Cloud's Rider

Chapter 5

With the storm-light all around them, and with the snow coming down on a steady wind, the woods took on an illusory sense of peace, a wind-swept, chill peace that bid fair to swallow down the weary— the mountain proving too vast, the snowy night and the wind trying to fold them in—fatally so. What had been traction was getting to be a knee-high barrier to horse and human.

“We’ve missed the shelter,” Carlo said.

“We’ll get there.”

“I think it’s behind us.”

“What do you want? Go back and run into that horse?”

“You said it wouldn’t follow us!”

“Yeah, well, best guess.”

“It can’t be this far!”

“So hire another rider!”

“Don’t give me an answer like that! What are we going to do?”

“If we’ve missed it,” Danny said, struggling for calm, “—if we have missed it, there’s another shelter.”

“There’s another! God, it’s hours on! It’s getting late! The sun’s gone! We could miss the shelter ahead of us, too, Danny! What are we doing?”

“We don’t know we’ve missed the first one!”

“There’s logging trails that spur off this road. We could be off on one of them!”

“I know. I know about them. There’s three. We never bear right into the trees. That’s what Tara said. All I can say. Keep walking.”

“Dammit,” Carlo said. “Dammit.”

“Yeah,” he said. He ran out of breath for talking. The shadow that was Cloud was pulling ahead of them again, nothing but a grayness in the ambient and a grayness in the softly felling snow.

They’d pull and breathe, now, pull and breathe, Randy on the travois, half-aware, neither of them who were pulling having breath to talk. But that ominous sending came to them now and again and drove them to greater effort. Danny was sick at his stomach, he’d had a nosebleed, which he only realized because the blood showed up dark on his glove and which confounded itself with the dreadful image chasing them.

We’re in trouble, was all Danny could say to himself. It had assumed a rhythm along with the pulling: We’re in—real bad—trouble.

“We’d better look for a spot to tuck down,” he said to Carlo. “Dig in and stay. We’re out of options.”

It meant Brionne was going to die for certain. But they were down to Randy’s life. And down to their own. There were trees. He had a hatchet.

“Damn that thing!” Carlo cried, stumbling to a stop. “I’ll shoot it!”

That was Cloud answering the challenge. Cloud had swung about, also stopped in his tracks, head up, ears flat, nostrils catching the night wind, and Danny dropped the travois and grabbed Cloud by the mane, imaging He was scared Cloud was going to take out chasing that sending, and Cloud did drag him a distance through the snow, until weariness had its effect and Cloud came to his senses.

Cloud stood shivering after that. But Cloud knew his rider was beside him at that point, snorted loudly, and listened when Danny imaged

Cloud agreed, also wanting and Danny let go all but a single handful of his mane and walked past Carlo without a word, because Cloud’s state of mind was as precarious as it could possibly be right now.

“Hey!” Carlo’s ragged voice came from behind him. It was a moment before Carlo could overtake him, pulling the travois alone to the point where he stopped—Carlo was and

“What are you doing?” Carlo cried. Carlo ran out of strength in that last effort and dropped to his knees.

He didn’t know what he was doing. He had Cloud headed in the right direction. That was where his thoughts were. But he took one pole, Carlo hauled at the other, and they pulled in Cloud’s track.

From Randy there was nothing but the image of

Trees were consistently on either side of them, arguing they had somehow missed the shelter and, almost indistinguishable from drifts, there were banks of snow-covered undergrowth that argued whatever this track was, it was used enough to keep the brush down. Trucks in this country dragged chain from their undercarriage to maintain the roads clear of brush and keep the ruts from making high centers; this was surely a road of some kind—if it wasn’t theirs, if they had gotten diverted onto a logging trail, it might lead to a camp, deserted in this season as the miners headed for villages for the winter, or even dug-in miners, fools so crazy for digging they wouldn’t leave for the winters.

But there’d be a shack strong enough to sleep in, if they could find it in the blowing snow. If they could just get a place to tuck in, even a deep place in the rocks, then they could wait it out—and hold off the horse that was stalking them.

Only if they could get Cloud into it. Only if they could keep him from challenging that horse. He might win.

He might not.

They perceived something else near them, too, something angry and curious that wasn’t a horse. Wildlife was disturbed by the intrusion. Wild things were waking from storm-slumber.

