“Understand,” Tara said. “Sending you on. I’d no idea about the horse. Or anything wrong.”
He couldn’t come back with what he thought was Tara’s real reason, <Guil lying sick>and <Tara wanting Guil.> He tried to keep his thoughts out of the ambient and had no luck at all. “I knew that,” he said. “Figured it out, anyway. I shouldn’t have moved from the shelter. Hell, I should have shoved Carlo there out the door and we’d have been fine.”
“Except what’s moved in on the mountain.”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s for sure.”
Tara gave a short laugh. “I’m no villager.”
“No—” Ma’am was his mother’s manners. “No,” he said, unadorned.
“Get some rest. We’ll fix things tomorrow.”
“Right,” he said, having presumed as far as he wanted to on senior riders’ patience, and he leaned back against Cloud’s side.
Tara settled down against Flicker. Carlo was out cold, in the ambient just barely, in that very faint way you could pick up someone sound asleep, at very close range.
Carlo and Spook were out, Danny judged, Carlo exhausted from nights of worry, and Spook from nights of exhausting Carlo and the rest of Evergreen village.
Fighting a solitary war with whatever-it-was. Keeping it penned up here, near the lake, because it wasn’t going to drive him off the mountain and away from the rider he’d gone through frozen hell and climbed a mountain to choose.
Stubborn horse. Very stubborn, canny horse.
So was the horse he was leaning against, the one keeping him warm in the icy cold air. He pillowed his head against Cloud and, patting a muscled shoulder, received a rumbling contentment-sound in return.
Jennie had a very scary kind of nightmare. There was a girl, a very angry girl, who wanted a horse to come to her. And she, Jennie, was in the camp on the other side of the wall when a sending came wanting Rain, but she wouldn’t let this girl have Rain. Papa said—papa said you didn’t own horses. Horses just were. You got along with horses.
She was in this girl’s house and she told her that. She told her so very firmly, and told her she couldn’t have Rain and she was sorry, but that was the way it was. And the girl was very angry and told her to get out.
So she flew back over the camp wall and told Rain he shouldn’t listen to this girl.
But something listened. Something came close, and it might be a horse. But she didn’t think so. And she flew back to that girl in the doctor’s house and stood in the middle of the room and wanted to warn her this wasn’t a good idea, and she shouldn’t call out beyond the wall like that.
Then something waked her up and she was in her own bed and mama was in the doorway and so was papa.
“Jennie,” mama said. “Jennie, —what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and papa said, “It’s that damned girl. The horse must be back.”
“Is Dan back?”
“No,” mama said, and sat down on the side of her bed and set a hand on the other side of her. “You stay out of the ambient, Jennie. Something’s going on out there.”
“It’s really real?”
“It’s real. You don’t go out there.”
“But she wants Rain!”
“Rain won’t go to her,” papa said. “The ambient’s just really loud tonight. The horses are upset. I’ll go out and calm things down.”
“Probably both of us should,” mama said. And Randy had shown up in her bedroom doorway, dressed, but with his shirt half on. “You stay inside and see Jennie stays inside,” mama told Randy.
“It’s my sister,” Randy said. He sounded scared. “It’s my sister. I know what she sounds like.”
Then the bell was ringing again. Jennie thought confusedly, Serge didn’t tie the bell again. Then another bell was going. And another. The ambient went terribly <upset,> then, her mama and papa and Randy all scared at once.
“That’s the breakthrough alarm,” papa said, and she remembered papa and mama had always told her if she ever heard all the bells, the gate’s big and little ones and the church tower and the fire bell all at once, then she should lock everything down tight and get the box of shells and set them on the table.
And never, never, never go out to the horses.
But Rain was out there.
Rain needed her.
“You stay put!” papa said in his harshest tone. “Randy, can you do anything with your sister?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yellowflower,” mama said. And papa:
“Jennie, put your clothes on. Get dressed. Right now.”
“Everybody’s in my room!”
“We’re going over to the village.”
“What about the horses?” She wasn’t leaving Rain. She’d never been so scared in her life.
Then half the bells that had been ringing so frantically stopped— leaving just the church bells and one other.
“Is it done?” she asked.
“No,” papa said. “Get dressed!”
Burn got up all of a sudden—which left his sleeping rider scrambling awake, sore side and all, and reaching after his rifle and struggling, with it for a prop, toward his feet, as the rest of the horses surged to their feet and the ambient that had been very quiet suddenly got louder by reason of one young horse that was overwhelming it with question and fright. There was the sound of bells, was what it sounded like, echoing from somewhere distant. Or maybe it was coming through the ambient, which was <there,> and more lively about them than it had been. <Fear> was contagious.
“Danny, get him quiet,” Guil said, catching his breath, and still leaning on the gun instead of relying on it for protection, because it seemed to him that the danger, like those bells, was very far off.
And it seemed to him that it came from the direction of Evergreen.
Evergreen—where Brionne Goss was resident.
Not a good thing. Not at all a good thing.
“That’s Evergreen,” Tara said. “What did the ride take you, Danny?”
“Half a day. Six hours at least. I stopped some.” <Depressions in snow. Carlo falling off. Danny riding fast.>
Six hours’ ride from here, if Danny’s account was straight, and neither Danny nor Carlo had been lazing along when they’d covered that distance.
“We’ve got to move,” Guil said, in the full knowledge there was no way he could last on that kind of ride. Bells in the night were a cry for help, from anyone in range. It seemed to him he did hear them with his own ears—and it was possible, given the folds of the mountain that made it that long a run for a horse.
It wasn’t saying the beast used the roads. It was past midnight. Since dark—it had had time to move, and it might well have had a place it wanted to go.
The same place Spook, until tonight, had been discouraging it from going.
Half the bells that had been ringing were quiet now, a sudden, frightening kind of quiet, but the bells of the church and the mayoralty were still ringing. In want of other remedies Darcy Schaffer went about brewing tea. Brionne had come downstairs in the dark, distraught and unhappy, as small wonder the girl would be, with alarms in the night. It felt to be blowing up a storm—which didn’t entirely account for the breakthrough alarm, but it could well be the cause of such an event—creatures getting desperate as they did before one of winter’s truly deadly storms, and all it took was someone near the walls on the forest side not watching their cellars or some warehouse foundation eroding. Creatures didn’t dig well in the rubble fill under the dirt, but now and again water made an incursion.