Maybe it was just Rain’s young nerves. Maybe it was the distance over which they were picking things up, impressions maybe carried by wild creatures snugged down in their dens, things of little brains and little accuracy about an image.
But knowing for certain enough that it was another rider: <Riders and shelter here,> he imaged out into the dark, laying himself open to whatever danger might lie in a sending coming back at them. <Camp walls,> he promised that presence. <Food and warmth.>
Callie made up her mind, too. She joined him, with, <Riders here. Fire and water boiling> and said, “I’ll go tell the marshal there’s strangers coming.”
Plainer and plainer to human ears, the ringing of a storm-driven bell, and the delirious dream of <hot water and shelter.> Danny struggled to keep his feet and keep moving; but even believing safety was in front of them, Carlo was fast failing him, losing not the will but the strength to fight his body upright against the wind. Carlo might fall and freeze in all but sight and hail of shelter.
<Leaving Brionne behind,> Danny began to think. But that meant <leaving Randy> because neither of them could carry him, and it meant <Carlo too weak to shoot,> if he left Carlo to defend his brother and sister from vermin and went ahead for help.
He held to Cloud’s mane in the deep snow, gripping the travois pole with a right hand that had lost all feeling. His feet—he didn’t even know.
<Rider in the snow,> he sent for all he was worth, and drove all his efforts toward that bell that rang louder and louder—too tired himself to pull the travois alone, unable to go faster than Carlo could go.
A beautiful image began to come clearer and clearer to him: <warm den, other riders, man, woman, child shoveling the rider gate clear of snow, horse helping dig.>
There were <bunks, supper, warm mash.> They promised the preacher’s Heaven after their day and night of hell, and to reach it, Danny began to believe he’d have to stand still and try to beacon help to them. Breath came raw and cold. Feet faltered repeatedly.
Then out of the bitter cold and the swirling snow—a dark barrier loomed up among the evergreens like a wall across the world, logs and snow, and <life and warmth> waiting for them behind it.
Carlo saw it, too. Cloud did, and all but pulled them through a succession of drifts by the grip Danny had on his mane.
<Randy warm by the fire,> he was picking up from Carlo. <Randy drinking hot tea, Brionne by the fire—>
There wasn’t anything of <Carlo by the fire.> But there hadn’t been enough of <Carlo> all up the mountain, in Danny’s reckoning. It was everything for Randy. Everything for Brionne and not damn well enough of self-preservation.
“Listen to me.” Danny struggled to have a voice at all as, letting Cloud go, he struggled toward paradise and the gate in that solid wall. He said it as fiercely as he could, before thoughts scattered again toward safety and comfort, and before he lost his chance, with distance, to put his own pain between them and eavesdroppers: “Listen to me. You shut it down, Carlo. You shut it down entirely— everything that happened—and you shut Randy down. They’re riders. They’ll kill us as soon as look at us if you go acting crazy in a winter camp. Same way Tara threw us out. So you shut up.”
“We’re here,” Carlo said, seeming bewildered. “We made it to the shelter.”
“We’re not in a damn shelter. This is the village, do you understand me? We haven’t got any place we can put your sister but in the rider camp till the camp boss passes on us and we can’t let her wake up, you understand me?”
“Yeah,” Carlo said faintly. “Yeah. I do.”
“You let me do the talking and you keep her as far away from the horses as you can get. You don’t think about anything down the mountain. You don’t think about it till you’re over villageside. Think about <clouds.> Think about water. <Still water.> Keep Randy quiet. Got it?”
He wasn’t sure Carlo understood everything Carlo said he did. He’d intended—getting to the shelter—having time to figure out a course of next action in that top-of-the-ridge cabin they’d missed. He’d had in mind a slower, more reasoned approach to the villages up here.
And they were here.
He kept his mind as blank of further guesses as he could manage, set the calm image in Carlo’s mind, and in Randy’s, in such consciousness as he felt there: <brown, smooth stones, running water, peaceful summer leaves… cabin insides. Tables. Food. Fire.>
“The gate’s opening!” Carlo said.
<Three horses,> Danny gathered in the ambient, information coming to him freely and abundantly now that he entered the close vicinity of other horses. <Two senior, one young male. Pregnant mare. Man and woman. Kid.>
Information was pouring at him now, as they met the muffled figures in the storm-glow, as three wary horses came out to stand by their riders. The seniors of the set were understandably protective and suspicious, wanting the kid <back,> and the horses were on guard, hearing, he knew, the spook-voice that had chased them, relayed from every creature denned-up tonight.
<“Loose horse back there,”> Danny said, first off—they must have caught their fear and desperate urgency, and that wild, troubled sending that chased them.
But he wasn’t sure then at what point they’d met or when the man had gotten hold of his arm or when he’d let go the travois in favor of the woman taking it.
They were inside the rider camp, that was all that was clear to him, attached to a village that had to be Evergreen itself.
<Dead rider, horse nearby, blood on snow.> Danny didn’t know whether it was his own thought or Carlo’s or a sending out of the dark—and after that just saw a confusion of <branches. Snow. Road they’d traveled.>
Then Carlo was overwhelming the ambient with <dark village streets> and <Brionne and Randy in the furs> as they lugged the travois along the path between the horse-den and the camp wall. All through the ambient then, fierce and strong in the milling-about of horses, came <cold nighthorse, hungry nighthorse,> and <male horse, here> and <pregnant nighthorse,> and <fight, kick> as they came.
Danny said, being all but held on his feet, “Behave, Cloud, dammit,” in the thread of a voice he had left, and managed somehow to keep the lid on trouble. He made shift to veer off toward Cloud, but he wasn’t doing at all well at keeping his feet on his own. He persistently got the image of a man and a woman and a kid as the only riders there were, several fewer than he’d have expected and with every right to be skittish at them splitting up, one of them wanting the den, the other wanting the barracks…
But for a giddy moment he asked himself if he’d really made it or whether he wasn’t after all hallucinating, not safe inside the wooden walls of a rider haven but lying back there in the snow somewhere.
Didn’t know how they’d done it. Couldn’t believe yet it was Evergreen.
He didn’t know how they’d come this far—except they’d been walking through trees—except, as the scale of things he’d expanded shrank again, it had been that very turn—that turn he thought he’d mistaken—
God, they must right then have been at the top of the road. They’d been right on the cabin they were looking for. That wasn’t the turn. It was the truck park. Where the cabin had been. His estimate of time and distance hadn’t been off.
God help a fool. He’d been there, and walked past shelter in the whiteout.