But he knew precisely the riders he was tracking; and he was scared, to tell the truth, not alone now of the riders they’d feared behind them, but of a night alone out where he’d never been alone before if they didn’t catch up before they ran out of daylight. He caught little strange vignettes of himself and Cloud seen from low to the earth or high on the hill or out of the brush, so he knew that small hunter eyes were watching them, nothing big, nothing that would bother a horse—yet. He had his pistol by him and he decided, considering having fallen on the hill and having had it slide free, that a tie-down would be a very good idea, but he wasn’t going to tie it in the holster now, thank you, he wanted to be able to draw it very quickly, and not shoot himself or Cloud, if an emergency happened. He was afraid his hands would shake if he had to aim. He was afraid of shooting in panic and hitting the men he was tracking. A townbred junior rider had no business alone out here, he was increasingly convinced—he’d never been alone in the dark in the Wild before, and he didn’t know what was watching them from the brush.
The Westmans might have slowed down just a little, he said to himself. They might have helped, damn them, when he’d fallen, instead of laughing and riding on.
They’d asked him to come with them out here. Jonas had said he’d improve their chances of finding what they were looking for— so why had they let Cloud dump him? Damned funny joke, maybe. But he didn’t think so.
Neither did Cloud. Cloud sent an uncomfortable hostility, daring the Westmans or their horses to stop anything Cloud wanted.
“You embarrassed me,” Danny muttered to the darkness under him, blacker than that gathering around them. He couldn’t make Cloud understand ideas like that, he didn’t think so, at least. Senior riders said that horses did come to understand, eventually, about human thinking—but a young horse was full of horse notions, and it wasn’t until they were ten or fifteen or so that they began to take up on fine points like embarrassment.
Or the politics of humans with each other.
Well, so maybe young humans didn’t pick up on things like human politics too well either, the way he didn’t understand why older and wiser riders would have left him. Why boys his own age would have done it, he could figure just fine: plain stupidity. But he didn’t think that was the case with the Westmans, who were borderers like Stuart, who understood what the dangers were.
So borderers played rough jokes on each other, and expected juniors to take more than they dared hand back, the way every other senior did… but they were friends of Stuart, and Stuart hadn’t laughed at him.
He tried to think it was some sign of trust that they did leave him, and figured he’d catch up, and figured he’d take care of himself. Maybe it was a sign of respect, or an expectation of him—or something.
<Cattle,> Cloud thought. <Jonas Westman hitting Shadow, at the gate.> Cloud hadn’t missed that. Cloud didn’t like it in the least. Cloud didn’t like Jonas Westman or his horse. <Shadow-horse pitching Westman in road. Cattle tail on Shadow.>
Cloud vehemently didn’t like the Westmans. Cloud certainly hadn’t indicated anything about that when Cloud had nudged him into going. Maybe it had always been Cloud’s notion that they could kite up to the High Wild and desert the Westmans to their business with Stuart, but that wasn’t the way Danny Fisher understood an agreement, thank you. Humans made promises and humans had to do what they said they’d do, and that was that. Maybe he hadn’t made Cloud understand that point, or maybe Cloud didn’t want to understand.
Or maybe, with somebody following them, it was time for Cloud to use his nose and his horse-sense and get them out of danger.
Whoever was following them could be somebody who didn’t like the Westmans. It could also be somebody who didn’t like Stuart, like that bunch in the meeting… and they’d cut your throat soon as look at you: Danny had that feeling, and Cloud didn’t disagree.
Whatever went on among riders, there was usually—and always before in his experience—a convoy and a lot of riders, or at least a boss of some kind, to buffer the feud, and if nothing else, to give one rider or a group of riders excuse to ride apart from one another and keep out of each others’ thoughts. But here there wasn’t any convoy boss to provide a young rider fearful of being put upon by his seniors the least small contact with town law.
He was off with people where there just wasn’t law at all… where seniors ran off and left you at a pace faster than any convoy was ever going to travel. He’d thought of helping somebody, their friend, no less, and this was the pay he got. The preachers said, Do unto others. And it wasn’t working that way.
It was darker and darker. There were singers in the grass he couldn’t identify, there were images that could come from a goblin cat pretending to be something small and harmless for all he knew…
Cloud snorted suddenly, and <horse> flashed into mind.
Danny took a fistful of mane and a deathgrip on his pistol butt. Cloud was imaging the smell, that kind of fluttery darkness a horse made on the landscape ahead of them, which was growing more frequently wooded than he liked, and generally uphill for a long while now. <Nighthorse,>the image was, in Cloud’s better nightsight: a shape against the brush.
But Cloud didn’t act disturbed, just disgusted, and jolted forward into a trot.
<Cloud stopping! > Danny sent, or thought he was sending: he was holding on with his grip on Cloud’s mane and his knees tight on Cloud’s sides, so nervously tight that Cloud shook his mane and snorted the scent out of his nose.
<Cattle,> was Cloud’s comment. <Rear end of cattle.>
Then they went jolting right off the road and through brush that made Danny have to duck his head and hold onto his hat with the hand that was supposed to be holding the pistol in its holster.
< Smell of smoke, > Cloud sent then, even Danny could smell it; and he could see the nighthorse as a blackness going quickly through the stand of trees in front of them. Danny had a terrified thought that it might be the rogue come downland…
But smoke led to fire and the gleam of fire through the brush to the stray nighthorse who had clearly come out to look them over as they approached; and the nighthorse—he was sure now it was Froth—led to three riders seated at a campfire and cooking supper.
“Well,” Jonas said, hardly looking up. “Made it, did you?”
<Cattle,> was his own quick thought, no more pleasant than Cloud’s. But you didn’t do that with a senior, you said, meekly getting down,
“My horse and I worked it out.” He wasn’t sure he wanted now to say anything about people following them. He wasn’t sure he wholly trusted present company to be friends of his, any more than the people behind them, but the thought that he might say something was enough, with the horses all about.
“What riders?” Jonas asked, with no levity whatsoever.
“I don’t know,” Danny said. “I didn’t stay to ask. We were downwind as we caught scent of them…”
“But you don’t know whether they got wind of you.”
“Possible they did, sir. I don’t know.” They thought he was stupid. He wouldn’t exaggerate what he did know: it was too serious a matter. “We kept the wind with us and got out of there, crosscountry. Cloud thinks there were more than two, less than ten, that’s all we could tell.”
Hawley was stirring the coals with a stick. He flung it into the fire. There was silence, and a confused group image of the meeting, of the principal rider who kept arguing to shoot Stuart.
“Harper,” Jonas said. “Damn him.”
It was undeniably the right image. Danny recognized the face. He didn’t know what more than the business at the meeting lay behind Jonas’ knowledge of this Harper, but he got a confused image of a fight, blades flashing, fringes flying—imprecise target in a knife fight, that was what the fringes were good for, he’d heard that. Borderers.