Текст книги "Cloud's Rider "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“We’re going to starve.”

“We won’t starve. I opened the outside door a while ago. The storm’s winding down. I figure they’ll fire the forge tomorrow morning. Then I’ll talk to them.”

Randy didn’t look happy.

“Nice house she’s in?”

“What I hear. Yeah.”

Randy didn’t say anything else, just tucked up, arms across his chest, and shut his eyes.

“However this works out,” Carlo said, trying to comfort the kid, “we’ll get some kind of work in this place, and if we don’t like it here, we can stash some money and move on. We’ll be all right. There’s got to be jobs for us somewhere. There’s villages up here, there’s camps on Darwin—”

“Not much on Darwin,” Randy muttered.

“We’ll manage,” Carlo said.

So it wasn’t home, so they were hungry for a day. They’d found a place to sleep. They were out of the storm. They didn’t have Brionne to take care of. And if they had to go somewhere else, Danny might help them. Danny might not really want to—but somehow they could make it.

He sat down next to the furnace wall. His head ached and his body ached, and he just wanted to shut his eyes. The stones were warm. He didn’t need the blanket. He’d gotten used to the cold.

Randy waked him once with a coughing fit, had a drink of warm water without complaining and went back to sleep again.

But, left awake, finding the light had gone entirely from the cracks that had admitted it earlier, Carlo found himself sitting by the forge looking at hands that had taken about all they could bear, and thinking, and growing more and more worried about the situation. He’dargued for going up. Danny had agreed with it, but mostly he’d pushed it—being scared to death of that horse, and Randy’s stupid notions, and his sister’s chance of waking. They could still be down there, fairly comfortable.

Now they’d gotten into a place where the local smith wasn’t happy to see another smith in town—and might notbe willing to take on help.

Randy looked to him for a way out. Randy slept now, expecting his older brother to do something to get them breakfast next morning.

But going back to the rider camp wasn’t the answer. The riders couldn’t take them. And close relationship with the village riders wouldn’t give them respectability at all, when their only source of help might end up being the church.

Maybe, he thought, maybe if he showed the smith he knew what he was doing—firing up without leave would be impertinent, but there was a lot of other work that wanted doing, right in front of him. The smith might in fact be shorthanded, considering the fact that the floor wasn’t swept and that the stock was lying and hanging in no particular order—there was just a lot out of order in this place.

He was awake, it was night. There was a broom leaning against a support post.

So he used it.

There was a slovenly stack of wood and he put it in order without making too much noise. Randy snored, oblivious to the movement around him.

There were leather aprons and such thrown about and he hung them up on pegs where they logically belonged.

He located the rag-bin and, ignoring the pain of his frost-burned hands and the stiffness that had set into his fingers, began the kind of cleanup his mother and father had insisted on, wiping up along the edges of the furnace, around the vent. If the forge was ever cooled down, you scrubbed everything you couldn’t get to when it was fired up, that was his father’s and his mother’s cardinal rule. You kept things in order. You set the tools out by kind and by size. If you didn’t know you had it you couldn’t use it, his mother was in the habit of saying. If you didn’t know you had it, you couldn’t sell it. If you didn’t know you didn’t have it you couldn’t make a likely item during your downtime so you could sell it next time somebody wanted it in a hurry.

The surly man in charge might thinkhe didn’t need a couple of assistants, but he at least wasn’t going to turn them down in the mistaken idea they didn’t know how to work or that they didn’t know up from down in the trade or in his shop.

He’d done all that and sat down to catch his breath and salve his aching hands by the time he heard the opening and shutting of doors somewhere nearby. Inside the house, he thought, which meant—he cast a look at the cracks in the door, confirming the guess—it was daylight again. There was just a smidge of ham left. Randy had eaten all of his, so he saved half for Randy and had enough breakfast at least to take the wobbles out of his legs and the complete hollow out of his stomach, on half the remaining ham and a cup of hot water.

