Rider at the Gate

Chapter XV

THERE WERE STORIES—HOW SOMETIMES IN SPRING THEY FOUND people frozen on the mountains, just the way they’d sat down, and when the wind blew the fire out, Danny began to fear some party coming up the road with the thaw would find them all that way in a melting snowbank, still huddled around dead sticks.

“Maybe the son of a bitch froze,” Quig said, hugging one hand under his arm for protection.

But Harper swore at everybody and Watt kept working, using a lighter, the lot of them using their bodies and holding a tarp to shield the fire until it took.

Stupid place to camp, Danny thought, while he contributed his own skinny body to the effort and held a corner of the tarp.

They’d found a less windy place a little downland, and thanks to Harper’s pushing everyone, they’d ended up at the edge of dark camped in hellish cold, on the high uphill of the road, where the wind could get a run at them and the horses had no grazing.

They’d run both late and tired, slogging ahead at a pace that taxed both humans and horses, walking and riding by turns—the last had been walking, the Hallanslakers’ horses and Cloud alike simply refusing to carry weight any farther on the uphill.

And finally their road had met another road at a rider-stone, way, way up in the windy cold, where—contrary to expectations of shelter one ought to find at a rider-stone—there wasn’t.

There might still be one fairly close. Maybe even a village—he wasn’t so clear on the distances up here. But the Hallanslakers either knew there wasn’t a shelter—or they had some reason not to go find it. Danny didn’t ask. He didn’t ask anything or question anything since they’d hit him for no more than thinking. He’d found he could tuck down and be quiet—and he was so cold he was brittle. He truly didn’t want to be hit right now. He just kept his grip on the tarp edge and kept as quiet as he could while Harper and his friends from Hallanslake did whatever seemed reasonable to people who couldn’t go into villages.

The rebel thought didn’t get him hit. He didn’t entirely understand why not, except maybe they didn’t want to let go of the tarp to do it.

And that thought didn’t get him hit, either.

He supposed what he thought wasn’t going into the ambient with any strength at all because the horses were tucked together at more than a stone’s toss distant, in a clump of old bearded evergreen, where the wind was less—except Cloud, who sulked apart, but on their lee side, so he had them for a windbreak, Cloud being no fool.

There was a phone line near them—they were making the fire near a telephone pole, so he knew they were on a main road, maybe the Tarmin road itself, and definitely, in that case, not far from real shelter. He hadn’t seen phone lines all the way up, and he remembered the Anveney road was the one—

But he didn’t want to think about that road. He just wasn’t sure what road they’d picked up, but there were the phone lines, and it did go off into Wild in either direction.

Stuart might be real near. But he didn’t want to think about Stuart at all, except he hoped Stuart had met up with Jonas and they were all out there in the bushes this very moment setting up to blow Harper and his friends to hell in a crossfire.

He really, really hoped Jonas wasn’t too mad at him.

He cast a furtive look at Harper, wondering that nobody had heard him, himself and Watt being in body contact at the moment. Maybe they were all thinking about the fire. Maybe everybody was too busy. Maybe Cloud was too cold to image. He hoped Cloud was all right out there in the cold.

But certainly he’d gotten away with more than he had this afternoon on the trail when Quig had elbowed him for thinking Quig was stupid.

Quig was stupid.

Quig was really stupid.

Still no notice.

Maybe they were just all too tired.

Maybe God was going to freeze them to death for punishment. He was in what his mother called bad company, he’d had no question of that, and it wasn’t God’s fault—stupidity had gotten him here.

Papa would be disgusted. Papa would have no respect for any of these men if they walked into his shop, loud and obnoxious, let alone the fact that they were riders. The men with Harper were scum. Nobodies, real nobodies. The Hallanslakers—who Harper was (by what Danny could gather) somehow kin to, or leader of, or both—thought a lot of things were funny that weren’t—and they were stupid.

Just damn-all mean, papa would call it. Anybody who was an outsider to them, like him, was a target, the way Stuart would have been a target when he’d worked with them. He understood now how that long ago knife-fight could have started. Stuart wouldn’t have backed down.

