Cloud's Rider

Cloud's Rider Page 26

by C. J. Cherryh

  “I want to go out to the den.”

  “It’s dark out,” mama said, and then—then there was a difference in mama’s tone. “Well, —finish your potatoes first.” Jennie couldn’t mama. Rain was drowning everything out but him. But there was a difference all the same, and mama was going to let her do something alone she’d never been allowed to do.

  Because she belonged where Rain was. It was a thought so wonderful she didn’t linger at all complaining about the potatoes. She bolted them down as fast as she could, got up from table—said, “Excuse me,” the way mama and papa were always scolding her to say. Tonight when she was grown up, she said it just because she wanted to, and tonight all the rules weren’t walls around her, they were part of the familiar way things were and she hadn’t any interest in being a kid and doing things the wrong way. She was Jennie Sabotay, Rain’s rider, and the whole world was different.

  She went and got her coat and her scarf, her hat and her gloves, she wrapped up and snugged down her cuffs herself, while her family and Dan sat at the table eating and trying not to watch her too obviously.

  But there wouldn’t be a thing in the world mama could find fault with in the way she dressed or acted, not a thing.

  “I’ll come back before I get chilled,” she announced, because mama always said that, and tonight she was handling everything for herself.

  She hadn’t expected the relief she saw, like everybody at the table had let go a breath all at once, even when the ambient wasn’t including them, just her and Rain and the other horses. She was puzzled.

  But she had Rain , and it was a clear night. She went out the outside door, and shut it tight, and walked down the porch—mama was always saying not to run on the steps, she’d slip on the ice. So she got all the way down to the yard. But by that time Rain was outside the den, coming to meet her, and she hadn’t another thought but Rain’s thoughts, the way snow smelled and the way things looked—Rain had never really seen the stars, either, that she thought were wonderful, and Rain seemed a little confused where and what they were.

  But mostly Rain wanted with him, and wanted

  Callie was trying not to be disturbed about the situation. She was doing, Danny thought, a very fine job of holding it in, and he wasn’t about to disturb what he perceived as a delicate balance.

  “I’ll go to bed,” he said quietly, that being the only refuge he’d discovered where he could take his influence out of the family.

  “No,” Callie said. “You were trying to say something this afternoon. What?”

  He honestly couldn’t reconstruct where he’d been in his approach to Callie. Or what he’d said. “Just that—I hoped not to disrupt your lives. That I never meant to.”

  “She’s gone,” Callie said. “She’s made her choice. There’s nothing to do about it.”

  “Seems to me,” Ridley said quietly, “she isn’t gone, and the colt was on his way to making a choice. She’s that age. So’s the horse. Fisher, you’ve probably seen more pairings than either of us have. Seventeen and all.”

  Shamesey being the huge camp that it was, Ridley was right: you saw about everything in every combination of human and horse there’d ever been—some good, some you wondered about. “Good horse,” Danny said ever so faintly. “That’s just a real good young horse.” He had another notion, realizing as he did tonight that neither Ridley nor Callie might ever have seen another pairing besides their own. “What I know—begging your pardon—if I could say—”

  “What?” Callie snapped.

  “It—sort of indicates to me that when Spook showed up Rain might have gotten just a little more protective of her. I think it would have happened. But when an older horse came around looking for a rider, I think that pushed Rain into claiming his before he could risk losing her—and so he had a rider to help him fend this other horse off.” The last thing he wanted was to lecture seniors regarding horses and their daughter. It was real dangerous territory to venture.

  “Damn glad it’s not the other horse,” Ridley muttered.

  “What in hell are we going to do?” Callie asked. “What are we going to do this spring?”

  “Split up if we have to. You go with her. Or I do.”

  Meaning if—almost when—young Rain took out with wanderlust.

  And it didn’t call for a junior’s opinion at all. But he had at least an alternative. And Callie had asked him to stay at the table.

  “There’s also me,” he said, and waited a half a breath for an explosion. He didn’t want to make the offer he made—he didn’t want to tie Cloud down even to a village and even for the summer: he felt like a traitor in that regard. But he was at least partly responsible for the danger he’d brought, and he saw at least a small way to patch it. “I know you think I’m the devil, but if she goes out this spring, I’d stay here through the summer. Or I’d ride with her and you stay here. I’ve got a little brother. I know kids her age. I’d stay with her and see she got back here safe before winter.”

  He wasn’t getting any reaction from them. He decided he’d said enough and maybe enough to offend them. Callie looked like a thundercloud. Ridley—he wasn’t sure.

  There was an ambient. But it was all

  “It’s to think about,” Callie said. And then added: “It’s not you in question. It’s that horse out there. It tried to get Jennie.”

  “It didn’t,” Ridley said. “It can’t, now.”

  “It’s still got to be stopped.”

  “I agree,” Danny said. “It has to be.”

  They hadn’t said what they’d do about Jennie this spring when horses started to wander or whether they even accounted his offer as serious or other than self-serving. But he didn’t entirely expect they would say anything. It was an eventuality they didn’t want to think about, and he wasn’t the person Callie would want with her daughter, not at all.

  He got up to refill the teapot.