He heard footsteps coming and going next door. The day was definitely starting, and he was ready to make as good an impression as he could or know he couldn’t have done more than he’d done.

The door opened—the man they’d dealt with when they’d arrived came in, big man, wide of waist as well as chest, big jaw set in what seemed habitual glumness.

“You’re still here.” It sounded like a complaint.

“Yes, sir. Name’s Carlo Goss. That’s my brother Randy. Thank you for the place to stay.”

“So what in hell are you doing up here? Tarmin, is it?”

What did he say? Protect the marshal’s information and say there was trouble down in Tarmin, but not say what? And that they’d run from it? What was the man to think?

“Tarmin’s wiped out,” he said. “We’re the only survivors.”

“Damn-all,” Mackey said. “That the truth?”

“Yes, sir. It is. Gates came open.” He didn’t say how. He tried to obey the marshal’s instruction by not saying enough. Making it sound like mischance. “Snow was coming down. The whole town was overrun with vermin. We were smiths down there.”

“Huh.” The man shook his head, scratched his chest and walked over and picked up a piece of wood. Threwit on the fire, scattering ash over the freshly swept stones. Tossed another on, carelessly, scattering more soot. “Sad story. Not my business.”

Not hisbusiness. Tarmin was dead, everybody he knew was dead, and it wasn’t Van Mackey’s business?

Carlo drew even deep breaths, asking himself whether the whole truth could have shaken the man, but he’d never know. Randy was waking up and he went over to take hold of his brother’s arm and drag him up to his feet where he had the ability to jerk him hard, in the chance Randy had heard the exchange or might hear something else to inspire an outburst of indignation.

Meanwhile the man was poking up the fire, opening the main flue, starting up for the day, as it seemed.

“Randy,” Carlo said, “this is the man who owns the place. This is the man who’s put us up for a day or so. Say good morning to Mr. Mackey.”

“Morning,” Randy mumbled.

The man didn’t say anything. Didn’t even look at him.

“What’s the matter with him?” Randy asked, aside.

“Quiet,” Carlo said. “Don’t say a thing.”

“So what’s he say? Are we staying here?”

He gave Randy’s arm a hard squeeze and Randy took the cue and shut up. Mackey went on poking about the fire. Somebody else came in, a young man maybe Danny’s age, maybe older than that, with the same large-gutted figure as Van Mackey, not quite as far advanced, and the same sullen jaw—brown hair cut way short, so you could see the scalp through it, and it stood up on end. The guy stood there with his hands in his pockets until Van Mackey gave a sharp order for him to work the bellows. Then he ambled over and gave the bellows a couple of shoves, waking up the fire.

“You actually work in the forge?” Van Mackey asked.

“Yes, sir. Pretty good, myself.”

“Lot of work in Tarmin?”

“Not now,” fell out of his mouth. He wished it hadn’t. But the man didn’t react to that, either. Bad joke. Bad mood, dealing with this glum son of a bitch who clearly didn’t like the sight of them.

“Mend a wheel?” Mackey asked.

“Truck or cart. Makea wheel, or a barrel. Minor mechanics. Some welding on the trucks.”

“Welding takes equipment.”

“We had it.”

“What’s the kid do? Eat and sleep?”

Randy sucked in a breath to answer. Carlo squeezed his arm hard. “Fix-ups. Scrub. Inventory. Small chain, kitchen stuff.”

“Skinny kid.”

“Stronger than he looks,” Carlo said, thin-lipped. Randy was about to explode. “I’m sorry we got dumped on you without warning, Mr. Mackey, but we canwork.”

“Got help.”

If he meant the other guy it didn’t look prosperous.

“I’m good. Food and a room. That’s all we ask.”

“Food and you eat and sleep in the forge.”

A grim-looking woman had meanwhile come through the door and stood staring from the doorway. “And you cook it,” the woman said. “And do your own damn laundry. No dishes from the house.”

