Or nightmares—as he slumped down onto his knees and then onto his face: <Brionne standing on the road, still in the red coat, with no awareness in her eyes.>
They reached him. Carlo knelt down and turned the kid and held him.
“Back on the travois,” Danny said.
“Can’t,” Carlo said. There was panic in his voice. “He’ll go to sleep. He’s too tired. He’s got to get up, that’s all. Come on, kid. Dammit, on your feet! Hear me?”
Randy wouldn’t wake up. Not even when Carlo hit him.
“He’s cold,” Carlo said. <Fear> was thick in the ambient. “He’s gotten cold. —Can’t Cloud carry him? Can’t you get him to?”
“He can’t,” Danny said. “He can’t. He’s worked as hard as we have. Let the kid rest. Calm down. Loosen the ties, we’ll bundle him in again.”
“He’ll die!”
“He’ll die if you scare hell out of him—the kid’s doing all he can.” He jerked ties undone and opened the furs, in which Brionne was still warm, to let Carlo lift Randy, half-aware as he was, onto the travois.
Carlo wasn’t saying anything now about being tired. There was just fear. Randy didn’t want the cords tied down. “No!” he said— scared, Danny didn’t need the ambient to understand, that the thing could finally get away from them.
“We won’t let you go,” he said. “It’s almost flat here.” He tied a couple of rumbling knots, securing the kid in the only real warmth there was, and got up.
<Blood on the snow> still came to them, a flash of white, daylight vision. It hadn’t stopped for their supplies.
“Best we can do,” Danny said as calmly as he could. “Keep going. Got to be a shelter—a door we can shut.”
“I don’t think it’ll hurt us,” Randy said from beneath muffling furs. “I could talk to it. It’s lonely. I could try—”
“Forget it! We don’t need a horsefight on top of everything else!” He was growing short-fused himself. And scared. Randy wanted a horse, Randy, like his sister, wanted a horse to such a degree that Cloud didn’t like to be in closed spaces with him, and that lost horse out there wasn’t in any sense one for any green villager kid to take on. When creatures in the Wild started doing the unusual they were usually sick—and for a horse to follow them up a mountain through the wintry hell they’d been through? Damn sure it wasn’t behaving like a normal horse.
“It wouldn’t fight Cloud,” Randy said. “I know. If you could just bring it in—I could talk to it. That’s what it wants, doesn’t it?”
“It’s not sane, if it tracked us up here, and it will fight Cloud.”
“It won’t.” Fourteen-year-old logic. “If it thought I was its rider it’d come for me, wouldn’t it? I can do it—”
“Shut up and listen to the rider, you hear me?” Carlo’s voice cracked and broke as he stood up. “We’re in trouble, we’re in real serious trouble, here, kid. Don’t beg trouble. Keep quiet. Think at it and I’ll hit you. I mean it!”
“Let’s move,” Danny said, and got up. Cloud had come back and wanted <Danny walking,> ignoring the existence of boys or travois.
Worse, Cloud had his mind on the road behind them, and kept looking that way, ready for a horsefight, sending out the impression of <male horse> and <wanting mating> all over the mountainside.
It had to be the same horse that had been down at the first-stage cabin. Randy was right that if it had fastened on one of them and saw its rider among them, it would follow through hell and ice— and he was surer and surer which of a number of horses it was: a horse that had always imaged itself as a succession of horses, as something twisting and horselike and scary, and there and not-there. It was the unhealthiest image he’d ever gotten from a supposedly sane horse, and that was what, in the way of nighthorses, it called itself, no human naming it.
<Spook> was the human name he’d put to it. He’d never learned what Ancel Harper had called it before he fired on the wrong rider. Harper, the <dead man in snow,> the source of <blood on snow,> might get pity in hell. Not from him. Not after he’d ridden with the man. And if it wanted Brionne Goss—that was worse news than Harper.
<Gunfire. Rider lying in the white, blowing snow, not moving.>
“Walk,” Danny said.
Carlo had found another small reserve of strength. So had he. He hadn’t much left.
But thank God for the snow finally giving them consistent traction. Cloud’s three-toed hooves, which shaped themselves very readily to rock, flexed enough so honest dry snow didn’t pack in the clefts of those feet: Cloud was sure-footed and confident now, so were they, and they were finally making time, through trees that indicated they’d turned away from the blasted areas and gone across a natural slope of the mountain.
They should come to the cabin.
At any moment now.
Chapter 4
Jennie was supposed to be asleep, but the wind was making a racket and she’d been bored a lot during the day. She was bored now, lying in the dark, in bed. The storm had been going on for a whole day, and she had played games and done chores and played games and she’d had a nap she didn’t usually take any more. She wished there was something to do.
If she got up, mama and papa would scold. If she slipped in to sit by the fire and didn’t make a sound, and just sat and watched the pictures in the coals, or maybe played with her trucks real quietly, mama and papa might not know she was up.
But the bell was still ringing out by the gate. Nobody had fixed it. The night was scary with wind and things going thump, and she began to be convinced that something spooky had waked her. She wasn’t sure what: she thought it might have been a sending, and she wished she knew what that was.
Spook-bears and goblin-cats didn’t ever get inside the walls. Serge Lasierre slept in the village gate house with his rifle on nights when the Wild was acting up, and bears couldn’t get past Serge. Mama and papa had told her that.
But that bell was ringing and ringing. Maybe a bear had gotten Serge and that was why Serge hadn’t fixed the bell.
Maybe out there in the wind and the dark something was really wrong.
She thought it might be Rain calling her. Rain was her horse, well, mostly her horse, though papa said she’d have to wait till Rain made up his mind, and Rain might have to leave the way Leaf had left. But she didn’t think so. Rain was hers, and he and she were friends. And papa knew it even if he didn’t approve.
Rain was, papa also said, a loud horse, because he was only two, and didn’t know but one pitch to be at, —like some little girls, papa had said. And like little girls, anyway, Rain heard things older horses didn’t pay attention to. Hearing everything made Rain spooky sometimes, over shadows and thumps and over things somebody remembered, so Rain’s rider had to be very quiet and not think scary thoughts, even alone in bed at night, in the barracks where the horses didn’t ordinarily hear them.
But in the barracks they weren’t supposed to hear the horses this far, either, unless the horses were upset.
And it wasn’t just Rain, she decided. Mom-horse Shimmer was nervous, too. Shimmer was pregnant again and expecting a foal in the spring, and mom-horse was getting angry, not angry at Rain, but disturbed at something Rain picked up, and that upset papa-horse.
So she wasn’t just making-believe. Papa said don’t ever make-believe near the horses, and said that that was why they built the rider-shelter so far away from the horse-den, so little girls being silly couldn’t upset them.