Cloud's Rider

Chapter 18

There’d been something wrong in the night—they’d waked, at least Danny and Ridley had, armed and gone half-dressed out to the den, but they’d found nothing amiss. Ridley said he wasn’t entirely sure it was Spook bothering them: small alarms during the winter weren’t uncommon, and they’d taken their frozen selves back to the barracks and headed back to their beds.

The horses were still jumpy this morning, arguing that something had bothered them in a way that had put them in a lasting mood. Slip kicked at Rain, and Shimmer snapped. Danny took Cloud out into the yard to curry and comb him—and file a chipped center-hoof that Cloud had gotten from somewhere about the yard, possibly last night.

There were abundant horse-tracks in the snow of the yard, the overlain traces of the horses’ paths to the walls and back, to the den and to the porch of the house last night, and a lot going back and forth over the passageways that made the only hill of vantage in the camp, a ridge in the snow, not much projecting above the ground, but a hump that made a nighthorse feel he’d reached high ground, silly creature.

And now he was combing manes and tails, and Callie, with a hammer and chisel, was doing some carpentry involving the den-side passageway door, which was new wood, and which had stuck last night when they’d been investigating the trouble.

Remarkable system, those passages. Ridley said when they built the village they’d blasted down a lot of gravel and rubble, and the builders had dug in with timber shelters buried in gravel where the wildlife couldn’t get at them, and that was the start of the passages at this and other villages, except one that was totally passageways and no houses at all.

A lot of effort, Danny thought. They’d laid in dirt atop the rubble, probably hauled up from the lower slopes, and compost of evergreen needles, just anything the village could put down for the brief growing season, so he heard from Ridley, for gardens—for the greens and vegetables they couldn’t afford trucked up. In summer, so Ridley said, all of Evergreen broke out in vegetable gardens and flowers.

No gardens on this side of the wall, however, where there were hungry horses to raid the plots.

Above this place on the mountain, with one exception around Mornay, was snow. Above here was uncompromising rock. It took a lot of effort just for humans to survive on what little soil clung here, and when a lad from the bustling crowds of Shamesey thought about it he marveled that humans not only survived, they built fairly fancy houses, and churches, and such, on the hard rock and thin soil of a mountain.

Pretty damn stubborn people, he said to himself, and took up a length of Cloud’s tail to get a knot out.

Cloud of course switched the tail, being ticklish.

“Cut it out!”

A lot better if he could take Cloud outside the walls regularly and at whim. Village camp walls weren’t as wide as Shamesey town’s, and playing chase around a small yard just wasn’t enough for Cloud. Ridley said they could go hunting whenever they liked, and often, once they could get the horse business settled—

But that wasn’t amusement. And it wasn’t settled. His personal guess that it wouldn’t leave despite the turn in the weather seemed to have been right, and neither he nor Ridley was looking forward to that matter. He ought, he thought sometimes, to have gone on to Mornay—but what could he have told them? The suspicion of a suspicion of a horse no one could deal with? That two riders who ought to have been able to call it in had failed and now they were down to spooked hunters and short supply of game with a situation down the slope at Tarmin he didn’t think maybe anybody had managed to tell Mornay or any other village up here.

Worrisome thought: maybe there were reasons Ridley didn’t want Mornay involved, or people talking to Ridley didn’t want Mornay involved. Certainly Ridley had been talking to the marshal from time to time, and they still had the horse on their hands, which, no matter the reasons that they weren’t talking to the other village, he had some chance of dealing with. He could have dealt with it without harming it if it weren’t for the Goss kids; and now he had Brionne Goss on his mind more often than he liked to have any thought of her near the surface.

He wished he’d been able to get his hands on the horse. That would be the best thing. But he wasn’t sure it was possible—especially with the distraction and attraction the village posed; and with the Rain and Jennie business. Everything in the world had conspired to keep that horse a problem to them; and dammit, it wasn’t fair, shooting at it.

But, mope about it as he would, he’d made his best and probably only good try at catching it that night he’d gone out on foot—and scared hell out of Cloud, who thought about it at the moment and swatted him with the tail, which still had one good ice-lump in it.

“Cut it out! Dammit!”

