She went and got her coat and her scarf, her hat and her gloves, she wrapped up and snugged down her cuffs herself, while her family and Dan sat at the table eating and trying not to watch her too obviously.
But there wouldn’t be a thing in the world mama could find fault with in the way she dressed or acted, not a thing.
“I’ll come back before I get chilled,” she announced, because mama always said that, and tonight she was handling everything for herself.
She hadn’t expected the relief she saw, like everybody at the table had let go a breath all at once, even when the ambient wasn’t including them, just her and Rain and the other horses. She was puzzled.
But she had Rain <wanting her,> and it was a clear night. She went out the outside door, and shut it tight, and walked down the porch—mama was always saying not to run on the steps, she’d slip on the ice. So she got all the way down to the yard. But by that time Rain was outside the den, coming to meet her, and she hadn’t another thought but Rain’s thoughts, the way snow smelled and the way things looked—Rain had never really seen the stars, either, that she thought were wonderful, and Rain seemed a little confused where and what they were.
But mostly Rain wanted <Jennie> with him, and wanted everyone else away.>
Callie was trying not to be disturbed about the situation. She was doing, Danny thought, a very fine job of holding it in, and he wasn’t about to disturb what he perceived as a delicate balance.
“I’ll go to bed,” he said quietly, that being the only refuge he’d discovered where he could take his influence out of the family.
“No,” Callie said. “You were trying to say something this afternoon. What?”
He honestly couldn’t reconstruct where he’d been in his approach to Callie. Or what he’d said. “Just that—I hoped not to disrupt your lives. That I never meant to.”
“She’s gone,” Callie said. “She’s made her choice. There’s nothing to do about it.”
“Seems to me,” Ridley said quietly, “she isn’t gone, and the colt was on his way to making a choice. She’s that age. So’s the horse. Fisher, you’ve probably seen more pairings than either of us have. Seventeen and all.”
Shamesey being the huge camp that it was, Ridley was right: you saw about everything in every combination of human and horse there’d ever been—some good, some you wondered about. “Good horse,” Danny said ever so faintly. “That’s just a real good young horse.” He had another notion, realizing as he did tonight that neither Ridley nor Callie might ever have seen another pairing besides their own. “What I know—begging your pardon—if I could say—”
“What?” Callie snapped.
“It—sort of indicates to me that when Spook showed up… Rain might have gotten just a little more protective of her. I think it would have happened. But when an older horse came around looking for a rider, I think that pushed Rain into claiming his before he could risk losing her—and so he had a rider to help him fend this other horse off.” The last thing he wanted was to lecture seniors regarding horses and their daughter. It was real dangerous territory to venture.
“Damn glad it’s not the other horse,” Ridley muttered.
“What in hell are we going to do?” Callie asked. “What are we going to do this spring?”
“Split up if we have to. You go with her. Or I do.”
Meaning if—almost when—young Rain took out with wanderlust.
And it didn’t call for a junior’s opinion at all. But he had at least an alternative. And Callie had asked him to stay at the table.
“There’s also me,” he said, and waited a half a breath for an explosion. He didn’t want to make the offer he made—he didn’t want to tie Cloud down even to a village and even for the summer: he felt like a traitor in that regard. But he was at least partly responsible for the danger he’d brought, and he saw at least a small way to patch it. “I know you think I’m the devil, but if she goes out this spring, I’d stay here through the summer. Or I’d ride with her and you stay here. I’ve got a little brother. I know kids her age. I’d stay with her and see she got back here safe before winter.”
He wasn’t getting any reaction from them. He decided he’d said enough and maybe enough to offend them. Callie looked like a thundercloud. Ridley—he wasn’t sure.
There was an ambient. But it was all <Jennie and Rain.>
“It’s to think about,” Callie said. And then added: “It’s not you in question. It’s that horse out there. It tried to get Jennie.”
“It didn’t,” Ridley said. “It can’t, now.”
“It’s still got to be stopped.”
“I agree,” Danny said. “It has to be.”
They hadn’t said what they’d do about Jennie this spring when horses started to wander or whether they even accounted his offer as serious or other than self-serving. But he didn’t entirely expect they would say anything. It was an eventuality they didn’t want to think about, and he wasn’t the person Callie would want with her daughter, not at all.
He got up to refill the teapot.
The ambient stayed as it was, a contented kid, contented horse, both silly, both louder than anything on the mountain. That horse if it was out there had to know it had lost Jennie as a prospect.
Maybe it would be discouraged. But it had lost Rain as a rival, too. And that might well figure in the situation.
“There’s something you can do now,” Ridley said. “Which is asking a bit. But there’s three riders at Mornay—that’s the next village down the road—and they could spare one.”
“You want me to ride to Mornay.”
“If,” Ridley said, “if we don’t get that horse in the next couple of days, weather permitting. And supposing it comes back. We could go out with the hunters—escort you out to the first shelter between us and them and you make the trek over to Mornay and come back with help.”
So Ridley wasn’t just getting him to go winter over at the next village.
Counting that one of them had a pregnant mare, one was a stranger to the area and one of them was an eight-year-old just this week trying to figure out how to get onto her horse—getting help from another village was a real good notion.
“Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’ll do that.”
“That’s saying we have to,” Ridley said. “Chances are—Rain’s settling with Jennie may put an end to it. I hope so.”
“Drink to that,” Callie said, and got up and got the spirits bottle. She poured three glasses, gave one to Ridley, second to him—which she sipped beforehand. Third for herself.
Proof enough, Danny said to himself, and didn’t hesitate to drink it when Ridley proposed, “To the Offspring and the horse.”
“We did it,” was Callie’s second. “She’s still alive and we are.”
Jennie was staying out in the den and she might be out there the whole night. He didn’t think Callie would get a wink of sleep. Maybe not Ridley. At the least they’d take turns.