“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 him from 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 knew the 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 not to 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 life that 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!”
Callie was crying. There were tears on her face. But Callie was holding the ambient very quiet, and he gave her all the help he could in that.
“Slow it down,” Callie shouted to her besotted offspring. “You’re going to take a spill!”
But about that moment <happy> washed through the ambient with all the noisy force of a pair of youngsters—God, it deafened. It had to reach Ridley. It had to reach Guil and Tara at the bottom of the mountain. And Danny laughed. He couldn’t help it. Cloud kicked up his heels, and pregnant Shimmer gave a little hop— there was nothing in the whole world like that happiness, and he couldn’t but remember <himself and Cloud,> the way <Callie and Shimmer> came to him—and <Ridley and Slip> from clear across the wall.
Ridley knew. Ridley had heard—God, who in all creation hadn’t? Danny had trouble breathing. And an unexpected attack of tears. Jennie and Rain had just that instant gotten—there weren’t words for it—but it was a coming together that made total sense of each other—or at least as far as which body had four feet and which one had two, which one was jogging about the yard and which one was sitting where Jennie had known for weeks she belonged and where Rain wanted her to be. He saw Callie take a surreptitious wipe at her eyes.
“She’s still a baby,” Callie complained aloud, he guessed to him. “So’s the damn horse.”
“A good horse. He’ll take care of her.”
“A damn colt!”
“A smart one.”
Then—came a feeling from somewhere outside the walls that was <horse> and <lonely> and <wanting, so, so badly.>
There was <someone>—Danny couldn’t pin it down. Couldn’t figure it, though it—it wasn’t Ridley.
Which said to him that was the comparison he’d instinctively made.
Another rider.
Another horse.
And not one that was supposed to be here.
Rain had stopped still, head lifted, nostrils flared. Shimmer looked toward the wall. Cloud did.
<Blood on snow. Lonely.>
“Damn!” Callie cried, fists clenched. <“Get out of here! Damn you! Go away!”>
Rain was protecting Jennie: <nighthorse with rider> was clear from that quarter, a horse that would fight—no doubt of it, not by Rain’s action or Cloud’s or Shimmer’s. Slip was <wanting Ridley> with all his considerable force. There was no way, no way, Danny thought suddenly, that Jennie could be tempted by the stray, now.
But Brionne could, and Danny started toward the village gate to know whether the ambient was as threatening there as here.
But before he could get there, Ridley was coming back, at a dead run if he could judge. Slip was <at the rider gate to meet him,> and Danny stopped, figuring that whatever there was to hear on that side of the wall and near that house where Brionne lodged Ridley would have heard and would tell them.
<Jennie getting down. Helping papa with gate.> Jennie slid down as Rain came near the gate and Ridley came through.
“Are you all right?” was Ridley’s first question to his daughter.
“I rode Rain, I rode Rain and he let me!”
Ridley picked his daughter up and hugged her tight.
Rain was throwing out the same <horse with rider> that would underlay every communication to a riderless horse from now on— and whatever was wrong out there went away.
Danny didn’t know for sure what had just flared through the ambient. But in the preoccupation of two overwhelmed parents he didn’t know whether they’d heard it at all.
Next thing, papa said at supper that night, Jennie had to learn to mount without the manger wall—
“Just can’t depend on those mangers being everywhere available,” papa said, and Jennie, knowing she was being teased, swatted at her father’s arm.
“You’ll learn,” papa said then. “Got to grow a bit first, though. Eat those potatoes.”
“I want to go out to the den.”
“It’s dark out,” mama said, and then—then there was a difference in mama’s tone. “Well, —finish your potatoes first.” Jennie couldn’t <hear> mama. Rain was drowning everything out but him. But there was a difference all the same, and mama was going to let her do something alone she’d never been allowed to do.
Because she belonged where Rain was. It was a thought so wonderful she didn’t linger at all complaining about the potatoes. She bolted them down as fast as she could, got up from table—said, “Excuse me,” the way mama and papa were always scolding her to say. Tonight when she was grown up, she said it just because she wanted to, and tonight all the rules weren’t walls around her, they were part of the familiar way things were and she hadn’t any interest in being a kid and doing things the wrong way. She was Jennie Sabotay, Rain’s rider, and the whole world was different.