Cloud backed into him. There was in Cloud’s mind. There was—

Danny looked up. He hadn’t seen Ridley when he’d come out to see to Cloud. He hadn’t known Ridley had gone to the village, but it was a good guess in a small camp when he’d not immediately seen him at the horse den. He supposed that Ridley had gone over to confer with the hunters.

hit the ambient. Callie left her door-adjusting and he followed Callie out into the yard.

“Is Jennie in the yard?” was Ridley’s first question.

‘“Was,” Callie said. Jennie had been out currying Rain till the horses got snappish. He’d mentioned it to Callie and Callie had sent young Jennie inside to play. “Horses are nervous this morning. Thought she’d be better off inside.”

Ridley let go a breath. “Never had horse trouble before,” Ridley said. “I’ve heard—it sets off people who aren’t riders. And something happened last night. A miner’s hanging around the doctor’s place. Or he was.”

was Danny’s first, leaden thought and it sailed through and around the ambient.

“Some disturbance there last night,” Ridley said. “Somebody tried to open Darcy Schaffer’s front door. And this morning when the doctor opened her door—there’s blood all over it.”

“God,” Callie said.

“Knifing’s what they think. Wasn’t any sound of a gunshot. But the way the snow was falling—guess maybe there was a reason besides the stray that the horses were acting up. Maybe it wasn’t even here last night.”

He caught the scene from Ridley’s mind, hazily, because Cloud didn’t know buildings real well. But there was

“Not impossible somebody was trying to get to the doctor to treat a stab wound, trying to get away from the guy who attacked him. And got hit again on the porch. They’ve been poking in all the snow drifts thinking somebody could have fallen there, but there’s nothing. If we can get the gates open, I’m going to bring Slip around—”

“Into the village?” He’d never heard of such a thing.

“To see if he can find whoever it was.”

It made good sense. But it wasn’t something you’d ever do in Shamesey streets—bring a horse past the barriers, let alone into a murder scene. “You want some help?”

“No need of it. What there is to find, Slip will find. And they know Slip over there.”

“Sure,” he said. “Want some help to clear the gate?”

“That,” Ridley agreed, “would be a good thing.”

Earnest Riggs wasn’t to be found. So the marshal said, holding the hat with the bushdevil tail in his hand—a hat Earnest Riggs had kept with great care, and now—now it, like everything about the porch, was spattered with blood; not that that appalled a doctor, but the memory of last night did. Darcy stood outside shivering in a light coat, while the marshal and his deputy stood officially at her front doorway and a snow-veiled crowd of neighbors, on whom the snow was gathering thicker by the moment, were standing and gaping and gossiping below her blood-spattered porch.

They were bringing one of the riders over—and the horse—to find the missing, or track the guilty, as the marshal or the judge sometimes requested. They’d shoveled the outer gates clear so the horse could get from the rider camp to the street—and she could see that distant figure coming through.

The crowd gave back in a hurry as the rider came at a brisk pace up the street. She wouldn’t budge from the porch. It was her house, her office, her daughter upstairs in her bedroom. She’d spent a bad and a sleepless night, sitting up with the gun she passionately hated, and she wasn’t giving ground to any threat—least of all one of their own riders, doing his distasteful job this time involving her porch, her property, which had seen all too much of notoriety in the last two years—the other two incidents with the law had had the sanctity at least of tragedy. This—this was an embarrassment in front of the neighbors.

Ridley Vincint was the rider’s name, and the horse, by that fact, would be Slip. That was all she knew about riders—except that this man had been the escort supposedly watching over Faye, and she considered him directly to blame, and she didn’t forgive him for that, or for speaking harshly to Faye, as others reported, on that day. She tried not to think about that as he rode close enough to let the horse sniff the air and sniff the blood around the porch rail. She watched it, thinking doggedly of snow, which was what she’d always been taught to do if she was around a horse or any creature of the world, just think of snow and it wouldn’t be interested in her, and it wouldn’t—horrible thought—spread her private thoughts and her private fears to the neighbors.

The door behind her opened. She knew who it was without turning around, but turn she did as, in her nightgown, Brionne came out, with a thunderously unhappy look. The child hadn’t even shoes on her feet, for God’s sake.

