Time.
God. Time.
They talked about going into the hills and not working for a while. And they’d always made just about enough for winter-over. They spent too much. He’d spent too much. He hated towns. Hated the crowding, the noise—hung about them for her sake. She’d said—hadn’t she?—that someday they’d make the money, buy the time, take the break to go back to the high country—and he’d known it would never happen.
Aby had pleaded with him to join her at Anveney. He’d refused. She’d gotten mad. And hurt. And they hadn’t talked about it. But winter at Shamesey let her do those jobs at Anveney. And make money she wasn’t spending.
That was what she’d been doing with her secrecy. That was why she’d been hurt. The big plan. The trip back to the south. The year off work. And Jonas moved in on her.
Tara sank slowly down on her haunches in front of him and rested her elbows on her knees, chilled hands in front of her mouth. The air was scarily tense. The wind screamed a steady song into the world.
Good man, Tara thought. Honest man.
And so damn much <anger,> so much <pain>—which he was so, so careful to contain in himself—all the signs of someone who’d been with the horses so early and so long that, hurt and hit, he had only the instinct to hold pain close and kill it, before it killed him, his horse, his partner.
She knew. She was smothering a lot of it herself. And she didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t intrude where only that partner ever had. Different from her—who’d had a set of lovers, interchangeable and easy. But with Aby Dale—and him—she got images of <children.> Of <yearling horses.> Of a whole life—
Fights. Reconciliations. Arguments.
Love had never changed, in all of it.
“Listen,” she said, in the face of his skittish suspicions. “Don’t— don’t shoot Jonas Westman. All right? You don’t know. If he shows up—and he could, when the storm quits, don’t—”
“My business.”
“Yeah,” she said, and knew when to back off. She began to get up.
He caught her wrist. Not hard. Didn’t have words framed— just—image. <Jonas Westman and the others. A gate. Village gate. Big town gate. Shots fired.>
“At you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Now—I think so. But I’ve known them a lot of years. I don’t know how to think. Maybe they just knew there was a secret. Maybe they were prying at it. Maybe they were just worried about her. —Maybe—I don’t know how she thought, you know? —I don’t know.”
“I don’t either,” she said, and was going on to say—But Aby would care what happens to you. I don’t want you to do something you could be sorry for—
She was almost to saying— I could care. I don’t want you hurt.
But another image overrode.
<Horse wanting out.>
“Hell,” she said. It was Flicker. But it was Burn, too. One had the idea, and then the other did.
Guil shook his head, and then looked up.
In silence. Or near silence. The screech of the wind on the shingle had sunk away to an occasional flutter.
“Storm’s letting up,” she said. “Or we’re covered up over the roof.”
Burn was pawing at the floor. Nudging the latch with his nose.
“Damn, Burn. Hold it, can you?” Guil got up, snapped the loaded cylinder closed and gave it to her as she got up.
Meaning guard the door.
He went and shoved the latch up.
The door wouldn’t budge. Burn shoved it, and it gave a little. Not much.
“Well,” she said, meaning it had to be the snow-door, which meant moving a table, and unscrewing two heavy bolts that held a wooden bar as thick as her arm. Bear-bars, they called them. With reason.
She moved the table, he unscrewed the bolts, and pulled the door open on a shoulder-high wall of snow with dark above it and a wind still fit to blast cold air and snow into the room.
Burn pawed at it, got purchase and began digging furiously. “Burn!” Guil yelled in protest, nothing availing, and Tara got the snowshovel and began making a heap of it on the floor. Coats were definitely in order.
“Damn,” Guil complained, pulling his on, and then took over the shoveling, piling the stuff in the middle of the board floor as first his horse, then Flicker behind him broke their way through a considerable drift. The wind was cold. A pile of snow in the room was quickly sending a trail of icemelt across the boards to a low corner under the bed. It was disgusting. And Tara inhaled a cold gust, shrugging into her coat, and felt like chasing out after the horses and breathing the free wind herself.
The horses had broken through into the night outside. They nipped each other and plowed through small snowbanks because they were there, they did their essential business when the urge took them, marking the area as theirs—and got to flirting with shadows, tails up, snow flying, while two humans froze, shoveling out the snow two horses had kicked into the room.
<Horses coming in,> Guil insisted, when they’d cleared everything but white traces of the shovel edge and a huge wet spot off the boards of the floor. <Snow on us. Cold, miserable humans.>
There was no sympathy. There was a rogue out there somewhere in the woods, and two fool horses wanted to play tag through brush that masked holes and drop-offs. <Flicker!> Tara sent furiously. <Flicker inside. Grain and water.>
Thirsty work, shoveling or digging. That drew the rascal, who came shaking her mane and shaking herself once she was inside, a spatter of quickly melting snow; Burn was right behind, hardly slower to spatter them and the room, with a whip of his tail to finish it—and no question in the world what was on both minds now. Flicker got her drink, from the bucket they kept full; and Burn moved in for a few gulps of water while two frosted humans were securing the snow-door to keep the heat in the room and the bears out.
But before they were done, the ambient was awash in <male horse > and <female > and there seemed to be a second source of heat in the room.
Two half-frozen humans went to the fire, nonetheless, to warm their chilled hands—impossible to ignore what was going on in the room, impossible not to feel the heart speeding and sensitivity increasing in areas one politely—desperately—tried not to think about.
And did, because it was impossible to believe a man and woman in the same room with those two were going to clench their teeth till daybreak.
She tried to concentrate on the fire. But she looked at him the same moment he looked at her, <seeing if she was looking> and it was like one thought, awareness of each other—impulses shooting through the parts in question. He was trying <not,> but she didn’t think he was winning. She wasn’t. Air seemed very scarce in the vicinity.
“Oh, hell,” she said, or something like, and he was a degree closer and she was—they might both have leaned. A thickly padded hug gave way to a totally mindless intention, mouths meeting mouths and breathing finding some way to happen.
Burn and Flicker were down to basics; but humans had clothes to go, and bare skin in a chilled room, and blankets that somehow the other party was sitting on, that resisted being wrapped around fast enough to keep the chill away, so her rear was cold, but she didn’t figure out where the end of the blanket was, and didn’t care.
After that—after that were explosions, intermittent rest, and a quieter trial or two, with the horses quiet enough to let them feel their way around each other’s sensations, new to each other, and old as their experiences, and full of ghosts.
He was thinking <Aby> through half of it. She was thinking, <Vadim> now and again—but not that she didn’t care. They were both confused, and so much was still recent with them that neither of them could straighten out where they were.