She didn’t feel like somebody who’d panic. She’d known Aby. That was something.
“We’ll get it,” he said. He didn’t know, after that. Didn’t have any plans, after that.
Except Cassivey’s orders. Except next spring.
She sat there staring at the fire. He wrapped the blankets around his shoulders and looked at it too.
The horses wandered back to their courtship. She sat there remembering her village and her partners and trying for quiet.
Finally she lay down on her side and pulled the blanket up to her ears. He did the same, listening to the horses—<tired horses, both,> Burn having settled to better manners. The mare was still scatter-witted, concerned for her rider, a cold-water bath for Burn’s attentions.
He wasn’t sorry. He really, really wanted rest from emotional images and emotional situations. She didn’t think about him. It was all, all <faces, moments, laughter around a rider quarters, man in bed, men on horses, women riding with her, sometimes Aby among them> as she sat there, still as the frozen dead.
Clenched fist. Steady stare. For a long, long time no thought but the patterns in the fire. She’d reached the angry stage.
Best help he could be, he decided, was do the same, image nothing but <fire patterns.>
She let go a sigh and lay down. Her concentration wobbled. He kept seeing <patterns in the coals,> and the horses settled, <tired horses, quiet horses, warm horses, side by side.>
One wasn’t tempted to linger in the necessaries in the morning: the small add-on joined by a too-efficient door to the main cabin had no heat but the natural insulation, one suspected, of snow piled up over the roof—and one was very glad to be back inside and back in front of the fire.
Tara Chang took her turn while he put tea on and toasted biscuits over a renewed fire. Horses were hungry—horses had to be let out for their own necessities, and let back in out of the howling gale.
It was still whiteout outside. If Jonas had gotten back to shelter in Tarmin, depend on it that Jonas was going to stay put, postponing all questions until the storm had stopped, and hell if he wanted to see Jonas right now—he’d enough on his mind without dealing with Hawley.
“Autumn’s definitely over,” Tara said, shivering her way inside, and shutting the door fast.
“Looks like.” He was uneasy. He wanted to keep the light mood she attempted, but he’d thought of Hawley and Jonas and his mind wanted to go ranging after questions he didn’t want to ask himself. He was cooking a taste of bacon for the horses, to go with <grain> and he’d make hot mash, but <Guil and the woman eating biscuits.> He was being very firm about that. He had water heating for the mash. Which Burn liked adequately well. He wasn’t in the least remorseful about the biscuits.
Tara made the mash, perfectly nice mash, mixed grains. A little bacon to flavor it.
Riders sat and toasted biscuits, and ate slowly, because it was certain they weren’t going anywhere while the wind was howling like that.
He thought about Shamesey, in a long silence marked by horses bashing buckets against the baseboards. He thought about winter drifts, and evergreen, and high villages.
“Verden,” she said. And he guessed it was Verden he was thinking about.
Where Aby’d spent no few days.
“Guys I’ve worked with, Aby’s crew, they’re back at Tarmin holed up. Guy who drew that thing—” He indicated the picture overhead. “You could go back there, if anything happened to me. They’re all right, I mean, I think you’d be all right with them. They’re probably after the thing too, but if something did happen—”
“I don’t miss.”
“I’ve been known to,” he said. He hated infallibility. Considered it lethal. “I’ve decided you’re right. One human hasn’t a chance. So if anything happens, you go back, get Westman. Tell him—” He decided against what he’d like to say, which was Go to hell.
“I’m not going to tell him a damn thing. I know who you mean. I don’t like those guys.”
Didn’t exactly surprise him. He didn’t exactly like them, himself, but he couldn’t find a cause against them.
It occurred to him that why was a reasonable question.
“What’s the matter with them?”
“Just—stand-offish. Just not damn friendly.”
“That’s Jonas. And his horse.”
She flung some small dark bit into the fire. Bark chip, maybe. There was a lot of it on the stones. She didn’t talk for a moment. She wasn’t happy with things. “Aby said—”
She couldn’t leave that hanging.
“What?”
“Said she was worried. I don’t know what about. I don’t know what had happened. The last time, this last trip, before she went with them up to Verden with the trucks, she rode over to us, said—God, she said she wasn’t staying around them longer than she had to, they were into her business… that was what she said.”
He bit his lip. Found his pulse racing. <Wanted> to know. “Did she say what that business was?”
“I don’t know. Only—you know, they don’t run the Tarmin shipment uphill and then down again, they just set a date and our trucks meet them and join up at the downhill. So she gave us the date. And two of our guys, Barry and Llew, they took the trucks out with one of our road repair crews. And you know, usually when the convoys join the convoy boss sorts out who’s going where in the line—”
“Yeah.” That was normal.
“Some bosses, after they sort the trucks out, camp there that night. Aby did, usually. But they didn’t ever stop. My partners were behind our trucks, and they just started rolling, and our guys, they stayed with the repair crew, ready to move them up when the trucks had cleared the road. But the whole convoy was just on down the mountain. Never did even see the riders. —It’s not that unusual if there’s weather threatening. There’s a truck pullout a couple of hours on down. And some bosses just had rather make the time. Aby’d said she didn’t want to spend time with them. I guess we all assumed she was anxious to get down—down the mountain. But she wasn’t with them, was she?”
“No. She wasn’t.” He was very careful with his edges. <Still water.> “They were spooked. That’s their story. The rogue showed up and spooked the convoy, sent Aby and Moon right off the mountain.”
“I took supplies and more crew up to the road repair just a few days ago. They’d found the wreck <way down the mountain.> Our guys thought it could be a month old. They had no idea.”
He was getting madder, and madder. Burn was disturbed. He tried to calm himself.
“Jonas knew,” he said. And then broke a promise Aby’d died keeping: “There was gold on that truck. Whole year’s shipment.”
She wasn’t knocked-down surprised. Mildly, maybe. “They said it went with the convoy before.”
“They.”
“Rumors. There are always rumors. But—”
She was confused. Thinking about <rogue.>
“Jonas imaged me about a rogue spooking the trucks,” he said. “A rogue killing Aby. —Hell of a coincidence, isn’t it? A rogue— and that one truck—the one with the gold?”
“The rogue’s real,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, and sat staring into the fire until he’d calmed himself from the attempt to add that up.
Sometimes things just happened. Sometimes the luck was just against you. But bet on it that Jonas Westman knew what was in that truck. Lead truck, it had been: he resurrected that from the image he’d gotten. Aby’d gone over the edge. It had.
<Wrecked truck. Logs scattered like straws down the rocks.> That was Tara Chang’s memory. The way it had been when she’d visited the site. No bones. Nothing. What died in the Wild vanished before morning.