And suddenly the horse gave a snort and reared up, so the rider had to fight to stay on.

“Get the kid inside!” Ridley said harshly.

“Stop it!” Brionne cried. “I won’t! You can’t tell me what to do!”

The horse backed away, shaking its head, having just smelled something, evidently, about the porch. The crowd scattered from it in panic.

All but the marshal and Jeff Burani, who stood their ground, Jeff with his hand on his gun.

“It’s her,” Ridley said. “He doesn’t like the girl. Get her out of here. Get her back inside!”

“Honey,” Darcy said, in the grip of so much craziness she didn’t know whether to protest or do what the rider said. The bare feet decided the matter. She flung an arm around Brionne to restrain her and had to hold tight to prevent her going to the rail.

“It’s just like Tarmin!” Brionne cried. “You’re just like the riders there! Go away! I hate you! I hate you and your horse! Get away from me!”

Darcy pulled her away and argued her back through the blood-spattered door into the house. For a moment—for a moment she thought she was having an asthmatic seizure or a heart attack. There was a tightness in her chest, and Brionne broke away from her toward the interior of the house, crying that she was going to get dressed and go back out there and talk to the rider if she wanted to, that she was embarrassed in front of the whole village.

“They’re awful!” Brionne was crying. “I hate them! I hate them!”

Darcy didn’t know what to do. She went back outside, trying to recover her breath and her wits in the cold air. Ridley and his horse were still there, in a large circle of spectators, a very large vacant circle, that had formed again near her porch.

“I can’t get anything,” Ridley was saying. “It’s just dark. My horse is starting to get upset. The girl remembers Tarmin too clearly. I’ll have to take him back to some distance. I’ll see if I can pick up any trail on the perimeter.”

“This is the craziest damn thing,” marshal Peterson said; and about that time John Quarles arrived, and came up on the porch, blessing the place with holy water, a process Darcy would have skipped on most days, but right now it was her house that had been denied, her doorway where yet one more life had ended, and holy water and John’s willingness to face the devil both came welcome, with Ridley on his horse still in her sight, and Brionne inside swearing she was going to come out again, to what earthly good in this horrific business she had no idea.

But after riding all the way around the house, with much of the crowd both drifting after him and rapidly reforming their apprehensive circle when he came back, Ridley showed up again at the porch to talk to the marshal.

“I don’t get any scent of anybody with blood about them. Just here on the porch. And I’ve got to get my horse out of here. This isn’t good. I’d suggest you give the girl something to quiet her down. She’s loud in the ambient. Dangerously loud. I can’t hear anything.”

“Meaning you can’t find any thing,” Darcy said. “Don’t tell me the problem’s with the girl, Mr. Vincint, damn it, I won’t hear it!”

It was certainly the closest she’d ever stood to a horse, and she was afraid—terribly afraid, all of a sudden. She didn’t know whether it was a sending or what, but Ridley Vincint made his horse turn or it turned, or something pushed it back. It looked—if an animal could have such a look—crazed; and snapped at her, not to strike, because she was out of range, but to make clear its hostility.

“I’m going back to the camp,” Ridley Vincint said, and the horse gave a furious whip of its tail and headed back down the street toward the outer gates, quickly graying out into the snowy distance of the street.

In the same moment the Goss boys were coming up the street ahead of a flood of miners and loggers from down by the barracks, and they passed each other, Ridley and the horse fading out, the newcomers growing brighter and more solid in the haze, until the Goss boys, arriving out of breath, forced their way through what by now looked like the whole village gathering to know what had happened.

God, she hated scenes. She’d had her fill, in Faye’s death, and after that in Mark’s. She hated to be the object of gossip, and she knew now she was the winter’s topic for good and all, and maybe worse than that. She could only think in one term now—how it affected everything she hoped for, all she intended: her respectability to parent a daughter.

And the respectability of her dealings with Earnest Riggs.

