Cloud's Rider

Chapter 7

Darcy Schaffer didn’t know how long she’d heard the wind. The heavy storm shutters were locked tight on the windows, and didn’t admit but a hint of light or dark—shutters that could keep out a blizzard or an intruder, or the world in general.

She was heating water for breakfast tea when she heard that distant kind of thump in the snow-passage that meant someone was running around at this hour of the morning—before dawn—and if it was those damned teenaged Durant kids again, out and annoying the neighbors before their parents were awake, she was going to call the marshal and let him talk to their parents.

But it was measured, heavier steps she began to discern headed for the passageway and directly for her door, and more than one of them. Her heart unwillingly picked up the sense of panic she felt when, first, she was sure someone was going to call at her door, and second, that someone had come with a cogent need for her to deal with them. She didn’t want to deal with the outside. She dealt with it only on emergencies—and that was when they came to her, someone with a pain or a hurt that sweet oil from the grocer wouldn’t cure. She was Evergreen’s only doctor.

Well, dammit, she thought, wiped her hands and left the kettle on to boil as she walked down the three steps from the kitchen that led to the snow-door. She reached the door from her side exactly at the moment the visitors knocked on it and the preacher’s voice called out, “Darcy, it’s John, open up!”

John Quarles and at least one other set of footsteps in a hurry. Definitely an emergency—and John didn’t usually come unless it was serious. She lifted the bar, shot the bolt back and opened the door wide.

She was, being the village doctor, prepared for blood and disaster of every kind. John’s involvement usually meant somebody was dying or damned close to it—and she saw marshal Peterson and deputy Jeff Burani further back in the dark passage, the marshal carrying a fur-wrapped body.

John was saying, “Darcy, there’s a case—”

But she wasn’t just seeing the marshal. She was seeing her daughter Faye in the marshal’s arms, wrapped in those furs. It was Then. It was That Day, the preacher was at the door, and Eli Peterson and his deputy were coming toward her down the passage, bringing Faye, who was dead; and soon then Mark was…

… dead.

But they were both in the mountain, where the village buried its dead. That Day was sealed away and she couldn’t relive it, couldn’t say, to Faye, No, you can’t go…

“Darcy.” The preacher had her arm, trying to move her back from the door and its cold draft. The teakettle on the stove reached a boil and screamed a steady, maddening note.

Distracted, she gave ground and let them in: marshal Peterson, Jeff Burani, preacher John Quarles, and a hurt kid—whose kid, she wasn’t sure, and her thoughts went flying distractedly down a list of kids that size and that weight. Above all else she didn’t like treating kids or dealing with anxious parents. But there was no one else for the hard cases and the broken bones and the appendectomies and such.

“Sorry, Darcy, sorry to bring this in on you—” Marshal Peterson turned the body to pass her and the preacher in the threshold. His heavy boots clumped loudly on the hollow wood and the kettle was still screaming fit to drive a body mad. The first thing she did when she reached the level of the kitchen was to go and lift the kettle off the fire.

The scream went on in her head. She hadn’t screamed aloud, Then. She’d shut in, shut down. She didn’t panic, now. She put on a professional face and calmed her heart, listening without giving a damn to what they were saying about a rider coming in, which didn’t make any sense with a storm raging out there, and that rider bringing three kids up the road from Tarmin, which made much less sense.

“We took the boys on to Van Mackey’s,” John said. “Figured it was asking enough for you to take on the girl, Darcy, but the Lord has set a particular task on you. The Lord has had His hand on this child of His in a special way, and maybe in His good providence He’s given you this precious charge. She’s been in the passage of the Beast. Her mind’s gone to sleep.”

John said other things. She didn’t believe in his God but she believed in John. They were partners in life and death, John doing the breaking of news and dealing with the next of kin, and that was a very useful thing to her. The marshal she had far less to do with and didn’t give a damn for most of the cases he brought her—miners and loggers who’d gotten drunk and bashed each other senseless or tried to shoot up the barracks.

But then they folded back the furs and showed her the girl, and it was Faye. It was Faye’s blond curls, it was Faye’s pale face, just that age.

Her eyes were open. Faye’s hadn’t been. Hadn’t ever been again. Faye’s eyes in this child looked through her, blue as the sky in summer.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Darcy asked, and brushed her hand across the girl’s forehead. But the girl didn’t blink.

“They’re reporting Tarmin’s entirely wiped out,” the marshal said.

She listened to it. It wouldn’t come into focus. Tarmin—gone?

“The girl didn’t come out so well as the brothers,” the marshal said. “They were swarmed. Kids holed up. She’s the youngest. Her mind’s affected. They say she’s getting steadily worse, don’t know how many days.”

Not my field, Darcy would have said. She’d dealt with a couple of shock cases—miners, generally, who in their profession had to get along without riders to do more than check on their camps now and again, and just made do with guns and dugouts. The miners were tough. One had come around. The other hadn’t.

