Guil hadn’t been in the mood for the last several days—a hole in the side tending to discourage a man. Tara had suffered the love-making in the ambient in lonely resolution and was not resigned to do so tonight; he caught that impression quite clearly through the taste of hash, the smell of dead bushdevil and the musk two amorous nighthorses generated on their own. She had set her mind on making an advance just real soon now—limited to milder activity, it might be. Acknowledging he was doing well to be on his feet.
He was going to finish the hash. His horse could wait. Her horse could wait. Tara could wait. He’d all night.
Tara made valiant attempts to slow down with supper.
But the horses didn’t wait, and he didn’t taste the last of the hash. Neither, he thought, did she.
One thing about horses, once didn’t satisfy them. They saved it most of the year for this season, though they’d not reject a little offseason recreation. But in winter, given time and opportunity and a couple of humans to care for their essential survival, they had only one thing to do besides eat and sleep. It was the force that bound herds together for the winter. It was the social impulse that shuffled the deck for pairings, that ended by spring in pregnant mares and smaller, saner groups, four or five, that hung together for the season.
And by the time two humans had wended their way through essential and polite human processes—Burn and Flicker were through the first round and far from finished for the evening.
Long winter nights. Long season.
Tara, fortunately, was taking the same precautions the mares did in bad seasons. He didn’t know if she had the first time they’d made love: he hoped so. But bitterweed was something the shelters kept, right along with the tea, the salt, and the flour. Horses wouldn’t touch it until there was nothing else left to eat: it prevented foals in years when there wasn’t forage and it kept riders from getting pregnant—maybe from siring as welclass="underline" he’d heard it speculated on but never proved.
He’d drunk the damn tea, too, though, out of basic courtesy, because it tasted really bad, sugar didn’t half cure it, and he didn’t think anybody should have to suffer it alone.
Fact was, he liked this woman. He hadn’t said too much yet and some things the horses didn’t carry in quite the human way or the human sense: nuances of emotion were real chancy. But he felt safe with her, felt as though if things went wrong he’d have solid, clear-thinking backup, and that on good days it’d be good just to know she existed in the world.
Wished she’d felt differently about the kids, that was the only thing. He was really, really disturbed about that, and hadn’t, in the dose of painkiller Tara had shoved down him, had his wits thoroughly about him when she’d taken a wide decision in the matter of their own welfare for the winter. Tara didn’t hesitate on a threat. Just didn’t. She’d been a Darwin rider before she’d come to Tarmin, a hell of a lot rougher life than this mountain had been, and there were a lot of shadow-spots like that with her.
There would be for her with him—he knew he had a lot. His partner wouldn’t have died if he’d had the capacity to follow blindly where she’d wanted him to be.
When the horses carried sex in the ambient, winter-long, thinking stopped in a rider shelter. Partnership and springtime partings were where thinking took up again—and as recent as Aby’s death was, and as recent as her partners’ deaths were, he thought it possible he’d ride with Tara at least for the summer to come.
Soft lips ran down his neck, gentle hands down his back.
—If there weren’t the question about the kids.
—If she weren’t so hard-minded.
Hands stopped. The mood crashed.
“The girl’s a killer,” Tara said.
That was true. The girl was responsible for everything that had happened at Tarmin—for Tara’s partners gnawed down to bone, still alive. That last was Tara’s image, not his, because Tara didn’t buckle and she didn’t give the kid any slack, not for the loss or the memory of it. She was damn tough.
And maybe, having lost a partner himself, he needed Tata’s unforgiving mind the way he needed the winter cold to come between him and what he’d lost.
She came around him, wrapped him tight, held him close.
Said, into his ear, “The mountain doesn’t forgive, Guil, and I don’t. I wasn’t made that way. ” Lips brushed his, gentle and kind, belying the words that passed them. “I told Danny everything— chance to go up, chance to go down—advice to stay. But they won’t let her die. And she should have. She should have, Guil. I’m not talking about justice. ”
The girl was still a danger, in Tara’s mind. It was possible in his experience that the girl would pull out of it—but it was equally possible she wouldn’t, and worse, that she’d go on living and that she’d be a problem around horses that might get worse instead of better. Tara could be entirely right.
But if they just got through the winter they could ship the girl down to Anveney—if they had to, with the first truck convoy that came up here—where there weren’t horses, where there wasn’t anything alive, including grass, for that matter. It was hell on earth for a rider. But there the girl couldn’t affect anything. There she’d have no power. No means to draw another horse to its death.
He thought when the storm passed and it looked like a good day he’d ride up the road as far as the first-stage shelter and see if the kids were there, as he hoped to God they’d stayed put. The weather certainly hadn’t invited them moving on.
But, God, if they had decided to move, he hoped they’d taken straight out. Most of all he hoped that they weren’t up at midway when this hit.
She punched him gently with her fist.
“Dammit, Guil. ” She propped herself on one elbow in the furs. Her shirt was open. The firelight glowed on her skin. “Told him every damn thing I could, Guil. I swear to you. —Better than anybody ever did for me! Don’t look at me like that. ”
“Somebody,” he said, tracing the line down the middle of her chest with a gentle finger, “should have done better for you. ”
She stared at him. Stared as if she were really mad.
But the surface of her eyes glistened in the firelight. “My partners in Tarmin did everything they needed to do for me. I don’t need people to do things for me. ”
“I know you don’t,” he said.
“All right, I’ll ride up and check on the next shelter. I’ll do it. I’ll go tonight!”
“When the weather clears,” he said, “we’ll go. ”
“I don’t need you to go. It was my doing. I’ll handle it. ”
“When the weather clears,” he said. If Tara said a thing she meant it. Tarmin’s fall had done some brutal things to Tara Chang. Stripped away the veneer of camp life and cast her back to thoughts of her own growing up, in dealing with those kids. She hadn’t admitted that to him.
But Darwin was a lot in her thoughts tonight when she thought about Tarmin or the kids.
A hard life. Growing up alone in a world of miners and loggers with no advice, no one to trust.
He’d been luckier. He’d had a partner from very, very young.
Then lost her. And almost lost himself.
Tara had pulled him back from that. But it was off the edge of one cliff and facing Tara’s own drop into darkness. She was maybe a couple of years younger than Aby or than he was—but she was harder than Aby, she was colder. She both anchored him from a slide he could have taken and bid fair to take him down another of her own.