“Take it or leave it,” the man said.

“That stinks!” Randy exclaimed, and Carlo jerked the arm hard enough to hurt, with, “Shut up,” and “Yes, sir, but we need at least a small cash wage.”

“No wage.”

“Thirty a week or I look elsewhere.”

“You won’t find elsewhere. You’re lucky you’re not outside in the snow, kid.”

“Twenty-five. The two of us.”

“Fifteen,” the woman said.

“Twenty.”

“That’s ten for you and five for the kid and first time either of you’s drunk on the job you’re fired. That’s the deal.”

“Can you getdrunk on that?”

“We don’t need ’im.” That from the younger one. “Tell ’em go to hell.”

“I’m competition,” Carlo said, arms folded. “ Somebodymight set me up.”

The man might have glowered. You couldn’t tell past the usual expression. He walked over and took out a rod from the sorting he’d done. Let it fell back. “This ain’t Tarmin. Wages are lower here. Fifteen, and you eat and drink down the street. Buy your own food and don’t let me catch you drunk in here or leaving food lie about or I’ll lay you out cold. Hear me?”

“Yes, sir.” Fact was he didn’t drink, or hadn’t until Tarmin went down and he’d met Danny Fisher.

“All right. Done deal. You fire up. Going to make up some logging chain, heaviest gauge. Any problem?”

“Easy.” The son of a bitch never had acknowledged the cleanup he’d done. He couldn’t resist walking over, confidently laying hands on a bar the right size, which he’dset in order out of the jumble of bars, and carrying it back to the forge.

“Huh,” the man said, and he and his wife left.

The other one stayed, the young guy, who sauntered over to the forge.

“You better get it straight,” the young guy said. “There’s onejob here. You just do what you’re told, collect your pay and don’t give him or me any backtalk or you’re out in the cold. Hear?”

Carlo faced him. The guy poked him hard in the chest.

“You hear me?”

“Yeah. I hear you.”

“You want a fight?”

“Not actually, no.”

“Hit him,” Randy said.

He didn’t wanta fight. “Name’s Carlo Goss,” he said. “This is Randy. You’re… ?”

“Mackey. Rick Mackey. This is myplace. Long as you keep that clear. That’s my old man. And you’re notstaying.”

“Fine. Come spring, we’ll likely be out of here—if we make enough. Not staying where we’re not welcome. Meanwhile I compete with you or I work foryou. Your father’s smart to hire us.”

“Fancy talk. ‘Compete,’ hell! You learn those words down the mountain, fancy-boy?”

“Sure didn’t learn ’em here.” Maybe that ill-considered retort went right over Rick’s head. At least it wasn’t a remark Rick could answer without thinking about it, maybe over several hours; and he trulydidn’t want an argument. “Look,” he said, and dropped down to a grammar his mother would have boxed his ears for. But Rick probably wouldn’t catch that change of gears, either. “I got work to do. Which I’m getting paid for.” He went on to the woodpile and started gathering up wood, trusting Randy to keep his mouth shut and restrain himself from provoking the situation.

Rick wasn’t excessively enterprising, he picked that up, Rick wasn’t inclined to move or think at high speed, and Van Mackey couldn’t get him to work; Rick was probably the reason the place looked like a sty before he’d cleaned it up, though for all he could tell, nobody who lived and worked here might even see the difference.

“Your brother a coward?” he heard behind his back.

“He can beat hell out of you,” Randy said.

Bothfools. If he warned Rick not to hit his brother that meant that Rick was of course, being Randy’s mental age, immediately going to have to hit Randy. Then he was going to have to hit Rick. So he said nothing and trusted Randy to dodge if the ox upped the ante.

“The kid says you can beat me,” Rick said to him, and nudged him in the shoulder as he walked to the furnace.

“Maybe. Maybe not. Fight doesn’t prove anything. Waste of time.”

