He applied himself to a vigorous brushing of Cloud’s far side in hopes Jennie and her questions would go inside the barracks again.
But in the same moment Slip went outside, and from there Jennie caught an impression of <Ridley going to the rider gate> and <Slip wandering along after him.>
“Where’s your papa going?” Danny wondered.
“To the hunters,” Jennie said.
“To go out?”
“To the village,” Jennie said. “To talk to the hunters.”
Ridley hadn’t asked him to go along. Which said something, he supposed. He hoped that it didn’t say Ridley was filling the hunters in on his and Carlo’s problems.
He applied his frustration to the tangles that crept into Cloud’s mane. He kept quiet in the ambient and was aware of Ridley leaving it, the other side of the wall.
Jennie flitted off. And he eventually ran out of tangles.
He thought—maybe he should go to the barracks and try to talk to Callie, personally, reasonably. Nothing worse could happen to him than what had happened yesterday with Ridley.
Well… on the other hand, shemight pull the trigger.
Cloud wasn’t enthusiastic. He didn’t want <Callie shooting.>
“It’s all right, silly.” Danny gave Cloud a pat on the shoulder, put away the brushes and went out into the yard.
But Callie had come out onto the porch, dressed for a stay in the cold, and had called Shimmer to her.
Callie spotted him, then, and the ambient went—tense, if not foreboding. Callie, he was sure, didn’t want the meeting with him; but there he was, and Callie knew he was there and knew he was looking to deal with her, he was also reasonably sure. Shimmer, maybe because she was pregnant or maybe because she was protective of Callie with Slip upset, was touchy and standoffish. Slip was occupied trotting up and down along a track beside the village wall, listening for what he could hear out of that strange full-of-people place Ridley went that a horse couldn’t. Slip was frustrated and anxious. But Shimmer was wary in particular of <Danny.>
So was Callie.
Danny walked toward the barracks, necessarily on a course to intercept Callie and Shimmer.
“I’d like to talk,” he said. “Mind?”
“About what?”
“About my being here. About my not telling the truth first off.”
“What about it?”
“That I’m sorry. You knew I was holding back. And I knew I was in trouble, but fact was—”
Jennie came running up. “I finished my problems,” she said. “I’m going to brush Rain.”
“That’s fine,” Callie said.
“Can I go over to the grocery and get some candy?”
“No.”
“Just one piece?”
“It’s Sunday and the grocery’s closed.”
“But papa went to the village!”
“That’s fine. Papa’s talking to some people. I’m talking to Dan. All right? Run away.”
“Papa’s talking about shooting that horse. Isn’t he?”
“Jennie, do you have lessons to do?”
“I don’t want him to shoot that horse!”
“Jennie—”
“I don’t want him to!”
“I’ll bet I can find you something to do inside if you’ve nothing better to do.”
“I’ll brush Rain.”
“Good. Go do that,” Callie said, frowning, and Jennie ran off to the den.
“I,” Danny said carefully, “just wanted to explain. I don’t know how much Ridley told you about what I said. But I did offer to go out and deal with the horse. I know I shouldn’t have brought the girl here. I knew it then and I didn’t plan to go all the way to the village until I was in a position to talk to the riders here and find outwhat I didn’t know. I made a mistake. A lot of mistakes. I don’t know that does anything—”
“You’re full of dark spots, aren’t you?”
“I don’t intend to be. I know you’d have been within your rights to have tossed me out. I just—”
“Just kind of miscalculated.”
“More than once. But—”
He could seeJennie making another try at Rain, off in the doorway of the den. Jennie was using the manger wall to stand on and the support post to hold on to in case Rain moved out from under her.
But this time Rain didn’t move.
This time Jennie slid on, and got a fistful of mane, and sat there. Cloud, out in the yard, turned his head. The ambient went full of <Jennie on Rain> and Danny held his breath between fear that Rain would pitch her off on her head and fear that Callie, catching the scene first from the ambient and from him and then from <Jennie and Rain,> was going to explode in a shouting fit that wouldn’t help junior nerves at all.
Callie didn’t. Callie was very quiet. He caught intense <unhappiness> and <fear,> enough to upset the neighborhood if it broke loose, but she remained very, very quiet. So did Shimmer.
“Look!” Jennie crowed, and out she rode into the yard, no great burst of speed at all, just an easy amble across the well-tracked snow.
Cloud (Danny remembered those first wild dashes across the hills near Shamesey) had dumped himfrom a flying run twice the first night he’d met him. The memory made his bones ache and made Cloud dance and throw his head.
But Rain had certainly dumped Jennie the requisite number of times during the last several days, and now the young fool of a nighthorse seemed to have figured out that his own wild moves were dumping the youngster off and hurting Jennie—which was a difficult thought for a nighthorse. Trying to get <threatened Jennie> and <strange-feeling thing on nighthorse back> all sorted out taxed a nighthorse concept of location to the limit.
Rain moved sedately, now, skittish at the same time, and Callie stood there—upset that this was happening at all, Danny was well sure, and upset that something so important was happening while Ridley wasn’t there, and upset with all that going with a colt horse meant to young Jennie’s future.
Shimmer gave out a challenge call that was part <excitement> and part <dismay> mirroring Callie’s restrained distress, and at that, her offspring Rain set into a jog trot, not a nighthorse’s best gait, but comfortable—until the horse in question had forty kilos of human bouncing unskillfully on his back.
But Jennie stayed on. Jennie even wanted <going faster,> while other humans could only hold their breath and hope Jennie stayed undamaged. Rain obliged, running a circle around the den while Jennie clung like a burr.
Danny let go a breath. He didn’t know if his opinion was welcome to Callie, but he knewthe hellish quandary Ridley and Callie were in in the matter of that colt and Jennie: he couldn’t live that closely with them and the kid for this number of days without picking up parental worry and their resolution notto have this pairing— and an initial year which they couldn’t conveniently supervise, if Rain did the ordinary young male nighthorse foray out and away from the local group—out the gate next spring and off in a giddy exploration of the whole mountain, nosing into everything. Spring—spring called to a new pair like them in a way that was just one sensation after another.
He knew. Every rider had to have known, at some point in his life, that first sense-ridden spring—the smells, the colors, the lifethat was breaking on both horse and rider after the long white days of ice and enclosure. And coupled with a winter pairing—when there were so many, many new sensations to get used to—
“Mama! Dan! See me?”
Oh, he <saw.> A rider could drown all his good sense in it. He found gooseflesh on his arms that had nothing to do with the cold; he felt Callie <struggling for breath and scared—so scared—>
But <Jennie and Rain> wasn’t just a visual picture. Not any longer. It was an accomplishment. It was a new creature. It had to be dealt with as rider and horse—even a fool junior could understand there was no redoing or undoing it, not now.
“We see you!” Callie called back. “Try not to break your neck!”