And what did you tell an eight-year-old about her horse’s reasons for dumping her? How much did the kid know and what did her parents want her to know?
The truth, if they were smart.
But he damn sure wasn’t going to argue that point with Jennie’s parents. He just hoped Jennie’s skull held out.
Chapter 11
It was blue sky and scattered clouds overhead, snow blowing off the trees and sunmelt glistening on the surface of the crags. <Horses,> was Burn’s occasional impression, and Flicker’s; but nothing close or threatening, nothing that would, Guil thought, make Burn jog, which he truly didn’t want this morning, considering the aches in his side.
The woman beside him was much more cheerful than she had been when they’d set out. Tara had begun to mope and to lose appetite yesterday—maybe understandable if she had never been anything except a village rider, and unaccustomed to lying snowbound all winter in an isolated cabin.
But she wasn’t; she’d been a free rider over on Darwin, and the ambient told him it wasn’t the closeness of the cabin that was bothering her. It was an occasional, uneasy, and angry despair that he didn’t want to invade with his advice or even his good will. Right now it felt like approaching storm.
He didn’t want to acknowledge it. She had a gun, an indispensable part of their job. He’d seen a crash coming—he knew it was inevitable, and when it came, it helped that they both had a place to go and something yet to do. It was a dangerous search, a perilous venture for a woman whose method of dealing with her loss had been to shut down and shut in for a while. He’d wanted to go up here from the hour they’d agreed they were going and she’d placed all sorts of interpretations on that haste, from his disapproval of her actions with the kids to a need to prove something to her on hermountain.
The latter had switched about to her need to prove something to him, and come down to an hours’-long fight, their first real partner-style disagreement.
But increasingly since their agreement to come up here she’dstarted thinking about those kids, and about Tarmin, and shewas riding on a mission, not just tagging him. Hecould stay back in the cabin and she’d undertake this to prove something to herself, was what it sounded like to him.
Angry. She was that. It was an anger flying about and trying to find a place to nest. She blamed the Goss family, not the boys, by the rags and tags he picked out of the ambient. She was mad and she had no place to turn it.
And if there was one place that anger could still fasten it was the girl who’d opened the gates, whose selfish whim had ridden the streets of Tarmin, looking for satisfaction. That wasn’t just his guess. It was what they’d both gotten out of the ambient while the boys were there, it was what had roused Tara’s outrage even before the girl had waked, and that outrage had almost pulled the trigger in the instant when sensible fear had drawn the gun—and Danny Fisher had intervened to the hazard of his own life.
She’d put the brake on the temper—and lost her forward motion. Lost the moral justification to do what in her mind wanted doing.
Lost her way, in a world suddenly lacking everyone she’d known.
Well, and there was him, out of his head with painkillers.
And there was this chance, today, to try again to deal with those kids.
The blue sky and the cold air, though, could lighten anyone’s mood. He was too sore to have Burn frisking about like a fool and too sore to think about climbing up and down—but on a day like this Burn found it very hard to behave, and jolted him now and again. Tara’s Flicker had her mind divided between Tara’s purpose and the skittish self-awareness of a mare in heat—which just didn’t raise the common sense to any high level.
Hell of a set they were, as they trekked up the road.
“ I’m fine,” Tara said shortly, so he knew she’d picked up—not the literal thoughts—but the mood and the images flitting about his brain.
“Good,” he said.
She didn’t say anything for a long, long space. Then: “Real quiet for a sunny day.”
“Might be the horses scaring them,” he said, because the little creatures that ordinarily filled the ambient with their flittery images, the minds that gave a sense of shape to the land, would shut down and lie quiet if a horse was hungry and hunting—or they’d all project being elsewhere, which could turn a whole section of the mountain queasy and treacherous.
But a while later he caught a number of strange, deliberate images he’d seen before, which at first he thought werewild creatures, and then he realized it was Tara right beside him, trying to call the lost horses out there, naming their names in the ambient, names not all of which he knew.
Flicker had a chancy, there-and-not-there kind of presence in the first place, light flashing through leaves, and Tara’s presence when she rode Flicker’s senses…
Hard sometimes to say what was due to the horse and what was the rider’s own difficult-to-corner nature. It wasn’t unusual for a horse and a rider to grow alike. It wasn’t unusual for two of the same disposition to pair up. And that was certainly what he had beside him.
While Burn, male, whose essence was <dark, pain, and fire,> with a <fine nighthorse mare> in mating season, was no stable presence in the ambient himself. Guil thumped him occasionally in the ribs to keep his attention to what was going on in the visible world, not wishing <Burn falling in hole> and the consequent <pain in Guil’s side.> It was sharp enough as was.
But the curve on that part of the road that faced the rest of the Firgeberg Range was a cure for any glum mood, a glorious sight which he was seeing for the first time—Aby would like it, Guil thought, just as natural as breathing: the snow-covered peaks, the blue sky, and snow-brightened forest as far as the eye could see.
But the fact came down on him then like a hammer blow, that Aby’d known it very well. She’d died here, and sights like this were the last she’d looked on.
“Damn,” Tara said.
“What?” He thought she’d seen something and he cast about with his vision and his hearing, not horse-sense.
“Just damn,” Tara said, and he knew he’d been far too loud with that realization of his and tried to shut down.
“Listen,” Tara said. “You won’t let mealone. I won’t let youalone. Want to go back? Want to avoid this?”
“No.” He didn’t like the exposure of his thoughts—not when he was thinking how Aby had begged him to come up on this route with her. And he hadn’t.
“Yeah,” Tara said. “ Youcan be standoffish and you’re fine.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Pretty view.”
“Just letting you know.”
“Had it coming.”
“Pretty day,” Tara said.
“Yeah.” The ambient was still quieter than it ought to be.
Maybe, they’d said to each other, the swarming that had taken Tarmin had dislodged wildlife from their territories and driven them further down the mountain.
Or onto the north face of the mountain, where the road wasn’t so well maintained—where the road wasn’t maintained at all, in fact: he’d come up that way, and he knew its deteriorating condition.
Burn took a moment to bump against Flicker and take a nip at her neck. Flicker gave a little kick. <Quiet water,> Guil imaged, and Tara: <sun through branches,> to calm it down.
They gave their horses’ legs a rest after the next turn of the road— slid down and sat down on the rocks, instead of walking as they usually would: he still wasn’t feeling up to a hike. The horses sniffed around the rocks and raked at a burrow where there might be vermin, and caused a minor rockfall onto the snow.
But there wasn’t any reaction in the ambient. There was nothing there. It was as lonely as it had been.