“Her brothers and one rider got her up here, storm and all. They’ve been through hell. I know it’s cruel, Darcy, but I honestly didn’t know who else to take her to. Mackey’s going to take the two boys in or I’ll break his neck. I just don’t know what else to do with the girl. I know you got one guy over this. If you could just take a look at her—”

“Take her upstairs,” she said. Downstairs was the clinic. Upstairs was where she lived. “Warmer up there, most-times.”

“All right,” Peterson said, and furs and all, carried the girl out of her kitchen, around the corner to the stairs. Darcy followed with the lamp and got in front for the ascent. Peterson carried the girl up, and the preacher came behind her, with the deputy clumping after them, up, up where there was a small landing and a choice of rooms.

The whole upstairs wasn’t warm yet: the kitchen stove was only just getting going. Their breath almost frosted, and the storm had torn something loose outside that banged and thumped. But Mark had planned for stormy days. Mark had set prism glasses in the steeps of the windward side of the roof where snow didn’t stick when the wind blew. The light came down four mirrored tubes, and it didn’t need kerosene to keep the upstairs lit even when the shutters were closed.

Faye’s room had one. She opened the door. Dawn must be starting, because there was a faint glow coming in above the lamplight. She hadn’t noticed how much dust there had gotten to be. But the sheets were clean under the coverlet, and she had the marshal lay the girl down there.

“You sure you’re all right?” the marshal asked her then, and she knew damned well what he was thinking and asking of her.

“Fine.” She wasn’t angry, just ready for them to get out of her way and let her find out what the girl’s chances were. She wasn’t sentimental about Faye’s things. She could use this room when it was practical. And it was practical now, a matter of light that didn’t risk fire or cost money.

Such a pale, cold face. She couldn’t keep her hand from the blond curls. She knew it wasn’t Faye, but it was something to deceive her eyes and her hands and, at least for a while, the blank spot in her heart. “Oh, honey, can you blink for me? Can you do that?”

“Let us pray,” John said, and launched into something about the Lord and lost sheep.

“Yeah,” she said, instead of amen—she said things like that habitually and John kept his mouth shut and winced: John could have the souls on their way to the next world, but she wanted this one alive.

So she herded the three men downstairs, as of no use, and had no time to spare for tea or cordialities: she shoved them out the door, with them promising to check this afternoon, and John Quarles promising to bring groceries if she needed them.

“I have everything I need,” she said, maybe foolishly, because it wasn’t the truth, and she shut the door on them, then shot the bolt and dropped the bar.

Faye, all done up in furs and softness. It was a beautiful dead child the marshal had brought her, That Day, and she began to cry.

But old thoughts came to her and prompted her to stop sniveling and get something done. She found the dusty warming bricks in the downstairs closet and set them on the kitchen stove top, and stoked it up with another few sticks of wood.

She took the hot kettle upstairs, moving faster than she had moved about her business in long, long months. She knew it wasn’t her daughter—she knew better; but she didn’t choose to know: that was the real difference between sane and crazy.

In the thoughts she chose to think, Faye was home, the marshal had brought her, and she had a chance this time to fight death, hands on and by her effort—slim, but at least this time, a chance.

The smith, Mackey, hadn’t been exactly hospitable.

But Carlo thought now, sitting in a warm nook in Van Mackey’s forge, with the faint glow of embers for light as well as heat, that he was very willing to put up with pain in his fingers and feet. He was grateful that Danny Fisher hadn’t let them quit—even if Danny had missed the shelters in the whiteout.

He could say now that they’d made it. And he’d have wished to talk to Danny before he left, but Danny’d had his head down, ducking things that they’d agreed not to talk about, he guessed, or what he might have to be grateful for, which seemed all there was left to talk about.

Thanks, he’d have said, at least, if he’d had his wits about him, and if that duck of Danny’s head hadn’t stopped him cold. When the rider woman had said he and Randy probably wouldn’t lose toes he’d been so grateful for Danny Fisher’s persistence and bullying toward the last that he’d sat there and sniveled like a five-year-old.

His eyes burned. He wanted just to sleep, and it was so still, so quiet in this place. The whiteout—

He suffered a mental slip, chin on his chest, thinking

At next blink it was And

No, they were in the forge shed. He and Randy. The preacher and the marshal had said they had a place for Brionne, and he and Randy should go on where the deputy took them, warmest place in Evergreen, someone had said.

And it was. From the branching of the dizzying wooden passages they’d parted with the marshal, taken a separate lantern which he lit and carried for the deputy who carried Randy, and they’d gone far down another spur to a side tunnel where it seemed even the earth was warmer.

Knock on the door, the deputy had said, having his hands full with Randy, and he’d knocked. They’d waited. He’d hammered with his fist, though it hurt like hell, figuring people were asleep, and the deputy had carried Randy all the way from the rider camp.