The Goss brothers reached her porch and climbed the steps and that, too, was a scene bound to stick in neighbors’ minds. The Mackeys were coming, too, with hateful Mary Hardesty marching in the lead, and there was no way to go inside and let them and the marshal talk out here in front of the whole village without her knowing what they were saying. She found herself trembling, fearing that the boys were intending publicly to fault her care of Brionne, fearing that someone, somehow, in investigating what might have become of Earnest Riggs, might uncover the financial dealings she’d had with him—God knew who he’d have talked to.

Someone had gotten wind of money—she was sure of the motive and daren’t say anything to the marshal about it. If it got about that she was involved—

She didn’t know what to say.

“What’s happened?” the oldest boy wanted to know. “What’s going on here?”

“Drunken fools,” she said, that being the position she decided to take—total ignorance. But the marshal gave the long account.

“Earnest Riggs,” Eli Peterson said. “The rider didn’t find any trace of him. His bunk wasn’t slept in. Found only his hat, lying sheltered on the porch.”

“He was at the tavern last night,” somebody yelled from the crowd below the porch.

“Ernie was always at the tavern,” another voice yelled. “He’s probably got in a fight and he’s sleepin’ one off!”

“Not with this,” Peterson said. He scratched his chin and looked back at the snowy street. “I’m not finding him, the rider didn’t find him. And there’s a hell of a lot of blood. I’m taking a survey of everybody, searching all the sheds and such.”

“Ask Carlo Goss!” somebody yelled. “He picked a fight with him yesterday. He threatened Riggs. Threatened to kill him! And he was up and about way late—I saw him!”

“That’s a lie,” the younger boy yelled back. “That’s a lie, Rick Pig! He wasn’t anywhere last night but with me. And you were passed out drunk!”

“Goss said he’d kill him!” That was assuredly Rick Mackey from near the fringes. “Riggs was talking loose about his sister and he said he’d kill Riggs. Now he’s done it. Naturally his brother’d give him an alibi.”

“Carlo Goss?” Peterson said, and all of a sudden the Goss boy just jumped off the porch and broke his way through the crowd and ran.

“Carlo!” the younger boy yelled after him.

But Carlo Goss was running breakneck down the street, disappearing into the snowfall.

“Get him!” Peterson yelled. “Bring him back here!” And that was a mistake. A number of miners took out running, chasing the boy, shouting encouragement to each other.

Then the younger brother ducked past people trying to stop him and ran after all of them, in the same moment Brionne, this time shod, came out onto the porch. Darcy put an arm around her as, in the distance, Carlo Goss failed her expectation he would go to the rider camp.

No, the boy was going farther than that, as she could see from her elevated vantage. The miners hadn’t overtaken him. Randy Goss had taken that side street and gone off toward the rider camp. But Carlo, almost faded out in the snow, came to the village gates, and as she strained to see clearly what was going on, or whether Serge, who kept the gate, would catch him—he vanished altogether.

He’d opened the lesser gate and gone outside the walls—maybe to reach the rider camp across to their outside gate. Maybe he’d hoped to draw the miners away from his brother, and then go where they wouldn’t—because from what she could see, nobody else passed that gate.

Gunfire echoed back. Someone had gotten up the steps and shot.

“Stop that,” Peterson said to his deputy, and Burani walked down off the porch, went out into the street and fired his pistol into the air, at which Darcy’s nerves jumped, and Brionne jumped, and the crowd got quiet.

Did they shoot him? she was wondering. Maybe it was suicide. Maybe Carlo Goss had had words with Riggs. Maybe Riggs had come to him trying to solicit more money, and the boy had gotten mad and killed him.

The marshal was shouting to Jeff Burani to go to the riders and get them to go out after the elder boy, and Burani lit out running on the course Randy Goss had taken.

Maybe Carlo had gone toward the rider camp’s outside gate and some overzealous miner had shot him from the wall. Riders wouldn’t necessarily turn him in—not until the marshal had made a case that it was village business and none of theirs.

She hugged Brionne against her side, in the blood-spattered venue of her porch, in the wreckage of the winter’s peace. Brionne was what she kept. Brionne was hers.

“Sorry the girl had to see this,” marshal Peterson said. “Honey, if your brother didn’t do this, we’ll find out. I just want to ask him some questions.”

“He could do it,” Brionne said bitterly. “He shot our father. He shot papa, Mama died. He was in jail down there. He deserved to be.”

