back and lifted his rifle—not the only one drawing a bead on that area.

“Stay still,” Callie was saying to Jennie, and to all the people around them.

“She’s just real mad,” Jennie said quietly, her thoughts rising very softly to the top of the ambient. “She knows we’re here. She knows Randy’s here. She knows about the preacher coming to the door. She’s not happy at all. She wants it to come and drive us away.”

Jennie was sending too much, Ridley realized that too late. Jennie and Brionne were trading far too much, and what had been a quiet struggle between two kids was suddenly reaching after all of them. The rifle wanted to shake in his hands as he stared down the sight and widened his focus to the whole porch, any movement in the snow-obscured night.

Then he knew something else—a wider ambient than had existed. It had direction. Distance. Outside the wall.

Horses. On the road.

it was. More than one rider. But that was definitely And Jennie and Callie knew it from him.

hit the ambient and shivered in the air, force added to their force.

He thought then of calling out to the preacher to come back. But he thought if a preacher could ever be in the ambient, John Quarles was there right now, and if ever they had the chance to reach Darcy, they had it now. Quarles knew something had changed just now, surely. He had to be aware of the arrival.

and had run riot and crazed the ambient.

They wanted, too. They wanted to be there, and around the next turning of the road, obscured in a thin veil of snow, Danny saw the village wall. He knew then they’d arrived and he pushed himself despite the ache in his side to keep running and not even to waste time getting up on Cloud. A jarred and frantic portion of the working brain said that in a crisis no one might be able to reach the gate to open it for them, and he might need to be on the ground to try to open it from outside. If the village had left the rope outside that made that possible.

He ran, he told the ambient as he stumbled down the last of the road. Cloud wanted Cloud wanted

They reached the lesser gate through a trampled space that said that this gate at least had opened—but not in hours, Danny judged by the rounded edges of the prints. Horses were at the other end of the street, no one was near the wall, and neither village gate had budged since yesterday.

Bad business. And the pull-cord wasn’t out.

“Damn it!” Tara said, and with her knife through a gap in the timbers tried to raise the heavy bar inside. Danny lent his hands to the effort, both of them pushing and struggling until finally it was lifted as high as they could hold it, and it wouldn’t clear the trip-latch.

They were at Evergreen, there was all hell broken loose inside as they listened to it, and nobody could let them in the gate.

He let off a rifle shot. It echoed off the mountain and into the ambient in a massive wash of and as everyone in Evergreen, deaf to the ambient or not, realized there was someone outside.

came, too. Someone else—was fiercely

They were shooting again, and Darcy flinched, though this shot was far away. “Listen to me,” John Quarles was saying through the closed front door. “Darcy? Darcy, —just for safety, I want you to find a sedative. I want you to find a strong sedative and get the girl calm. I know you want to protect her. You have a sedative, don’t you, Darcy?”

“Yes,” she admitted. But she didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to lose the girl’s trust. Brionne was suspicious and afraid. Brionne suspected everyone out on the street, and John said terrible, incredible things, how something was prowling the village passages and it had killed people down at The Evergreen and it had killed Earnest Riggs.

She knew it was true, though. She knew the way she knew that people were outside and that they had designs on Brionne. It was as if pictures of everything were pouring in on her, John coming with the marshal, bringing her Faye’s body. She’d heard gunshots going off and it conjured that single shot that had echoed through the house, that moment she had known it came from downstairs, from Mark’s office. There were memories of blood, so much blood. Mark was a doctor. And he’d chosen that way, when there were easier ways in the locked cabinet. Mark had wanted violence in the leaving of his life. He’d been so quiet. And he’d chosen violence for her to deal with.

He—dared—leave her—that unspeakable sight to remember. It was his anger. It was his spite. It was his blame. It was Mark saying again as he’d shouted at her the day before he died, Damn you, Darcy, shed a tear! Yell! Blame me out loud, don’t just look at me like that!

She wasn’t sitting on the couch, with John talking about God’s mercy, she wasn’t rocking back and forth like a fool, and still not able to cry, and John talking inanely about what colors to use at Mark’s funeral, as if anyone gave a damn. She was standing at the front door, and John was on the other side, begging her to drug the child senseless, when Brionne knew, she was sure Brionne knew people were betraying her. Pans were flying about the kitchen, crockery was breaking.

“I’ve got to go,” Darcy said.

“Will you do it?” John shouted through the door.

“I don’t know,” she said. And then thought—if she did that—if she did that, John would be on her side. John was her arbiter of what the village thought. What John said was what they thought was good.

And if she quieted Brionne down, then everything would be quiet and John would help her.

So she went to the cabinet, and turned the key and shook powder into a prescription vial. Her hands were shaking, but she got it in, knowing fairly accurately the girl’s weight. She thought she’d make another pot of tea and put it in that. She stopped the vial and tucked it in her waistband, under her sweater.

Then she went to the kitchen, where Brionne was having a tantrum.

The crockery was all broken in pieces all over the floor. The teakettle was lying against the wall. Brionne was crying and had a metal plate in her hands.

