“No. It isn’t. But I don’t do everything I think of.” <Walking down snowy road, Tara and Flicker and the blonde girl.> “Maybe I could teach her something. I don’t know. What do you say? She’s thirteen years old. —And she’s killed my partners, dammit! Killed the whole damn village.” <Kid reaching for Flicker. Flicker jerking away.> “She wanted things. She unsettled Flicker just being around her. Want, want, want. Push, push, push. Damn bottomless well of ‘I want.’ And temper when she didn’t get her way. Real surly temper.” Silence a moment, the ambient seething with anger that sank, sank, sank. Then: “You know what I ask myself? I ask myself— how much of the rogue is the horse, and how much is that kid? And that’s a lousy thought for a rescue.”
It wasn’t at all a pleasant thought. But a kid wasn’t innocent in the ambient. Just not as strong.
Usually.
<Rogue prowling the streets. Fire on window-glass. Rogue hunting for individuals. Woman. Girl. Boy. Minds going out. Guns going off. Predators and scavengers rolling through the village street like a flash flood. The girl riding through it blithe as a summer wind, searching out victims one by one—>
<Still water,> he sent. <Still water. Woods around us. Daylight.>
He wasn’t getting her back. There was only <desire to kill.>
<Fireplace,> he remembered. That was their potent memory. <Skin on skin. Hands touching.>
<Partner-lover. Talking with him on the porch.>
For a moment the ambient stifled breath. Then Tara backed off the anger, drove it down to quiet, quiet, quiet.
“We do what we can,” Guil said. He wasn’t good with words. He sent <meadow with flowers.> He sent <new foals.>
She’d heard her village die. He’d not been on the mountain yet, the only way he could figure it. He didn’t know how she’d stood it.
<White,> came back to him, just <white-white-white,> walling him out, all but blinding him. Burn threw his head and took small nips at Flicker’s shoulder until <white > gave way to <branches > and <mountain road.>
“Her damn choice,” Tara muttered finally, no weakening of her anger, just better control.
He rode thinking about that for a while, thinking he shouldn’t have given her the gun.
“Don’t do any heroics,” he said. “My rifle may be able to take it—drop the horse and miss the kid. If the kid survives—best we can do.”
Not damn easy, if it came at you—and it might, out of the trees at any moment. Aim low and hope you knew where the horse—
A chill went through the ambient, as if a cloud had gone over the sun. He looked left; and Burn pricked his ears up and laid them flat again.
The lump of snow among the trees—wasn’t a lump of snow. It was a roof, blown partially clear.
<Rider-shelter,> Tara sent. She knew it inside and out. He heard the soft click as Tara drew the pistol. He became acutely aware of the rifle in his hand, where its balance was. They made a winding approach, through the outflung wall of a snowdrift, on the shelter’s lower side.
Burn was smelling <female.> So was Flicker, he thought. But smelling something more, something confused, and upsetting.
Smelled it all the way to the shelter.
The door was clear. It had been opened. But there was nothing there. The place felt empty. There were tracks in the snow, both horse and rider—pointed-toed boots. Village boots. Drag of something in the snow, he wasn’t sure what.
<Checking inside,> he thought and, rifle on his arm, slid down from Burn’s back. He walked up to the door. The latch-cord was out. He pulled it, pulled the door open.
The place was a wreck. Pans on the floor, bed stripped, pottery broken. The place smelled of horse, smoke, burned food. Recent. The front of the mantel was smoked.
The kid hadn’t known to open the flue. Or hadn’t thought of it until she had a cabin full of smoke.
There were charred bones on the hearth. Small animal. He was almost certain—it was a small animal.
He shut the door fast, figuring Tara had seen what he’d seen, smell and filth and all.
Flicker shied from him. Burn was taking in scents, nostrils flared. The whole place reeked to their senses: <female horse, female human. Bad, unhealthy horse. Blood.>
He grabbed Burn’s mane, got up, and Burn wanted to go back, turned his head downhill. Burn was agitated, thinking <Aby,> for whatever crazed reason. <Aby. Dead on the rocks.> Burn resisted the pressure of his knees, kept turning with him, a fit of refusal that wasn’t like Burn, a fear and a confusion that afflicted Flicker, too, until Tara got her headed around, and moving.
Then Burn would go. <Flicker> was in Burn’s mind. And <Aby riding away from us. Red hair in the sunlight. Aby on Moon.>
“Damn fool,” Guil muttered. Burn had almost thrown him on that last fit. He’d slid far enough he’d thought he was going off into a thicket. He gave Burn a thump behind the ribs, wanted <going faster, > if Burn had so much energy to waste. They were on the road Tara imaged as <going up to the curves, past the junction, beyond the trees.>
Where he imagined the truck had gone off.
Tara straightened his road a small distance and thinned the trees and showed him the mountainside in her memory: a steep, badly slipped face of the mountain, a road crawling up a long, long curve that was a steep ascent and a hellish downhill, with all the mountain range spread out to see.
Burn calmed until that hillside conformed to vague memory, and it resonated with <truck falling > and that <Aby, Guil and Aby> nonsense. Burn was a smart horse—Burn remembered more than some horses; Burn put things together in spooky ways sometimes, thinking in nighthorse fashion through associations that had to do with smell and mating and group-making that didn’t always find an echo in a human brain. Burn was right now on one of those autumn-hazed treks through the associations in his mind—probably, Guil thought, Burn was disturbed by the ambient smells. A smart horse felt the land-sense in ways that had nothing to do with the look of a place, and this place resonated in the memory he’d used all the way up here.
<Aby,> Burn was thinking, and <unhealth,> and <death,> with <female> somewhere in the mix. Burn was traveling with that ready-to-move feeling in his stride that made a rider aware how fast the fool could change direction.
“What’s he smelling?” Tara asked.
“Horse,” he said. He wasn’t hearing Flicker that clearly—or hadn’t been. Flicker was <uneasy.> Flicker wanted <quiet> and began to try to turn, except for Tara’s pressure on one side and another. Burn was going willingly ahead. Flicker was confused and increasingly distressed as Burn picked up the pace. Trees were thinning out. They crossed a wide clearance, a place where three roads met, the one they were on, the one down the mountain, and the road Aby’d died on.
Burn went toward that place of open sky, wide vistas.
“Guil, that road’s going to be hell up there, bad drifts. That kid’s coming back here. This is where she’s been coming to. Maybe we ought to fall back, just sit and wait. She’s not going up that road much—”
<Aby,> he was getting from Burn, and then a feeling of <female> so intense he couldn’t breathe for a moment, couldn’t think, because it wasn’t just <Burn.> And he kept going.
Up and up the road. Into the daylight.
“Guil!” he heard someone shouting at him.
<Aby,> Burn was thinking, and <death,> and back to <female,> all while traveling with that light-footed gait that made a rider know Burn could dive any direction.