It had taken three such assaults before he heard steps inside, and finally the door opened on a sleepy, burly man in his underwear, who’d gazed blearily past the lantern he carried while they stood in the dark of the tunnel.

“These kids hiked up from Tarmin,” the deputy had said. The deputy had gone on to say they were the smith’s kids from down there, and that the marshal wanted them to have a job, at which Mackey acted as if he’d slam the door in the deputy’s face.

But the deputy had gotten his hand against the door, and without saying anything about why they’d walked up from Tarmin, said something about the tavern and the miners and young boys not being safe in there. Details blurred. The passage doorway had. Carlo had been thinking he hadn’t the strength to go through another round of where to lodge them.

But Mackey had said then that they weren’t firing up the forge in this blizzard anyway and they could stay there till he could talk to the marshal in person. After which Mackey slammed the door.

They hadn’t mentioned the details about Tarmin. The marshal had said not to tell Mackey anything but the absolute least they could say. They didn’t want that public yet, because, the deputy had said, the village had so much stake in Tarmin, and there were people who might take advantage of the situation.

The deputy had brought them through the side door over there, into the forge, this vast shed with stone walls, a blackened timber roof, a stone floor that looked like a solid piece of the mountain itself. The forge was banked and almost dark, but even so the warmth in the air here was considerable.

His greatest desire in the whole universe had been to sit down and peel out of his coat and sweaters and the knee-wraps and all of it, and he’d done the same service for Randy, then covered Randy in his coat, thinking he might need it. At some point—he didn’t even remember—the deputy had left. With the lantern. He’d thanked him. He thought. His thinking wasn’t clear at all.

Randy made a sudden sound in his sleep and flailed an arm from under the coat Carlo had settled over him. His eyes came wide open. “Where are we?” Randy asked in panic. “Where are we?”

“Warmest place there is,” Carlo said. “It’s all right. Nothing to do but sleep.” He didn’t know even whether it was day or night. He thought it might be daylight, but he hadn’t been able to tell in the passages. Mackey might have been asleep, or sleeping late—but if people had come in after risking their necks on that road he thought the man could have been civil about a knock on his door. “Storm’s still blowing,” he said to Randy. “Hear it?” He sat down as close to Randy as he could, while the wind kept on howling like devils outside and thumping at the flue.

“We aren’t home, are we?”

“We’re in Evergreen,” he assured Randy, and chafed Randy’s shoulder. It did look like home, mostly. The place was put together a lot the same, except the forge faced differently. It smelled the same. Cindery heat. Hot metal. Fire. The stone walls and floor of the place accepted and gave up heat slowly and it wouldn’t chill too much despite the uninsulated roof above soot-blackened timbers. There was a metal tank that sat elevated on a masonry wall, probably taking rainfall and snow-melt from the roof. He got up, hobbled over and got a forge-warmed drink of water for Randy in a cup he’d found sitting near the tap.

Then he threw on a couple of logs he didn’t think the smith would miss, less for the heat than to have brighter light until Randy could get his wits about him and know for sure where they were.

But Randy quickly faded out again, exhausted. And, so tired himself he could fall on his face, and completely unable to sleep, Carlo paced. Then drew off water in a quenching bucket and set it beside the fire to get warmer.

Pain brought tears to his eyes even yet when he dipped his hands in that lukewarm water; he pulled his boots off and endured the heat in the stone pavings just off the hearth of the forge. He waked Randy again and put him through the same routine, warm water and warm stones, though Randy broke down and cried and complained.

Randy was due that. He’d been hard on Randy on their way up the mountain. He’d done what their father would have done and said the words their father would have said because those were the things Randy was used to. It took that, to get Randy’s attention and put the fear of God into him.

His father would tell him, the same way he’d told Randy: The weak die, kid.

They hadn’t died. Their father was dead.

And they were where they’d stay—maybe for the rest of their lives, if things worked out to get them a job in this forge. Riders came and riders went when they decided to leave, and he knew Danny would go with the spring breezes. But not the blacksmiths’ kids. They were the kind to put down roots. They’d never looked to leave Tarmin. And here—was a staying place. They had to think that. They had to work to get on Mackey’s better side and make their lives better than they’d been.

The wind found a plaintive note, on a loose shingle, maybe. It was a lonely sound. He didn’t hear the bell that had called them in, and hadn’t in a long while. He guessed someone must finally have secured it so it didn’t ring.

He’d never hear it after this without remembering that thin, wonderful sound that had given them the strength and the direction to keep trying.

Now there were walls, the world was ordered again, and they were back inside a zone of safety the riders with their horses, in their camp, maintained for a village that sustained them—

Only now he knew how fragile that zone was. He knew now that the riders’ protection could be broken, and he didn’t know if he could ever feel quite so safe here as he’d been before in his ignorance of the Wild.