“You’re a coward.”

“Yeah, fine.” He had his arms full of potential weapons, and he didn’t want to put himself in position for Rick to badger, but Rick stepped between him and the forge.

So he dumped the load. Rick skipped back as logs bounced everywhere about his shins and his feet, and Rick stumbled back against the furnace, in danger of bad burns. Carlo reached out and grabbed him forward, got swung on for his pains and let him go.

“You all right?” he asked with all due concern—which wasn’t much.

“Go to hell.”

He didn’t even answer. Rick grabbed his shoulder and tried to swing him around, and he broke the hold, a move which popped a button on his shirt and gave Rick a straight-on stare, which evidently exceeded Rick’s plan of action.

“You better not steal nothing,” Rick said, and left, sucking on the side of a burned hand.

The door slammed shut.

“You should have fought him!” Randy cried.

He grabbed a fistful of Randy’s shirt and jerked him hard. “You acted the fool, kid. What do you want? What’ll satisfy you? We need this job!”

“He called you a coward!”

“Yeah. So what?”

“So you could beat him!”

“I know that. He doesn’t. Pretty clearly I matter to him. He doesn’t matter to me.” He let Randy go and started picking up wood. “He shouldn’t matter to you. Be useful. Feed the fire.”

“He’s going to make trouble for you.”

“Kid, you know how close you came to him hitting you to provoke me? Did you figure that out or do I have to say it in smaller words?”

“I’m not scared of him. I’d have ducked.”

“Yeah, sure. You listen to me. You’d betterbe scared of him. That guy is stupid. You should be afraid of stupid people. You don’t know what they’ll do. Don’t get into fights with stupid people.”

“You could beat him!”

“Yeah, and you tell me where our food and board’s coming from.‘*

“There’s that horse out there in the woods. I could—”

“No.”

“I could be a rider and I’d make a lot of money.”

He was disgusted—he was sick at his stomach only thinking of Randy going out looking for that horse. “Did you learn from your sister, or didn’t you?”

“I’m not stupid.”

“Yeah, well, don’t talk like it.” He grabbed up scattered logs and took them to the fire, not willing to argue, not with feet that hurt, hands that hurt, ears that hurt and knees that said a biscuit and a piece of ham yesterday wasn’t enough to keep a guy going stoking furnaces.

“You’re scared of him.”

“Yeah. Sure. Grow up.”

“Don’t talk to me like that!”

“I mean it. Grow up. This is serious.”

“You could still beat him up.”

“That’d be real useful, wouldn’t it? We’re in no damn position to start trouble, we’ve no place to live, it’s the middle of the winter, we’ve no tools, nothing to our names—figure it out, kid. He wantsme to fight him. Doesn’t that give him everything he wants?”

“You could still beat him!”

“Then what?”

Randy sat and scowled and hugged his stomach.

“So what’s the matter?”

“I’m still hungry,” Randy said.

“So stoke the fire. I’ll go next door and talk to the man about cash and where we get some kind of breakfast. —Which we don’t get by bashing his son. Got it?”

Randy didn’t answer him. His answer wasn’t the way Randy wanted the world to be. Randy was going to sulk about it because Randy’s belly hurt. Sometimes he wanted to bash Randy hard until Randy used the brains he had.

But that wasn’tthe answer, either. Getting the fire started and getting an ember bed going was ahead of breakfast, at least if he was going to ask for an advance on their earnings.

Wouldn’t hit Randy. No matter what. He’d hit Randy to keep him alive on the way up. But he wouldn’t do it here. Randy had seen too much of hitting. A whole lot too much.

And finally Randy quit sulking and got up and brought a few logs for the fire.

Chapter 9

No, sir,” Danny said to the question from the marshal, “there wasa rogue horse and it’s dead. I knowit’s dead. That’s all I can say.”

“And it got inside,” the preacher said.

