But Evergreen village suddenly seemed very small and very fragile against the mountain shoulder. It dawned on him then for the first time that there just wasn’t any human civilization in the world farther out on the edge than Evergreen and the little string of villages down its lonely road. Over on the other side of the mountain— there was just the Wild, where humans who’d dropped down from the sky had never visited, not on their farthest rides. No villages, no trails, no camps, no riders. Civilization just stopped—maybe just around the shoulder of the rock outcrops on the road they’d ridden. Civilization stopped in the mountains he’d not been able to see from his whited-out vantage on that high turn. Nobody had been out there. Ever.
Cloud’s skin twitched. Cloud snorted and the other horses acted bothered, but the ambient was otherwise quiet, and Cloud settled to being brushed again, rocking gently to the strong strokes Danny put into it.
A rider just shouldn’t think about spooky things, he told himself, not up here, not when the wind had started to blow out of the unsettled Wild.
The snow was coming down thick and hard when he walked out of the den with the notion increasingly sure that in this edge-of-the-world place friends were hard come by.
The end of winter might not see him better settled in the barracks than the beginning had: he had every legitimate right to be in the rider camp for the winter, but he still found himself in an awkward position as an intrusion in the common room of the barracks— which turned out to be a family’s living room: not that it was supposed to be that, but there just wasn’t another child Jennie could play with—even as easy as the rider camp’s relationship with the village seemed, that line was one people wouldn’t send their children across—and the barracks that in some places was a very rough and careless environment, was unquestionably a family living arrangement in Evergreen, an arrangement in which a teenaged visitor of outside origins was undeniably suspect in motives and personal habits. He didn’t think even Callie thought he’d do something so awful as have designs on Jennie; but clearly Callie didn’t leave him alone with Jennie, He wasn’t friends with Callie. He never would be, he strongly suspected. He probably would never be friends with Ridley, on Callie’s account.
He didn’t know what his relationship was with Carlo, and why he hesitated so long and resisted so much going over there, whether he didn’t want to get the rebuff he’d had from some of his old townside friends, or whether he was beginning to believe Callie that he was a fool in the path of rational people, and he was scared to give Carlo advice on something he really didn’t understand any more than Carlo did.
He was spooked about the law, was one thing. His early association with it hadn’t been that of an honest and upright citizen
And he held too damn many secrets to sleep sound at night—Callie not even trusting him to keep to his bed. He’d tried turning down the vodka last evening.
Funny thing, Callie had said her feelings would be hurt if he didn’t drink it. So he had drunk it, all but certain now his very deep sleep and morning lethargy had something to do with it. People who’d do that to you—maybe they didn’t want you wandering across the line between camp and village. That was the other matter that had him spooked—but at least this morning he knew for sure what he’d suspected about his nights there.
And they were the source of all the advice he had.
Maybe they had their own set of problems. He had his.
So he found no need to tell them he was going.
He cast a look toward the barracks veiled in blowing snow, and no one was stirring—he’d given the excuse of going out to the den—he didn’t have to give them excuses, and there was no reason he couldn’t go over villageside on his own, absolutely no reason. Ridley was camp-boss, and could forbid him, but then he’d be out that gate and elsewhere.
They’d say later, Where did you go and what did you do? not as if they had a right to ask.
And he supposed, as he walked toward the camp gate and toward the village, that if he told Carlo what he knew, things were going to get out that could speed up the gold-rush mentality that was working among the rich. And that could rouse a little of the anger he knew was stored up and waiting for him when he finally did let loose what he knew about the Goss kids.
It wasn’t a happy situation he’d landed in. In some measure he’d like to walk up to the barracks, fling open the door and lay out in two minutes everything he had to say.
But once you let a matter out of the proverbial bottle, it was out.
And panic wasn’t at all a thing to let loose in a place like this, with all the High Wild around them—at least that was the only wisdom on a situation like this he’d ever gotten from anyone. Panic in the ambient was like blood-smell on the wind.
There were two other people who knew everything he knew. And Carlo began to be not only somebody he owed the truth to—Carlo began to be the only human being in Evergreen that he’d rely on.
So never mind what the village marshal wanted, or what Ridley expected. With a quiet walk through thick snow-fell over to the gate of the camp and past the restraining post into the village side, he was gone, on his first foray into the village alone, into the quiet of the villageside ambient, this time without Ridley’s voice to fill the silence.
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’t in 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.