He’d heard the sendings as the rogue prowled the darkened street, looking for mama, looking for papa—and the whole town died, house by house, swarmed over by vermin and larger predators that had held the village for hours. He and Randy had clung to each other, tried not to hear, tried not to think—

It hadn’t gotten in. It had tried the door. But it couldn’t get in.

And they couldn’t get out. That was what had saved them.

His heart jumped.

It was there again, that vision, that one, time-stopped moment. That overwhelming confusion. It had nothing to do with Tarmin. The horse belonged to a dead man—but Danny said horses didn’t understand death when it came too suddenly and too isolated from other minds. It was looking, was what. Looking for its rider. Looking for a rider. It was hard to say.

What if the smithy was up against the village wall? He had no sense of location, having come here through the tunnels. He didn’t know. He didn’t have his orientation to the village, he couldn’t even imagine what it looked like, and in a handful of days with Danny Fisher, he’d gotten used to seeing things and hearing things, even to finding it a shortcut to speech when he and Danny and Randy couldn’t, in that hellish wind, make themselves heard.

He pressed his fingers against his eyes. But that didn’t work. It wasn’t in your eyes. It was in your brain, inside, where you couldn’t run, couldn’t ignore it.

Go away, he wished it. Go away, you can’t get in here.

Randy stirred in his sleep. But went on sleeping. And the world got quiet again.

The preachers said once you started listening to the Beast you couldn’t ever really stop, and if you came near horses or anything native to the world, they’d talk to you and you’d have to hear—they’d haunt you, and you’d dream wicked, godless, animal dreams.

Was it really out there, that horse? Or was it his remembering it? Sendings were like memories, some vivid enough to wash right over your vision and make you see and smell and hear something else. And horses thought. Horses reasoned. Danny said horses didn’t hold a purpose long and they forgot what they were about unless a human being was there to remember for them. Danny said when humans had come to the world horses had come to them because they were curious, and they carried riders now because they were outright addicted to human minds.

A horse could remember things so long as he had a rider.

That was why the rogue had been so deadly dangerous—because it had had Brionne on its back.

He pressed his fingers against his eyes until he saw red flashes.

The preachers said the Wild separated man from God and led you into bestialities. Sex, and blood-lust, and just not hearing God anymore when God talked to you.

He actually wasn’t sure God had ever talked to him. But he knew beyond a doubt that Cloud talked to him in his head. He knew that Danny Fisher had. Randy had. Randy, who’d been saying things about dealing with that spook-horse. About wanting to be a rider.

So had Brionne.

So had Brionne.

He wanted to go to church and smell the candles,and the evergreen boughs.

He wanted to hear about God’s mercy and have his mind and his thoughts his own again, and his dreams safe from horse-sendings.

Danny had said you didn’t hear the horses if you weren’t near them. That people might send a little—they must—but they were deaf as stumps without a horse to send to them. You didn’t hear other humans without a horse or something in the bushes—and if you did it was bad, because little creatures didn’t have the brain to intrude real easily. Sending sight was their real defense and their hunting tactic. If you got something strong coming at you—it was big, and big regarding anything in the Wild meant predator.

He just wanted peace from all of it.

He began to shiver. He thought that was a good sign, maybe a sign he could be horrified again, and not just accept images as they came. But the shivering made his travel-bruised joints hurt and it might disturb Randy. In the warmth and the smells of the forge, he could blink and think he was in his father’s forge in Tarmin and that nothing he remembered had ever happened—but that was dangerous, too: it wasn’t that forge, and Tarmin didn’t exist anymore. Nothing could ever bring Tarmin back the way it was. It was lost.

Nothing could bring their beliefs back, or their innocence… certainly not his. Maybe Randy’s. He hoped Randy had a chance to forget.

And for him—he’d find a niche for himself. A smith could always find work—he and Randy had nothing but what they stood in, but they had no debts, either. They could work slave wages if they didn’t fit in here, just stay until they had a stake, then move on with a truck convoy in the summer to wherever some settlement needed a fair-to-middling smith. A whole village could grow up around a couple of enterprising craftsmen, where miners and loggers could know they could get equipment fixed, and some cook set up shop, and they put up walls to protect the facilities— and then—then miners and loggers came to do their drinking and their rest-ups because it was a safe place. That was the way a lot of villages had begun.

And the two of them would do all right. Randy was at that gawky, all-elbows-and-thumbs stage that didn’t in any sense look the part of a smith, but Randy would put on muscle given another year, the same as he had, by working the bellows. You did that, you did the rough work, get the job going—the master smith would step in to finish it. Damn right, you put on muscle fast.

Hands weren’t in good shape. If Mackey who owned this place gave him a chance he’d rest up. But if not, if not—he’d take what he could get. He was fighting for survival in this place just as surely as he had been on the road that brought them here. The house, the forge, the money and the respectability so Randy could have a wife and kids and a normal life, getting as far as possible from what had happened down there. That was what he’d fight for.

Everything right this time. He’d see to it.

Danny set himself on the edge of the bed, and Ridley tipped him back into it while Callie watched from the open doorway.