He didn’t want to know what they’d think up to do to him now if there wasn’t Harper’s glum influence, and if there wasn’t Harper to knock heads when things got too rough. He couldn’t figure what hold Harper had over these men, except they’d wanted to go up that mountain: they’d egged each other on until they were blind, stupid tired and the weather turned on them. They’d challenged each other up that mountain because there was mischief to do, and they thought it was fun. They were men on the outside, but inside they were a nest of willy-wisps, all fangs and claws, all mean—he’d known boys like them in town, and he’d avoided them even before his father’d yanked him sideways, knocked him on the side of his head and said he expected brains in his sons and he expected his sons not to die stupid.

He’d never heard his father talk like that before and never since. But he’d remembered.

Then he’d gone to be a rider and his father didn’t talk to him about virtues at all now.

He’d not known everything before he left home—but, damn, he knew his father would have had the insight to have pitched any of the Hallanslakers and probably Harper out of the shop on first sight. He didn’t know where his father had learned about people like the boys his father had found him with, but his father had had them pegged, all right, and he’d gotten the measure of the Hallanslakers in the same way: eager to go up that mountain to do all the harm they could to Stuart, who’d, by all he could figure, never done any harm to them personally. About Harper’s motives—he didn’t want to think.

They just had to have a target for their meanness, he guessed, because if they didn’t have one, they just had each other to pick on.

And that wasn’t much fun, since they were too damn stupid to feel pain.

He could think that, with his knee right against Quig’s. That was really odd. He thought: Quig’s a pig, just to see—not wanting another elbow in the ribs.

But he was quiet and secret now—mad; but he’d grown far more canny in the passing hours. He’d had to be hit a couple of times, like with papa and the boys—and then, damn, yes, he did learn. He could keep his thoughts quiet.

Or Cloud wasn’t paying real close attention right now.

He stole a glance sidelong, saw Cloud about his own business, nibbling the weeds that still poked up above the snow at road’s edge.

But Cloud didn’t look up.

he thought.

But he didn’t move his elbows when he thought it, and Cloud still didn’t look up—didn’t seem to notice at all.

Maybe he had a lot better luck being quiet if he wasn’t right in Cloud’s convenient view, attracting Cloud’s attention. There were trees in the way. He’d made himself ever so quiet, even wrestling with the tarp.

And that led him suddenly, while Watt was swearing at the tarp and Quig was a slightly less bearlike mass beside him, to the basic fact that he’d heard a hundred times but never, somehow, gotten through his head in reality—that he could think anything he liked if Cloud wasn’t in range, and he suddenly realized—astonished— that the fact that he heard uncommonly far wasn’t necessarily all Cloud’s doing. Cloud certainly didn’t seem to hear him right now.

And with that, he acquired a notion of how he got a constant flow of images from farther than he was supposed to—dimbrained kid that he was, he naturally assumed when people called him noisy that it was some marvelous special gift he and Cloud had that nobody else did.

Special, hell. He fell off his horse and Cloud got into fights: it wasn’t exactly a shining performance on this trek. He’d annoyed two groups of seniors and nearly gotten shot on the last set-to because he couldn’t calm Cloud down.

Noise wasn’t exactly an advantage if you hadn’t any choice about it.

And Jonas had said that kids did it—and seniors didn’t—except Wesson, who needed to because of who he was.

So it wasn’t exactly a special gift, it was a special problem kids tended to have.

And if it ever was useful, this getting Cloud’s attention at a range at which most people didn’t have constant talk with their horses, it wasn’t always useful, witness the situation with Harper this afternoon.

When he was on the outs with people, he wanted Cloud’s attention; he just—wasn’t comfortable with people the way he was with Cloud, not even with his friends anymore, since the new had worn off him being a rider. Cloud was his friend. Cloud didn’t carp and criticize—

Maybe Cloud ought to criticize. Maybe somebody should have done what his father did and what Jonas did and what Quig had done—like tell him he was fouling up, mad as it made him. He was doing wrong with Cloud. Jonas had tried to tell him, but he’d been too righteous then to believe it.

Elbows still, Jonas had said. Knees still. Quit looking at Cloud, which he began to realize was almost impossible for him—every two seconds he was reaching for Cloud, wanting to know where Cloud was, like a toddler running after his mother.