Deep, deep trouble, Danny began to say to himself, and in that inattention put his foot in a hole. He went down, and made Carlo fall. For a moment they both lay there, neither with the strength to move.

Then Cloud broke the force of the wind, coming up to shove with his nose at his back, and slowly, shaking at Carlo to move him, Danny began to get up. He’d gotten snow into his cuffs. He tried to get rid of it, got his feet under him somehow.

“Need to rest,” Carlo gasped.

“You got a kid freezing faster than you are. His body’s thinner. Get up. Now!”

Carlo moved, and got to his knees, and got on his feet.

They struggled along what, for they knew, was indeed a logging trail. There wasn’t any sense of climbing or descending, no way to tell they weren’t walking to some dead-end clearing out across the broad face of Rogers Peak.

the image kept coming to him:

didn’t work. Cloud didn’t understand anything Cloud couldn’t picture and silence didn’t translate when Cloud was distraught.

came back to him. Then came:

Rogue-image.

Danny countered desperately.

But that was a trap. It was easy to get to thinking about that and just—not to come back from that image. And anything that faltered, anything that hesitated in the Wild, anything that took a wrong path and broke a leg—it died.

When Men had come down to the world in their ships, horses had been the only thing that had come snuggling up to humans, wicked as they were, being the Beasts that God had sent on the settlers—

And some of them had to take the gift and be damned to save the rest, because the rest without horses, without riders, wouldn’t have made it.

You’re going to hell, his father had yelled at him.

But what he was doing was not wicked. Trying to get these boys to safety was not evil.

“Slow down!” he yelled at Cloud, as Cloud began to widen the lead on them, breaking the way through the drifted snow, making a path for them.

But Cloud wouldn’t stop. Cloud threatened and wanted

Carlo didn’t say anything about what Cloud was sending—maybe he heard, maybe he didn’t. But he moved as if he had heard, and pulled desperately on his pole—got up without urging when his feet stumbled on the deep snow.

It wasn’t just a sending. The sound of a bell came unmistakably, now. Cloud was still breaking the path ahead of them, thinking and and

We’re going to make it, Danny began to say to himself, half in tears. We’re going to make it.

But—

Rider-shelters out in the wilderness didn’t have bells, —did they?

God, had he led them not past one shelter—but past two? That was a village gate bell.

Had the junior rider in his blind, stupid desperation—just led them all the way to Evergreen?

The den was not only the safest place to be: it was the only place they could do anything besides stand watch in the guard-stations above the walls—which Callie reported the marshal and five men were doing, now, on the village side of the wall.

And by a stretch of awareness, once the horses caught the notion of the marshal on guard from Callie, the villageside guards were near enough to the den that the horses were vaguely aware of them as a force.

That was useful. That meant there couldn’t be alarm over there villageside without them in the camp hearing it.

Better than villageside guns against the Wild, the horses were wary and watching against a sending so moiled and confused. With Slip and Shimmer on guard, nothing harmful would insinuate a sending close enough to make either the guards in the village or them in the rider camp do something stupid, which was generally how you died in the Wild—a gate opened, a latch forgotten. Haste. Confusion. Short-term memory overpowering a human’s long-term thought.

Ridley didn’t intend to make mistakes here. That was what they all said to each other, including Jennie, but Ridley paced and fretted, and Slip made frequent forays outside to sniff the wind and threatened, until Callie, sitting on a straw bale, said, “Quiet, for God’s sake,” and Shimmer’s irritation came through with it.

“It could very well be miners,” Ridley said finally, and leaned against the post by her. “But I don’t recognize that horse. Do you?”

“Road drifted shut, maybe,” Callie said after a moment—meaning some rider could be coming to them instead of back to his own village. A road drifted beyond the strength of a single horse to clear it—that was one explanation, and a rider would indeed go to the nearest village. Maybe a hunting party had gotten caught out and couldn’t make it back to Mornay village, which was nearest to them down the road—the land-sense was too diffuse yet to pin the direction down.

Possible too, if somebody had been in longer-lasting trouble out there, a bad storm could be exactly when a party dug in might make their break and run for the nearest village, hoping the predators would stay put in dens. It would be a terrible risk. But he’d heard of miners taking that measure without a rider.

Except—this party had a horse.

He didn’t want to think about dire possibilities in too specific images: the night was chancy enough and they had a scared and sleepy kid on their hands.