“Made it to the mattress this time,” Ridley said, and flung at least five kilos of blankets atop him.

“Yeah,” he said. They’d had warming bricks on the mattress. He felt apt to pass out from the heat.

But he’d done that already and had a sore spot on his head to prove it. His eyes wanted to shut, heat or not, and he wished they’d just go away.

But they didn’t. They hadn’t. They’d gotten him up after they’d determined he might be concussed, they’d kept him awake sitting in the chair in the common room, talking about the camp, talking about local custom—anything but Tarmin and the trip up—being sure, they said, that he didn’t have a skull fracture.

He’d heard that staying awake after a crack on the head was a fairly good idea. But Cloud had dumped him harder than that and his skull had survived. He was just godawful tired. But if his fingers and toes all made it through the event, and they seemed to be going to, he was happy.

And they hadn’t thrown him out into the snow. And they let him go back to bed.

“Pretty good job you did,” Ridley said, lingering at his bedside— which made him wonder if they were going to continue the sleepless treatment. It was morning outside. He was relatively sure it was bright morning. And he so wanted to go to sleep.

“Yeah,” he said. Yeah covered most everything. And he’d already forgotten the question.

Callie’s voice: “Damn good for your first time in the mountains.”

“I had a fair map,” he said. You didn’t ever, as a junior, attempt to take credit for what a senior had done—or pretend to have done what you hadn’t. “And good advice.” Which he wished he’d understood at the start rather than the end of the trek. But he’d lived to learn.

So had the kids.

“Who gave you the advice?”

“Tarmin rider.” His heart rate kicked up a notch. He’d wondered when they’d start asking on the matter of Tarmin, and here it came. The ambient was quiet, the horses were snug in their den, the dark-eyed little girl with the lively curiosity was safely in her room. They might be about to go after answers on the subject they’d danced all around for at least an hour.

And if they didn’t like what they heard—they could still throw him out.

“Who?” Ridley asked. “Who survived?”

“Tara Chang.” He thought by their expressions it was a name they knew. “The others—didn’t make it. Friend of mine—Stuart—he’s down there. With Tara. Near Tarmin.” He wasn’t tracking well. The mind was trying to sink into deep, deep wool. He tried to sort out what they must assume. What he’d said and not said.

“How did she survive? What happened down there?”

“Dead.” His tongue was getting thick. He was thinking about and but there wasn’t any horse to carry the ill-assorted baggage of his mind and he was both protected by and held to words that wouldn’t contain half his thoughts. The kid was in bed, but if a horse got curious, even asleep she might pick something up. He hadn’t remotely counted on a kid in the camp—even if he’d come in to consult in advance what to do with Brionne, there’d have been the kid—

Which, with what he remembered, didn’t make him comfortable winter company. Maybe he should hit the road.

But he hadn’t told them—

“Fisher.”

“Don’t want to think now. Tomorrow.”

Ridley sat down on the bedside and Ridley’s hand closed hard on his shoulder. “Hate to be inhospitable, Fisher, but we have a village missing. The horses are out of range. So just tell us the rest of it.”

You couldn’t swear when a horse was listening. You could just swear to when it was sending. He was scared of being pushed, scared of spilling just enough to make them want more and more and more, until they got more than they wanted to hear, for more than he wanted to give. He was scared of spilling stuff that was his, and stuff that was the Goss kids’ business, and Tara’s and Guil’s as well.

But he was in real sorry shape to survive now if the Evergreen riders told him go on, get away from their village—just another day, he’d be all right—

Something had stalked them here—he thought it had. But he couldn’t swear to it. It was so, so dangerous, imagination. A rider kept it in his pocket and only took it out on sunny days with no shadows.

Ridley’s hand insisted and hurt his shoulder, shaking at him gently. “I want answers now, Fisher. Hear me?”

“Yeah.” He didn’t even remember exactly what information of all he held that Ridley had actually asked. “What was the question?”

“To what happened down at Tarmin.” Ridley’s mild voice grew angrier. “To who you are, where you came from, how the hell you got up here in the first place, and how safe is your horse?”

That was the most dangerous accusation. Cloud’s safety. That question scared him. He shook his head, and even the pillow hurt the back of his skull. “Horse is fine. No problem with us.”

“Ask him what brought him up from the flatlands?” Callie asked, coming close to his bed. “What cause to be here in the first place? Was there a convoy down there?”

“Friend’s partner died up here. He came for her. I came—came for him. He was pretty shaken up.”

“Names,” Ridley said. “His. Hers.”

“Guil Stuart. Aby Dale.”

“Oh, damn,” Callie said with what seemed real sadness, and Ridley’s hand let up its vise grip on his arm. “Not Aby,” Callie said. “We just saw her.”

