Carlo moved, and got to his knees, and got on his feet.
<Frozen trails of red. Man’s glove. Man’s arm. Echoes of a rifle shot dying on the mountainside.>
They struggled along what, for they knew, was indeed a logging trail. There wasn’t any sense of climbing or descending, no way to tell they weren’t walking to some dead-end clearing out across the broad face of Rogers Peak.
<Cloud and Danny,> the image kept coming to him: <us going up the mountain. Snow coming down on Brionne’s still face, the curly blond hair. Snow making a mound. Snow in a deep, even sheet.>
<Shut up> didn’t work. Cloud didn’t understand anything Cloud couldn’t picture and silence didn’t translate when Cloud was distraught.
<Frozen Danny,> came back to him. <Frozen horse, covered with ice.> Then came: <Horse with tangled mane, sick nighthorse, horse throwing off warning, horse with staring eyes and flat ears.>
Rogue-image.
<StiIl water,> Danny countered desperately. <Still, warm water. Water with steam rising into the cold…>
But that was a trap. It was easy to get to thinking about that and just—not to come back from that image. And anything that faltered, anything that hesitated in the Wild, anything that took a wrong path and broke a leg—it died.
When Men had come down to the world in their ships, horses had been the only thing that had come snuggling up to humans, wicked as they were, being the Beasts that God had sent on the settlers—
And some of them had to take the gift and be damned to save the rest, because the rest without horses, without riders, wouldn’t have made it.
You’re going to hell, his father had yelled at him.
But what he was doing was not wicked. Trying to get these boys to safety was not evil.
“Slow down!” he yelled at Cloud, as Cloud began to widen the lead on them, breaking the way through the drifted snow, making a path for them.
But Cloud wouldn’t stop. Cloud threatened <bite and kick> and wanted <Danny walking.>
<Bell ringing in the distance, far through the snowy woods.>
Carlo didn’t say anything about what Cloud was sending—maybe he heard, maybe he didn’t. But he moved as if he had heard, and pulled desperately on his pole—got up without urging when his feet stumbled on the deep snow.
It wasn’t just a sending. The sound of a bell came unmistakably, now. Cloud was still breaking the path ahead of them, thinking <warm den> and <nighthorses> and <ham.>
We’re going to make it, Danny began to say to himself, half in tears. We’re going to make it.
But—
Rider-shelters out in the wilderness didn’t have bells, —did they?
God, had he led them not past one shelter—but past two? That was a village gate bell.
Had the junior rider in his blind, stupid desperation—just led them all the way to Evergreen?
The den was not only the safest place to be: it was the only place they could do anything besides stand watch in the guard-stations above the walls—which Callie reported the marshal and five men were doing, now, on the village side of the wall.
And by a stretch of awareness, once the horses caught the notion of the marshal on guard from Callie, the villageside guards were near enough to the den that the horses were vaguely aware of them as a force.
That was useful. That meant there couldn’t be alarm over there villageside without them in the camp hearing it.
Better than villageside guns against the Wild, the horses were wary and watching against a sending so moiled and confused. With Slip and Shimmer on guard, nothing harmful would insinuate a sending close enough to make either the guards in the village or them in the rider camp do something stupid, which was generally how you died in the Wild—a gate opened, a latch forgotten. Haste. Confusion. Short-term memory overpowering a human’s long-term thought.
Ridley didn’t intend to make mistakes here. That was what they all said to each other, including Jennie, but Ridley paced and fretted, and Slip made frequent forays outside to sniff the wind and threatened, until Callie, sitting on a straw bale, said, “Quiet, for God’s sake,” and Shimmer’s irritation came through with it.
“It could very well be miners,” Ridley said finally, and leaned against the post by her. “But I don’t recognize that horse. Do you?”
“Road drifted shut, maybe,” Callie said after a moment—meaning some rider could be coming to them instead of back to his own village. A road drifted beyond the strength of a single horse to clear it—that was one explanation, and a rider would indeed go to the nearest village. Maybe a hunting party had gotten caught out and couldn’t make it back to Mornay village, which was nearest to them down the road—the land-sense was too diffuse yet to pin the direction down.
Possible too, if somebody had been in longer-lasting trouble out there, a bad storm could be exactly when a party dug in might make their break and run for the nearest village, hoping the predators would stay put in dens. It would be a terrible risk. But he’d heard of miners taking that measure without a rider.
Except—this party had a horse.
He didn’t want to think about dire possibilities in too specific images: the night was chancy enough and they had a scared and sleepy kid on their hands.
“They’re coming in,” Callie muttered. “It’s getting stronger the last while.”
“Mama?” Jennie said, and stirred awake in a frightened jerk.
“Hush.” Callie stroked Jennie’s hair. “Nothing’s happening.”
“I had a bad dream,” Jennie said, and Rain came close and nosed at her. Jennie reached out and patted him, and tucked down again where it was warm.
They couldn’t lie to Jennie. They couldn’t hold her out of what was happening or protect her from it—eight years old, and there was so very little time in which to learn all she had to know to survive—including when it was time to be scared, or angry, or how to keep herself in check to hold onto the horses and not let them spook, because in Shimmer’s and Slip’s reckonings, let alone in Rain’s, Jennie was all of a sudden and in this crisis a serious presence—when she wasn’t drifting off asleep.
Just last fall she’d still been <baby,> and even lately Shimmer still protected her that way; but Shimmer was pushing Jennie away tonight the way Shimmer shoved Rain aside, who was her last, now-grown foal.
Young horse. No brakes on his sensing things. No self-protection. He belonged with a herd, not in a winter den with a pregnant mare, a stallion in rut, and a kid herself years from puberty in close mental contact with a horse that was in the throes of it. He didn’t like it under ordinary circumstances.
But he could no longer blame Rain for the sending out there. It was real, and Callie was right, it was coming in: they could all feel the sense of <presence in the storm, human and horse> getting closer by the passing minute.
And it was from the direction of the Climb, not from the direction of Mornay—that was increasingly sure in the sending the nearer it came. If it was a rider from anywhere on the High Loop, they’d have had to have ridden past Evergreen to get to that side of the village.
“Up the Climb,” Callie said faintly. “Why on earth?”
So Callie heard it the same way, and became certain of the direction at the same moment he did.
The rider with that horse had to be crazy, Ridley thought. Shimmer was <spooked.> Slip was <spooked and angry.>
And though right and justice said that once they were reasonably sure they were hearing any rider they ought by all means to beacon him in from such a storm, the skittery character of the sending still made Ridley reluctant to reach out to it.