Which kept Cloud’s attention all the time on him and nervous. Other riders had seen it. He’d been the only one not to see it—and it turned out so damn simple: if he could just hold his body still and not demand Cloud’s constant attention, he could hate the sons of bitches as hard as he wanted. Horses could hear humans, just barely, but humans didn’t hear well enough to hear each other— he’d known that, sort of, as a townsman kid knew anything, even before Wesson had told him. And what that really meant had just slid off him as one of those details like long division, which he never liked so he never bothered to think about.

Stupid kid, he said to himself. Smarted himself right into a real mess. Didn’t need to know things. Didn’t like to know things. Real damned bright—now he was in a situation where he wished to God he had listened to everything his seniors had tried to tell him. He swore he’d go back to mama, if God gave him another chance, and ask her to tell him again about long division. And he’d ask Jonas Westman to tell him all the things he was doing wrong, if God just let him and Cloud get out of this.

But thinking all those things, he didn’t move. He didn’t twitch. The tarp fluttered, but he didn’t bob around controlling it, he just bit his lips and tried to keep his arms still as if he had the same strength as Watt beside him.

The fire caught, streaming sideways in the wind. “Hold the damn tarp,” Watt ordered everybody. “Hang on, damn you.”

On one level he was fascinated with what Watt was doing. He’d never seen a fire built in a gale-force wind the way Watt was doing it, with a hastily thrown-up wall of wood, to which he figured the tarp was a help, not a necessity—and he wanted to see the technique. They’d failed it once and had to take it apart; but Watt, now that his inside kindling was set and lit, started assembling his small-grade wood inside his three-sided shield of bigger pieces, working fast so that the fire would stay lit—he stuck tinder and smallest kindling in out of the wind, shielding it with the edge of his hand the second after he set in a larger stick. There was never a hesitation in what he picked next, as if he’d had the sizes of the sticks in his head all along. Fast as he was working, every stick fit as tight as could be to its neighbor, so that, just with the irregularities of the wood, the fire could breathe; but the wind couldn’t get at the fire to blow it out.

Watt stuffed his next grade of sticks in with one hand while with the other hand he began to take bigger wood from the stack— he’d built the inner frame, and it was burning. The outer frame was a chimney now, and the fire held—until, Danny thought, the really big, last-an-hour stuff could go in after the firepit was full of coals and able to handle it, and when it wasn’t so prone to throw sparks on the wind. They were scum, but they were careful scum: nobody burned a forest down.

Watt was scum. But he had an amazing skill.

“More wood,” Watt said. “That wind’s going to burn a pile of it tonight.”

The others grumbled about it, but they moved off. Danny, being still, followed them with his eyes, thinking—

But Harper hadn’t gone. Harper sat with his arms on his knees staring at him, and it was Watt himself who went to gather wood with Quig.

“I really wouldn’t,” Harper said darkly.

“Get more wood?” Danny played stupid. Harper didn’t buy.

“You know what I mean. Go ahead. Run. See what happens.”

He didn’t want Cloud involved in his thoughts. Not moving at all took willpower. He stared at Harper, thinking that Harper might be asking himself why Danny Fisher was so quiet this evening.

He wasn’t faster than a bullet in the back. That was certain. And Harper had served notice he was watching.

But he got up slowly after a moment, left the fireside and joined the men gathering wood, choosing at the same time to move as far away from the horses as he could, into the teeth of a freezing wind. He started gathering up deadfall, to prove his honest intentions.

But he knew now, all but bubbling over with the discovery, that he could keep quiet enough to have private thoughts, he could do what the senior riders did—and he resolved then and there that he was going to leave these men in a snowbank if he got a chance.

He didn’t know woodcraft the way the long riders did, that was his most serious handicap—like, right now, he would dearly love to know whether, say, common wood fungus was at least moderately poisonous. He could get plenty of it off the deadfalls, and he’d, oh, so gladly put it in their tea, and fake drinking his.

But if it turned out to taste too strong or if it wasn’t debilitating fast enough, they’d shoot him; and they’d shoot Cloud, because Cloud would go for their throats in an eyeblink if things blew up.

So that wasn’t a good idea. Whatever he did, he had to make good on fast, and it couldn’t give them a target. Like maybe if the snow got worse.

Maybe if a blizzard came. The middle of the night. He could slip away.