“Last convoy down. She was in the way. Just—” He didn’t want to go into all of it. Most of all he didn’t want to think about Tarmin tonight. There was too much white in his mind, and winter was such a dangerous time. Dreams turned real when the wind was howling like that outside, and the horses carried the worst imaginings. “Just—she died. They said—they said a rogue horse spooked the convoy. And Guil came up here to get it.”

“But it got Tarmin?”

“Up at the gates—just—people opened doors. I was in the woods looking for Guil, and I heard it go—and—I don’t want to tell this around the kid.”

“She’s asleep,” Ridley said. “Keep going. Horses aren’t hearing you. You just happened into Tarmin when a rogue happened on the mountain. And where’s this other guy and why isn’t he up here?”

Rogue horse—was rare as legends and campfire stories. And they shouldn’t believe a pile of coincidences. But he couldn’t begin to tell them the connecting strings without giving them leads to other things. He just strung it together as best he could.

“Gunshot. This guy—Harper—not from this mountain—he thought—thought, I guess, I mean, he’d seen a rogue once before, or he thought he had, and he wasn’t real right in his head. He really, really hated Stuart. The rogue wasn’t him, you know, it wasn’t Stuart, but everything just got tangled up in his head. I knew this guy was on his track, and Harper—Harper just—just went crazy. Tried to kill Guil.”

“Before the rogue got Tarmin,” Ridley said. “Is Guil this rogue? Is Harper?”

“Horse. Rogue horse.” Danny forgot and shook his head. “Harper’s dead. It’s dead. Shot it. Guil shot it.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“Yeah.”

There was a little easing of tension.

“You came in with a damn spooky feeling,” Ridley said.

“Yeah.”

“So what was it?”

“Horse—followed us. Maybe five, six horses loose down there.”

“Followed you up the mountain. Through that?”

“Kids with me—nobody alive down there. None without horses. Can’t go down the mountain, snows down there… avalanches…”

“And?” Ridley asked. “Fisher? You’re not going to sleep until you talk. What happened with the rogue? What happened to that girl?”

“It was just—” He didn’t want to lie. He didn’t dare tell the truth. “Just—when Tarmin went down—kids hid out. I rode in. Searched for survivors. Babies. Old people. There wasn’t anything. —I felt it go, understand me? I felt it go, I don’t want to remember it in this camp, I don’t want to remember it near the horses.”

“Damn,” Callie said.

“I’m all right. My horse is all right.”

“And those kids?”

He let his eyes shut, closing out the questions. They could hit him. They could toss him into the snow. He had to keep the lid on things until he could get his story straight. He didn’t need to pretend to drift toward sleep. His mind kept going out on him—and he didn’t trust them—didn’t trust them not to call a horse close to him—outside the wall.

“What about the rogue horse?” Callie came to stand over him. “How bad is this kid, Fisher? What happened?”

“Just—” He had ultimately to tell them all the truth. But not tonight. Not tonight. The girl was beyond the wall. The gates were shut. It was daylight. “Just—the kid was affected. Keep her in the village. Don’t bring her near the horses. Had a hell of a time on the road. My horse is all right. Didn’t ever come near the rogue. Couldn’t think about Tarmin, though, I didn’t want to think about it all the way up. And the kids kept remembering it, spooking my horse. Didn’t help. Didn’t help at all.”

They had no more questions for a moment. He didn’t open his eyes to see, but he thought he’d answered everything.

“Jennie’s eight,” Callie said, nothing else, but he understood what she meant. As if a whole village on her hands wasn’t reason enough in itself to worry about him or Cloud in the camp.

“I’ll leave if you like. Give me a day or so.”

“Not saying that,” Ridley said.

Decent, good people. He’d had all the way up here to imagine the godawful situations a lone junior could get into, including finding himself in some shelter alone with a bunch of guys older and rougher and maybe far crazier. Winter came down and bunched people up in shelters at the same time the horses were in rut, and memories and sex flew thick as falling leaves through present time.

You didn’t want to get in with a rough crowd, damn, you didn’t, and he hadn’t wanted to scare Carlo and Randy about that possibility. He’d held his own nerves together and was so, so relieved to find himself with a solid, sensible lot of people with an ordinary little girl—

But he’d never… never thought about a little kid exposed to the outspillings of his mind… he just… wasn’t safe…

“Here.” Callie came near, but it was Ridley’s voice, and a smell of vodka. He’d been out, or almost out. They’d had time to go and come back again, and Ridley nudged his hand with a glass. “Drink it.”

They’d done it to him before, and he’d hit his head on the fireplace. “Drunk won’t help.”

“Panic won’t either. Just calm down. An eight-year-old in the next room—we’re a little protective. You understand? There’s yellowflower in it. Drink it.”

Understood Ridley’d shoot him before they let him spook the camp, or hurt the kid or Callie.

They’d shoot him before they let him go off the mental edge, the way Spook’s rider had gone. Harper should have had somebody a long number of years ago, someone who’d hand him a glass of yellow and figuratively hold a gun to his head and say straighten out or I’ll blow your brains out.

