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.