There had to be riders up here, maybe riders who wouldn’t take to what Harper or Jonas or anybody intended. He wasn’t alone up here. There were whole villages full of people up here—and they had to be close now that they’d come up on the phone lines, where Stuart had to come—

God, shut that thought down. Fast.

But that the Hallanslakers were willing to camp out in the cold like this, when there were supposed to be shelters with free food and firewood, as he understood it, argued to him that they were scared of Jonas. Harper or somebody had been thinking about Jonas earlier—even seniors were sometimes noisy. Harper had been thinking about Jonas and about Stuart—and it hadn’t been pleasant thoughts.

If Harper thought Jonas and his friends were holed up in a shelter for the night, or, probably worse from Harper’s point of view, if Jonas had gotten up here first, he’d have gotten to shelter. That could be the reason Harper had them out here shivering in the cold: they were scared to shoot it out with Jonas at a shelter where Jonas had cover, and maybe get shot at themselves. That was too much like a fair fight.

And they were going to go on skulking in the brush and the cold until they did find a place Harper didn’t mind shooting.

He wasn’t acutely scared anymore: he’d reached a stomach-upsetting kind of terror he could live with—but trouble was, now that he’d figured out how to be quiet—he didn’t know how to do anything else but be quiet without giving everything he thought away; and he didn’t know at what moment something was going to scare Cloud and upset the balance.

At which point Harper might decide he wasn’t any use finding Stuart, and that he was a liability among them if they ran into Jonas.

He stayed out at the perimeter as long as he dared, so long his fingers were growing numb through the gloves. He gathered up a fair armful of wood and followed Watt back to the fire. He dumped it down and squatted down on the edge of the wind-blown heat, chafing warmth back into his fingers, avoiding Harper’s eyes. Harper had never left the fire.

In the same moment he felt Cloud’s attention skitter over him— Cloud just brushing by his thoughts—and he thought of the fire and of and He liked the biscuits. They weren’t as good as mama’s. But they were going to taste good on a cold night. Cloud was going to like the biscuits. He ought to tell them use less soda. That was the taste they could use less of. He’d asked his mama, on one of his visits home, and she’d been making biscuits at the stove and he’d stood right there and paid real careful attention to the measures and everything she did, because he really missed those biscuits.

He stuck a little wood in the fire, not too much. They wanted less flame than coals in this wind. Nothing to carry into the trees. Hope they had a decent meal tonight. Watt scorched everything.

Always on the edge of catching the pan afire. He was better.

Close, close, close, he mustn’t look up. Little nervousness among the horses—they could solve it. He didn’t need to look up.

Mama said they’d have to. So they got better at it. Even Sam.

Mama would buy some scuffed up table or chair from a shop or another household and do a little sanding and fixing and painting.

Then she’d trade it to a store or direct to an individual for more than she paid for it.

Or sometimes she just did refurbishings for the same owner— any of which paid money that came in handy before he started bringing in money and fixed the place up.

Mama would be sitting there with the bread baking, all the while she’d be painting flowers on a chair—she liked that part—or sanding and swearing—she always swore when she sanded—

There was always some piece of furniture in the apartment that you weren’t supposed to touch or sit on, and it always made his nose run when she’d been painting.

But the bread-smell was over all of it,

Harper never stopped watching him. Just watching.

They’d warned the village. They’d advised everybody lock the doors and the shutters and stay inside no matter what. People had guns. They had their storm-shutters locked.

The rogue-feeling went away and it came back, maybe two, maybe three hours into the night, as if it was feeling them over, and it wasn’t a thing anybody could catch with human senses. You didn’t know when you’d started being afraid. You just knew by the prickling terror behind you that it was there again. A shutter banging in the wind. Rattle of sleet against the roof. A sense of presence…

Something was near the walls.

“It’s Vadim,” Mina murmured as the three of them, sitting by their fireside in the shelter, listened. “God, it’s Vadim.”

“No!” Tara said sharply, because it was coming by way of their own horses now, she could hear them, could hear Flicker take up that refrain. Mina shoved her chair back and Luisa grabbed her arm, arguing with her not to go outside, to stay with them.