“Honey. Put it down. It’s all right. I told him go away.”

“You’re lying!” Brionne clanged the plate down against a chair, and bent it, and flung it away against the wall. “I hate you! I hate all of you! They’re all talking about me! My brother’s out there, and he’s telling lies about me and everyone believes them!”

“I’m sure I don’t believe them. I think it’s all rather silly.” The playing cards were all over the floor. She crossed the kitchen and picked up the teakettle. She wasn’t sure there was a whole cup in the kitchen.

“My friend will come for me,” Brionne said. “You just watch! He’ll come.”

“Not a horse?”

“I’ll have a horse. I’ll have a horse when I want one! And everybody will be sorry.”

Darcy felt such an anger from the girl, from somewhere, so much anger and confusion…

Brionne headed down the three steps to the passageway door.

“No!” Darcy said sharply, expecting obedience, but Brionne didn’t stop. Brionne flung up the bar, and Darcy crossed the kitchen in four fast strides, reached to stop Brionne and slam the door shut.

The door banged wide. A black shape was there, yellow-eyed, yellow-fanged. It reached a shaggy arm—an arm!—around Brionne, snatching her away, and the other arm swept with a force that flung Darcy back against the wall. It hit her again, and again. She was numb, and astonished—totally astonished—to see the blood spatter wide across the wall. Like Mark’s, that day…

Very much like that day.

Danny was trying to move Cloud into line with the gate to use Cloud for a ladder—but he people coming then, a that very soon he and Tara could hear aloud, swearing and encouraging each other.

“Open the gate!” Danny and Tara yelled, almost with one voice, and that reassured the people on the other side. Someone opened the gate, and Danny got through first, rifle in hand, the pain in his side grown acute, and his throat so raw he immediately went into a coughing fit. Cloud was behind him, and then Tara and Flicker, but the people in front of him, shadowed by the wall, were faceless to him, a mob, a mass—men from the barracks, villagers, he didn’t know.

He did know and he didn’t waste time trying to understand the shouts about and and he just got control of his coughing enough to swing up to Cloud’s back, feeling the wobble in himself and the wobble in Cloud’s legs as he landed. He started moving through the crowd, aware of and it was a measure how frightened the crowd was that people bunched around two riders on horseback and pressed up close to the horses as a point of safety.

Cloud wasn’t used to that kind of treatment. It was a question whether they were going to get through before or after Cloud bit somebody, but the instant there was an opening Cloud jumped forward, instinct-driven toward the of him, and Cloud’s rider was along for the ride for an instant, Cloud knowing beyond any doubt there was

Flicker was close behind them as Cloud ran, and Flicker might not know the horses ahead, but they were a band Cloud knew: was the presence at the mountain-end of the street. flung the ambient wider and louder than Danny intended, but it was five horses now, with one mare in foal and a boss horse aggressive as hell toward whatever threatened their vicinity.

They came in where Ridley, Callie and Jennie were holding the area across from the doctor’s house. Randy was there, with a couple of armed women Danny didn’t know, with the marshal’s deputy, some of the hunters, and a very shaken-looking preacher, whose total contribution to the ambient was a roiling chaos of and at them being there.

“Tara Chang,” Danny said to Ridley and the rest, by way of introduction. “Guil Stuart and Carlo are coming, but they’ll be longer. What’s happened?”

He got more than he wanted. Cloud shied back from a rush of and and Someone had died. He thought it was the doctor. He thought the worst of the sending came from young Jennie, in the way of loud juniors and young horses, but he wasn’t sure, and rapidly there was more of it, the echo of confirmation sounding in his head to be the preacher, and was current and happening now—along with a presence he knew from brief encounters: Brionne Goss was the core of it, but it was and and again.

“Tarmin,” Tara said beside him. “That’s what it was like.”

Like and unlike, Danny was thinking. The Tarmin rogue wasn’t essentially a killer. It opened gates to those that were.

This thing—this confusion—had hands and walked upright, or it was Brionne herself.

“It’s in the upstairs of the house,” Ridley said, and how glad Ridley was to see the two of them was evident in the ambient. “It’s strong. God, it’s strong. We haven’t dared get close to it.”

“Five of us, now,” Tara said. “Let’s push it. Let’s get it out of here and hunt it later.”

Ridley was and thought of Danny understood the fear he had, bringing a kid’s mind close to that thing. But not doing it guaranteed she’d be close for sure when the thing went further over the edge than it was.

“I don’t think it’s a rogue,” Danny ventured to say. “Part of it’s the same, but it’s not crazy. I don’t think it’s crazy.” A dreadful comparison occurred to him, and he unintentionally let it loose:

Tara, last person he’d have thought would agree, slid into that image with astonishing quickness and memories of and “Smart like a horse,” she said. “Damn sure.”

“Paired with that?” Callie said in disgust.

“Nothing I want to see leave here,” Tara said, and intended no question, while Randy Goss hovered in the low edges of the ambient, and and Danny knew that image of the way Tara had to recognize it.