“They’re coming in,” Callie muttered. “It’s getting stronger the last while.”

“Mama?” Jennie said, and stirred awake in a frightened jerk.

“Hush.” Callie stroked Jennie’s hair. “Nothing’s happening.”

“I had a bad dream,” Jennie said, and Rain came close and nosed at her. Jennie reached out and patted him, and tucked down again where it was warm.

They couldn’t lie to Jennie. They couldn’t hold her out of what was happening or protect her from it—eight years old, and there was so very little time in which to learn all she had to know to survive—including when it was time to be scared, or angry, or how to keep herself in check to hold onto the horses and not let them spook, because in Shimmer’s and Slip’s reckonings, let alone in Rain’s, Jennie was all of a sudden and in this crisis a serious presence—when she wasn’t drifting off asleep.

Just last fall she’d still been and even lately Shimmer still protected her that way; but Shimmer was pushing Jennie away tonight the way Shimmer shoved Rain aside, who was her last, now-grown foal.

Young horse. No brakes on his sensing things. No self-protection. He belonged with a herd, not in a winter den with a pregnant mare, a stallion in rut, and a kid herself years from puberty in close mental contact with a horse that was in the throes of it. He didn’t like it under ordinary circumstances.

But he could no longer blame Rain for the sending out there. It was real, and Callie was right, it was coming in: they could all feel the sense of getting closer by the passing minute.

And it was from the direction of the Climb, not from the direction of Mornay—that was increasingly sure in the sending the nearer it came. If it was a rider from anywhere on the High Loop, they’d have had to have ridden past Evergreen to get to that side of the village.

“Up the Climb,” Callie said faintly. “Why on earth?”

So Callie heard it the same way, and became certain of the direction at the same moment he did.

The rider with that horse had to be crazy, Ridley thought. Shimmer was Slip was

And though right and justice said that once they were reasonably sure they were hearing any rider they ought by all means to beacon him in from such a storm, the skittery character of the sending still made Ridley reluctant to reach out to it.

Maybe it was just Rain’s young nerves. Maybe it was the distance over which they were picking things up, impressions maybe carried by wild creatures snugged down in their dens, things of little brains and little accuracy about an image.

But knowing for certain enough that it was another rider: he imaged out into the dark, laying himself open to whatever danger might lie in a sending coming back at them. he promised that presence.

Callie made up her mind, too. She joined him, with, and said, “I’ll go tell the marshal there’s strangers coming.”

Plainer and plainer to human ears, the ringing of a storm-driven bell, and the delirious dream of Danny struggled to keep his feet and keep moving; but even believing safety was in front of them, Carlo was fast failing him, losing not the will but the strength to fight his body upright against the wind. Carlo might fall and freeze in all but sight and hail of shelter.

Danny began to think. But that meant because neither of them could carry him, and it meant if he left Carlo to defend his brother and sister from vermin and went ahead for help.

He held to Cloud’s mane in the deep snow, gripping the travois pole with a right hand that had lost all feeling. His feet—he didn’t even know.

he sent for all he was worth, and drove all his efforts toward that bell that rang louder and louder—too tired himself to pull the travois alone, unable to go faster than Carlo could go.

A beautiful image began to come clearer and clearer to him:

There were They promised the preacher’s Heaven after their day and night of hell, and to reach it, Danny began to believe he’d have to stand still and try to beacon help to them. Breath came raw and cold. Feet faltered repeatedly.

Then out of the bitter cold and the swirling snow—a dark barrier loomed up among the evergreens like a wall across the world, logs and snow, and waiting for them behind it.

Carlo saw it, too. Cloud did, and all but pulled them through a succession of drifts by the grip Danny had on his mane.

he was picking up from Carlo.

There wasn’t anything of But there hadn’t been enough of all up the mountain, in Danny’s reckoning. It was everything for Randy. Everything for Brionne and not damn well enough of self-preservation.

“Listen to me.” Danny struggled to have a voice at all as, letting Cloud go, he struggled toward paradise and the gate in that solid wall. He said it as fiercely as he could, before thoughts scattered again toward safety and comfort, and before he lost his chance, with distance, to put his own pain between them and eavesdroppers: “Listen to me. You shut it down, Carlo. You shut it down entirely— everything that happened—and you shut Randy down. They’re riders. They’ll kill us as soon as look at us if you go acting crazy in a winter camp. Same way Tara threw us out. So you shut up.”