“That thing could be anywhere on the mountain. It’s no good going out there. God, it’s echoing in every creature in the woods, can’t you hear it? That’s what it’s doing—that’s why it’s so damn loud—”

The whole mountain seemed to echo it, loneliness, mourning over something lost. It echoed failures, or things undone, a terrible melancholy. It gnawed, it burrowed, it ran, it flew, it crawled—it slavered with winter-hunter and ached in rut and leapt along the ground, aching with loneliness and fear—

Then it dissolved, flew apart in screaming rage.

Flicker was still there. Skip and Green were, Tara could feel them through Flicker’s noisy presence and, Luisa’s advice to the contrary, she went and snatched up her coat.

“Tara,” Luisa protested.

“I’m fine, dammit, Flicker’s not. I’m going out there.”

“We’ll all go,” Mina said.

So that was the way it was—they went out to the porch and down into the nightbound yard. Snow was gusting on a fierce and biting wind.

Then a presence came to them,

Tara thought. fool.>

She lost her balance—slipped and skidded on the ice. Mina had her arm.

A presence so… lost… so idly strayed from reality… came flitting through her senses.

it imaged.

Brionne with the horses. All the horses loving her. Brionne in the moonlight, in the snow… the numbing, gentle snow… >

“Get away from us!” Tara shouted into the dark.

papa—!>

<“Tara!”>

Luisa hurt her arm, she grabbed it so hard. She slid on the ice and Mina grabbed both of them.

went out across the ridge. <Wanting in. Wanting in—>

“It’s her,” Tara said. “It’s the Goss kid—God, stay here. Keep the gates shut.”

“Where are you going?”

The ambient was so live it didn’t need a horse near. slammed.>

<Mama,> the voice cried on insubstantial winds. <Mama, let me in… >

Tara ran, sleet stinging her face—she ducked through the village gate and let it slam behind her; she ran not for where instinct or whatever drove her told her to go: instinct was screaming at her to go the other way. She ran against it—ran for reason, ran down the center of a deserted, sleet-hammered street, all the way to the end of the street, her throat hurting with the cold air. She ran up the wooden, icy steps to the marshal’s office and pounded her fist on the door.

She heard someone coming, footsteps inside. The feeling of presence behind her all around her—was overwhelming, a wave of living anger rolling toward them, from all around the walls.

“Who’s there?” the marshal called out. “Who’s out there?”

“Tara Chang!” she shouted back, holding to the rail—resisting the impulse to look back and see if anything was in the street. “It’s here—” she said, and got a chill breath as the marshal opened the door. The marshal’s wife was holding a pistol aimed at her: she paid it only passing attention. “It’s the rogue. It’s the kid. Brionne. She’s with it. She’s wanting her mama and her papa. You’ve got to send word down to Tuck—keep those gates shut. No matter what!”

“It’s a kid out there,” the marshal began. “We’ve got to shoot that horse.”

“It’s hell out there.” She found herself shaking. “It’s my partners out there. It’s our men. It’s that kid. We can’t help them. We can’t do anything but hold that damned gate, do you hear me? Get out there! Keep that gate shut, I don’t care who wants in! That horse comes with her and everything in the woods comes next! Keep it out!”

The marshal went for his coat and his scarf and his shotgun. “Watch the boys!” the marshal said to his wife. “If it’s the Goss kid—she might try to get to the boys! Keep that door locked!”

Tara stood there shivering in the wind, trying to keep her hand from freezing to the icy porch rail—trying to be deaf and blind and numb to the ambient. Mina and Luisa were with the horses. She knew.

She knew that the Goss boys were still in lockup.

She knew that Brionne was with the rogue.

She knew that Brionne was calling to all that was hers—her mother, her father, her brothers, her friends and acquaintances… every one.

Brionne had never gotten on Flicker’s good side. But she was calling to and in the lame way she’d always imaged their names.

She called to But not to her. Not to Tara Chang. Brionne hated her. She felt the lost presence flit past her in anger, and she ran for the camp, assaulted by the ambient.

<“Papa!”> it wailed.

Shutters were opening. Lights from those windows flared out onto the snow, here and there down the village street. A door opened, a larger spill of light.

Answering that voice.

That was the way they heard it. The town was ready and armed for a rogue.

They heard a lost kid. They heard Brionne Goss wanting in, wanting rescue.

“Stay inside!” Tara screamed at the tanner, who came out on his porch. “That’s it, damn it! Get that door shut!”

