That was the part of the reasoning that weighed on his mind.
It was remotely possible that the kids hadn’t gone on to first-stage, that they’d trekked on down toward Shamesey before the snows came and were down by now and making their way across the flatlands.
And that, in cold clear consideration, scared hell out of him.
Tara didn’t need Flicker’s attention to know, not what he was thinking, but the subject he was thinking about. She frowned at him and glanced up. The next stitch pushed too hard and sent the needle through into her finger. She sucked the wound, scowling.
But she didn’t ask and he didn’t say anything—or intend to dwell on it in range of the horses. He wasn’t usually one for recriminations. A decision was a decision was a decision, as they said down south, which was his usual range.
He didn’t know as much as he wished he knew about Tara Chang or her mountain. But that was the way of winters. You ended up in some small cabin or in some encampment, pinned down and pent in for the season with whatever other rider, sane or not, known or not, was in the vicinity, and on many points of his present situation he couldn’t complain, especially considering that otherwise he’d have been flat on his back, wounded, and alone.
Instead he was recovering tolerably quickly, situated with plenty of supplies on the forested bottom road of Tarmin Climb, with someone willing to cut firewood and shovel the door clear till he mended enough to take his turn. He’d be here, he supposed, and fairly content, till water ran downhill again.
He could have had the kids for help. That was true. But instead of that, he was holed up with a woman who’d been a good fill-in partner to him in a bad situation, a woman who’d saved his life, as happened, and the only actual fault he’d seen in her was an ironclad notion of what was sensible and what wasn’t—well, that and a slight unwillingness to change her mind.
“If they stayed in that first shelter on the Climb,” Tara said out of long silence, “they’re fine. ”
“I hope they did. ” He didn’t say that Danny Fisher was a lowland kid from the biggest town in the world, and that the things Danny Fisher didn’t know not only about this mountain, but about any mountain at all, were frightening. Tara’s instruction to the kids, her giving them a map of the way up, had been sensible. Charitable. Responsible.
And the foresight of riders who’d helped make the roads up here had provided ample shelters for riders, summer and winter. If you didn’t use them for as long as they were designed for, and didn’t use caution in leaving them, you had yourself to blame, no one else.
Problem was—they were kids. And kids didn’t notoriously do well with waiting things out.
But stupidity wouldn’t have carried Fisher as far as he’d gotten, and he trusted the kid’s resourcefulness and common sense—as far as the kid’s knowledge went.
That was a warm snow going on.
He decided he would sit down. With a hand on the fireplace stones he flexed his knees gingerly and did that.
The horses had just caught their prey. They’d begun a game of tag that had everything of humor and blood and wicked behavior about it, but that was Burn for you. Burn was from the borders of inhabited land. So was he. Flicker would have killed their supper. Burn played games with it.
In that, they were different. He found he had a soft heart for some things. He didn’t admit to it, exactly, but Flicker’s rider was a far harsher judge of humans and horses. Tara would have shot the girl—in the heat of the moment, granted, and Tara hadn’t in fact shot her. But she nearly had. And the day she’d pitched those kids out the door with a map of the higher road he’d been putting up a pretense of sanity right up to their leaving. Now he couldn’t entirely reconstruct what had happened or what he’d urged them to do.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Tara said.
They were deaf to the ambient—or at least their share of it. They might be hearing the horses, but the horses weren’t paying any attention at all to them. Which meant two humans trying to figure each other out just went by guesswork.
“Thinking Burn’s a son of a bitch. ”
“Bushdevil. ” That was Tara’s guess about the prey. It might be that. It was small and dark and fast in the snowy brush, and it dug fast, but a horse’s tri-hooved feet dug fast, too. Even match.
There was a little silence.
“They’ll have dug in,” Tara said. “The kids will. ”
“Probably,” he said. “The kid’s resourceful. ”
Tara had bloodied her finger. Third time.
He reached out and stopped further carnage.
“Give yourself a break. Easy. ”
“Dammit,” she said.
He really didn’t do well at argument. He carried the hand to his mouth and nipped the finger himself.
“Ow!”
When maybe she’d expected tender sympathy. No luck. She jerked to get loose.
Didn’t work. His hand was stronger.
“I’ve got the needle,” she said, and held it up.
And stuck it away in the mending and rose onto her knees and gently against him as he tugged her other hand.
They’d been lovers.
They might be again, testing the extent of his healing, —except Flicker caught the bushdevil and there was the distinct taste of blood in their mouths.
Burn caught the prize then and threw it with a toss of his head.
“Ugh,” Tara said.
Horse mood was contagious. Outrageous play was one thing. Carnivorous mischief was a difficult but not impossible background for lovemaking.
Next thing, the two would want to be let in from the storm.
It seemed to Carlo Goss that it had taken more than an hour for them just to make the next switchback on the road, walking mostly on ice. He couldn’t always figure out whether they were turning or going straight—he couldn’t see Cloud right now—couldn’t see a black nighthorse, the whiteout was so total in the patch of roadway they were climbing. He couldn’t see Danny next to him or even the ground under his own feet until the gray shadow of a crag on their left side hove up between them and the wind.
Then he could make out Cloud’s rump, snow-spattered shadow horse, tail sprinkled with honest snowflakes, materializing slowly in front of them in a world otherwise white. He could feel Cloud all along. But except for Danny on the other pole of the travois and Randy atop it, and the ends bumping heavily along the roadway, he couldn’t have sworn where the ground was.
“Get off,” he said to his brother, then, because the wind wouldn’t catch the travois during the transaction here and his knees were growing rubbery with fighting both the slope and the constant slippage.
Randy slowly took his weight off the rig, so the load was lighter by him, at least.
“Breath,” Carlo requested, then.
“Minute,” Danny said.
The grade was too steep to do other than stand, but he needed the rest. His legs were shaking under him, and he tried to ease the strain on them as they stopped and stood on an icy steep where if they once entirely let go of the travois where it was, it and his sister would toboggan down a giddy stretch of rubble and ice and soar high and wide on the winds before it fell.
But in all this trek Brionne had never waked.
Never would wake, in his guilt-ridden thoughts and guiltier hope. His sister had been a rider for a brief number of days—she’d been a rider on a horse the whole district and clear down to Shamesey had known had to die—the horse Guil Stuart and others had come up here to get before it took a village out.