  The ambient stayed as it was, a contented kid, contented horse, both silly, both louder than anything on the mountain. That horse if it was out there had to know it had lost Jennie as a prospect.

  Maybe it would be discouraged. But it had lost Rain as a rival, too. And that might well figure in the situation.

  “There’s something you can do now,” Ridley said. “Which is asking a bit. But there’s three riders at Mornay—that’s the next village down the road—and they could spare one.”

  “You want me to ride to Mornay.”

  “If,” Ridley said, “if we don’t get that horse in the next couple of days, weather permitting. And supposing it comes back. We could go out with the hunters—escort you out to the first shelter between us and them and you make the trek over to Mornay and come back with help.”

  So Ridley wasn’t just getting him to go winter over at the next village.

  Counting that one of them had a pregnant mare, one was a stranger to the area and one of them was an eight-year-old just this week trying to figure out how to get onto her horse—getting help from another village was a real good notion.

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’ll do that.”

  “That’s saying we have to,” Ridley said. “Chances are—Rain’s settling with Jennie may put an end to it. I hope so.”

  “Drink to that,” Callie said, and got up and got the spirits bottle. She poured three glasses, gave one to Ridley, second to him—which she sipped beforehand. Third for herself.

  Proof enough, Danny said to himself, and didn’t hesitate to drink it when Ridley proposed, “To the Offspring and the horse.”

  “We did it,” was Callie’s second. “She’s still alive and we are.”

  Jennie was staying out in the den and she might be out there the whole night. He didn’t think Callie would get a wink of sleep. Maybe not Ridley. At the least they’d take turns.

  And they talked about having gotten Jennie to a major turning in her life.

  But he didn’t think they expected it would be easy after this.

  Nor that they wanted help waiting up for the kid. So he excused himself to his bed and lay there listening to an ambient as new and full of foolishness as could be.

  Thinki
ng of Cloud and himself. And beginnings of life and not endings for a change.

  Darcy had made supper that evening and Brionne ate half a dish of beef pasta and a whole cookie and half of another for dessert.

  But Brionne said very little—or what she said was so quiet that Darcy couldn’t hear.

  Once it sounded like, “I want to go home.”

  And another time, “Go away!”

  But when Darcy started to leave Brionne said, “Where are you going?”

  Darcy came back and sat down by the side of the bed. The girl had been dreaming awake, she thought. Not really sleeping, but not entirely aware, either. There was a strange feeling to the night—her own elation with the child’s waking, or the unaccustomed feeling of life in this room, or just the knowledge that the days would change now. Everything had stopped at some time around Mark’s death, and no day had brought anything different from the last. And now every day brought a possibility of things changing.

  Now she went to bed at night thinking about tomorrow, and what she’d do, and what she’d try. She hadn’t done that kind of planning in—a long time.

  And tonight she lay abed thinking of Mark as she sometimes did, just thinking about him in the dark and the things she’d tell him— and wanting to tell him about all the things that had happened.

  But there was so much, there was so very much she’d done that thinking about it became a job in itself, and made her sleepy.

  Her edge-of-sleep thought seemed infected with cheerfulness. With recklessness and sheer anticipation that just wasn’t like her.

  She felt equal to anything. That in itself was unprecedented.

  If the girl had come a year ago Mark wouldn’t have died. Mark would have wanted to live if he’d seen this child, if he’d seen how much she was like Faye. But more, if Mark had felt the things she felt tonight, he’d never have wanted to die.

  Right at the edge of sleep she pretended that Mark had seen her and that Mark was sleeping in the bed beside her. She knew better, of course, but she could think that for the night, the way she could tell herself that the empty room had a child again and that mistakes were all revised, and that she had a chance to do right all the things that had for a year been so wrong.

  There was a tomorrow again. She’d run to the very edge of the money she had on account. She’d not collected fees for things she’d done on call, or at least not pursued any of the late ones—because she’d not cared.

  But tomorrow she’d open the lower-floor shutters and open her office again, and she’d take patients. The miners always had complaints and aches and pains. Miners always had money on account.

  And she’d buy Brionne such pretty things.

  Things felt better. Maybe it was going to church. Maybe it was just getting another number of days between them and disaster and church days were markers.

  But, sleeping in a proper cot alongside his brother in the warmest place in Evergreen village, with the banked coals making a comfortable glow and the stones lending warmth to a peaceful night, Carlo let go a sigh that seemed to stand for so much that had been piled up on him, so much debt, so much fear, so much anxiety.

  Things were working out. Rick wasn’t happy—least of all in the public scene this morning, with them being welcomed by the congregation and all. Ordinarily he’d have found it excruciating notice on himself, and had, for the duration, but it meant something. It meant something vitally important, to have the preacher’s backing and to know that they weren’t to blame for that horse that had scared hell out of the village.

  Rider business. A horse didn’t come within his responsibility. Wasn’t fair for Danny to get tagged with it—but if the preacher didn’t see blaming him and Randy for that horse, that left Rick Mackey as the only one with that notion. And precarious as his and Randy’s situation was, he wasn’t about to rush forward to claim the blame.

  He just—just hoped to God it went away.

