Except freezing to death in a rainstorm. He was saner than that. He’d not acted like it, spooking out, out there, but Burn had known he wasn’t rational, and Burn had duly taken him where he had to go.
So I’m here, woman, he thought in distress. What more do you want?
God, I should have heard you. Should have heard, when you said you couldn’t say your reasons.
It wasn’t easy to hold back with the horses involved. They’d met as juniors, they’d been naive, having no idea how to deal with people, how much to give away, how much to deal for—at least he, personally and sometimes painfully, had had to discover the rules.
He’d run whenever she came too close to him, he’d stayed whenever it looked comfortable. He was ashamed of it—but he was a skittish sort. He just didn’t know how to tell right and wrong even with her, let alone with riders he didn’t know, least of all with townsmen; and he supposed now in hindsight that he’d sensed for four years that Aby had something going in the Anveney business. When she’d been snowed in up on the heights last year—he’d wintered down in Shamesey alone; hell, he’d been mad, Aby’d tried to talk to him—he hadn’t seen it. He just hadn’t seen it.
Maybe she’d thought he was cleverer than he was. She always gave him too much credit. And she’d gone off this summer more than mad—she’d gone off hurt.
Burn, half-asleep, jerked his head up, shifted a foreleg, licked his face once, twice, urgently, until he elbowed Burn off.
Burn always had had a jealous, protective streak.
Burn had, he recalled of a sudden, interrupted him and Aby on their first night together, at a very personal moment.
He’d been a kid, embarrassed at his horse’s manners and mad as hell. Aby’d been helpless with laughter—able to laugh, when he couldn’t find it in him.
Aby’d ever after stood between him and quarrels he’d otherwise have had. Aby could generally calm him down. Guil, she’d say, you’re being a fool. And, Down, Guil. You’re wrong. You’re outright wrong. Listen to me.
Suddenly it was that year again, that giddy, all-or-nothing time, the moment, the night, the place, an open-air camp in early autumn, with the chance of frost. Two fool kids had started out in all good behavior trying to keep warm, they’d built a small fire under a cliff, on rock that turned out to be less than comfortable. They’d shared a blanket, chastely watching leaves from quakesilvers higher up the slope drift down into their fire and go in a puff of fire. You could see the veins in fire before they went to ash—quakesilvers were tough.
He’d said it was like seeing through the leaves. She’d always remember the image, because she thought it wonderful; veins of fire in a leaf gone invisible. It was their secret. It was the image she’d cast him… whenever she wanted him.
The horses had set at their own lovemaking, autumn being wild in the air—and two chaste fools had gotten, well… warmer under their blanket, and more reckless.
And at the worst—or best—moment Burn had just gotten curious and hung his nose over them to watch.
God. He’d chased Burn clear across that mountainside, swearing and bare-ass naked and embarrassed as hell—while Aby had rolled on the ground laughing and laughing.
Two fool kids, in a place and a raw edge of weather no little dangerous. But they’d been only kids, and invulnerable, and they’d had Burn and Moon with them for protection—what forethought did they possibly need?
First love. Never faded.
He dreamed awake: he drifted in that time, before quarrels, before mistrust or a promise ever passed between them.
In the mating season, when desires ran high and thinking was at an ebb.
The rain drizzled down, dripped miserably off the firelit evergreens, and the smoke of the campfire collected under the branches, whipped this way and that by mist-laden winds, stinging eyes and noses. They sat in slickers, black and brown, glistening with rain and firelight. Drips from the overhanging boughs scored on Danny’s neck no matter how he shifted his position at the fire, and Cloud sulked, standing off from the Hallanslake horses’ position under the trees.
Hallanslakers, it turned out, felt perfectly free to get into somebody else’s supplies, saying they’d pooled everything.
Which meant they were common thieves, in Danny Fisher’s thinking, and his displeasure had to come through to them—if Cloud’s continual sulking didn’t smother it.
Nothing like his contempt seemed to bother the Hallanslakers, who were evidently used to being thought badly of.
And that left not a damn lot a sixteen-year-old could do, his gun and ammunition having been pooled, too, along with items of his personal gear he was sure he wouldn’t get back until he could physically beat the man who’d taken them, not a likely prospect, counting the man bulked like a bear.
Danny thought so too. He wasn’t even sure they were going to feed him once they’d made supper with his supplies. He and they hadn’t been at all pleasant with each other.
But when they got down to handing it out, he set his jaw, got up and made his move for what he figured was a fair share. Nobody stopped him from filling his plate.