“We’re here,” Carlo said, seeming bewildered. “We made it to the shelter.”

“We’re not in a damn shelter. This is the village, do you understand me? We haven’t got any place we can put your sister but in the rider camp till the camp boss passes on us and we can’t let her wake up, you understand me?”

“Yeah,” Carlo said faintly. “Yeah. I do.”

“You let me do the talking and you keep her as far away from the horses as you can get. You don’t think about anything down the mountain. You don’t think about it till you’re over villageside. Think about Think about water. Keep Randy quiet. Got it?”

He wasn’t sure Carlo understood everything Carlo said he did. He’d intended—getting to the shelter—having time to figure out a course of next action in that top-of-the-ridge cabin they’d missed. He’d had in mind a slower, more reasoned approach to the villages up here.

And they were here.

He kept his mind as blank of further guesses as he could manage, set the calm image in Carlo’s mind, and in Randy’s, in such consciousness as he felt there:

“The gate’s opening!” Carlo said.

Danny gathered in the ambient, information coming to him freely and abundantly now that he entered the close vicinity of other horses.

Information was pouring at him now, as they met the muffled figures in the storm-glow, as three wary horses came out to stand by their riders. The seniors of the set were understandably protective and suspicious, wanting the kid and the horses were on guard, hearing, he knew, the spook-voice that had chased them, relayed from every creature denned-up tonight.

<“Loose horse back there,”> Danny said, first off—they must have caught their fear and desperate urgency, and that wild, troubled sending that chased them.

But he wasn’t sure then at what point they’d met or when the man had gotten hold of his arm or when he’d let go the travois in favor of the woman taking it.

They were inside the rider camp, that was all that was clear to him, attached to a village that had to be Evergreen itself.

Danny didn’t know whether it was his own thought or Carlo’s or a sending out of the dark—and after that just saw a confusion of

Then Carlo was overwhelming the ambient with and as they lugged the travois along the path between the horse-den and the camp wall. All through the ambient then, fierce and strong in the milling-about of horses, came and and and as they came.

Danny said, being all but held on his feet, “Behave, Cloud, dammit,” in the thread of a voice he had left, and managed somehow to keep the lid on trouble. He made shift to veer off toward Cloud, but he wasn’t doing at all well at keeping his feet on his own. He persistently got the image of a man and a woman and a kid as the only riders there were, several fewer than he’d have expected and with every right to be skittish at them splitting up, one of them wanting the den, the other wanting the barracks…

But for a giddy moment he asked himself if he’d really made it or whether he wasn’t after all hallucinating, not safe inside the wooden walls of a rider haven but lying back there in the snow somewhere.

Didn’t know how they’d done it. Couldn’t believe yet it was Evergreen.

He didn’t know how they’d come this far—except they’d been walking through trees—except, as the scale of things he’d expanded shrank again, it had been that very turn—that turn he thought he’d mistaken—

God, they must right then have been at the top of the road. They’d been right on the cabin they were looking for. That wasn’t the turn. It was the truck park. Where the cabin had been. His estimate of time and distance hadn’t been off.

God help a fool. He’d been there, and walked past shelter in the whiteout.

“You all right?” The man had his arm, helping him walk.

“Yeah.”

But he kept in mind his own warning to Carlo, and on a night like this, with strangers out of a storm when no reasonable people would be out and about, he didn’t want to act like a spook. He just wanted wanted and he imaged in case the riders hadn’t realized from Carlo’s mind that there were two more lives in their company than it seemed. Cloud’s welfare was absolutely foremost for him now. And he had to stay upright long enough to do that.

“I can take care of your horse,” the man said. “There’s mash cooked. We heard you coming. How are your feet?”

“No worse than the last hour,” he said. “And my horse got me here. I’ll see to him.” He didn’t want to think about his feet. He might be crippled for life. Bound to camp. Cattle-sentry. He couldn’t think of worse he could do to Cloud, including them freezing to death. “There’s a shotgun. Take it and the shells. All I can pay you. Promised ham to my horse. Got to pay him off.”

“This way.” The man didn’t argue with him or bargain for shelter. He was aware of knew the horse belonged to the man, and he knew the and another were ambling off instead toward the rider barracks where Carlo was going, where the woman and the kid were going, as protective of them as the stallion was of the man.

