Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 25

by C. J. Cherryh

  But at the second sip the girl blinked, and blinked again and passed a glance around the room.

  “Where is this?” she asked then.

  “Evergreen, honey. You’re all right.”

  “How did I get here?” she asked. She was porcelain and gold, wind-blushed and delicate despite the signs of exposure. Darcy scarcely dared breathe, feared to say something that might drive her back into that silent world and shatter this tenuous contact.

  “Honey, your brothers brought you. They carried you up the mountain.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Darcy. This is my house. I’m the village doctor.”

  “Are you?” The eyes drifted shut again. And opened, and wandered across the details of the room. “Can I stay here?”

  “Honey, you can stay here as long as you want to. Would you like some cereal?”

  A thin, pale hand explored the crocheted white roses. “It’s a pretty room.”

  “It was my daughter’s room. Now it’s yours.”

  “Did your daughter grow up?”

  “No. She died. So you see—” Darcy set the bowl and the spoon down on the table. And the girl didn’t slip away. She touched the white coverlets and explored a ribbon in an eyelet cutaway. Darcy couldn’t resist the curls. And Darcy found she could say the hard truth about Faye without a lump in her throat now. She wound a curl around her finger and made it perfect. “There’s no one to use the room now. I’d like you to stay, sweet. I would.”

  “I want my mama,” the girl said. “I want my mama.” But white-gowned arms reached for her and hugged her, the way no one had since Faye died. Not even Mark. And the girl was so thin, so weak. “I want to go home,” the girl said.

  Not Faye. Brionne Goss. From Tarmin. Which didn’t exist anymore.

  “Honey, I don’t think you can go home. This is Evergreen. I’m afraid nobody’s left in Tarmin. That’s what they say. So you can stay here as long as you like.”

  “Where’s my mama?”

  “I think she must be dead, honey, like my daughter. Like my husband. —Like your papa.”

  “Not my papa!” It was an angry voice. Terribly angry, weak as it was. “Not like my papa!”

  “I think everybody’s gone, honey, except your brothers. They brought you here.”

  Darcy watched tears start. She sat down on the edge of the bed and brushed the wind blushed cheek with a gentle finger and let the tears run for a moment before she gathered the frail body against her and let the child cry her eyes dry.

  Then she mopped the child’s wet lashes and gave her a handkerchief from Faye’s bureau and let her blow her nose.

  “I could make you a bowl of cereal,” she said, “if you don’t want soup.”

  The blond head turned away.

  “A sandwich.”

  “No.” A frail fist wiped at a tear.

  “Do you want me to bring your brothers?”

  “No!”

  “There might be cookies. I might have some.”

  The girl turned her head toward her. Sniffed.

  “Would you like some cookies, sweet?”

  A nod.

  “All right. I think I could do that, sweet. I certainly could. It’ll take me a bit. But you’ll have cookies.”

  She hadn’t the makings of cookies. It meant a trip outside and asking the shopkeepers on a Sunday afternoon, at which time some were open and some weren’t. But she was willing. She put on her coat and her scarf and went out to the bakers’ house and roused Alice Raigur out and bought cookies, as the fastest course to produce them. She went and called on the grocer’s house and bought dried beef, ferociously expensive, and pasta and sugar-sweets, which the grocer just happened to have. She went back with her arms full of groceries and to her own surprise found herself nodding and being pleasant to one of her less-liked neighbors in the passage coming back.

  The child was asleep when she got back. When Brionne waked to her urging she seemed listless as before and didn’t remember her name, but all the same Darcy kept her word and served Brionne the cookies with hot tea—Brionne ate half of a cookie.

  Danny couldn’t say exactly there was peace in the barracks, or that the business with the horse was settled. It hadn’t come around last night. Maybe it had been scared off by the shot Ridley had fired. was part of its personal nightmare; and maybe with guns going off it just hadn’t wanted to stay.

