Then the feeling just lifted. Flicker shook herself as she walked, snorted, kept going at a slightly slower pace.
<Goblin cat,> Tara suggested. She loved the High Wild and the woods. She enjoyed riding alone… but now and again came one of those small, cold moments when the woods seemed foreign and lonely, when the sounds all seemed right, but muffled and faint, and when before and after seemed to change places.
Flicker didn’t agree with her image. She couldn’t tell what Flicker thought.
<Ghosty in the bushes, > she thought then, shakily, telling herself it was only some particularly clever small creature—a spook, a fast-moving one, maybe not a kind she was used to.
But she couldn’t convince herself of that. Maybe she’d gotten scared at something and scared Flicker with her own human imagination.
That could happen up here, especially in the woods, especially with the snow flying and whiting out the details of things. Humans had to have edges. Humans had to know the connections of things, and human minds made them up if they didn’t get them. There were stories about riders who’d spooked themselves and their horses into serious trouble, losing track of the land and where the drop-offs were; but she wasn’t a scatterbrain, she wasn’t inexperienced, and neither was Flicker.
She just didn’t like what she’d felt back there, she still didn’t get a clear image out of Flicker—and she’d never in her life felt Flicker do what she’d done.
It was a cold, cold morning, overcast about the mountain ridge above them, as the road wound in slow, gentle ascent toward the rising wall of Rogers Peak.
It was a mountain Danny had grown up seeing from his third-story window, a peak drifting disconnected from the earth in misty distance above Shamesey walls—a place a town kid had regarded as remote as the stars the preachers talked about. He’d never imagined himself in those days as a rider—certainly never thought he’d be traveling to that mountain, hunting rogue horses, or rescuing villagers. But the closer they’d traveled, the more solid the mountain became, not a daydream now but an environment of stone and gravel and grass, under a high dark wall of evergreen.
The more solid the mountain became, the more the business they’d come to do seemed both too close and too unreal to him. He heard nothing wrong. He felt nothing besides themselves and the occasional spook, the impression of being watched that was just the Wild, that was all. It went on all the time, nothing threatening— even reassuring, a sign that large predators weren’t in the area.
It was definitely colder, a knife-edged wind where the road wound into the open, the sort that made one’s ears ache, and Danny, like the others, rode with a lap of his scarf over his head and his hat on tight.
He looked back now and again as the road offered a downward view of the land, wondering anxiously if he might see any trace of the riders Cloud had heard lower down—which didn’t at all seem to worry Cloud now. Cloud was feeling energetic, snorting, flaring his nostrils and watching every flutter of leaves and wind-wave across the grass—grass which was giving way to an advance guard of scattered evergreen, not just occasional stands of trees, but the edge of real forest, at which Danny had looked all his life, seeing it only as a darkness on the mountains. Cloud moved here and there on the track, generally annoying the three other horses, while Jonas and the others pointedly ignored his presence. The other horses were trying to be peaceful, Danny thought: they seemed to realize that Cloud was excited about the mountains and were forgiving of his behavior.
He wanted no more trouble. He’d had a go at the land alone, it was damned spooky out there even without the remotest hint of whatever might be on their backtrail, and he hoped Cloud would be content finally, now that they were headed upland.
He’d at least calmed himself enough he could be sure he wasn’t sending out a constant broadcast of his concerns, and he was sure that made Cloud calmer.
But he couldn’t but look over his shoulder from time to time.
“They’re not going to be that careless,” Jonas said finally.
“Yes, sir,” he said meekly. Yes, sir, after being left on his own in the wild seemed the best answer to anything and everything Jonas or any of the others said to him. He was not going to get into trouble again. He was not going to afford these men an excuse to look down on him.
Cloud had to try to bite Shadow just then. Had to, though Cloud deliberately pulled the nip short of Shadow’s flank—deliberate provocation, status-battle, and nighthorse tempers flared for a jolting moment.
“Boy,” Jonas said.
“Yes, sir,” he said, embarrassed, taking Cloud’s rebellion for his fault, which only made Cloud madder.
“You have a problem, boy. Do you think you can fix it, or do you want to ride home now?”
<Juniors laughing,> was his immediate and mortified thought. “He’s just never worked with a group. I’ll pull back some.”
“You going to spend your life pulling back some, or what, boy?”
“My name’s Dan, sir.” It had to be Cloud’s influence. His face was burning. His heart was beating hard. He might pull back from making a direct and personal challenge of Jonas’ authority—that was farthest from his mind; but he wasn’t going to tuck down and take it from all of them for the rest of the trip, either, and that was one boy too many for Karl Fisher’s son. “You asked me to come along to help find Stuart, and I take that for a promise. But I don’t pick up anything right now. So I’ll ride back behind till I do, thanks.”
“Got you,” Hawley said dryly. “Kid’s got you, Jonas. It was your idea to bring him. I told you.”
Jonas wasn’t happy. Or didn’t look it. Danny started to signal behind Cloud’s ribs with his heels. Cloud fell back on his own, sullenly imaging <fight.>
But < fight > wasn’t what came from Jonas or from Shadow. Some impression slid past him, something nebulous and fast and without edges, a piece of something he didn’t understand, and Jonas dropped back, too, in clear intention to speak with him, as Cloud and Shadow went unwillingly side by side.
“Kid,” Jonas said. It was an improvement on ‘boy.’ And Danny caught an impression, now, of a meeting among the three men after he’d left them last night—that and talk on the trail, yesterday evening. “I didn’t figure the complications, a kid getting into this. Maybe you’d better go back.”
“I don’t want to, sir.” The juniors would know—he broadcast the fear of that humiliation without in the least wanting to. He tried to image himself on convoy, instead, riding guard with senior riders. He’d done that: it was the truth. “I can pull my own weight, I’ve no question.”
“I have. You can’t stay on your horse. That’s bad news up there.”
“Now, ease off, Jonas.” Luke Westman had dropped alongside, on Jonas’ other side. “I can recall the day.”
Jonas sent him a surly look. But everybody got the image, Jonas taking a tumble right over Shadow’s neck. And Hawley had to laugh.
Danny ducked his head and thought urgently, desperately, devout as a prayer in church, that Jonas looked important and professional and—his traitor mind added—rakish, experienced, absolutely unflappable at disasters, the way he’d like to look.
That brought a silence from Jonas, further guffaws from Hawley and Luke, and he’d rather have died, right then, fallen right off Cloud’s back and died right on the road at their feet.