“Randy Goss,” Dan Fisher/Cloud identified that presence, and they weren’t afraid of it, skittish and angry mess that they all were. Dan was steady and Ridley held fast as Dan wanted <going to Randy in the yard.>
Ridley didn’t want anything to do with the intruders in his village. He wanted <Callie and Jennie safe in den.> But he was sane, now, and he had a partner and a daughter with him that he wasn’t going to let down. He separated Dan out of <us> and let him go, even while he walked to the door of the den and Slip and the rest of <his own> trailed him.
He wanted no part of the boy who came toward them—the girl’s brother, it was. The young one. Who blurted out, spilling images right and left,
<“Carlo’s run. Miners chasing him.> You got to help him!”
Dan didn’t stop to question further. He wanted <Randy standing still with Ridley and Callie> and he ran alone for the gate, and into the village.
Ridley didn’t know what they were supposed to do with a village boy. The boy was crying and trying not to show it. And Jennie was upset, and wanting <Rain> near her, where her hands could feel him.
Shimmer was <pregnant mare> and hanging back behind the others, both more and less afraid. Shimmer would kill if the kid made the wrong move, and on the instant of the realization how fragile Shimmer’s truce with the situation was, Ridley moved, and Callie moved, him to take the boy under his protection and Callie to hold Shimmer’s temper under her calming hands.
“It’s crazy,” the boy gasped. “It’s crazy out there. They want to kill him, and he didn’t do it!”
“We’ll prove it, then,” Ridley said: the village called on them and the horses to untangle conflicting testimonies, sometimes outright scaring the guilty into confession—but they weren’t usually as clear to the mind as this boy’s impressions came, <Carlo and Randy in the tavern, Rick Mackey slumped at the table, blood on the porch, and the girl—the girl that Slip hated—>
<Jennie and Rain> came very loud just then. <Jennie and Rain> couldn’t be still against the challenge that was pouring around them, and the boy just stared toward the rider-gate until Dan came running back, out of breath, with—
“He’s gone outside!”
“You’ve got to go after him!” the boy cried. “Danny, you got to find him—he didn’t do it! I was with him! They’re lying!”
“You,” Dan said, already running for the barracks, “stay in the camp.”
Dan intended to go find the kid. Ridley had no doubt of that— at the same time that another certainty was running over his nerves, and < blood on snow> shivered through the ambient.
“That damn horse!” Callie cried.
Dan Fisher was headed to get his gun and his gear. It didn’t take him long to run back again. Fisher was going after the horse and the boy—and he, dammit, had a camp and a village in his charge with a real problem outside his walls and a worse one in the middle of the village. He was staying behind, he had no question of it, same as if a chain bound him here.
While the ambient rang with loneliness and terror.
“Get the Goss kid on to Mornay if you reach halfway,” he told Fisher, as Fisher swung up on Cloud’s back, and the rest of them headed around end of the den to help open the gate. “In Mornay he’s out of reach and out of trouble. Sort it out in the spring.” They reached the gate and he flung the bar up. Callie and Randy and Jennie pushed it wide. “There’s one shelter on your way—he’ll surely know it, if he gets there! Hope to hell he doesn’t go on the logging trails!”
“Yes, sir,” Fisher said.
“Go fast! If you catch him before halfway come back and we’ll organize a trek over. If it’s a long run—good luck to you! Come back when you see a chance and bring us word how you are!” He gave a slap to Cloud’s rump and Fisher was off.
That left him with one rider fewer. And one scared kid more.
Breath wouldn’t come any longer. Legs wouldn’t run anymore. Carlo sprawled downslope, plunged through snow and into snow until the mountainside finally gave him up again, just casually tumbled him out of a snowy embrace and into the snow-drifting air.
He lay on his back, facing the light—a light coming through the branches of evergreens, out in the deep woods, alone, with the snow coming down on his eyes, and himself with no inclination even to blink. He’d been lucky so far. Luck wouldn’t last. Wild things didn’t go on the move much while the snow was coming down. That was why he’d lived this long. He thought he was afraid. He was too numb, now, to know what he thought.
He couldn’t let the accusations go the way they had the last time, with Randy swept up and jailed with him. Couldn’t go to the rider camp gate. The mob would have piled up there and trapped Randy—God hope that he’d run there. He’d led them off from that, and then he’d seen the outside gate, and meant to go to the camp from the outside, and get Danny to help him.
But he’d forgotten that when he got there. With all the woods in front of him, he’d just run and run and run, free of all of them, drunk on it, not using his brain—
He wasn’t hurt. He wasn’t being chased anymore. He was back in the snow, in the woods out of which he’d come to Evergreen village, as if it closed a circle, somehow, and set things back at the point of change.
Foolish thought. Delirious thought. He was in dreadful danger, having run out here unarmed and alone—he’d done something self-destructive and stupid, and he didn’t understand himself.
Except he was back on the road. When the day of the climb up here, despite the pain, proved the best day he’d lived, what could he say about himself? He knew the rest of the life ahead of him, shut in the forge, working with and for the Mackeys, wasn’t alluring. The only time he’d ever felt free and doing something for himself was the association he’d had with Danny.
Now his future didn’t even look to be going back to Tarmin, to live his life down there. It looked to be jail. Again. Locked up. With Rick Mackey to lie and swear he was guilty. Give Rick credit for brains. Not much. But enough to get everything he wanted.
Maybe that was why he’d gone crazy for a moment—until he went off a cliff. The fall and the landing was a sobering thing, that could persuade him he ought to go back and face the charges and try to prove he was innocent.
If he lived to get there. If—God—if Randy hadn’t followed him.
If Randy had followed instructions for once in his life and gone to Danny—Danny would come after him. Danny was probably already out the rider-gate and looking for him, if he just made a little noise—in all this quiet.
Then something made a sound. A horse sound.
And his world—expanded.
<Cloud,> he thought with relief, and had that sense of where that told him <horse was behind him> as a sound came to him, of something moving. He lay still, asking himself wildly how he was going to explain things to Danny, how he was going to ask Danny to go with him, prematurely, in the winter, down to Tarmin, to get at those damned records—because he had a chance again.
<Horse-presence> came treading softly up to him, and it appeared to him incongruously upside down as he lay on his back. It— he—lowered its head and blew warm horse breath over his face—spooked up when he moved and turned and scrambled backward on his hands and knees.
<Blood-on-snow> was its name.
He saw <Carlo looking up at <horse looking down.>> It was inside out—or outside in.
<Blood-on-snow and Carlo.>
And if Danny was right it was a killer. Or could become so—on any provocation.
He got up very slowly, trying not to startle it. Danny had said, never startle Cloud, and he thought—maybe—if he just backed away very, very carefully and got to a tree—