He ate a spoonful. He was a better cook than that. He didn’t care who heard the thought.
He had his biscuits and sausage—or half of it. He saved half for Cloud, who otherwise was making do on the sparse, edge-of-the-road grass pasture, in the dark and the rain. The Hallanslakers took shares out to their own horses, which was at least decent behavior; Danny slipped Cloud a biscuit and half of the sausage.
The other horses thought they were going to push in for Cloud’s dinner. Danny took his life in his hands and swatted one nighthorse nose that came far too close—dodged a kick and bumped into one of the Hallanslakers, Watt, who grabbed him, sent a surly
“Then keep him out of my horse’s face,” he answered Watt back, in the same mood he’d swatted the horse.
And got spun around by another hand, face-to-face with Ancel Harper.
“I’m not going to stand there and get bit!” he said to Harper.
“You…” Harper said, “be careful how you carry yourself, kid. You could have a serious accident.”
The man meant it. Danny had no doubt. Cloud meant the anger he sent, too.
Danny struggled for calm, said, on a breath, “Yeah, I figured,” and shrugged his arm free.
He went over then to stand in the rain in Cloud’s close company and think about Shamesey, because Cloud was mad, and Cloud could get hurt—
But Cloud thought about
Danny tried not to think about the camp. He thought instead about the mountains where they were going, and high-country cold, and tried not to think about Jonas, or guns—they’d pushed hard and late in their traveling and still not managed to catch Jonas and his crew. They’d found Jonas’ abandoned campsite with no trouble: the horses could smell
But they hadn’t caught Jonas and his company, and Danny wasn’t at all sorry about it. He feared there’d be shooting if Jonas and the Hallanslakers met, and he didn’t want himself or Cloud to be in the middle of it. He skittered nervously around the thought that maybe Jonas and his friends could win a shootout, if one happened; or that Jonas might lie in wait for Harper; or that Jonas being out ahead of them mig
ht warn Stuart and team up against the Hallanslakers.
Most of all he tried not to think about Stuart, since he’d as good as told Harper aloud what way Stuart had gone, and by that, how and where to lay an ambush.
Ambush was very much what Harper intended. He gathered that from the lot of them. They wanted no fair fight. And he didn’t know why—except they hated Stuart because of a dead man whose name he didn’t know, and because of a quarrel they’d had when they’d worked together. It seemed to him a thin reason to want to kill somebody, since by what he could gather, Stuart hadn’t killed the man he’d fought, and it had been a fair fight—but that didn’t matter to them or to Harper.
And the Hallanslakers in general kept imaging Stuart and the rogue as one and the same, as if—as if somehow they’d become the same thing in the Hallanslakers’ minds, an ugly thing, a tricky, shifting thing in their thoughts. They wallowed in their notion of Stuart as the enemy and their image grew and grew even off things he knew and he brought to the ambient: they caught his image of < Stuart on the porch > and twisted it until it was an evil, cheating man, giving a kid bad advice. They caught his memory of
He felt sick at his stomach with the shifting-about they were forcing on his memories. They didn’t beat him, and on the evidence of tonight’s camp, they didn’t intend to starve him. They just thought their skewed thoughts at him so insistently and so often and so vengefully he felt the edges of his world curling up, as if the images he cherished of Stuart were about to peel away and show something else underneath.
But when the Hallanslaker images came thick and fast, Cloud just imaged
And Cloud was. The ambient several times in the afternoon had gone crazed with conflicting images and Cloud’s disgusting commentary, until the man who’d appropriated his supplies had started calling him names of a sort he’d never in his life tolerated, and then threatened Cloud.
That was Quig, no other name, Quig. There were three of them, counting Harper. Quig and Watt—he gathered they were cousins. Harper’s horse was an image of shapes and dark—Spook was how he thought of the beast, but he never heard Harper call its name; Quig’s horse was flashes of light; and he didn’t even catch Watt’s big horse: it just slipped around in the ambient. Watt had a hellacious scar running back into his hair, and a dent in his skull where it looked like he’d been kicked once upon a time. They all carried rifles. From what he could tell they’d rather shoot from far off than confront anybody on equal terms.
He heard movement. He felt it, simultaneously, from Cloud: < Harper walking, > and looked behind him, where Harper stopped, hat brim dripping with the rain. Harper was mad.
“Smart-ass kid,” Harper said. “Damn troublemaker. You don’t know all you think you know.”
He didn’t want to listen. He turned his face away to avoid a fight and Harper punched him in the shoulder.
That got his attention, and a move from Cloud that he stopped with a shove of his hands.
