He found it spooky to walk among utter strangers. He felt cut off, deaf in a very important sense. Passersby became a threat to him in a way merchants and chance encounters in his own neighborhood in Shamesey town had never been. He didn’t know these people. For the first time in his life he was in a place where he didn’t know people either by long experience or by the thoughts they shed.
Which was stupid. He wasn’tin danger and neither was Cloud.
But he’d sure felt safer when Ridley were with him.
Right now—he’d feel safer with eight-year-old Jennie for a guide, which told him how entirely silly he was being: the street was mostly deserted, and while a rider in his leather breeches and fringed jacket was as conspicuous as a horse walking down the street, he was in a mostly deserted neighborhood in heavy snow, and it wasn’t exactly as if he was walking among hostile crowds.
The few venturers outside their passage system did stare. One man even said hello. A couple of girls—he thought they were girls—walking along bundled into shapeless coats talked behind their hands while they approached and giggled as they came close. “Hello,” he said, defiantly taking the offensive in the deadness of the ambient; “hello,” one said, and then they went into a spasm of teenaged giggles and raced off down the street.
Very young, he said to himself in all the maturity he’d assumed. Too silly. He wasn’t interested. Much.
He passed the public tavern Ridley had mentioned—Ridley hadn’t said whether in so small a camp he and Callie ever crossed over for an evening of what his father called ale and riot—or whether it was going to be a dry winter. It looked like a comfortable sort of building, with lights glowing behind glass windows, with tracks on the snow going up onto the porch and inside.
Then, next to a rusting and untidy stack of iron scrap and old truck parts mostly buried under snow, was a huge evergreen tree, and the smiths’ shop.
The double doors were shut, as came as no surprise. But he took the handle and turned it and pushed, testing whether the place was open, and as it proved to be, walked from the snowy outside white into the shadowy, smoky heat of a large, low forge-shed.
“Yeah?” said a burly young piece of trouble who turned up standing right beside him.
In the same moment, across a low stone wall, he’d seen the ones he was after. Carlo and Randy were working at the forge, Randy with his hand on the bellows lever and Carlo with a set of tongs in his gloved hand—which, if Carlo’s fingers felt like his, Carlo wouldn’t find comfortable.
“Looking for the Goss boys,” he said. “Hello,” he said cheerfully, walking past the surly, close-clipped kid, him with his hair growing long and a knife in his boot. “How’s it going, guys?”
The burly kid said, from behind him, “You the new rider, huh?”
He stopped so as to include the guy in his field of view—not inclined to ignore a provocation behind him, not in Shamesey alleys and not here. “Yeah,” he said. The guy was big, but there was soft fat over the memory of muscle. The gut argued for more acquaintance with the bar than the bellows. “Wintering over, at least.” He didn’t like the tone. At all. And Carlo hadn’t answered his hail—Carlo hadn’t given him a clue what the situation was except to say something low and fast to Randy. But he was getting bored with the threat, and walked on.
“So what do you want?” the big kid asked, not satisfied with one look back.
“Friendly call,” he said, just about hoping the guy would pick up one of those iron bars and come at him. He’d notbeen a thoroughly good kid back in Shamesey streets. He’d been very good since. He’d learned to be smart. But God should give him some satisfaction for his reformation.
Carlo came to meet him, and Randy stayed. Quiet, real quiet, for Randy.
“How’s it going for you?” Carlo took his gloves off and offered a handshake.
“Fine. Want to talk to you. Private. Got a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Place to talk?”
“I’ll get my coat. —Randy, you just keep the heat on. Be back in a minute.”
“Wait a minute!” Randy began.
“Back in a minute, hear me?” Carlo tossed the gloves at him and Randy caught them, still not happy.
“You better get your ass back here,” the other kid said. “Pretty quick. You don’t get paid for talking.”
“Yeah,” Carlo said. “—Come on.” He nodded toward the door and shot a look at Randy before he picked up his coat off a peg near the door, grabbed his hat, and the two of them went out into the milky white of a snowy morning, near the big evergreen. Carlo led the way over beside it and stopped.
“Just a real pleasant fellow in there,” Danny said. “Is that the owner’s kid?”
“Yeah,” Carlo said. “Son of a bitch.” And more cheerfully: “How are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m doing fine. Nice family folk I’m with. Nice kid. Pleasant place. —Is that guy somebody who stays around? You have any trouble with him?”
There was a small silence. Carlo ducked his head, arms tucked, then looked up with his jaw tight. “I tell you I’m getting out of here come spring. Me and Randy, we want to go with you when you leave downland, upland, I don’t care. Anywhere we can get work. I’ll have a little by then to pay you with—or owe you. Whatever it takes. I never hired a rider. I don’t know—”
“Save it. I won’t take your money, long as you don’t want to go off the road I’d take—which is down by east or down by west. Anything else, you’d fell off the mountain.”
“I swear—” Carlo began.
“No big favor. I’m going anyway. Might as well have good company-”
Carlo let go a huge breath. “This guy,” Carlo said. “It’s not just me, understand. I’ve tried.”
“This Mackey guy—the senior—I don’t gather he’s got a good reputation in town, clear out to the rider camp. Ridley sure doesn’t think much of him.”
“I tell you,” Carlo said, thin-lipped, “I’d like to pound his head in. But he’ll take it out on Randy. So will the old man. We wouldn’t have a roof over our heads. And Icould end up in jail.”
“I think people in the village know—”
“I’m the stranger here. This guy has property. Listen—I want to ask you. If it ever got real bad—I mean realbad—or if something happens to me, could Randy come over to the camp? And you take care of him?”
“If it gets bad— bothof you come over. There’ll be breaks in the weather. I can get you on to Mornay or somewhere no matter the weather. Winter’s bad. But it doesn’t mean a horse can’t move.”
Carlo drew several slow breaths. “That’s real generous.”
“I’d take you this week if the weather clears. But—” He suddenly remembered the whole reason he’d come—and it dawned on him the import of what he knew and the village’s ambitions, and maybe that it wasn’t a real safe thing for Carlo and Randy to try to leavethe village with their news. Respectable people could do some damn dirty things—for less money than was involved—and while there might be some who’d take a chance to see there weren’tany heirs to Tarmin property but themselves—there might also be those who’d kill to be sure no other village heard about it.
Carlo could be living with one of the chief suspects in eithereventuality, to judge by Mackey’s blowhard son and the fact Carlo was talking about refuge.
But the plain fact was, riders weren’t in great abundance up here. All of Evergreen had better reckon they couldn’t get ten meters through the Wild without a rider to guide them, and that came down to him, and Ridley and Callie—with an eight-year-old they didn’t want in rough circumstances. Things came crystal clear to him of a sudden, just being over here in this environment, that if he made it real clear to the village at large that he and Carlo were close friends, it might be the best protection for Carlo and Randy he could arrange. Nobodyhad better piss off the only rider-for-hire there was up here.