  He didn’t want to be listening to it when they shot it.

  He had a fistful of pillow, doing violence to it without realizing it, and let it go, and let go another sigh, this time consciously, purposefully releasing all the pent-up worry.

  He ought to take care of the rest of the pending business he had in town, pay off all the emotional debts and pin down the uncertainties.

  Meaning going finally and finding out about their sister, what the doctor thought of her chances, what the outlook was, what the debt might be that she’d accumulated. He was responsible for her. He had to be. There was no one else.

  * * *

  Chapter 15

  Ť ^ ť

  “That’s right, darling. Take another spoonful. There’s sugar in it.”

  The girl swallowed down the cereal, and after three or four such spoonfuls, the girl heaved a little sigh and blinked and blinked again. “You’re in Evergreen, honey,” Darcy said. She offered that information every time she thought the girl might have come close to hearing anything or truly absorbing the things she said—because there’d been that moment of lucidity—and then it had gone for the rest of the day. But she knew that if it had come once, it could come back—to the right lure, to the promise of safety and comfort. “You’re in the village up the mountain. My name’s Darcy. How are you doing?”

  “I’m tired,” the girl said unexpectedly and matter of factly. But Darcy didn’t let herself show surprise at all.

  “I imagine you are, honey. Do you want some more?”

  “All right,” the girl said, and ate the rest of the bowl before she shut her eyes and seemed to drift away.

  Darcy was trembling as she set the spoon and the bowl down. She sat there by the girl’s bedside telling herself she might really have won this one, and seeing in that wind-burned face, still lovely after the long trek up the mountain, and the hands all broken-nailed and cut, the evidences of a suffering and struggle her Faye had never known except in the few minutes of her death.

  This child would never know privation in Evergreen, not while she was taking care of her. This child would grow up safe and have all the things a beautiful young girl should have, and she’d see to it.

  She went downstairs and went on tidying up. She arranged things in Mark’s office, and sterilized the instruments in boiling water, against the arrival of clients.

  Then she went out on the snowy balcony of the second floor and opened the storm shutters. People about in the winter evening, the few who weren’t using the tunnels in the light snow-fall, stopped in the street and looked up. No one spoke.

  But two—two, while she watched, came from the street onto the walk, and stamped their boots on the porch and disappeared under the angle of the porch roof.

  She heard a knocking at her door. Miners, she thought. Maybe clients.

  It was bitter cold out on the balcony and she gladly went inside and down. She opened the door and set herself in the doorway in such a way that they couldn’t just brush past her without explaining themselves, because some such clients were the sort that deserved sending right down to the pharmacist with an order for sugar pills or strong purgative.

  “Ma’am,” the tall one said. “Are you the doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name’s Carlo Goss. This is my brother Randy. How’s our sister doing?”

  The girl’s brothers. It came to her like a thunderstroke that these boys could take the girl away. It wasn’t fair. They couldn’t. Not now. They hadn’t even asked how she was. They didn’t care—

  But in the same heartbeat and in deep confusion she had to amend that harsh judgment. They’d carried the girl to her with heroic effort. There were frost burns on their faces. How did they love her enough to do that—and not come to see her?

  “She’s doing pretty well,” she said—hardly a breath having passed in those thoughts. Their arrival disturbed her for reasons she didn’t even want to look at in herself. She didn’t want to let them through the door to talk to them, much less admit them to the girl’s room— but she couldn’t say go away. They had rights. They could go to the marshal and complain, and Eli would have
to come back and say, Darcy, you have to let them see her, and how would that look? And how would that feel?

  “Come in,” she said. She wondered whether she should ask them to take off their coats. She wondered whether she should offer tea. She wanted them out of the way, out of this house, but how fast could she push them and how much could she keep secret that wouldn’t ultimately get back to them and color how they dealt with her?

  Friendly. Friendly seemed the best approach. Court the boys. Make them comfortable so they couldn’t turn on her.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked. “Would you like to sit down?”

  “To see our sister,” Carlo said—and very businesslike, very much in possession of his rights over the situation. She was afraid.

  “Come along upstairs,” she said, then, constrained to cooperate.

  “Nice house,” the younger brother said as if he was estimating the value of the set-abouts.

  “Thank you,” she said, while her mind was racing over what they wanted and whether they meant to take Brionne and what she could do about it. She winced at bringing two such enemies into the heart of the house, into things that were hers and Mark’s and Faye’s, where they could see what she had and maybe calculate it wasn’t as fine as where they’d come from and wasn’t really a house they’d want their sister in. But she had no choice but take them up the stairs and into Faye’s bedroom.

  There they took off hats and gloves and loosened scarves. They brought deep cold with them. It clung to their clothing, on which snow didn’t melt. They brought noise. They brought foolish fears into her heart—even to think of them taking her back. The brothers didn’t know how to deal with her. They didn’t understand how to take care of the girl—they’d failed. They stood above a sleeping sister—having failed.

  And then—then—maybe a creak of the floorboards, or maybe just a sense the girl at times seemed to have—she opened her eyes and stared at them.

  “Carlo?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and got down on one knee and took her hand. “Hi. How’re you doing, Brinny?”

 

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