But he wasn’t going to become Tara Chang. He wasn’t going to shove Aby into the past and take on the hardened self-sufficiency that was Tara’s answer to loss. He’d rather bleed. And she was scared to. That was what it came down to.
He drew her close, into his arms. He made love to her, personally, carefully, not the hard fast way that was Tara’s own urging. She was going to feel before he was done, and she could do what she liked about it later, but he wouldn’t be ignorable, he wouldn’t be someone whose name she’d forget if she rode away. Fact was, he wouldn’t forget hers, and he felt for her, and it seemed only fair.
And whether she thought so or not he was going up there to the first-stage shelter to find those kids. He’d been flat on his back on painkiller and too damned compliant when vital decisions were being made on his behalf, and her patched-together notion of going up there now to check was only to satisfy him, and protect him from the situation she’d protected him from knowing about when it was in the cabin with them.
That was the impression he got—though he could be wrong about her intentions. He’d see about that, too.
His own way of grieving hadn’t been quiet or safe. He’d inspired a man to shoot him. Hers seemed to be ignoring the loss of her partners except for a burst of occasional anger. Seemed. That was the word.
And he didn’t think so: having just been through what she was going through he didn’t believe it. It wasn’t easy to love him—and God knew Aby’d been patient of his faults. It might not be real damn easy to get through the barriers Tara Chang threw up.
As now he felt the panic under him. He felt the sensations she was feeling the way she felt his—and most of all she wanted haste and satisfaction he wasn’t going to give her that fast or that cheaply. Not between the blankets. Not in letting her seal that shell around herself for the rest of her life.
Liar, he said to her in his mind. And she bucked and screamed and hit him hard with her fist, forgetting he was the wounded one. She was instantly sorry and didn’t object to what he was doing, just— wanted him to hurry; but he didn’t give her up.
He wasn’t her partner. But you knew a rider by certain things: he knew the woman that had taken care of that mare of hers when her own hands were hurting so badly from the cold she’d had tears in her eyes. How she’d interrupted grieving over her own hurts to stand in as his partner when many men of good sense would have hung back or turned and run.
And by everything he’d learned about Tara Chang, he wasn’t going to give her up until she could tell him—in words, at which riders including himself didn’t generally excel—that she’d made up her mind to be as shut down as a rock forever.
“Damn you!” she said, for what he was doing, not what he was thinking.
Afterward she lay and shivered, and in her mind still was the firelight. And him.
Then her lost partner. And him again.
She had her hand on his arm, and could have pulled away, and didn’t. Just lay there, as he did, the two of them in the firelight. His horse, Burn, helpfully came over and sniffed them over, approving.
That told him something, too. Burn didn’t like everyone.
There was probably a glorious view from the turn next and higher, as the wind shifted into their faces again: all the peaks of the great Firgeberg Range were probably right there behind that veil of white, but all they met was wind that scoured what it hit. If they plummeted straight off the edge in their next snow-blinded steps it still wouldn’t give them a view—they’d just fall and fall, Danny said to himself, in white no different from the snow that veiled the road.
From a high Shamesey window he’d dreamed boyish dreams of the far crest of the world. From the safety of Shamesey walls he’d seen Rogers Peak send out its winter banner of white and thought it the greatest beauty in the mountains—his mountain, his horizon against the evening sky.
Well, this was it. He was here. Best view he might ever have. And snow and the fading of daylight were all the view he had.
One foot in front of the other—hand was numb, arm was numb, and Cloud was getting too far ahead of them, moving into blowing sleet that didn’t let up, up an increasingly sleet-gray road. Randy, walking near him, was dropping behind; Danny realized that in a distracted moment and turned his head, blinded by his scarf, to urge Randy to catch up.
“Come on,” he yelled. “Keep with us. ” He saw their strength giving out, finally, to pull that travois. They’d dumped all the non-essential supplies. Held on to the shotgun and most of the food. Couple of blankets. And Brionne. Randy had to carry himself—but he looked to be losing his battle against the wind.
Randy might have answered his hail just now. Danny couldn’t entirely hear. His ears were aching to match the duller ache racketing around the walls of his skull. But Randy didn’t overtake them until Carlo stopped and beckoned and cursed and refused to go on until Randy trudged past them again.
On that steeper grade, Randy struggled to keep walking. Feet skidded on snow-packed rubble as often as they gained upward. More than once the kid slipped to his knees and got back up in what had become an exercise of raw, desperate courage. Danny’s hand that held the left-side travois pole was going numb even through the gloves, and his running argument with Cloud about <bacon> and <cabin in the woods above> had degenerated to a litany of calls on God as his feet slipped and his heart jumped—supposing the preachers’ Beast-hating God had a little concern to spare for a stranded and hellbound rider.
Carlo had his feet go out from under him, wrenched the travois down and almost took Danny off his feet, and that was the way it went: slow going for a long, long distance as rubble fill bridged a rift in the mountain flank. Wind blew the ends of Cloud’s tail straight sideways below the point where muscle and bone had it tucked tight into Cloud’s rump.
Then tail and horse alike faded into white ahead of them. Randy was momentarily a gray, ghostly figure and then gone, too.
It was like walking into a wall. Ice particles stung exposed skin. They couldn’t see, and what Cloud sent made Danny sure Cloud couldn’t, either. By the end of the next switchback and the change of the wind from their flank to their backs Danny couldn’t feel his grip on the travois pole at all. His chest hurt, his head hurt, his lungs hurt, and the constant slipping and the scares it set into him didn’t help his labored breathing or his pounding, front-of-the-skull headache.
Carlo was bearing up somehow, but Randy—
Randy by now was walking on instinct, not mentally there, Danny was increasingly afraid. He watched Randy, who’d stopped when they had, wander off to the left and to the right again, averaging their course, but not holding a steady line. The thoughts that surfaced from the boy were increasingly erratic, things about home and <Tarmin> and going somewhere Danny couldn’t figure.
Cloud was struggling with the increasingly frequent idea of < shelter and shops> coming from the kid. <Cattle tails,> was Cloud’s opinion of villagers walking this road—<cattle tails> describing the feature Cloud most despised on the creature Cloud most despised on the planet, adding <cattle dung> and <cattle rear ends> for villagers who confused his navigation.
Foot slipped. Randy went momentarily to all fours and got up again, amid <fear> from Carlo, who surely knew the score. They couldn’t, Danny thought, afford another test in this gale with Randy already chilled—couldn’t just pile him on the travois in the open, either, if he was chilling. He kept looking for a tall rock, a snowbank, any place where he and Carlo could shelter Randy and stabilize the travois for long enough to pack Randy in the furs with his sister—if she wasn’t frozen.