Stuart’s horse. Defensive. Outraged.
Dart flung out a feeling of ill and warning, protecting the porch from that outrage, and trotted across the street, positioning himself between his rider and the source of that dark anger.
Opinion all along the street solidified around that pair as they passed through the gates and the strangers’ message reached its target.
No question now: rogue was the word on the wind. That was how humans called it. What nighthorses imaged was something roiling and dark, and that was what Wesson perceived in Dart’s image.
Rogue horse at least: that impression came through the horses, and maybe—far worse news—rogue rider, somewhere out in the bush.
He didn’t know where, now, that image was coming from. It had no direction, but it was spreading like wildfire, and even the image was deadly dangerous. It was more than imagination nighthorses shared with human interlopers. Insanity came quite, quite naturally in this season of mating and rivalry. So did death.
There began now to be another presence in the uneasy flux of images: a young red-haired woman, a borderer, on a nighthorse that imaged itself as, no qualifier, just the bright and largest Moon.
“Aby Dale,” Ndele whispered, and Dart’s presence carried a gut-deep certainty of the woman’s death, and a landscape so real, so particular in detail, that Wesson would swear he’d been there. “She’s dead,” Ndele said. “A fall. On the rocks. She was with the convoy. She died.”
More riders gathered, soft movement on the boards of the porch. Images proliferated, rocks running with blood.
On that instant young Danny Fisher came skiting in, shied off from the man at the gate, and darted, distracted, along the palisade wall, looking for his horse, Wesson could guess, among the nighthorses that maintained an uneasy vigil at the den near the gate. Wesson caught and held his breath until the fool kid was clear of the situation.
Town kid. Shamesey kid. If the boy had fallen afoul of Stuart, it would have been his business. And Wesson was, personally, very glad it wasn’t.
Chapter II
DANNY FISHER CAUGHT THE RUMORS IN FULL FORCE AS HE CAME through the gate, in a flood of images both true and half-true.
And, stopping along the gate wall in a shiver of shock, he discovered the general focus of the trouble was the man who had just walked past him.
In that time-stretched moment he realized he knew Stuart— knew him for a fair man, a borderer, true, but never the bullying sort: far from it, Stuart had sat on a rainy spring evening on Gate Tavern’s porch, sharing three drinks with a kid who, at that time, could only pay for one, and telling a towner brat who’d dared— dared come to a borderer to ask, how he could ever hope get the long-distance convoy jobs he dreamed of.
Trips the like of which Stuart was clearly born to—born on, Danny had caught that in the way you knew some things even when the nighthorses weren’t near, things that just echoed to you—a muddle-headed junior had trouble distinguishing the sources of what he’d gathered out of that moment. Maybe he’d heard them from Stuart himself; maybe he’d recalled small details from casual remarks Stuart had made earlier at the bar—he didn’t know, now.
But Stuart hadn’t grudged information to him. He’d come to Stuart half expecting ridicule—or worse, an indecent proposition, borderers having no good repute among lowland riders. He’d been mortally scared, and desperate, walking up to that table, offering to buy Stuart a drink in return for his question, and Stuart must have picked up on that fear. Stuart had laughed, given him an amused and immediate Calm down, he was spoken for.
And because Stuart’s Burn and his own Cloud had both been nearby, he’d caught the image of the rider who’d laid personal claim to Guil Stuart… beautiful, beautiful rider, beautiful seat, maybe glossed by Stuart’s memory, he didn’t know that either, but he’d been instantly set off his balance and mortified with embarrassment, because, of course, he’d realized Stuart had read his suspicions of him through and through.
But now, watching the man walk out the gate alone to face some kind of bad news—news that Danny suddenly, illogically, felt centered on that woman so important to Stuart—he shivered in the unmistakable darkness and skittishness in the horses’ minds, and wished he could do something. He felt outraged when someone muttered, ‘borderer’ in that tone that implied Stuart and trouble deserved each other.
It wasn’t fair. He almost blurted out something to that effect, junior that he was, but talking out of turn could start what he by no means could finish: it was a group of Shamesey men, six of them, years senior to him, and you didn’t contradict the seniors.
Then he first heard, aloud, from the same group, the word rogue horse, and almost lost his supper, because it at once echoed off everything that had brought him running out of town. Rogue was that going-apart. He’d heard a rider tell about it, a man who didn’t need to say he’d talked to somebody who’d personally seen it, because the images had carried a detail and a feeling that haunted a junior’s sleep for nights after.
But rogue couldn’t have anything to do with Stuart, or Burn, or Stuart’s beautiful border woman. It couldn’t. That awful word didn’t happen down in Shamesey lowlands. It was campfire stories, it was ghost tales around the hostel fires in deep winter: other riders had objected just to the telling of the story with the horses at hand. They’d said it was irresponsible to pass that image at night, when things were spookier, a word that belonged up in the highlands, in the extremes of dangers riders and horses faced up there and you always hoped they exaggerated—some creature, a horse or a bear usually, got brain-injured and started doing things a sane one just wouldn’t do, sending at a range a sane one couldn’t, coming right into encampments to kill, playing canny games with trackers while it hunted its hunters. It didn’t for God’s sake come down to Shamesey gates and civilized territory to trouble a town of Shamesey’s size.
It didn’t touch someone he knew in real life, or disturb his family at their own dinner table.
The tail-end of the convoy had just filed by the open camp gate, on its way into the city gates, headlights shining in the twilight, and behind that last truck, he could see Stuart cross the road to meet with the riders waiting there, all mounted, all waiting.
He had the most terrible feeling then, like chill, like forewarning… he suddenly realized he was picking up expectations out of the ambient. Every horse around them was disturbed by what they picked up from human minds, like a buzz of gossip, everyone anticipating/dreading/wanting calamity to the man they were watching. The feeling around the gate grew stiflingly close, charged and irrational.
Rogue, rogue, rogue, kept circling through his mind and maybe others’, that dark, nasty feeling that clicked into place with a clear impression of a twilight mountainside, a memory so specific he could have recognized that place if he’d ever been there; different than he’d felt with the man who’d told a story and given impressions into the ambient secondhand, right now he felt something… so powerful, so horrible… so present with them…
<Body on the rocks, limbs broken, blood everywhere. >
“Dead,” he kept hearing, words, as humans talked. Dead, dead, dead… while Stuart stood on the other side of the road and out of earshot, arms folded, head down, mostly, so one couldn’t read his face as he talked with the mounted riders.
Then a sudden crisis hit the ambient. Danny held his breath as Stuart abruptly strode away from the meeting and turned upslope on the grassy hill, heading away from the camp.