“Reverend, it did, but it wasn’t all that did. It was just vermin everywhere. I don’t claim to know much. I’m a junior rider, only two years out, but the things they say about the vermin going in waves when there’s a big kill, I saw it. There was blood all over—” You didn’t talk about the ambient with religious townfolk or villagers, and, he guessed, least of all with a preacher. “All over. Willy-wisps were running from under my horse’s feet, there was a lorrie-lie going over a wall getting away from us, bodies, bones—it was a real mess. I was out on the mountain when—when my horse started getting upset. When I rode into Tarmin gates, it was night, the gates were wide open. The kids were the last ones alive. They’d held out behind a locked door, and that’s all I know. A lot of other people just—lost their good sense and went outside when—” Sometimes you just couldn’t explain it any other way. “—when they heard the goings-on. Sometimes—sometimes you’ll paint your own image on things. You’ll hear neighbors, people you know. That’s true. It was pretty scary when I rode in.”

There were dismayed shakes of heads. The preacher gave a sad sort of sigh and mouthed something that looked like merciful God. And they didn’t have anything to say right off.

He’d taken the excuse of his feet to avoid a walk out to the den– or over to the marshal’s office—and it was partially, but not insurmountably, true that he was lame. At least he was still limping and sore as hell, and neither Ridley nor Callie had pushed him to do anything for the last number of days but eat, sleep, and sit by the fire and tell stories and play kid-games with Jennie.

He’d dreaded this meeting fit to give him nightmares.

But he was embarrassed to go on claiming that feet that had gotten him up the Climb couldn’t quite get him over to the marshal’s office, or that the small crack on the head was still affecting him that badly. On the day he’d for good and all agreed to walk over to the village side of the wall, a howling cold had set in, and he’d really, really hoped they might cancel the meeting at the last minute, but Evergreen, having its snow-passages, didn’t let a little thing like that stop them. Ridley had brought him through the dank, timber-smelling dark of the tunnels and so over to the village side—so that to this hour, having avoided the horses who might have carried him some sort of mental map from Ridley, he was quite helplessly disoriented and still had no idea at all what the village looked like.

The marshal’s office where he sat was just a desk, some pigeon-holes stuffed with various papers, a board hung with keys, and a door that could lead to the marshal’s house, or the village jail, or even the courtroom. The mayor was there. The preacher, who seemed to be a particular friend of the marshal, had shown up to ask questions. So had one deputy—Burani was his name, he remembered that—and a couple of other people, one man, one woman, both gray-haired, whose position and reason for being here Danny couldn’t figure, so he didn’t know entirely what they wanted, whether they were people who had relatives down in Tarmin or what.

On that ground, he didn’t want to say anything indelicate—that was his mother’s word—about the dead down there, or paint the situation too vividly. He just wanted to let them know what the kids had been through without saying too much.

Those were two of the anxious points he was skirting around. And he kept having to remind himself, as he’d never had to remind himself down in Shamesey, that he couldlie comfortably, that as closely as he’d lived with other minds in all the wide open space of the mountains, and as small and claustrophobic as the villages felt to a Shamesey rider, both things were illusion. Cloud and the rest of the horses were far enough away when he was in the barracks, let alone on this side of the wall, that he was as safe from Cloud carrying unintended images as he had been in Shamesey town before he ever met Cloud.

That kind of privacy wasn’t always true in Shamesey’s huge camp, where a thousand horses wandering around among the barracks meant anything you thought could travel. But here, without Cloud near him, he could lie with all a townsman’s skill at it—and if he could get his mind onto other tracks and calm down, once this meeting was past, he could afford to go near the horses again in Ridley’s company—he was sure Ridley had been wondering why he wouldn’t go out to the horses, and why he’d get uneasy when Cloud or one of the other horses came up near the windows of the barracks, as they’d done. He’d fed Cloud treats from the porch.

He’d tried to keep his thoughts on very mundane things—and didn’t know how successful he was.