She didn’t know whether he listened. She ran for the only source of help, half-blinded by the sleet, through the narrow gap of the Little Gate, into the rider camp—and had a clear sense of Flicker’s sending, that shutting out the world.

But Skip and Green were absent from the noise. There was only a darkness wanting wanting

“Mina? Luisa?” She ran for the den, skidding on the uneven ice—caught herself on the corner post as she came inside, unprepared for the darkness that rushed at her— was all she knew.

It flared past like a black rage and she pasted herself to the wall, blind and deaf to everything but and and as it passed—

she realized then, and and she heard so intense and so close a sending that she couldn’t see where she was.

Gunfire, then. In the village, outside, she wasn’t sure. Shots were going off, echoing off the walls.

<“Luisa!”> she yelled, trying to get through the ambient, but came down like blizzard. She wasn’t sure of Luisa’s whereabouts. She wasn’t sure of Green’s. She only knew Flicker’s, and she didn’t want to lead Flicker to disaster.

she sent and felt rather than saw her way—as if the whole world had gone to snow.

She reached the open air and the blast of the wind, she wanted and she went the way she’d sensed Mina go.

But she heard someone screaming then, into an ambient gone red and black amid the white, a voice beyond the village wall, a voice near the village gate.

<“That’s my daughter! ”> it cried—and she saw Brionne, Brionne, Brionne—wanting mama—>

An image of as and and came flying together in the air, assembled itself in a rush that reached the heart, the mind, the gut, one creature, one self, one mind—anything else was and Tara was

She thought she saw—sight came fleetingly through the —the outer gate of the rider camp standing wide against the dark.

She thought she saw snow whirling about her—white, thick snowfall, and wind so loud she couldn’t hear the screaming or the howling it made. It just was, and the snow was, and the cold was.

came up beside her, it brushed against her, it called to her, and her hands knew its shape, found its mane to clench onto, and her body knew where, as she launched herself, she would find and and

Then—then she was and and, blind and deaf as she was, she became the whiteout, she became the blizzard— blind and deaf and

Nothing could touch her. If she’d had another purpose she’d lost it. If she’d had another destination she didn’t know.

She was in the woods again, sweeping through the trees, and nothing more.

Harper hadn’t moved. Quig had come back with another load of firewood and dumped it.

But suddenly something was wrong—Danny felt it, just as the firewood struck the ground and scattered, like something witnessed at that half-aware substitute for sleep, a thing of strange importance and insignificant aspect. He felt a jolt, just the faint brush of something like horses, running horses—and acute fear—like Shamesey streets, when the horses imaged together—

The horses were in it—they snorted and milled about. But that wasn’t the only source. It was coming from somewhere completely opposite. It was huge, and full of anger, and it had a thousand feet. It moved—

Danny sent. “What in hell is it?” Quig asked the air in general. “Could be a cat,” Harper said.

“Cat, hell!” Quig reached for Danny’s arm. Danny hadn’t expected it, and scrambled backward from Quig’s hand, hit on his rump as Quig scrambled after him—and he scrambled away, scrambled up, turned and ran.

A weight hit from his back—he fell, skidded on the snow with that weight on his back trying to pin his arms. He spat snow from his mouth, dug with his knees, to get to

“Back that horse off!” Harper yelled from somewhere, and he panicked, wanted wanted

He felt the jolt of nighthorse feet on the ground, sharp pivot, and

But none fired, or he’d gone deaf. He was still spitting snow when whoever had fallen on him hauled him up by the scruff and shook him, and somebody else grabbed his arm and cuffed him on the ear.

He could see Harper then. He knew where he was, in camp with the Hallanslakers, in the dark, in front of Harper, and Cloud was

Cloud had left him. He didn’t know what could make Cloud leave him—Cloud never had, never would, but he felt something so scary, so dark, so threatening in the ambient—

Then he felt as if the mountain were flying apart, as if the ground were dropping out from under all of them, as if the trees were about to fall on them.

“It’s the damn kid!” somebody yelled.

somebody was sending. He thought it was the man who was holding him, but he didn’t feel calm—he felt as if he were drowning in ice water, sinking and sinking in it, the whole world gone from flying apart to folding in on him, pieces coming together, heavier and heavier, the red-haired rider, and Stuart—

“Kid!” Someone cuffed him hard, across the face, and in that moment’s shock he tasted blood.