“Honey,” Darcy began, hoping to stem the bitter flood, but Brionne wasn’t finished.

“I was scared of him,” Brionne cried. “He was hateful. He was always hateful. He never wanted me to have anything. And he shot papa, I know he did!”

The whole snow-blinded sky was screaming, a condition against which the gunshots were faint noise, and it didn’t stop. Ridley couldn’t get his bearings except by sight, and that was diminished to an insignificant sense in the noise and the fright that raged in Slip, in Shimmer and Rain and Cloud—Jennie was terrified and trying to protect Rain, and in the stubbornness and the skip-to-any-belief character of a youngster, might be the strongest of them. Jennie didn’t equivocate—Jennie didn’t care about anything but what Jennie wanted, and that was including all the horses.

But her father knew she was no match for that thing in the village, not in age, not in angry tenacity. Ridley kept by Slip’s side, trying to keep him calm, and tried to be the stable center of their camp— but he’d compromised himself. He’d persisted against better sense, he’d tried with all he had in him to do the job his village asked him, even with that darting, unhealthy there, and he knew he hadn’t made sense to the marshal or to the doctor when he’d suddenly known he couldn’t make headway either against the search or the girl who so doggedly possessed that place. He’d had to get Slip and himself away from there.

There was in that place, there was and and so much and so hard> that Slip imaged it as so quickly you couldn’t track it,

The rider camp gate had opened for them and now it was shut— Jennie and Callie and Dan had opened it for him, the horses all bunched and sending and so strongly that presence enfolded him, snatched him into harmony with one breath, one thought, and

Now, slowly, they became and

But something had come into reach, and it was and first and foremost.

“Randy Goss,” Dan Fisher/Cloud identified that presence, and they weren’t afraid of it, skittish and angry mess that they all were. Dan was steady and Ridley held fast as Dan wanted

Ridley didn’t want anything to do with the intruders in his village. He wanted But he was sane, now, and he had a partner and a daughter with him that he wasn’t going to let down. He separated Dan out of and let him go, even while he walked to the door of the den and Slip and the rest of trailed him.

He wanted no part of the boy who came toward them—the girl’s brother, it was. The young one. Who blurted out, spilling images right and left,

<“Carlo’s run. Miners chasing him.> You got to help him!”

Dan didn’t stop to question further. He wanted and he ran alone for the gate, and into the village.

Ridley didn’t know what they were supposed to do with a village boy. The boy was crying and trying not to show it. And Jennie was upset, and wanting near her, where her hands could feel him.

Shimmer was and hanging back behind the others, both more and less afraid. Shimmer would kill if the kid made the wrong move, and on the instant of the realization how fragile Shimmer’s truce with the situation was, Ridley moved, and Callie moved, him to take the boy under his protection and Callie to hold Shimmer’s temper under her calming hands.

“It’s crazy,” the boy gasped. “It’s crazy out there. They want to kill him, and he didn’t do it!”

“We’ll prove it, then,” Ridley said: the village called on them and the horses to untangle conflicting testimonies, sometimes outright scaring the guilty into confession—but they weren’t usually as clear to the mind as this boy’s impressions came,

came very loud just then. couldn’t be still against the challenge that was pouring around them, and the boy just stared toward the rider-gate until Dan came running back, out of breath, with—

“He’s gone outside!”

“You’ve got to go after him!” the boy cried. “Danny, you got to find him—he didn’t do it! I was with him! They’re lying!”

“You,” Dan said, already running for the barracks, “stay in the camp.”

Dan intended to go find the kid. Ridley had no doubt of that— at the same time that another certainty was running over his nerves, and < blood on snow> shivered through the ambient.

“That damn horse!” Callie cried.

Dan Fisher was headed to get his gun and his gear. It didn’t take him long to run back again. Fisher was going after the horse and the boy—and he, dammit, had a camp and a village in his charge with a real problem outside his walls and a worse one in the middle of the village. He was staying behind, he had no question of it, same as if a chain bound him here.

While the ambient rang with loneliness and terror.