Until, dammit, he was absolutely ashamed to face Cloud, who couldn’t know whyhe wasn’t out there when the food buckets came out. Cloud was stiff and sore and being put upon by the other horses, particularly by Slip, who was boss horse in the camp. Cloud didn’t understand being left alone in the den or cared for by Slip’s rider while his own rider was lying about the barracks.

Meetings on the porch weren’t enough any longer. Not as of today. His feet that had walked him over to the marshal’s office could support him while he worked in the den. The headaches had stopped, and even young Jennie had to have picked that up out of the ambient. He just didn’t have any more excuses.

Not that for any guilt of his own he didn’t want to tell the village the truth; but there were details he was still convinced he had to be as careful of as a loaded gun. What he’d seen in Tarmin was nothing to show Jennie, for one major consideration: he was carrying a lot of memories he didn’t want to relive, and least of all to give a little girl nightmares winter-long.

There were also matters of Carlo’s and Randy’s business he didn’t want to bring up—things that didn’t help Tarmin and couldn’t help the dead.

Fact was, he knew he was badly shaken in his ability to keep his thoughts private—and knowingCloud would spill everything in his mind to the local riders made it likely that was exactly what would happen, early and fast, with the worst possible implications.

And if things went wrong, it could conceivably touch off a panic in the village or in the camp, and possibly get Cloud hurt by the other horses. Carlo and Randy, under constant threat of the unknown, that horse, their memories—they’d been throwing off high voltage emotional upset nonstop, so intensely so that it had beenthe ambient, with Cloud’s spookiness in the mix in the hour they’d come in, Cloud being upset as hell about Brionne being near him, about the weather, about the horse nosing about, about the general spookiness in wild things all over the area—which he guessed had traveled up here before they did: Callie had said they’d felt it—and if he started trying to explain all that—he didn’t know where it would lead. Callie and Ridley had been forgiving, had been hospitable to him, had made no threats of making him move on, and had treated him very well, give or take Callie hadn’t quite entirely decided he was reliable: not that Callie was madat him, because Callie didn’t seem the sort, but that Callie thought he was unreliable, possibly not too bright, and maybe lying.

Mad would have been easier to deal with. Callie’s conclusions about him were going to take some long, consistent work to counter, and what he had yet to tell them wasn’t going to make Callie happier with him.

Trouble was, there wasn’t, to this hour, any neat, sure answer to what he’d brought up here except the essential piece of comfort he’d given them: his sure knowledge that the rogue was dead.

But if he let rumor get loose about Brionne or let people go flaring off on suppositions, Carlo and Randy weren’t safe—let alone their sister. And disturbing Brionne, and threatening her, and maybe rousing her to a pitch of fright at which she couldreach a horse’s attention—

God only knew what could happen if she came to and panicked, and some of it got to the horses. Gates couldcome open. People could spook and take up weapons or bolt for imagined safety, or take actions he just couldn’t foresee. He hadn’t talked yet to Ridley or Callie on that score, and while Callie was watching him, he was watching her, and telling himself that while Ridley seemed a calm and reasoning man, a woman who judged that fast and who condemned that quickly might not be the woman he’d trust with a handful of kids who needed forgiveness.

Well, hell, he didn’t anticipate needingto trust her, unless something went wrong.

So he and Callie were at a standoff and it was likely to last a while.

And he sat on a hard chair in the marshal’s office, with Ridley sitting near him, and he answered question after question from the marshal that trod near the center of his concerns: “Does Shamesey know what happened? What did they report down there?”—all the while he was hoping to God none of these people thought to question the locked door story about how Carlo and Randy had survived, never asked whether Brionne was with them, or asked why other locked doors in town hadn’t worked to keep out the vermin.

So far he was lying with a skill his father would be ashamed of.

But, God, if he could just figure out what to tell and what not to—what they needed to know in order to protect themselves and what they didn’t—

He’d warned them, hadn’t he?