Might have saved a lot of people.

Might have saved Harper himself.

He drank it. At least three fast mouthfuls.

“You think that horse followed you all the way?” Ridley asked. “Or where did you lose it?”

“Don’t think it came near the village. But it could be on the road.”

“Must have a real strong notion what it wants.”

“Yeah,” he said, and felt a rush of fear—what it wanted.

“I’d hate to have to shoot it. But I will if it comes around.”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “I know. Five, six, loose, though.” He had no idea. Predators could have gotten some, but it could be more than six.

“Bachelors are the fools. Mares with the lot?”

“Mare down with Tara.” He recalled Stuart, and the cabin, and Tara’s mare, and the vodka and yellow began to hit him like a weight. “Yeah. Tara’s mare. But there’s a stallion with her.” He wanted it quiet, quiet, just barricade it out of his mind. He’d held his sanity this far—but he felt himself not able to hold onto the vodka glass, and it burned his raw throat when he took another sip. “You better take it. I’m going to spill it.”

Ridley took the glass back. Danny couldn’t even coordinate his fingers to turn it over to him. His head spun, and his temples pounded, and that and the cough went with the altitude.

He hadn’t slept in a bed since Shamesey.

Couple with a kid wouldn’t put on him or rob him.

Nice little girl. Cute kid. He missed Denis—he really missed Denis. Last time he’d met Denis he’d hit him. He’d ridden out of Shamesey without a word to his family. He really wished—wished he hadn’t done that.

Dark, then. He thought they’d blown out the light.

The morning—it was mid-morning now, though the sun hadn’t even been a faint suspicion in the sky when the party had come in— settled down finally to quiet, except for the wind and the snow still going on outside. Ridley made a late, late breakfast for himself and Callie. Jennie was still sleeping like the dead after her unprecedented night wide awake in the den.

Young Fisher was asleep, too, and might not get out of bed for three or four days, by the look of him. He was anxious to get Fisher over to Peterson and see what else he knew.

Fear had come up the mountain with those kids. Fear had lent them the strength to do what only a couple of young men could do, in making (Ridley didn’t question that part of the story) the whole trek from midway in one day and most of a night, up that iced slant. It was the kind of thing young folk could do, maybe once in their lives—and that some didn’t survive. And the trouble they brought wasn’t going to bed as quickly or as easily as Dan Fisher had.

But the kids—including the problem the girl posed—were disposed of to the village side of the wall, out of the reach of their horses, Fisher wouldn’t stir for thunder, and that was enough to let him and Callie at least draw breath and have their breakfast and a following cup of tea in quiet, mental and otherwise.

All the same Callie had to go look in on Jennie—just checking.

And that, from Callie’s partner, required at least a look up when Callie came back. He generally disapproved Callie’s hovering over the kid. Today there was reason.

Callie—who was used to reading his mind, literally so when Slip and Shimmer were in question—didn’t tell him Jennie was all right when she came back into the main room. Callie didn’t give him a bit of information, meaning he’d have to go look in for himself or he’d have to ask her, dammit.

“She all right?”

“She’s fine.” Callie went to the fireside and poured herself a cup of tea.

It was their hardest argument, how much exposure to the realities of life, sex, and death was too much too soon for their daughter, and when they shouldn’t baby her. It was certain as sundown and sunrise that Jennie would take off on a horse and go long before either of her parents thought she was ready. Kids always did. Young horses didn’t know their young riders were too young, or that two horse years and eight human years didn’t exactly make a mature decision.

They’d been worrying about Rain. But with this arrival in the camp they knew there could be much worse going on. He’d heard of rogues, and in the tales that ran among riders, if you got one in a district you could have others.

And dammit, Fisher offered to trek out of here, but the kids he’d escorted were here. There was no way in good conscience to pass that mess on to Mornay village, which was smaller than Evergreen and less equipped than they were to handle the kids.

Especially the girl.

Tarmin gone?

There’d been five riders down there. Five riders hadn’t been enough, against what had come down on Tarmin.

And these kids survived?

“It’s quiet out there,” Callie said as she joined him by the fire. “I’d think the horses would have been out and about.”

If there were any intrusion into their hearing, that was what Callie meant, specifically—if that loose horse Fisher had talked about had come in. There’d been a disturbance before they’d put Fisher to bed, a little queasiness in the ambient—but it might have been a bushdevil, something stirred out of a burrow nearby. They hadn’t heard anything they could be certain of.

“Just hope the quiet lasts,” he said as Callie warmed her cup with a dollop from the pot. He truly didn’t want to have to kill a horse— but, dammit, he was defending a daughter. “If that stray comes in— I don’t know. The horses down the mountain may attract it back down. I hope so.”

“It could have been us, you know that?” Callie had been upset since he’d brought Fisher into the barracks. He’d seen it in every line of her body. She’d been dealing with the village kids—including the girl. “What got Tarmin could have come to Evergreen instead.”

