But there wasn’t peace. She felt, even at distance, a sense of unease among the horses, even before one of them came out of the den, a shadow in the low, earth-banked entry.
The second horse that showed up was definitely Flicker. All of them were in a surly mood. The first out had been Mina’s Skip, and Luisa’s Green turned up at Flicker’s rump—Green nipped at Flicker, and Flicker returned the favor with real temper.
<Quiet trees,> she sent. <Deep snow. Snowflakes falling softly.>
<White, > came Flicker’s chilling echo.
Then something got to her, a quickness of breath and a speeding heartbeat where everything around her said there was nothing wrong.
<Behave!> she sent to Flicker, and the horses sent a shivery, angry impulse back, on edge about a feeling she couldn’t see in the sky or hear in the air or smell on the wind.
<Vadim,> she sent out into the ambient as strongly as she could. <Chad!>
Then—she was being crazy. She wished she hadn’t made that noise in the ambient—in the remote case the horses together couldcarry it—in case the boys might hear it and do something foolish in the mistaken notion that the camp was in distress.
<Safety,> she thought, and wanted Flicker to carry that idea far and wide. <Forest. Village walls.>
But Flicker was skittish as she walked up. Flicker kept doing a nervous <white > sending and shifted about uncooperatively when she bent to lean against Flicker’s side and listen to her breathing.
Just the harsh, regular breathing of an uneasy horse, heartbeat a little fast, but it kept up with the breathing, and Flicker kept shifting about with her, quarreling with her den-mates.
Tara gave up, since Flicker was healthy enough to be difficult— ears up, nostrils working, disturbing attention outward; but she couldn’t get any sense of direction about it, just a general distress. She went from one horse to the next, patting necks, dodging shifting, restless bodies and swatting Green, who came just too close with a snap of her teeth.
<Inside the den,> she ordered them. <Flicker inside, Green inside, Skip inside.> She got that occasional <white,> and then a grudging compliance when she seized Flicker by the mane and pulled and argued with her.
Then the report of a gun echoed off the mountain—stark, sudden, close. Flicker jerked free of her hand. All the horses were looking toward the palisade wall, not the outer one, but the one that divided them from the village.
A flare of light touched the tail of her vision—she turned her head briefly, saw the shelter door open, a coatless Mina and Luisa standing on the porch.
“What was that?” Mina called to her.
“It came from the village side,” she said. It was all she was certain of. The rogue might be across the village, next the wall—that was her first clear thought. She went for the narrow gate, the gate no horse could pass, and she began to run, her feet cracking the frozen, pitted crust.
“Tara?” Luisa called out. And Mina: “Wait, dammit! We’re coming!”
“Stay there,” she turned around to shout. “Stay with the horses!”
She wasn’t the only one who’d taken alarm. The village bell began to toll the three-stroke that called Assembly.
The village didn’t know what it was. She guessed that much before she even reached the gate. She lifted the latch, went through, aware that Flicker had followed her, aware of Flicker’s frustration at the gate Flicker couldn’t pass.
She didn’t have her gun. She hadn’t even brought her gloves— fool, she said to herself when she checked her pockets. She was damned little use. But she found herself in a flood of villagers in nightclothes and robes and boots and carrying guns and even axes, all streaming toward the common hall, to find out what no one knew and what the ambient, even reinforced by the concerted effort of anxious horses, couldn’t tell her.
But before she ever reached the hall she was hearing rumors— the blacksmiths’ neighbors, Vonner and Rath, came running up saying it was the blacksmiths’ house the shot had come from.
The crowd surged in that direction then, unordered, unruly— she was uneasy, walking deaf in a group of people who didn’t read the ambient, either, unless that feeling of unease she had now was coming from elsewhere.
One of Andy Goss’ kids was on the doorstep. The other came out with a gun dangling in his hand. And shefeared she knew.
In the next moment the village marshal came up and took the gun from the boy without resistance.
Andy Goss’ wife, Mindy Rath, was safe. But Andy Goss wasn’t.
Dead, the marshal’s deputy reported with a grimace, on a quick glance inside the door. Bad in there, Tara thought.
And the marshal took the boys away, both of them. Tara caught whispers of dismay, whispers that the Goss-Raths were an upstanding family, and nobody could imagine what prompted it.
She didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to explain to them. But half the crowd went away, shivering in the cold, and the marshal took the boys away. And she didn’t know what she could say that would make it better.
So she went back the way she’d come, through the rider gate, and found Mina and Luisa, dressed for the cold, out in the yard with the horses.
She told them. She said, remembering Andy Goss and the boys beside the den: “They loved him. I think they killed him.”
<The porch, the boys, the gun, the wife. Herself, watching from the crowd.> She remembered from their meeting beside the den <the boys hating Brionne, wanting their father.>
She added, in a feeling of utter shock: “I think that was why they did it.”
The day came up still misting rain, a gray drizzle outside the shelter. Guil lifted his head, and pain like a knife went from one point to the other of his skull and bounced. Several times. He let his head back, eyes shut.
He didn’t want to move after that. He just wanted to lie there and breathe until his head mended or he died.
But Burn got up, slow shifting of a heavy body, a second imperilment of the roof supports. He heard the timbers creak.
Then a breathing horse-smelling shadow came between him and the daylight, and Burn nosed his face, puffing warm horse-breath on him. Persisting at it. Guil pushed him away with a none too coherent <Guil hurting.>
<Bacon,> Burn imaged, as if that cured headache.
And nosed him in the face again.
It took him a moment more to muster reason, and a moment after that for coherent images. <Wet wood,> Guil thought, <fire.> If he could possibly sit up, which his dizziness and the pain in his head made a nauseating prospect, he was resolved that Burn should have bacon, if there were any wood to be had.
He’d never asked Burn to do the job. It seemed worth a try. <Burn finding wood. Burn dragging it back to the shelter, wood making fire, fire with bacon.>
<Cattle,> Burn thought. Burn didn’t believe fire made bacon. Or didn’t think wood made fire. At this point in the morning, Guil didn’t know what he believed, either.
But he groaned, and shifted in his cocoon of blanket, slicker, sodden coat, and sodden shirt. Which reminded him he hadn’t dried out during the night, and he needed fire for more reasons than bacon.
“Hell,” he moaned, tried to reckon in fact where he was going to get wood. <Burn on grassy hills. Finding wood. Guil hurting. Fire. Big fire. Trees. Wood. Burn dragging wood with his teeth.>
Burn didn’t think so. Burn imaged <bacon> and <Guil riding.>
<Burn outside.>
The last made his head hurt. It upset Burn, who went out imaging <fire> and <dark> and <fight.> And there wasn’t a damned thing out there. Guil could see it in Burn’s images as if he was seeing it with his own eyes: <eroded stone, bare rock, puddles and more barren hills with tufts of grass… >