Randy lagged back by them. Danny turned his head and in the fuzzy side vision his frozen lashes and the edge of his scarf afforded him realized the boy was no longer trudging beside him and Carlo. He looked back, fighting the scarf and the wind for vision. Randy was standing still, slowly disappearing into a veil of white.
“Randy!” Carlo yelled back at him. Carlo’s voice was mostly gone, too, but he yelled: “Randy, come on! Keep up, dammit, you lily-livered stupid kid!”
It wasn’t exactly the encouragement Danny would have offered, but he guessed Carlo knew his brother, because Randy started walking, and as they went at a slower pace, caught up, <angry> and <wanting to hit Carlo.> Carlo shoved at him one-handed as he passed, cursed him and made him madder.
Couldn’t have the kid quit. They were—he’d tried to reestablish a time-sense—maybe an hour from the shelter and the end of this road. It was getting toward dark.
Get the kid to a level spot, pack him on—he and Carlo could pull that weight.
Couldn’t be that much longer. The shelter was supposed to be right at the crest, a broad truck pull-out, so that trucks in convoy from the High Loop could park and the drivers could sleep in them before or after that notorious steep. Villagers appreciative of the means by which their goods had moved provided soft bunks, even heated showers in the summer, Tara had said so. Tara had promised them—he could see the image she’d cast him.
<Hot water. Hot meals. A shelter still within the treeline> and away from this rocky face, which meant firewood available if they had to wait out a succession of storms.
He had no feeling in his left hand. With his free right, he gave a furious wipe across his eyes to free his eyelashes of the accumulating ice—and in that moment Randy slipped on a runoff trace of ice and shot past him downhill.
He dropped and grabbed the kid, and Randy’s weight spun him, the travois, and Carlo all to the left and onto the ice. Carlo—he thought it was Carlo—by a miracle or a dug-in boot-toe held onto the other pole of the travois, flat on the ice, and didn’t let them skid more than a body length further.
Danny lay still with a gloved fistful of Randy’s sleeve and a second precarious grip on the side of the travois. For all he knew the rig might be only balanced on one pivot, ready to slide again if he moved.
He really hadn’t been scared in the instant he’d grabbed Randy. Now a shudder went through him that passed to quaking shivers, a blinding acuteness of headache, and an inability to get his breath.
He couldn’t let himself panic. Couldn’t. He’d saved Randy. His eyelashes had mostly frozen shut and he couldn’t judge where they were on the road or how close to the edge or how steep it was below them.
“Just stay put,” he said to Randy, who was starting to struggle. “Catch your breath. Don’t move, dammit. ”
Cloud would realize their predicament. Cloud would give him vision if he waited. It wasn’t just iced rubble where Randy’s momentum had carried them. It was slick as glass. And Cloud was coming back now, worried, picking his way, fearfully imaging <dangerously slick ice, Danny in danger.>
<Cloud stopping,> he sent back, frightened for Cloud’s safety more than their own at the instant; he could see <Danny and boys and travois> through Cloud’s eyes, but that warning wasn’t going to stop Cloud long from a rash approach if they didn’t move immediately to get out of their predicament.
“What’s holding us?” he asked Carlo, and Carlo managed to say,
“My foot. On the snow. On our right. ”
“Can you pull us?”
“No! You’ll slide!”
His brain had started working. He had both hands occupied at the moment—but at very worst he had a knife in his right boot, if he could grab it and use it fast enough to hold on the ice; but he didn’t want to do that if he had an alternative. He worked and found a little, little toehold for leverage. “Randy. You take hold of my arm. You crawl over me. Onto the travois. Over to Carlo. ”
“Can’t. ” He could hardly understand the kid. “Can’t. ”
“Calm down. Grab my arm. Then the rifle—the strap’s solid around me. Just crawl right over my back. ”
The kid moved. Grabbed his arm—grabbed the rifle barrel and Danny pressed his face against the ice and hung on as the kid clambered over him. Everything shifted, slid sideways—the travois turned slowly in the shift of weight and by God knew what effort of Carlo’s arms, angled him slowly toward the snowbank.
Danny got a foot onto it and let Carlo drag him and Randy both to the snow, where he could get a knee under him and get up, and they could walk.
Carlo had saved them, saved the damn travois and his sister—and he trudged uphill with Carlo, pulling the travois with Brionne and Randy to the snowy spot where Cloud waited for them.
“Up. ” Carlo hauled Randy up by one arm then and let him go. “Walk on the snow. Hear?”
Randy tried, but the scare and the cold of the ice had taken all the shaky strength Randy had left. The kid was exhausted, trying to walk, but staggering left and right, knees shaking under him. Danny got a dizzy feeling and felt pain he thought was Randy’s.
“We’re in real trouble,” Carlo gasped. “Aren’t we?”
“Shelter’s going to be soon,” Danny said. “It’s got to be. ”
“Maybe it isn’t, you know?” There was a wobble in Carlo’s voice. “Maybe we got off the track somewhere. ”
“There isn’t anywhere we can get off. They cut the road out of the mountain, they shore it up with logs—there aren’t any side roads. ”
“You’ve never been up here!”
“I’ve seen it, trust me that I’ve seen it. ”
“I saw what you saw!”
“Don’t take it for granted. ” A senior rider had said it to him once, when he was a week with his horse, and he hadn’t believed it then, but he fell back on it now as the only authority he had. “You don’t pick up the details I do. Tara told me plain enough what the road is. ”
“Maybe we ought to make a camp. We could find a place in the rocks—we’re not going to get snowed under in a blow like this. ”
“There’s no place to camp!” He didn’t mean to attack. But he didn’t have breath to argue, and if Carlo wanted to quibble and object to the only advice he had they were in real trouble. “Shelter’s coming. Be patient. ”
“You’ve been saying that!”
What came through Cloud wasn’t confidence. It was spooky-feeling, bite and kick.>
<Blood on the snow> he heard then.
“Oh, my God,” Carlo said.
“Easy,” Danny said.
“It’s behind us! It’s that horse again!”
“Calm down. It could be the kid. Could be he’s dreaming. ”
“It’s not coming from him! It’s followed us up here! It’s still behind us!” Carlo pointed back the way they’d come with an accuracy his own direction-sense echoed plain as plain. More, Cloud felt it, <wanting fight.>
“No!” Danny let go the travois pole without warning to shove against Cloud’s chest and sent a strong <quiet water.>
<Blood. Rifle crack ringing off the mountainside. Pain. And shock.>
“You said,” Carlo insisted in rising panic, as if he hadn’t heard. “You said it wouldn’t come up here—”
He’d thought so. And as strongly as it had come—the <blood on snow> image vanished on them.