“Get the Goss kid on to Mornay if you reach halfway,” he told Fisher, as Fisher swung up on Cloud’s back, and the rest of them headed around end of the den to help open the gate. “In Mornay he’s out of reach and out of trouble. Sort it out in the spring.” They reached the gate and he flung the bar up. Callie and Randy and Jennie pushed it wide. “There’s one shelter on your way—he’ll surely know it, if he gets there! Hope to hell he doesn’t go on the logging trails!”

“Yes, sir,” Fisher said.

“Go fast! If you catch him before halfway come back and we’ll organize a trek over. If it’s a long run—good luck to you! Come back when you see a chance and bring us word how you are!” He gave a slap to Cloud’s rump and Fisher was off.

That left him with one rider fewer. And one scared kid more.

Breath wouldn’t come any longer. Legs wouldn’t run anymore. Carlo sprawled downslope, plunged through snow and into snow until the mountainside finally gave him up again, just casually tumbled him out of a snowy embrace and into the snow-drifting air.

He lay on his back, facing the light—a light coming through the branches of evergreens, out in the deep woods, alone, with the snow coming down on his eyes, and himself with no inclination even to blink. He’d been lucky so far. Luck wouldn’t last. Wild things didn’t go on the move much while the snow was coming down. That was why he’d lived this long. He thought he was afraid. He was too numb, now, to know what he thought.

He couldn’t let the accusations go the way they had the last time, with Randy swept up and jailed with him. Couldn’t go to the rider camp gate. The mob would have piled up there and trapped Randy—God hope that he’d run there. He’d led them off from that, and then he’d seen the outside gate, and meant to go to the camp from the outside, and get Danny to help him.

But he’d forgotten that when he got there. With all the woods in front of him, he’d just run and run and run, free of all of them, drunk on it, not using his brain—

He wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t being chased anymore. He was back in the snow, in the woods out of which he’d come to Evergreen village, as if it closed a circle, somehow, and set things back at the point of change.

Foolish thought. Delirious thought. He was in dreadful danger, having run out here unarmed and alone—he’d done something self-destructive and stupid, and he didn’t understand himself.

Except he was back on the road. When the day of the climb up here, despite the pain, proved the best day he’d lived, what could he say about himself? He knew the rest of the life ahead of him, shut in the forge, working with and for the Mackeys, wasn’t alluring. The only time he’d ever felt free and doing something for himself was the association he’d had with Danny.

Now his future didn’t even look to be going back to Tarmin, to live his life down there. It looked to be jail. Again. Locked up. With Rick Mackey to lie and swear he was guilty. Give Rick credit for brains. Not much. But enough to get everything he wanted.

Maybe that was why he’d gone crazy for a moment—until he went off a cliff. The fall and the landing was a sobering thing, that could persuade him he ought to go back and face the charges and try to prove he was innocent.

If he lived to get there. If—God—if Randy hadn’t followed him.

If Randy had followed instructions for once in his life and gone to Danny—Danny would come after him. Danny was probably already out the rider-gate and looking for him, if he just made a little noise—in all this quiet.

Then something made a sound. A horse sound.

And his world—expanded.

he thought with relief, and had that sense of where that told him as a sound came to him, of something moving. He lay still, asking himself wildly how he was going to explain things to Danny, how he was going to ask Danny to go with him, prematurely, in the winter, down to Tarmin, to get at those damned records—because he had a chance again.

came treading softly up to him, and it appeared to him incongruously upside down as he lay on his back. It— he—lowered its head and blew warm horse breath over his face—spooked up when he moved and turned and scrambled backward on his hands and knees.

was its name.

He saw > It was inside out—or outside in.

And if Danny was right it was a killer. Or could become so—on any provocation.

He got up very slowly, trying not to startle it. Danny had said, never startle Cloud, and he thought—maybe—if he just backed away very, very carefully and got to a tree—

The horse edged forward, leaned to smell over his gloved hands, got through his guard to smell his face, his snow-caked coat and trousers, his coat again and his face. The ambient was there. Spook-horse was Its friendliness could change in the instant it realized it wasn’t his rider.

“Stupid horse,” he said, trying to back away, knowing his thoughts were in themselves betraying him. He looked for a tree whose branches he could reach. And didn’t see one. “Stupid horse.” It was nuzzling his hands again, forcing its way closer. “What do you want?”

