He’d tell Ridley and Callie—soon—about Brionne. Maybe. Or maybe they’d never need to know. If she died—they wouldn’t need to know. He guessed, in the absence of anyone available to ask, being a man meant not spreading the worry about for something two more worriers couldn’t fix.
So it was his to hold. On his own. If spooky stuff once started to spread where horses and an eight-year-old kid were involved, it could turn scary for sure. And no one would ever figure out who had contributed what to the pot.
So he answered the villagers’ questions, at a safe remove from Tarmin orthe intruder on the mountain slopes, and the Evergreen marshal’s office provided hot tea and the preacher provided cookies until they seemed to have run out of questions.
He was free and clear.
“We’d like,” the marshal said then, “for you to come back tomorrow.”
If there’d been a horse near at that moment of distress it would have told everything in the district he’d just panicked.
“I told you all I know,” he said.
“We’d like you to tell the council,” the marshal said. “Won’t take too long. General meeting.”
There wasn’t a way to say no. It wasn’t as if he had a tight schedule.
And the weather today had certainly proved a storm didn’t stop Evergreen officials and their meetings.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “No trouble.” He collected his hat, his scarf, his gloves, and a couple of cookies for Cloud, for a peace-making.
Ridley nipped a few for, he was sure, deserving horses who would expect the same of someone who came remembering <cookies,> and the same for Jennie and Callie, too.
“Oh, we provided,” the preacher said, and came up with a whole sackful, which Ridley took with a grin and a thank-you.
So they went out into the passages with the bag of cookies, and trekked back through the echoing boards toward the camp.
“What do you suppose they want?” he ventured to ask Ridley, and Ridley shrugged.
“Got to tell it firsthand,” Ridley said. “The village wants to know. And the miners and loggers, they have their rights to know. It’s just the way they do things. It’s their rules with the miners association.”
“Huh,” he said, and tried instead, in preparation for coming into camp, to think about cookies—good cookies. And he let himself think how his feet hurt, and he let himself limp and think about his sore knees, which didn’t take any pretending at all.
They walked back through the passage and past the post-and-jog that was the horse-barrier, after which they were in the rider camp, and through the door that let them out into the yard.
Jennie ambushed them out of the snowstorm, having been listening to the horses. So did Cloud, who was lurking near the den and not pushing too much against the horses that owned the place. Cloud came trotting over, black turned gray in the driving snow, and when Danny thought of the taste of <sugar cookies> Cloud switched his ears forward and Cloud’s nostrils dilated.
Then Cloud caught the notion of <cookies> in Ridley’s possession. So had Jennie, who danced about Ridley, trying for the bag, as Slip and Shimmer moved in to assert their claim.
“Pig,” Danny said laughing, when the ambient went to <bag of cookies in Ridley’s hand> as opposed to cookies his rider had. <Cookies,> Danny sent, and held them out, which seduced Cloud right back before heels started flying around Jennie’s short and unpredictably located self.
Jennie got cookies along with a scolding from her father about antics around hungry horses, and one of Jennie’s went to Rain, so Jennie naturally had to have another; Slip made off with one, and well, Rain and Slip had had one apiece from her, so she had to have one to give Shimmer and one for Cloud.
Callie came out into the yard before the bag was gone, and got one, at least, before Shimmer persuaded Callie fairness dictated she was due the other one.
Danny took his chance and left for the porch while it was all happiness and horses high on sugar. He limped up the steps and went to sit by the fire, figuring Jennie would distract Cloud at least long enough—Jennie was good at scratching chins and had not a troubling image in her young head: Cloud seemed to like her, and that hadn’t been the case with his own brother Denis.
His feet didhurt. He hadn’t lied so much in that.
But, God, he wished there weren’t tomorrow to deal with. He’d thought he was free and clear: he’d thought he could go back to camp and dismiss Tarmin from his mind for good and all—at least until spring, when he could get out of here. Dirty trick on their part.
Very dirty trick. So in a concentrated effort to empty his head of everything he didn’t want broadcast, he just stared at the stones and the fire and thought about Shamesey, where things were safe, and about Carlo, whose company he missed, and about—but there were reasons he couldn’t go and talk to Carlo.
The marshal and the village would imagine their questions going to Carlo’s ears, for one thing; they might trust a young rider who was under the orders of a camp-boss they knew, but they’d have no way to know Carlo’s self-restraint, or lack of it.
He wondered if Carlo would be at the meeting tomorrow. Maybe he’d see him there and have a chance to know how he was getting along.
But he didn’t want to betray an interest in the question, no more than he wanted to talk about other things he knew.
Chapter 10
The weather had settled down after yesterday’s snow—as generally the weather had been more moderate than the storm of the night they arrived.
It proved, Danny thought as he and Ridley set out down the barracks steps, that it would have been smarter to sit it out in the cabin at midway. Yesterday had been bitter wind, but nothing still like the storm and the ice they’d climbed in, and the weather today was bright blue sky and only a little white bannered overhead from the heights.
Fool again, he thought. He should have stayed put.
Maybe.
But then—that came of flatlanders climbing mountains in the winter. He’d lived through it. He learned from it.
He asked Ridley what he thought of the weather-chances for the next while and Ridley said, Oh, should clear for at least two days. When he asked how Ridley knew that, Ridley looked puzzled and didn’t answer at once.
Ridley just knew, that was the real answer. It was complicated, the system Ridley had for knowing, or at least rendering good guesses. And no flatlander was going to be sure of it on a single telling.
Assuredly, though, it was a day too good and too sunny to take the passages, and they walked through the camp gate into the village on the surface, past a head-high snow-blown drift along the rider camp wall, and matching ones along the sides of two gray, un-painted board buildings. There were deep piles of snow on either side, but that had been shoveled. The village had cleared the short street from the camp and as they came past those two buildings, which Ridley pointed out as warehouses (not surprising: no villager wanted to livein close proximity to the horses), they came out into the village proper, where industrious and, Danny was sure, constant work against the days of bad weather had shoveled all the street clear, making rumpled piles of snow head-high along the way and a truly huge pile on which children were sliding and playing.
The village as a whole was one street, no more, and the buildings were of unpainted boards, with incredibly steep roofs, a village made quaint and beautiful with a deep, deep coating of snow, and snow-coated trees, of all things, trees right in town, the evergreens that gave the village its name, thick-coated with white where they stood out of the range of children. He was delighted by the trees. And by the fact the snow-piles were white, not brown with mud.
And maybe the village wouldn’t look so pretty when the rains came and the mud took over, but under its coating of pristine snow it was the prettiest human-built place he’d ever seen, including Shamesey’s middle square where rich folk lived.