“Smart-ass, I’m saying. Big threat, kid. The Wild doesn’t give a damn.”
Harper’s thought. Cloud shied off, the horses around them shied, catching the rogue-feeling implicit in the sending, and Danny didn’t know when Harper grabbed him. Harper was suddenly holding his arm so hard the slicker clasp parted at his throat. They were together in a woods where it wasn’t raining, and this… thing was around them.
“You don’t like it?” Harper asked him. “Don’t like it?”
Harper had cared for the dead rider; Harper had felt pain and guilt then that Harper felt now, and it was all one thing with Stuart, < Stuart with a knife, Stuart inviting attack, a different Stuart than he knew, angry and deadly serious.> And
Danny couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think straight.
“My brother,” Harper said.
He began to be afraid, afraid Harper was crazy, afraid that Harper was going to spook Cloud into an attack and they’d shoot: he kept sending
“I’ve seen it,” Harper said, up in his face. “It wants you, that’s what it does, it wants you so bad, and it’ll get right up to you and you’ll let it, you can’t help it. It wants you, and you can’t hear anything else. And that’s when you’ve got to hold firm, that’s when you’ve got to want to kill it, you got to want to kill it before it kills your horse and it kills you, you hear me, kid? You shoot it fast, because you want it so bad it’ll haunt you, it’ll be back in your brain every time you put your head down to sleep, it’ll be there behind your eyelids every time it’s quiet. It’ll be there. It’s always there. I’ve seen it. I’ve shot it. I shoot it every time it comes back to me, because I won’t let it near me, you hear me?”
“Yessir,” he breathed, “yessir,” because it was the only way he knew to get loose. He felt sick at his stomach. He wanted
Harper shoved him away so hard he struggled to keep his balance on the wet leaves, and that set him free of the images, just
Cloud was shivering, twitches of Cloud’s skin up his leg and onto his shoulder, muscles jumping, but something else was going on, too, association with the horses around him, a sense of
But in the instant of his panic, Cloud traded it for
He was shivering. The ambient was still rattling and shaking to the feelings Harper had let loose. He had no doubt that Harper had dealt with a rogue before, and Harper still had dreams about it. Harper had scared the whole camp. The Hallanslakers were afraid. They were bigger than Harper, stronger than Harper, but neither one of them was smarter, neither of them was more in possession of the ambient. Only these two had come of those who had stood with Harper in the meeting, but these two did what Harper wanted and resonated to Harper’s hate and fear.
Noisy, Harper was that. Harper was always There, when you were near him. And nobody could argue with him. Harper knew what he knew and you weren’t going to change it.
He hadn’t liked them in the meeting. He truly didn’t like them now. He traced a finger over the softness of Cloud’s nose, told himself he should think about
And as for why they hadn’t shot him, or beaten him—they want
ed the same thing Jonas had wanted: they wanted him to find Stuart for them. They probably had the idea he was stupid enough to go on giving them what he knew, the way he already had. Jonas said that being noisy like that wasn’t unusual in kids who hadn’t gotten a hold on their sendings, or learned to be polite—and Cloud being young, too, it made it worse.
So the Hallanslakers counted on him being a stupid kid who’d think about what he tried not to think about, and give away everything he knew if they just kept him rattled with their lies—
Only—they didn’t think they were lying. They believed what they thought about the world and about Stuart, which meant they were the stupid ones; they only thought they had the straight of things.
And having no other defense, he decided to think so as often as possible.
* * *
Chapter xiv
« ^ »
THE FIRE IN THE HEARTH HAD BURNED DOWN AGAIN. TARA GOT UP and put another log on, but the chill was more than in the air of this night. Vadim and Chad hadn’t come back.
So what could they do but wait and go on waiting, she and her partners? The shelter ambient was full of floor-pacing and frustration—they couldn’t go kiting off after Vadim and Chad, because they couldn’t leave the village undefended, especially since they had reason to fear there was something out there dangerous enough to put two riders in trouble.
They could only cling to what Vadim had said about maybe staying out if they found something—they told each other that, as hope of things going right grew thinner and thinner.
By now they were on the third big log of the night; and while they agreed that Vadim and Chad wouldn’t have any trouble camping out on a clear night, no one could sleep, no one was quite on her best logic, and no one was talking with any clarity. Anxieties were too high. Words were too unreliable. They kept the horses away in the den, out of range of the shelter—they hadn’t precisely consulted about that decision, but Tara had wanted the horses there, and Luisa and Mina, whose thoughts already were too dark and too disturbed to make supper sit well, agreed.
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