“Tara!” Vadim shook her till her head snapped back. Till she could see the dark around them. He hugged her till her joints cracked, kissed her, breathed warmth on her.
“Get help.” She’d been too cold to shiver. In the still warmth of the den, in Vadim’s attempts to warm her, his sending that she couldn’t take in—she found the ability. “Water. Cold water. Need more hands.”
When you were this cold you started with cold water compresses, and you kept increasing the heat in the water little by little. If she and Flicker were alone she’d do it herself, but there was help. Chad and Luisa and Mina were in the barracks, and with a <Tara sitting, Tara waiting in the den> Vadim went running out into the snow, running, scared for her, when nothing she’d ever met could scare Vadim.
Vadim hadn’t been where the danger was. He hadn’t felt it stalking behind him. He only had the echoes. And by that shapeless, dark fear of his, she knew how desperate it had been—still was, in her mind.
“We’re all right,” she said to Flicker, pressing close against Flicker’s shoulder, thinking <den, camp, riders and horses, all around us… >
In not very long at all, her partners came running, Mina and young Luisa, all appalled, saying there was a rogue, they’d had a phone call clear from Shamesey, they’d wanted to come after her, but Vadim and Chad had held out against their going outside the walls—<wanting> (young fools that they were) <coming out into the woods to find her; town gates were all guarded; they were both angry—>
<Safety, > Tara kept saying, half-aware of them, shuddering at the thought of them going out into the woods unprotected. But it was constantly Flicker uppermost in her thoughts, it was Flicker she desperately tried to make aware of the camp, the den—the horses Flicker knew as her den-mates, as close to her as her human partners were to her rider.
Flicker just kept imaging <white,> only <white,> as if, even in safety, she still couldn’t come back from that place.
Chapter VIII
MAN’S A DAMN GHOST,” HAWLEY SAID, AT THEIR WIND-BLOWN campfire that night, high on the road, in a clump of evergreens that gave them a little shelter. There was no sign of passage but the ruts the trucks had made in the road. The prints of horses on the dust were old, hardened mud; the tracks of game were newer. They hadn’t turned up tracks or sight or scent of Guil Stuart or, for that matter, any sight at all of whoever they’d sensed following them.
Maybe we imagined it, Danny thought against his day-long inclination. He was, by now, willing to doubt his perceptions and Cloud’s.
Maybe I misled everybody.
“It’s sure a steep climb if he’s gone straight up the ridge,” Luke said, meaning <Stuart.> “Question is, how bad was he hit? He could have gone to ground somewhere, if he was bleeding heavy.”
The question turned unexpectedly to Danny then, when his mind was half-elsewhere; but Jonas was next to him, looking at him, so that a crawling-feeling went up and down Danny’s skin.
Jonas wanted, Jonas was impatient, that came through, and Danny’s wits went scattered. <Gawky kid sitting on ground,> also came through to him, along with a feeling of irritation.
“Boy,” Jonas said. “You’d tell us if you had a thought of Stuart’s whereabouts. That so?”
“Yeah, but I don’t. Sorry.”
Jonas kept pushing at him. Friendly in the morning. Jonas’ back to him all afternoon. Everybody talking. Except him. <Cloud increasingly unhappy—>
He rolled to his knees, intending to leave the fireside and go over to Cloud’s vicinity, where he was comfortable and welcome.
“Kid,” Luke said, not half so harshly. Luke was the friendlier, youngest one, the one he didn’t want a fight with—Luke maybe knew it. He couldn’t tell what got through to other people. “Sit down. Sit down, all right? Just a question.”
It wasn’t just a question, he thought, with upset still roiling in his stomach. The question he was asking himself was about his own competency, a question so wide and general through his life he didn’t want to consider it except piece at a time, and most of all he didn’t want to consider it with them.
But he didn’t want a fight with Luke, so he sat back down, arm around one knee, and found a dead seedpod to break up into dry pieces.
“Ought to have stayed with mama,” Jonas muttered.
“Yeah, fine,” he said back. “You want an answer, Jonas, sir? I don’t know where he is. I’m not hiding him.”
<Cattle.> He was unhappy, Cloud was unhappy.
“You’re being loud, kid,” Jonas said.
“Yeah, well, get off me. Doing the best I can.” He didn’t look at Jonas or the rest of them. The seedpod was far more interesting. It had four inside chambers, with hard, round seeds, brown in the firelight. Crunch. Four, six, a handful. He tossed them at the fire, one, two, three, trying to land one where it would burn visibly. Two hit, off, the third landed under the glowing archway of branches at the edge. Achievement.
“Kid.” That was Hawley. He didn’t dislike Hawley. He really, really wasn’t sure about Jonas.
“Kid’s adjusting,” Jonas said. “And he doesn’t know.”
Truth. Jonas always talked nicer about him than Jonas talked to him. He didn’t know why Jonas couldn’t do a little adjusting himself.
Didn’t know why Jonas had wanted him if nobody was going to believe him, except that remark Jonas had made about him being bait, and he didn’t take that altogether as fluffery. They might have intentions like that, using him that way, to draw Stuart in; and no reason they shouldn’t tell him so.
They probably thought he was lying about people following him, trying to make himself important, trying to cover his trailing in late the way he had, as if there was some big, awful danger out there and he’d escaped it on his own.
Serve them right if somebody did come up on them. And he’d warn them, of course, but they wouldn’t listen. They were seniors, and knew everything.
“Kid,” Jonas said. “Calm down for two minutes, have you got it? We can send the horses off a ways so you and I can have a discussion, if you want.”
“No, sir,” he muttered. Nobody was sending Cloud anywhere he didn’t want Cloud to go. But it wasn’t smart to quarrel with men who carried knives for more than fire-making. It didn’t even take a junior’s intelligence to figure that out.
“Guns are quicker,” Jonas remarked dryly.
He was sending, again. Dammit.
“The kid’s just upset,” Luke said. “Lay off, Jonas. You’re pushing him too hard.”
“Damn right I’m pushing him. We leave him at Tarmin village first chance we get. The rogue’d have him for breakfast. Go right for him, it would. I don’t plan to get him killed.”
Madder and madder. Insult and concern. He couldn’t read Jonas’ signals and he couldn’t say whether Jonas was right or wrong. He wanted to go to Cloud the way he’d started to and not have to listen to them. He’d no need of lectures. But he’d been told to sit down, by the only one of them who was civil to him, and if Luke got mad at him the trip was going to be hell.