But Tara was trying to pull them together in which with Flicker’s essential skittishness had its difficulties. So he wanted it, in support of Tara’s effort, and Callie wanted it; then Jennie was there, fiercely so, and that spooked Ridley into a direct attack that wasn’t native to him: Danny suddenly felt what Ridley and Slip could be when Jennie was threatened, and all of a sudden the marshal and the preacher and the rest were clearing back from them.

But Randy stayed. was there with them, recalling all of it with an overlay of and Randy didn’t want the Randy wanted

Glass shattered at that house. Wood broke. A throat uttered a sound not human. came back at them.

“It’s going up!” Callie cried aloud. “ It’s Get a sight on it!”

Danny didn’t expect it to show on the street side of the building. But there, in the murky light that had been growing around them, he saw an upright darkness on the very crest of the roof, a darkness with something white hugged against it—with what a blink of snowflakes cleared into the sight of Brionne Goss in her nightgown standing on her own feet with the creature, balanced on the snowy rooftree of the doctor’s house.

He didn’t trust he could hit it and not spook it out of the sights of those with a chance. Tara, beside him, and Ridley, had rifles.

More than those two guns went off. A ragged volley made Cloud jump and him blink, and in the stench of gunpowder and the smell of snow around him afterward—there wasn’t anything on that roof.

“Did we get it?” Ridley asked. Randy’s shock was racketing through an ambient that was just them, now, nothing in, on, or beyond that house.

“Don’t trust not hearing it,” Danny said. “Not till we find it dead.” He rode Cloud forward, and the rest of them were with him,

Randy attaching himself close to Cloud afoot, and Tara and Flicker going on his other side.

That silence persisted. The doctor’s house stood adjacent to outbuildings, small sheds behind; but a warehouse roof came close, and he and Tara went down the alley it made, rejoining the others along the wall.

The post was absent from the rider-gate. Danny knew that from Ridley and Jennie and Callie. The post was still in the tunnel access, but that wouldn’t have stopped a beast on two feet, either—if it had had the chance to get in there, but none of them believed it had.

The marshal and his group came now and joined them as, in the very early dawn and among the shadows that still were left, they looked for footprints.

They didn’t find them until they went through the rider-gate. The tracks of one set of long humanlike feet and sometimes two, the second clearly human, went toward the den.

Shimmer was and Slip pulled the rest of them in, as a band of five horses went toward the den intent on

But the tracks went around to the outside, to a rider-gate left standing open to the forest and the light coming through the trees.

Danny and Tara went out hunting straightway. But the trail, which showed blood now and again, went aside into the trees before it had gone a kilometer down the road, on a diagonal line down the mountain. The trail all along had been tending toward the south, toward the truck road, but now it left that. Cloud and Flicker were sure about it going into the trees, and downhill, after which, with the beast’s tree-climbing ability, it was capable of going cross-country and above brush and rock that would stop a horse.

So they both thought it more prudent to go back to the village and in a day or so, with full kit and enough gear to survive what began to feel like chancy weather, set out to warn other villages. There was nothing they could do chasing it now; and a great deal they could do by warning the other settlements.

Besides, with the beast’s talent for misdirection, and the possibility of a human mind helping it, they didn’t want to leave things in disorder in the village behind them—in case it didn’t find itself discouraged.

Guil and Carlo came in the early afternoon, with snow coming down heavily. Guil was decidedly hurting, Burn was exhausted, and Carlo had walked, so as not to overload Spook. Both of them had pushed things more than they ought.

They came in the village gates. In the middle of the street and in full view of the curious, Carlo slid down off Spook’s back and held out his arms for his brother, who until that time had held himself reserved and quiet. Things weren’t reserved or quiet for some time, then, in that quarter, among riders and villagers alike.

And introductions went quickly, rider-fashion, the ambient thick with self-protection and reserve for a moment, then warming up considerably. Yes, the Evergreen camp had known Guil’s lost partner, they’d liked Aby Dale, they trusted her lifelong partner; and they knew that the last Tarmin rider hadn’t survived by scanting duty, any more than Tara had done since her arrival at Evergreen.

They stayed villageside, all of them, including Guil and Carlo, with the horses, to survey the damage, to help the marshal sort out the dead and make sure the village felt safe. With the smell of blood on the wind it was certain in their minds and in the minds of very anxious villagers and winter residents that the wildlife would come back to the area, and relatively quickly if the beast hadn’t hunted it to nonexistence: Guil said the ambient had formed at their backs on their ride along the road like water flowing into a gap, as if wild things knew that a horse’s presence in this instance was an assurance of a worse predator moving out of the territory.

And in truth that night and the morning after there wasn’t a sign of it coming back—hard to imagine a creature you had to recognize in terms of the silence that went around it. Slink was the name some villager came up with for it, and it might stick, who knew? It was certain at least that the High Wild produced some odd creatures, some strange, some deadly, and that humans who’d come to the world had yet to see most of them.

As Tara said, they just hoped this one stayed wherever it had gone. Weather came howling down, and that, the village hoped, finished that. In all senses.

Even the Goss brothers’ mourning was short.