“Well, the last rider in Tarmin must have done something right. It’s dead. He swears they did get it, Callie.”

“If we’ve heard the truth,” Callie said. “We’re leaning an awful lot on Fisher’s word.”

“He’s got no motive to lie.”

“The hell he hasn’t! He brought that girl up here, in her condition—what kind of judgment is that?”

He had to think of Jennie. “I’m not sure I could have let her die. And she was getting worse.”

“And they’ve got a horse after them. We have his word the rogue is gone. We don’t know that’s not what chased him up the mountain! He had walls down there, shelters near Tarmin—and why did he leave there? Because the girl would have died? Or because something was chasing him?”

“We have his word it ever existed in the first place, Callie. If he was a thoroughgoing liar, why would he have to tell us anything?”

“In case the phone lines aren’t down for the winter here. In case we’d already got a message from Tarmin! In case we listened to him and caught how damn scared he is! In case we asked why he didn’t go down the mountain if that’s where he’s from? Look at the girl, for God’s sake! He said—when she came out of it—she shouldn’t be near the horses. What did he mean by that, except that she’s not safe here, she was spooking him and his horse, and I don’t think she’s safe even in the village!”

He didn’t have an answer for that—not one Callie couldn’t knock down. Callie wasn’t a trusting woman. And she’d formed conclusions it was well to listen to.

“The lines going down early this year,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t just the ice on the lines, you know? As crazy as things have felt for weeks, the way things felt out there when he was coming in with those kids—oh, I believe him when he says there was trouble at Tarmin. I don’t believe him when he says the rogue situation’s done with. And he’s under this roof and that girl’s just the other side of the camp wall!”

“Are you saying we should put him out? The little I did catch from him while we were in the den—I believe he’s honest; I also think he’s young, he’s skittish, he’s holding stuff in, but I don’t think he’s actually lying to us. I think he’s told us what he feels safe telling and I don’t blame him for not letting all he remembers loose on a night like that.”

“I wish I thought he wasn’t lying.”

“Wish I had an answer for you,” Ridley said. But he didn’t.

And by now he’d had time to realize that not only did they have a winter problem, they were facing a spring and summer and years down the road problem, and the very scary prospect of not just Evergreen but all the villages on the mountain going into next autumn without supplies.

Much of their supply source for equipment and half their trade with the lowlands was a company down in Anveney town that might—who knew the minds of townfolk?—be very reluctant to send even the usual number of trucks up here without some hard dealing. The main source they had for food was Shamesey. Oil and gas came from the south. One truck lost, when Aby Dale had died— that happened. But Tarmin gone?

That was the staging area for all trucks going up to the High Loop and it was the depot for supplies, the warehouses for trade goods that were just too heavy to ship up: warehouses for everything coming down off the mountain and everything that had to be sent up—some items by oxcart, as things moved when the villagers were paying the freight; and some by truck, when the trucks hauling company loads had space and the item wasn’t too heavy.

Food for the High Loop villages stayed in warehouses in Tarmin before it moved up the Climb by oxcart. They were going to be eating a lot of bushdevil and willy-wisp if they couldn’t get lowland beef and pork. Flour already cost twice what it did in Tarmin, which was already three times its cost in the lowlands.

Gasoline and freight costs could easily quadruple for Evergreen.

And the oxen that made those runs—the only transportation for goods that didn’t run at Anveney’s cost for fuel—he didn’t need to ask young Fisher what their fate had been once those gates were open. They were gone. The men that drove those teams were gone along with everything else edible that wasn’t cased in steel or locked behind it.

Tarmin gone meant no local goods moving until they replaced the oxen and the drivers. And oxen with experienced drivers didn’t exist except over on Darwin Peak—a far journey—or down in Shamesey district, which had a long-running feud with Anveney, which had no oxen. Anveney was Rogers Peak’s primary contractor—and the best source of people with the nerve to leave the big towns and venture into the High Wild.

“I tell you,” he said, “we’d better spend less time sitting in camp this winter, do a little extra hunting, store whatever we can. It’s going to be a long year.”

Callie shot him a look that said he’d caught her attention. “Think Cassivey will deal hard?”

That was the company in Anveney.

“Will snow fall this winter?” was his counter. “He’s a townsman. I tell you, if we don’t get some ox-teams up here it’s going to be a cold, damn expensive next winter, or we’re going to make a lot of trips with wheelbarrows up and down that road.”

“Shamesey’s going to know we’re in trouble. And they’ll jack the price. It’s not going to be easy this summer.”

“They’ll rebuild Tarmin,” he said, and as he said it a thought came to him, the glimmering of an idea that, yes, Tarmin had to exist: Anveney and Shamesey were as dependent on Rogers Peak as Rogers Peak settlements were on them, and even if they had help from Anveney’s most desperate—it wasn’t townsmen from the flat-lands that were going to be able to bring it back to life.