  But Ridley hadn’t proposed going out on a Sunday, maybe village custom: Danny didn’t ask. He spent a lot of time out in the den, taking the occasion to do some clean-up around the place, raking and turning the bedding, doing a lot of things that weren’t needful, exactly, but they’d have to be done later, if he didn’t do them sooner, and he really wanted to make Ridley and Callie happier with him than he’d merited.

  He didn’t know what Ridley might have said to Callie. His spending time out at the den at least gave Ridley and Callie a chance to talk matters over without him hearing it in any sense, and he figured if he’d moderately won Ridley’s better opinion, he couldn’t have a better lawyer with Callie.

  He hadn’t heard any explosions.

  Cloud followed him about, getting him to and finally to , of which Cloud never, ever tired.

  Jennie came outside to tend to Rain, and brushed Rain—well, as high as Jennie could reach.

  “Was that girl bad?” Jennie wanted to know, and the ambient carried thoughts of and

  “That girl didn’t mind the way she was supposed to,” Danny said. Having a kid brother, he knew the tracks an eight-year-old mind wandered, and knew not to make it too complicated—or too lacking in detail. “A rider who knew told her to stay inside the gate and she went out anyway. And that’s what happened.”

  “I wouldn’t go out the gate,” Jennie said.

  “You’re smart.” Compliments never hurt. In his experience. Once you were praised as good for one thing, you didn’t so readily do the opposite. “That horse out there is dangerous. If a gate got open Rain might go out to fight him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because boy horses do that. And if Rain got in a fight, that’s a big mean horse, and he might hurt Rain real bad. So we have to be real careful that one of the boy horses doesn’t get out the gate.”

  “What about Shimmer?”

  “Shimmer, too. The horse out there might try to come inside where Shimmer’s den is, and she’d fight him, and she might lose the baby.”

  “I’d get the hoe. I’d hit him.”

  “If that horse ever gets in here, you get into the barracks and you bolt the door and you let the horses handle it. Our three boy horses together can put a strange horse out of the yard. And they would. But Shimmer could still get hurt. That’s why your papa and I want that horse to leave.”

  “Would you shoot him?”

  Delicate question. “Wouldn’t you shoot him,” he asked, “if he was going to kill Rain?”

  “Yeah.” A reluctant and unhappy yeah, that was, but Jennie did agree to the premise.

  “Your papa would never shoot anything if he didn’t have to. He’s real smart. So if he ever did, you’d know he did the right thing.”

  “Yeah.” Not enthusiastically.

  He applied himself to a vigorous brushing of Cloud’s far side in hopes Jennie and her questions would go inside the barracks again.

  But in the same moment Slip went outside, and from there Jennie caught an impression of and

  “Where’s your papa going?” Danny wondered.

  “To the hunters,” Jennie said.

  “To go out?”

  “To the village,” Jennie said. “To talk to the hunters.”

  Ridley hadn’t asked him to go along. Which said something, he supposed. He hoped that it didn’t say Ridley was filling the hunters in on his and Carlo’s problems.

  He applied his frustration to the tangles that crept into Cloud’s mane. He kept quiet in the ambient and was aware of Ridley leaving it, the other side of the wall.

  Jennie flitted off. And he eventually ran out of tangles.

  He thought—maybe he should go to the barracks and try to talk to Callie, personally, reasonably
. Nothing worse could happen to him than what had happened yesterday with Ridley.

  Well on the other hand, she might pull the trigger.

  Cloud wasn’t enthusiastic. He didn’t want

  “It’s all right, silly.” Danny gave Cloud a pat on the shoulder, put away the brushes and went out into the yard.

  But Callie had come out onto the porch, dressed for a stay in the cold, and had called Shimmer to her.

  Callie spotted him, then, and the ambient went—tense, if not foreboding. Callie, he was sure, didn’t want the meeting with him; but there he was, and Callie knew he was there and knew he was looking to deal with her, he was also reasonably sure. Shimmer, maybe because she was pregnant or maybe because she was protective of Callie with Slip upset, was touchy and standoffish. Slip was occupied trotting up and down along a track beside the village wall, listening for what he could hear out of that strange full-of-people place Ridley went that a horse couldn’t. Slip was frustrated and anxious. But Shimmer was wary in particular of

  So was Callie.