Blood was part of the ambient.

Blood was the smell, was the wind, was the air, was the taste on the tongue—blood was the anger and the envy and the hate and people were shooting—

“Get that horse back,” Harper said to him, holding his face in a hurtful grip. “You hear me, kid. Get that horse back!”

He tried.

“It’s his horse,” Watt said out of the dark behind him, and Harper hissed:

“It’s the rogue, fool. That’s what it is—watch the dark! Watch the dark, dammit, and hold on to the horses! Keep them here!”

But more real than Harper’s voice came something moving and dark—an ambient full of screams, cold of snow under Danny’s hands—he tasted blood and sprang up and ran, with

“That’s Tarmin,” Quig said. “That’s Tarmin gates, damn, that’s Tarmin, do you see it? They’re shooting each other!”

“You got to catch him, you got to, you fool! Stop him! He’s doing it!”

<—fire blazing up, firelight on snow. Gunshots. People yelling—people falling under him—>

He couldn’t hear. Somebody hit him across the face. His head snapped back and then he was in the woods again. His right ankle had folded, but the hands that held his arms had held him up, dizzied as he was, and cut the blood off from his lower arms.

He felt the entire side of his face hot and numb, and he was he was he was

He wanted his family. His. Now. And they were Papa!>

A second time a blow landed across his face. Second time someone shook him.

“God, shut him up!” someone yelled, and he saw “He’s spooked the horses, shit! Stop!”

but he was

He had no other chance. He got his knee under him, he lurched to his feet, branches breaking—immediately recoiled from a sheer drop, and ran along the edge.

<(Voices—screams in the houses. Fire reflecting on window-glass. Embers glowing on the wind.)>

He ran and ran, breaking through branches, plowing through thickets, blind, desperate. His side caught an agonizing stitch and the world was still churning with images,

But snow began to muffle the shouts and the screams, as if the wind-driven white that skirled through the dark had deadened the pain and smothered the fear.

He walked, breathing through his mouth, holding his side, knowing he was free of Harper, but equally well aware he had no gun, no supplies, no idea where he was going.

<(Log walls and fire. Gates open. Going through streets, on horseback.

<(Looking. Searching.

<(Days-old ice crunching under three-toed nighthorse feet.

<(Everything the same as she remembers, all the street the same, but windows reflect orange with fire. Fire through veils of sleet, sleet flying out of the dark, touching face, making stars in nighthorse mane—

<(Gunshot. Horse jumping forward, horse wanting fight, wanting her, wanting—what horse can’t find.

<(Red-haired woman.

<(But she can have red hair like that. She can be grown like that. No one can ever stop her again, no one can tell her no.

<(Wanting what horse wants. Wanting what she can’t find, a mind she doesn’t hear, but listening, listening, all up and down the streets she knows, because it might be here.

<(Faces come. Voices come. People walking about their daylight business as if they’d forgotten the dark.

<(People buying and selling.

<(Old woman making soap—telling her go away, don’t bother her.

<(Riders with horses—telling her go away.

<(Girl with baby—blond braids. Pretty clothes. Kick and bite. Nasty girl.

<(Her hair… red like the autumn leaves. Fringes fluttering about her. Her horse going where she pleases.

<(Horse trampling over something in the street. Not caring.

<(Buildings reflect fire on window-glass. Fire shines paler on the snow.

<(White drifts down. Ash. Or snow.

<(Riding, searching, still, for what she can’t find.)>

<“Cloud!”> he shouted out loud, desperate. The other sending was pouring over him, overwhelming all sight, all sense of direction.

<(The dark is all, dark streets, new snow falling—)>

<Thump.

Ahead turned to up, fire to night, ash-fall to snow-fall, thick white puffs fell in a stillness of the wind, on his sweating face, into his dry mouth.

The world was strained to the limit. He felt half of him missing and he desperately wanted that piece of him, stretched thin into the dark—

Not she. He. Him. Here. <(She)> screamed out into the dark after what she was missing.

But he was alive. Breathing. And the strain grew less. The missing part drew near to him. He’d dropped off a ledge. He’d fallen in a snowbank. He’d had the breath knocked out of him.

