“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’dtold Randy: The weak die, kid.
Theyhadn’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 heardthe 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. Thatwas what had saved them.
<Gunshot. Blood on the snow.>
His heart jumped.
It was there again, that vision, that one, time-stopped moment. That overwhelming confusion. It had nothingto 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 arider. 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 seeingthings and hearingthings, even to finding it a shortcut to speech when he and Danny and Randy couldn’t, in that hellish wind, make themselves heard.
<Lonely. Snow and branches.>
<High in the branches, looking down.>
He pressed his fingers against his eyes. But that didn’t work. It wasn’t inyour eyes. It was in your brain, inside, where you couldn’t run, couldn’t ignore it.
<Fear.>
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 likememories, 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.
<Horse running, running through the woods. Fear and anger.>
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 wantingto 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 littlecreatures didn’t have the brain to intrude real easily. Sending sightwas 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.
<Dead riders. Lost horses. Dead streets. Fire reflecting on glass windows.>
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’tthat forge, and Tarmin didn’t exist anymore. Nothing could ever bring Tarmin back the way it was. It was lost.