The stillness of the air, then, the dark inside the den, the mere cessation of the wind itself were like warmth as they came inside the safe, insulated stalls. It left him breathless and blind except for Cloud’s senses, lingeringly deaf from the wind, except for Cloud’s hearing, mentally lost, except for Cloud’s presence and Cloud’s sense of They must, Danny thought giddily, use it like straw up here where straw didn’t grow. That was a nice touch. He liked that.

And he was wandering, and staggering.

He knew when Cloud found a water pail that wasn’t frozen. He knew that Cloud drank, and then they both were blinded when the rider watching over them cut on an electric torch. In that beam of light he saw details of a smallish den, snug and warm, stalls and a sheltered heap of meadow hay that had never grown on this height: had to have been trucked up here. Had to cost as much as flour. But it meant life to the villages.

And when the rider set that light in a bracket aimed at the roof and stopped blinding him, he saw a village rider muffled up in a rider’s fringed leather coat and woolen scarf and broad-brimmed hat tied down against the wind. Could have been a mirror of him.

“Name’s Ridley,” the man said. “Callie, my partner, she’s got your partners.”

“Village kids,” he corrected that impression. “Tarmin village.” On that, he ran out of voice. He needed water. He pulled his gloves off fingers that had no feeling, dipped his hands into water that at least was above freezing, and that felt hot—and drank what Cloud had drunk, a sip or two, and a splash over his face to warm it.

But even that was too much. He thought for a moment he’d throw it up again, somewhere between the pain and the load on his stomach. He leaned on a stall post, just breathing until the waves of nausea passed.

Meanwhile the rider called Ridley had gotten warming-blankets and thrown them over Cloud, and at that he had to move, because he wouldn’t have anybody else taking care of Cloud. He thanked Ridley in his shred of a voice, took up the job himself, and rubbed and rubbed Cloud’s cold body and colder legs to get the blood moving.

The effort warmed both of them, set him panting and coughing, made his nose bleed and made him sick at his stomach. He’d been in such misery he hadn’t felt the altitude headache in the last push toward that faint sound of a bell, but now it came back, so blindingly acute he shut his eyes as he worked. Ridley gave him salve to use, and he rubbed it down Cloud’s legs and checked Cloud’s feet— Ridley helped in that, which was good, because Ridley’s fingers could feel the spots between the hooves and his still couldn’t.

“Looks pretty good for where he’s been,” Ridley said after he’d inspected all four sets of hooves. “Tarmin rider, are you?”

He didn’t want to talk details. Not tonight. He was sniffing back blood that otherwise dripped from his nose. “Kids are. I’m from Shamesey.” He rubbed salve vigorously into Cloud’s rear right pastern and down over the tri-fold hoof, which Cloud obligingly lifted and let him tuck against his knee. “Long story. Tell you inside.” Working upside down made him cough, threatened him with losing all the water he’d swallowed, and the blood was drowning him.

Cloud on the other hand was faring much better. Cloud sank down after that treatment, seeking warmth on the evergreen boughs that were the flooring. Cloud was feeling much better and very glad to have blankets thrown over him, then. Danny swiped a salved, horsey back of his hand across his nose and made a last assault with the salve at Cloud’s neck, where he could get warmth to the big artery, with the warming salve under Cloud’s mane and onto Cloud’s throat, which had to be as raw and dry as his.

Then from somewhere out of the dark came the girl-kid lugging a bucket too heavy for her—a heavy bucket that steamed and smelled, such as his and Cloud’s altitude-ravaged sense of smell could detect, of warm mash. Cloud gave a snort, interested, as the other horses were interested, having had one supper—but, being horses, always willing to eat. Ridley took the bucket and poured a taste into the common trough before he brought the rest to Cloud, who hadn’t gotten up. Ridley set the bucket in front of him.

Cloud sucked up a mouthful of warm mash, and on the strength of that, found it worthwhile to get to his feet and go head-down in the bucket—maybe not to eat much: Cloud wasn’t a fool, among a canny, self-preserving kind. But certainly Cloud meant to get his promised reward.

That meant that Cloud’s rider could go to the warm barracks and the fireside, and Danny started toward the door by which he’d come in, back into the snow—but the Evergreen rider pointed with the beam of the electric torch toward a second doorway, one framed by shattered boards.