He lay there, got his breath back, relatively undamaged—too stunned to be alarmed at the moving of the brush on the ledge over him.

Not surprised, either, at the The missing half of him had shown up and Cloud wanted Cloud was going to jump.

“No!” Danny found self-awareness at least to wish

Then before Cloud tried it again, he had to move an arm, a leg— finally to turn on elbows and knees and crawl up the snow-chill slope, past the screen of thorn branches—

He hauled himself up by the brush that overhung the last of the slope. He was on his feet then, couldn’t remember getting up, just

Cloud made a sound between a cough and a snort and shivered up and down his shoulder. Cloud wanted Cloud wanted but Cloud didn’t know what the enemy was. Cloud was as lost as he was in the battering of sendings; and Danny spared one frightened thought for

But after that Danny just thought and heaved himself up, belly-down and grace-be-damned, to Cloud’s snowy, willing back.

Cloud moved, walked, not sure where they were going except

Danny rode, not at all sure where he was going, except that, for the hour, he was where that thing wasn’t, that thing that he’d felt and had no question—

—no question she was a killer.

He heard too much. He didn’t want to listen anymore. He just wanted Cloud; he wanted to drift on through the dark and the downfalling white. He wanted and from the things he saw, that still careened centerless about his memory.

He rode until he was keenly aware of the snow and the cold.

He rode until his hands and feet and face were numb.

He rode until he found himself in and knew that was a place he’d never, ever been.

Then he was afraid to go farther. He’d been following the beacon of that place—but it was nowhere he wanted to reach.

Nothing stirred. Nothing dared. The air felt warmer than it had. The wind had stopped blowing. The snow fell, real snow, in thick, fat lumps.

he thought.

Because he remembered and somehow it had come up in what Stuart had told him, about having a knife, and how a knife should be last of everything you lost, because with that, no matter how desperate you were, no matter how much of your gear you’d lost, you could make a den, keep warm, get food, stay alive.

He hadn’t even the knife. They’d taken that.

But he had his bare hands. In everything about him, even, if it got to that, tearing the fringes off his jacket for bindings, he had the makings of shelter, of tools.

He slid off Cloud’s back, imaging and Cloud hovered about him as he set to furiously, tearing at branches with his hands, leaning his body against them to break them free.

Cloud tore at a few small limbs, using his teeth. Cloud thought, and spat out bits of bark.

But gloved hands jerked, ripped, twisted until branches splintered, until muscles ached. He tore at the trees, sweating and gasping for breath, until he had a pile of branches he thought was enough.

With them he made a bed, and he had Then, pulling branches over himself, he lay down on the edge of their mat, himself tucked against Cloud, warm on one side, keeping Cloud’s side warm because in that horse-smelling pocket he could make of his body and Cloud’s was the only warm air, and his chest ached and his gut ached with the fall and with shivering. A long, long time he lay there and shook, until Cloud’s warmth seeped into him.

Then Cloud himself sighed, gentle movement against his shoulder.

Snow fell on him, but that was all right. It could do that. Snow was an insulator, wasn’t what he’d heard?—as long as he had Cloud’s body radiating warmth into his.

Snow was warm, if it kept away the wind, if it kept away the dark.

If it didn’t let him dream of streets and fire reflecting off glass, and if it didn’t let him dream, sweating warm despite the cold, of dark and something more terrible than the preachers’ devils—

He wanted daylight.

God, he wanted the day to begin and this night to be over. He tried not to image, but kids, Jonas had said, couldn’t keep from noise. Kids couldn’t shut down.

(Kids in that village, oh, God, they’d have been close to that thing. Mamas and papas couldn’t do a damned thing to help them—they’d have been the first, they’d have gone to it.)

He kept seeing

Cloud snorted, shifted, settled. The whole woods was so scarily quiet you could almost hear the snowflakes land. He’d not realized that until now: the whole woods was hushed, and Cloud was part of that silence.

They’re born to this world, Stuart had said to him. They hear the Wild first. If you can’t hear what’s going on, listen to your horse. Always remember that.

Cloud’s rider listened.

Cloud’s rider lay still, noticing only the trees, only the wind, only the snow, until he was as quiet as Cloud.

He wasn’t there. For any number of very long hours, he wasn’t there.