Then it dawned on him.

The horse following them up the mountain in the winter season. The horse persisting in harassing the village, even at risk of being shot. The horse— and to the village walls at night—

It wanted its rider. It wanted a rider. That was what it wanted.

“Stupid horse.” He kept backing, losing ground, cast a look back to make sure there wasn’t another cliff, and it got its nose past his hands to blow breath in his ear. Which brought his head around and his chin into collision with its spooked head-toss as it backed off. He saw stars for a second, and found it coming forward again, pushing at his hands.

“Stupid horse, you’ve got the wrong one of us. It’s my brother that wants you. Not me. I’m a blacksmith. I’m not a rider. Go away! Leave me alone!”

The black nose got past his protective hands, and nudged him full in the face, desperate for something, but Danny had told him the truth—he didn’t hear everything in a horse’s sending; and he didn’t know what it was thinking—or expect it when of a sudden the damn horse licked him on the face, across the nose and bashed his lip when he flinched. He put out his hands in self-defense and it butted against them, rubbing its face on his gloved palms, with that odd sound and that feeling Danny had said was

“Damn fool,” he said to it, but to appease it he rubbed its cheek with his hands—otherwise it was going to rub its head on him and bash his face again. That led only to a harder push and a loss of balance. He went down backward in the snow and the horse nosed him in the face, or the hands, when he pushed at it, radiating and He couldn’t get up without its nose in the way. He got as far as his knees and had its head in his middle, butting him until he patted its neck and used it for a wall to lean on getting up.

“I’m not it, silly fool. I’m not.”

But it wanted. It and he’d been with Danny long enough to know that if a horse wanted to reach his rider, he’d go through or over anything remotely possible, and this horse wanted with that kind of intensity. It wasn’t in its mind any longer. It was something else—he didn’t know what, but it wasn’t any longer, either.

Neither was he It had him, and he had it; and he couldn’t be as scared as he’d been or as desperate as he’d been or as lonely as he’d been, while the creature he’d most feared was most interested in rubbing its face against him.

he kept seeing, but not a threatening shape, just a fast-moving shadow through the trees, horse here, horse there—the eye couldn’t track it.

“Spook,” he said to a back-turned ear, his arm at the moment encircling its neck from below. He was there instead of the person it most wanted, whoever that was. He was there because he’d happened into its path, was all, when Randy had wanted it, when maybe his sister had, in her untouchable dreams. It might get him back close to the village, might save him, but certainly he hadn’t a right to it—

Which, he realized all of a sudden was his answer to every question of everything he’d ever had a chance for—he hadn’t a right. He was the oldest. He had the responsibilities, he always had been the responsible one. He had to learn the craft. He had to stay and work. He had to go to Evergreen. He had to see to Brionne’s life. To Randy’s future. To the forge down in Tarmin. All those things. Only thing he’d ever done right, only thing good anybody ever said about him, was he was responsible, and what could he do now? He was a stand-in for his brother with this creature. It wasn’t responsible to have notions of accepting it himself.

was the ambient right now. It was powerfully persuasive. It was so, so attractive to believe it could make a mistake like that, and that he might accept it and just not go back again to being responsible.

Couldn’t. Randy wouldn’t forgive him.

It could keep him safe, though, till he could deal with the charges and prove—whatever he could prove to the village.

It could—it could take him clear to Tarmin. It knew the way up and down the mountain. It could fight off predators. It could guide him, hunt for him, protect him—he didn’t need anything he didn’t have in his hands right now.

And the world around him had expanded so wide, and the smells had become so clear—he didn’t know how much he’d lost when he’d left the ambient for the Mackeys’ forge and the living he owed his brother.

If he stayed too long, he said to himself, if he let himself get used to it, he didn’t know how he’d give it up.

“God, I don’t know about horses. I don’t know how to ride. You’ve really made a mistake, horse. I swear to you I’m not it.”

Didn’t make a difference. Spook was still there. Still wanting, exploring with a curious soft nose the gloved hands he put up to save his face from being licked raw. Hands failed. The horse butted him in the chest and wanted him to

There weren’t words. He felt presumptuous even to try what it wanted him to try. Danny if he were here would call him a fool.