Danny didn’t ask. Horses were horses, and boards suffered when the night was full of alarms. He scooped up a handful of snow blown in from the outside door and pressed the icy handful against the bridge of his nose before he went back to that door, through which Ridley and the kid led him into a night-black wooden tunnel.

“Where did you come from?” the little girl wanted to know, looking back as she walked ahead of them in their little sphere of light; but Ridley said sternly, as he shone the light down the passage: “Get on to the barracks, Jennie-cub. Leave the man alone. He’s got a nosebleed.”

Man. Man, the senior rider said. People down in Shamesey certainly hadn’t called him that. He’d been struggling all during the trip for Dan instead of Danny.

And a village rider saw him as a man, an equal, worth respect just for living to get up this mountain.

That was worth the hike up here.

Jennie-cub hadn’t gone. She looked back this time upside down, or at least with her head tilted way back as she walked ahead of them. “I had a nosebleed once. What’s your horse’s name? Mine’s name is Rain.”

“Rain isn’t your horse,” Ridley said. “You wait for Shimmer’s foal, miss. —Get to the barracks and open that door before I tan your backside for good and all.”

Young Jennie went ahead of them. Light and shadows ran on either side of the little girl, who became a shadow as she skipped ahead of them down a course grown dizzier and dizzier. The walls seemed closer as they went and the air grew more still and dank, smelling of old wood and wet stone and earth.

Couldn’t feel his feet. Couldn’t see up from down in the shadows. He was passing out of Cloud’s range and his sense of orientation was going.

He put out a hand along the wooden wall, seeking balance, thinking, I’m going to fall—about the time they overtook Jennie, who pulled open a door on blinding light.

Warm air met them. He dumped his handful of bloody snow and walked in blind, with Ridley behind him, caught a lungful of the heat inside, and felt himself going as his knees had just turned to jelly.

Strong arms caught him around the ribs and helped him toward the fire and the light. Carlo and Randy were sitting on the floor against the wall.

Brionne was lying there too, unbundled from the travois, but still folded in her nest of furs.

Ridley let him down. He sat against the fireside stones, that being all that was going to hold him up. He had just enough strength to take off his hat and scarf, and a moment later to struggle out of his coat and a couple of sweaters before he smothered. He told himself he wasn’t going to pass out. Wasn’t going to make a spectacle.

Ridley came and checked his hands in the bright lamplight.

“Not as bad as could be,” Ridley pronounced his fingers. “A little burn. But not real bad.” Then Ridley unlaced his boots for him and carefully pulled them off. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know; but they were his feet, he’d no choice, and it wasn’t would-happen, it was already had-happened, whatever the verdict was going to be as the socks came off, one layer after another.

“Mmn,” Ridley said. “Going to lose a little skin. —Feel that?”

“Yeah.” It felt as if Ridley drew blood. Then Ridley stripped the other foot. He felt those toes, too. It hurt so much tears began running down his face. His ankles hurt. His knees hurt. There wasn’t any part of him that didn’t hurt, and Carlo and Randy didn’t look any better off.

“Wasn’t sure for a long time that you were human,” the woman said, squatting down near him. “Lot of spookiness out there tonight. Lot of spookiness the last week or so. You know anything about it?”

“Yeah.” His gut knotted up. He started thinking frantically what he could say. “But get these kids to the village first.”

“You go,” Ridley said (he thought) to Callie, and a second later said, “Jennie can go with you. It’s all right.”

The woman for her part wasn’t enthusiastic about leaving Ridley alone, Danny decided, small threat that he and Carlo were. Carlo looked to be fading out, Randy was asleep, and Brionne—Brionne was a bundle of furs the other side of the fire.

They’d gotten her here.

And hadn’t they done something good in that? Even heroic?

Even if he had been stupid and missed not just one shelter but both of them in the storm?

And as for himself, at the definite end of his stupid years, his do-anything, dare-anything childhood, and grown older and wiser all in one disastrous climb—he fingered his nose and his ears, wondering if they were frostbitten and whether he’d be scarred for life from this adventure, or whether he could just swear to God he’d learned and didn’t need to do anything this stupid again.

The woman put on a coat and prepared to leave as Ridley pressed a warm teacup into his hands, wrapped in a cloth. That was, the pain in his hands told him, a very, very good idea.