  Danny walked toward the barracks, necessarily on a course to intercept Callie and Shimmer.

  “I’d like to talk,” he said. “Mind?”

  “About what?”

  “About my being here. About my not telling the truth first off.”

  “What about it?”

  “That I’m sorry. You knew I was holding back. And I knew I was in trouble, but fact was—”

  Jennie came running up. “I finished my problems,” she said. “I’m going to brush Rain.”

  “That’s fine,” Callie said.

  “Can I go over to the grocery and get some candy?”

  “No.”

  “Just one piece?”

  “It’s Sunday and the grocery’s closed.”

  “But papa went to the village!”

  “That’s fine. Papa’s talking to some people. I’m talking to Dan. All right? Run away.”

  “Papa’s talking about shooting that horse. Isn’t he?”

  “Jennie, do you have lessons to do?”

  “I don’t want him to shoot that horse!”

  “Jennie—”

  “I don’t want him to!”

  “I’ll bet I can find you something to do inside if you’ve nothing better to do.”

  “I’ll brush Rain.”

  “Good. Go do that,” Callie said, frowning, and Jennie ran off to the den.

  “I,” Danny said carefully, “just wanted to explain. I don’t know how much Ridley told you about what I said. But I did offer to go out and deal with the horse. I know I shouldn’t have brought the girl here. I knew it then and I didn’t plan to go all the way to the village until I was in a position to talk to the riders here and find out what I didn’t know. I made a mistake. A lot of mistakes. I don’t know that does anything—”

  “You’re full of dark spots, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t intend to be. I know you’d have been within your rights to have tossed me out. I just—”

  “Just kind of miscalculated.”

  “More than once. But—”

  He could see Jennie making another try at Rain, off in the doorway of the den. Jennie was using the manger wall to stand on and the support post to hold on to in case Rain moved out from under her.

  But this time Rain didn’t move.

  This time Jennie slid on, and got a fistful of mane, and sat there. Cloud, out in the yard, turned his head. The ambient went full of and Danny held his breath between fear that Rain would pitch her off on her head and fear that Callie, catching the scene first from the ambient and from him and then from , was going to explode in a shouting fit that wouldn’t help junior nerves at all.

  Callie didn’t. Callie was very quiet. He caught intense and , enough to upset the neighborhood if it broke loose, but she remained very, very quiet. So did Shimmer.

  “Look!” Jennie crowed, and out she rode into the yard, no great burst of speed at all, just an easy amble across the well-tracked snow.

  Cloud (Danny remembered those first wild dashes across the hills near Shamesey) had dumped him from a flying run twice the first night he’d met him. The memory made his bones ache and made Cloud dance and throw his head.

  But Rain had certainly dumped Jennie the requisite number of times during the last several days, and now the young fool of a nighthorse seemed to have figured out that his own wild moves were dumping the youngster off and hurting Jennie—which was a difficult thought for a nighthorse. Trying to get and all sorted out taxed a nighthorse concept of location to the limit.

  Rain moved sedately, now, skittish at the same time, and Callie stood there—upset that this was happening at all, Danny was well sure, and upset that something so important was happening while Ridley wasn’t there, and upset with all that going with a colt horse meant to young Jennie’s future.

  Shimmer gave out a challenge call that was part and part mirroring Callie’s restrained distress, and at that, her offspring Rain set into a jog trot, not a nighthorse’s best gait, but comfortable—until the horse in question had forty kilos of human bouncing unskillfully on his back.

  But Jennie stayed on. Jennie even wanted , while other humans could only hold their breath and hope Jennie stayed undamaged. Rain obliged, running a circle around the den while Jennie clung like a burr.

  Danny let go a breath. He didn’t know if his opinion was welcome to Callie, but he knew the hellish quandary Ridley and Callie were in in the matter of that colt and Jennie: he couldn’t live that closely with them and the kid for this number of days without picking up parental worry and their resolution not to have this pairing— and an initial year which they couldn’t conveniently supervise, if Rain did the ordinary young male nighthorse foray out and away from the local group—out the gate next spring and off in a giddy exploration of the whole mountain, nosing into everything. Spring—spring called to a new pair like them in a way that was just one sensation after another.