But Danny wasn’t here.

And he had no notion how to do the flashy move Danny could do, grabbing the mane and swinging up: he knew where that would land him. So he tried the way Danny would when things were chancy, and just bounced up to land belly-down across the horse’s back and tried, with the horse beginning to move, to straighten himself around astride.

Too far. He made a frantic grab after a black and cloudy mane that like finest wool went almost to nothing in his hands—stayed on for maybe a hundred meters, breathless with what he’d done, was doing, could do. But when the course turned uphill he slid right off over Spook’s rump.

To his surprise he landed on his feet, in a position to look uphill as the horse reached the top and looked down at him as if to say, God, I’ve picked a fool.

He slogged up the snowy incline, panting, and tried again—got on, and fell off more slowly, still clinging to two fistfuls of mane, when Spook picked up the pace.

Definitely there was a knack of balance he didn’t have.

But he got on again.

He wanted to go back and find Danny. But Danny was and Spook didn’t want to find Danny. He suddenly had that image. He couldn’t just ride into Danny’s sights—when Danny thought Spook was a danger to the village. He couldn’t go back and get Spook killed for no reason.

He knew now as long as the village chased him, Randy had a chance to do what he’d told Randy to do if things got bad—go get Danny’s help; with Randy staying in the rider camp, the marshal at least couldn’t include a fourteen-year-old in a murder charge.

He had to talk to Danny. But on his terms. After he’d had time to think what to do, what he wanted, where he was and where he wanted to go.

Spook had hit a rhythm and broke into a run that didn’t pitch him off. They’d reached a road—the road, a road, he didn’t know— where there was easy moving and for a hundred meters or so he was with Spook, and no longer fighting for balance—it was just there. It was wonderful, wild, and right in a way he’d never found anything just happen for him.

Until the stop that almost pitched him over Spook’s shoulder.

Danny was there. On Cloud. With a

Spook saw it, too. Spook swung around and bolted and he didn’t know how he stayed on, except the double handful of mane, both legs wrapped tight and his head ducked down because he swayed less that way.

“Carlo!” he heard Danny yell at him. “Carlo, it’s all right, come back!”

Couldn’t take the chance. Couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t.

was the only safety. It was what Spook knew. Or he did. He’d have trusted Danny. But Spook was afraid. And he thought now he should have been.

“Damn it!” Danny cried. “Carlo!”

But Carlo wasn’t hearing him. Couldn’t hear him, maybe. Or Spook-horse’s state of mind was contagious.

Chase him, maybe. But push him on a mountain road with no-knowing-what ahead—no. he wanted of Cloud, and tried sending into the ambient,

Cloud didn’t think so. Cloud’s mind conjured and Which wasn’t the case, but that was where Spook had consistently been, long enough that it was part of Cloud’s thinking.

Which he had to calm down. Cloud was of a mind to right now, and that wasn’t what he wanted.

he thought, patting Cloud’s neck as they walked along the well-defined track in the snow. “It’s all right,” he told Cloud. He didn’t know how far Carlo might make the chase—but he was willing to go that far. He’d come out with his kit, his cold-weather gear and his guns. He was equipped. He’d taken longer than he wanted getting onto Carlo’s trail.

He’d known when had hit the ambient that he’d been too late, and he’d only come up on them because they were so obsessed with each other, in that way of new pairings, that they wouldn’t have heard a herd of horses coming.

He’d made his mistake when he’d hesitated—one way or the other, shoot fast or don’t shoot. Spook wasn’t a green horse from the mountains, playing tag with echoes of gunshots and sprays of dirt on the hillside, the way Cloud had done with the gate-guards down in Shamesey two years ago. Spook very well knew what guns were, and he’d had one rider shot to death.

Wasn’t going to have a gun pointed at him, no. And he’d been asking himself down to the moment the pair turned up in front of him whether he was going to be obliged to shoot the horse to save Carlo.

The lingering question was, should he have, and whether he’d just stood back and let somebody he was supposed to protect go off on a horse that had last belonged to a crazy man.