Meanwhile the little girl—Jennie—came near, leaned over and asked, “What’s your horse’s name?”

“Cloud,” he said, grateful for such simple, answerable questions. “My name’s Dan Fisher. I’m from Shamesey.”

“From Shamesey!”

He was aware her father was listening. And her mother. His voice was down to a hoarse thread. “Yeah.”

“What brought you to the mountain?” Ridley asked, with clear suspicion, and the woman hesitated in leaving.

“Friend of mine needed help.”

Ridley went to the cabinet and took out a bottle. It was spirits. Ridley came and poured a generous dollop into Danny’s tea. And he went over and poured some for Carlo, too, who was sitting up and looking dazed, but likewise lifting up a cup.

“And what brought you all the way up here?” Ridley asked, and Carlo blurted out,

“Because there’s nothing left down there. Tarmin’s gone.”

You didn’t need the horses to feel the shock in their minds: fear, disbelief, that Tarmin, the biggest village on the mountain, their main depot for shipments going or coming… didn’t exist anymore.

“Tarmin is gone,” Danny said, to draw all the questions back to him and not to Carlo. He sipped the fortified tea to gain time for a breath and a second thought. The woman stood in her jacket, and Jennie, likewise dressed for the cold, came and huddled against her legs.

“What’s he saying? What happened, mama?”

“So what is the story?” Ridley asked him, dead calm, as controlled as a rider needed to be. The horses couldn’t hear them here. At least, they shouldn’t be able to.

And he needn’t tell even half of it. He’d given his caution, in asking that the kids leave the camp. They hadn’t. He said only, “Somebody opened a gate. I don’t want to give the details—don’t know the range from your den—”

“Is your horse all right?” Ridley asked. The senior rider here, boss-man in this camp, had an absolute right to ask that question. He had a kid lying on his hearth stiff and gone somewhere she couldn’t get back from. He had a strange horse in the den with their horses. He had a village locked in for the winter, with all its people. He had a daughter as well as a partner to protect.

And if they themselves hadn’t been hallucinating, he had a horse out there in the woods whose distress had waked the wild things in their burrows and relayed its sending God knew how far, disturbing the mountain a second time in less than a month.

“We weren’t there when it happened,” Danny said, the horse-and-rider we, but he wouldn’t elaborate more than he had to, either— didn’t quite lie, just leaned very heavily on Ridley’s assurance the horses in the den were beyond their ordinary range of picking up human beings.

Which could change if one horse picked up a suspicion of human distress in the rider barracks—and they had a young horse out there, an unridden horse of their own, at a stage notorious for being loud and hearing even humans unnaturally far.

So he concentrated entirely on the cup in his hands and sipped it this time not to keep his voice from cracking, but to save his mind from wobbling from the very narrow path of information he had to hold.

“I came in after the fact. These three—they’re all that lived through it. They’re brothers and sister. We’ve been trying not to think of it near the horses. Couldn’t do anything for the girl down there. She’s caught in it, deeper and deeper. She used to react to things. She doesn’t now. I understand there’s supposed to be a doctor in the village.”

The woman pressed Jennie against her legs. Danny found his hands shaking so he burned himself as the tea slopped over. He didn’t look at their faces. He didn’t want to. A mind that wasn’t right wasn’t ever anything to bring near the horses.

A mind that wasn’t right wasn’t anything to leave within range of anything of the Wild. And Brionne’s mind, above all else that was wrong with her, wasn’t right. They were senior riders. They had to recognize the kind of shock she was in and know that she was dangerous. He’d meant to be out in a shelter tonight—come to Evergreen on a clear, quiet day with no emergency in the situation. But that wasn’t what had happened. Things were done—choices were made around a set of facts that involved several lives, facts he didn’t want to let loose just for the asking—because the truth could cause a panic that itself could get people killed.

“Was it her,” Ridley asked, “making that spook-feeling out there?”

No, he thought: direction and location had been in the sending: that was what had made it so damn real. It had convinced Cloud.

“No,” he said aloud. “I’m pretty sure it was behind us. A horse. Rider’s died. With the sister’s condition—I didn’t want to stay where it was.”

“Go get the marshal,” Ridley said, meaning, Danny thought, get the little kid out of here and get Brionne the hell out of reach of the horses. The woman took the kid and went out the door to the passageway they’d used—a second and third passage had gone off from there, he remembered them in the light from the door.