He’d told them not to let Brionne near a horse. He’d told them about the one that had followed them.

He’d handled everything his seniors had trusted him to handle. Hadn’t he?

And getting this business out of the way would make him calmer. A lot calmer. So he could deal with Cloud and act normal. And maybe he could think more clearly what to do next.

Except—

Except every night they drank a glass of vodka and he wouldn’t swear his wasn’t tampered with. He slept soundly. He didn’t remember his dreams. Maybe he was just that tired. Maybe they just didn’t want him walking about or going out to the den at night.

“Do you happen to know prices on fuel oil down in the flat?”

“Don’t know that,” he said. “I know it’s gone up a little.” The authorities of Evergreen village, deprived of the warehouses down in Tarmin, were worried about their supply and what kind of base cost they were facing: he knew that from overhearing Ridley and Callie on the same topic. “But I do know that it was a good wheat crop this year. Oats, too.”

There was a slight relief in tense, worried faces. He could give them good news in a lot of regards, because the bitter Anveney-Shamesey quarrel had taken a quieter course. The hoarding that had been going on in Shamesey during the spring and even into the summer was cooling down—he knew: his parents had been laying in supplies, and then weren’t. Probably it was the same story on both sides of the long-standing argument, Anveney with its metals and Shamesey with its grain sometimes downwind of Anveney’s smokestacks.

“I think,” he said to their further questions, “that that’s got to bring prices down. I don’t know that much,” he added, “but my father’s a mechanic in Shamesey, and I do kind of know what he pays for supplies, and what wire’s running per foot, and so on.”

The woman was interested, not alone in the price of wire.

“You’re out of the town itself.”

“I was bom in town. Grew up there. Mostly.”

Evidently not all the information he’d given had gotten passed on—or they hadn’t understood. There were all kinds of riders. Most were born to the life. A few, like him, weren’t. And a man could say .he was a Shamesey rider without saying he had ties actually inside the town itself—which he did truly have.

But after they knew that, the cautious atmosphere warmed considerably. He’d become a human being in their eyes, he guessed, though he wasn’t exactly flattered by it. With town connections, he became nearly as respectable as—well, at least as respectable as their own riders were, which didn’t seem to be too bad a relationship. He wasn’t, like Stuart, a borderer, a rider of the far Wild, half wild himself and unobservant of town manners. He was, instead of a foreboding arrival out of the storm, a rider of some background, even understandable to them.

He didn’t, however, react to their reaction: he might have, a few weeks ago—before he’d been really on his own, before he’d dealt with the things he had to deal with. Now a distance had come between him and towns and villages of every stripe, a kind of uncaring deadness where it came to town sensibilities and an increasing unwillingness to give a damn where it came to a village accounting him righteous.

So he didn’t come across with a sudden burst of truth for them– he stilldidn’t want to damn Carlo and Randy. Horse business was rider business. Townfblk didn’t understand, wouldn’t understand, couldn’t judge whyanyone down below had done anything—and the conspiracy of silence among riders he’d gotten accustomed to down in Shamesey evidently held here, because Ridley hadn’t said a word about a loose horse, either.

And they didn’t ask about Tarmin anymore. They diverted themselves into meticulous questions about the prices and the market down in Shamesey, which he could answer, his father’s shop’s prosperity or lack of it being tied to prevailing costs.

In the past couple of days, he said to himself, among things Ridley hadn’t told them—Spook-horse hadn’tshown up. That was a benefit. Spook-horse hadn’t come into range or made itself a trouble to the village and, by the lack of questions this morning, apparently nobody had heard it.

That could mean the horse had gone down the mountain again, or in feckless grief slipped off a cliff and broken its neck, or that, with the only humans it wanted out of reach, it had just given up and frozen to death in the storm. He was more sorry for it than scared now that he had the solidity of village walls between Cloud and a horse that wanted company enough to fight for it.