Then half the bells that had been ringing so frantically stopped— leaving just the church bells and one other.
“Is it done?” she asked.
“No,” papa said. “Get dressed!”
Burn got up all of a sudden—which left his sleeping rider scrambling awake, sore side and all, and reaching after his rifle and struggling, with it for a prop, toward his feet, as the rest of the horses surged to their feet and the ambient that had been very quiet suddenly got louder by reason of one young horse that was overwhelming it with question and fright. There was the sound of bells, was what it sounded like, echoing from somewhere distant. Or maybe it was coming through the ambient, which was <there,> and more lively about them than it had been. <Fear> was contagious.
“Danny, get him quiet,” Guil said, catching his breath, and still leaning on the gun instead of relying on it for protection, because it seemed to him that the danger, like those bells, was very far off.
And it seemed to him that it came from the direction of Evergreen.
Evergreen—where Brionne Goss was resident.
Not a good thing. Not at all a good thing.
“That’s Evergreen,” Tara said. “What did the ride take you, Danny?”
“Half a day. Six hours at least. I stopped some.” <Depressions in snow. Carlo falling off. Danny riding fast.>
Six hours’ ride from here, if Danny’s account was straight, and neither Danny nor Carlo had been lazing along when they’d covered that distance.
“We’ve got to move,” Guil said, in the full knowledge there was no way he could last on that kind of ride. Bells in the night were a cry for help, from anyone in range. It seemed to him he didhear them with his own ears—and it was possible, given the folds of the mountain that made it that long a run for a horse.
It wasn’t saying the beast used the roads. It was past midnight. Since dark—it had had time to move, and itmight well have had a place it wanted to go.
The same place Spook, until tonight, had been discouraging it from going.
Half the bells that had been ringing were quiet now, a sudden, frightening kind of quiet, but the bells of the church and the mayoralty were still ringing. In want of other remedies Darcy Schaffer went about brewing tea. Brionne had come downstairs in the dark, distraught and unhappy, as small wonder the girl would be, with alarms in the night. It felt to be blowing up a storm—which didn’t entirely account for the breakthrough alarm, but it could well be the cause of such an event—creatures getting desperate as they did before one of winter’s truly deadly storms, and all it took was someone near the walls on the forest side not watching their cellars or some warehouse foundation eroding. Creatures didn’t dig well in the rubble fill under the dirt, but now and again water made an incursion.
It was amazingly quiet, yet, but she supposed the barometer at the mayoralty might have dropped and advised the night guards. The air had that feeling about it, and with murder on her doorstep this morning and Brionne’s brothers running, one to his death outside (or to a horse: that was the whisper in town) and the other to the rider camp to stay—small wonder Brionne had complained of bad dreams.
Occasion of her own uneasy rest—the Mackeys had come to call in the afternoon. They disavowed all knowledge of their son’s accusations, and wanted to assure Brionne that they were still taking care of Randy.
“He’s in the rider camp,” Brionne had said in icy tones, with an aplomb which she had inwardly applauded. “The riders have him. You don’t.”
Even that rebuff hadn’t set Mary Hardesty back. “But he’ll have a place with us when they straighten this ridiculous mess out. Our son thinks now he was mistaken. He thinks it could have been another miner he saw quarreling with that Riggs person.”
A wonder Rick Mackey hadn’t come in for stitches after some fall down the stairs today. She’d put various stitches in him during his growing up, usually for falls on the Mackey stairs. So Mary Hardesty had always claimed, and she’d bet any amount that Rick and his father had gone at it.
She hatedthat woman.
And of course Brionne’s coolness to their well-wishes didn’t dissuade Van Mackey from offering to see that the Tarmin properties were taken care of and that the forge was working.
“You think Rick can do that?” she’d been cold-blooded enough to ask. Rick’s lack of meaningful competence was well known even outside of Evergreen, by what she knew, but Mary Hardesty never flinched.
“Well, until we can hire help. In the girl’s name, of course.”
She’d gotten them out the door shortly after that, smiling all the while she was wondering whether the Mackeys had heard about Ernest Riggs’ proposal to her and whether thathad been the reason for Riggs’ violent demise.
They never had found the body.
She poured the tea. She added spirits to her own. She set a cup in front of Brionne, who sat in Faye’s nightgown and Faye’s lace-collared robe. Brionne’s golden curls were tousled from the pillow—Brionne had banged her shin and overset a chair in the dark in the lower hall, scaring the wits out of her.
But Brionne didn’t ask about the goings-on, or the bell, probably because it was perfectly clear that there was an alarm, as there would have been in Tarmin, Darcy was sure. Brionne didn’t seem to want to acknowledge the crisis, after embarrassing herself in the lower hall, and Darcy didn’t mention her own apprehensions of a breakthrough and reasons the marshal and the village guards might be abroad tonight. It wasn’t their business, after all. They had their latches tight, and her house was near the rider wall, not the outside, so there was no need to check the foundations for burrows from beyond the village confines. They’d done their part.
She sat down at the table with Brionne. “It feels like blowing up a storm, doesn’t it?” she asked, to fill the silence. “It’s been snowing all day.”
“I don’t care,” Brionne said. And apropos of no remark of hers: “He had no right to go out there! He hatesme.”
Hewas very clearly the brother. And that was at least a clue to Brionne’s state of mind. She didn’t know whether it was the truth, what Brionne had said this morning about her elder brother shooting their father. But she had no reason to doubt it, either. “Honey,” she said gently, “don’t think about it. You’re safe here. And you don’t ever have to go with him. We’ll go to the judge. We’ll be sure he hasn’t any rights over you.”
Brionne wiped her eyes.
“I hate him.”
“Don’t hate people, honey. It’s not good for you. —You know what we should do? We should both go to the store tomorrow. You’re strong enough, aren’t you? And we’ll get you a new coat, and some yarn for sweaters if we can’t find one we like. What color would you want?”
“I want a leather coat. Like riders have.”
“What about for church?”
“A red one.”
“And for Saturday nights? We used to have supper at the tavern on Saturdays. And everybody shows off their nice clothes. What would you like to wear?”
Brionne seemed to be thinking. She stared off into nowhere.
“He hears me,” she said. “He hears me. I can still talk to him. He won’tgo with my brother.”
“Brionne. Honey.”
“He’ll come for me. He will!”
Horses. Adolescent fancies. Children pressed to the limit by a violence within the family that had finally found a way to attract outside attention. There was nothing, on the surface, amiss with Carlo Goss. But there’d been something deadly wrong in that household. Maybe it was Carlo. Maybe it had been the parents. But Brionne sat talking about going off with horses when this morning she’d accused her brother of murder. There was a certain tendency toward denial in the Goss children, which she could plainly see. But knowing that, she could afford her dear Brionne a little extra understanding and bring the girl to love her.