Ridley went meanwhile and warmed Carlo’s cup with tea from the pot. Randy was sleeping like the dead, on his stomach, his hand up near his face, head on his arm—he didn’t wake for anything. Poor kid, Danny thought, and hoped there was better luck for the brothers. They’d earned it.

Ridley came and poured tea into his cup. And in that closeness and the quiet of the ambient Danny took the chance. “There’s more to it than I’ve said. We’re all right. But get the girl out of here fairly soon.”

“What have you brought us?” Ridley asked sharply, and Danny ducked his head to cough—he’d been wanting to since he tipped his head back, and he didn’t want to look Ridley in the eyes.

“Dammit.” Ridley dropped down on his haunches to meet him eye to eye in that privacy of the fire-crackle and the wind outside; and the ambient still stayed quiet and numb as he finished his coughing fit with a swallow of tea that still had spirits in it. “What’s going on down there?” Ridley asked. “What’s a Shamesey rider doing here, for God’s sake? What’s the real story?”

“Rescuing a friend,” Danny repeated. He heard the indignation in Ridley’s voice. He knew he deserved it. “It’s a long story. Get the kids safe and I’ll talk.” He took another sip of the spirit-laced tea, saw Carlo staring into his cup as if it held answers, and saw Randy sleeping.

Brionne didn’t change. Thank God. He was all but counting the minutes until they could bring someone in and get Brionne out of the camp. And very rapidly now the very last reserve of strength was running out of him. He sipped the tea and his hands began to shake.

Feeling was coming back to his feet. They hurt. His hands did. His face did.

“The whole damn season’s felt bad,” Ridley said in a more moderate tone. It wasn’t like a statement. It was a peace offering he didn’t deserve, from a man he deserved worse of, in a situation he couldn’t, right now, discuss. This was, Danny thought, a good-hearted and forgiving man. A man more reasonable than he deserved to have to deal with—he hadn’t wanted to go all the way to Evergreen. But he had. And now he had to deal with the consequences.

“Yeah.” Agreement seemed safest, agreement with everything the local riders said at least until he could use clear-headed judgement.

Meanwhile Carlo had edged over to try to see to his brother, lifting the blanket they’d wrapped him in to look at his feet, and that movement was a distraction for the conversation. “How is he?” he asked Carlo across the intervening space.

“I don’t know.” Carlo let the blanket down. Randy didn’t stir through any of it, and Carlo made a fast swipe at his eyes. Carlo’s hand was shaking.

Ridley got up and squatted down again to take a look at Randy’s hands and feet and ears. He looked at Carlo’s, too, while he was at it.

“Better than yours,” Ridley said. “Work your fingers. Fist.”

Carlo tried. Ridley made a doubtful expression. “Horse medicine,” Ridley said, and got a small grimy pot off the shelf and squatted down and rubbed salve into Carlo’s hands. “Hands and feet. You take the pot with you, son. It’s cheap. We’ve got buckets of it for the horses. Use it. Marshal’s going to find a place for you. You think you need a doctor?”

“No.” Carlo shook his head fast, and Danny could read his mind without Cloud’s help: Carlo didn’t want to be under the same roof with his sister. Didn’t want Randy there, either. “Smith,” Carlo said. “Our folks—” His voice faded and came back again. “They were the smiths down in Tarmin. Need—need to find work if we can.”

“Ours might take you on.” Ridley maintained a tight reserve. “But those hands aren’t going to be fit for smith-work for a while.” He patted Carlo gently on the leg and got up to pace the floor—another not too difficult guess, that Ridley was aching for Callie to get back safely with the marshal and a means to get his problem out of the camp.

Danny drank his tea and kept his mouth shut, feeling even with the pain in his feet and hands and ears that he could pass out where he was sitting—but he held on: if something happened, he wanted to be awake. He wanted to know what disposition village authorities would make of the boys and Brionne, who came under village law.

He didn’t. He was in Evergreen, looking at the authority that governed the rider camp, and what Ridley said in these walls had to be law—including the possibility that Ridley would tell him get out of the village and go somewhere else, weather or no weather. A camp boss always had that authority, and he had to respect it.

But, God, he didn’t know where he or Cloud would get the strength to go on.