  He knew. Every rider had to have known, at some point in his life, that first sense-ridden spring—the smells, the colors, the life that was breaking on both horse and rider after the long white days of ice and enclosure. And coupled with a winter pairing—when there were so many, many new sensations to get used to—

  “Mama! Dan! See me?”

  Oh, he A rider could drown all his good sense in it. He found gooseflesh on his arms that had nothing to do with the cold; he felt Callie

  But wasn’t just a visual picture. Not any longer. It was an accomplishment. It was a new creature. It had to be dealt with as rider and horse—even a fool junior could understand there was no redoing or undoing it, not now.

  “We see you!” Callie called back. “Try not to break your neck!”

  Callie was crying. There were tears on her face. But Callie was holding the ambient very quiet, and he gave her all the help he could in that.

  “Slow it down,” Callie shouted to her besotted offspring. “You’re going to take a spill!”

  But about that moment washed through the ambient with all the noisy force of a pair of youngsters—God, it deafened. It had to reach Ridley. It had to reach Guil and Tara at the bottom of the mountain. And Danny laughed. He couldn’t help it. Cloud kicked up his heels, and pregnant Shimmer gave a little hop— there was nothing in the whole world like that happiness, and he couldn’t but remember , the way came to him—and from clear across the wall.

  Ridley knew. Ridley had heard—God, who in all creation hadn’t? Danny had trouble breathing. And an unexpected attack of tears. Jennie and Rain had just that instant gotten—there weren’t words for it—but it was a coming together that made total sense of each other—or at least as far as which body had four feet and which one had two, which one was jogging about the yard and which one was sitting where Jennie had known for weeks she belonged and where Rain wanted her to be. He saw Callie take a surreptitious wipe at her eyes.

  “She’s still a baby,” Callie complained aloud, he guessed to him. “So’s the damn horse.”

  “A good horse. He’ll take care of her.”

  “A damn colt!”

  “A smar
t one.”

  Then—came a feeling from somewhere outside the walls that was and and

  There was —Danny couldn’t pin it down. Couldn’t figure it, though it—it wasn’t Ridley.

  Which said to him that was the comparison he’d instinctively made.

  Another rider.

  Another horse.

  And not one that was supposed to be here.

  Rain had stopped still, head lifted, nostrils flared. Shimmer looked toward the wall. Cloud did.

  “Damn!” Callie cried, fists clenched. <“Get out of here! Damn you! Go away!”>

  Rain was protecting Jennie: was clear from that quarter, a horse that would fight—no doubt of it, not by Rain’s action or Cloud’s or Shimmer’s. Slip was with all his considerable force. There was no way, no way, Danny thought suddenly, that Jennie could be tempted by the stray, now.

  But Brionne could, and Danny started toward the village gate to know whether the ambient was as threatening there as here.

  But before he could get there, Ridley was coming back, at a dead run if he could judge. Slip was , and Danny stopped, figuring that whatever there was to hear on that side of the wall and near that house where Brionne lodged Ridley would have heard and would tell them.

  Jennie slid down as Rain came near the gate and Ridley came through.

  “Are you all right?” was Ridley’s first question to his daughter.

  “I rode Rain, I rode Rain and he let me!”

  Ridley picked his daughter up and hugged her tight.

  Rain was throwing out the same that would underlay every communication to a riderless horse from now on— and whatever was wrong out there went away.

  Danny didn’t know for sure what had just flared through the ambient. But in the preoccupation of two overwhelmed parents he didn’t know whether they’d heard it at all.

  Next thing, papa said at supper that night, Jennie had to learn to mount without the manger wall—

  “Just can’t depend on those mangers being everywhere available,” papa said, and Jennie, knowing she was being teased, swatted at her father’s arm.

  “You’ll learn,” papa said then. “Got to grow a bit first, though. Eat those potatoes.”

 

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