She told herself that Flicker was still on edge from a brush with disaster; or Flicker was reacting to villager hysteria—Flicker shivered and snorted and worked her jaws, <wanting bite, wanting blood >—she was still trying to haul Flicker down from her fighting mood when Vadim and Chad came riding around the corner with the kits they always kept ready against a sudden call—outbound.
Bound outside into danger she’d ridden through last night, for a damned spoiled brat who’d killed herself in one willful push of a latch.
<Goblin cat,> she imaged, and felt Flicker jump under her hands. She had a leaden weight of apprehension in her gut. There was no use in what they were doing, this late in the day. Vadim was having a crisis of guilt, Chad was going because Vadim was dead set on it; and she was mad, dammit. They were running a risk and they knew it, but they weren’t listening to her.
Mina and Luisa arrived from around the same corner, their horses trailing behind them—but being nearer the outside wall than they were, Tara found it her job to walk along in the men’s tracks, unlatch the gate for them and fight it wide against the snow piled up inside.
“Back before dark,” Vadim said, from Quickfoot’s back, “unless we do find her trail. We might have to make a camp. I don’t think she got far.”
“She couldn’t,” she said, and clapped a hand to Vadim’s leg, trying to still the ambient. “Don’t be a fool, God, don’t either of you be fools. You know what’s out there, the damn kid’s gone to it—”
“I’ll turn him around before dark,” Chad said, meaning Vadim. “Don’t you open that gate, Tara, don’t open that gate, unless you know it’s us or it’s Barry and Llew.”
“Get back before dark!” Mina said from behind her. Vadim was Mina’s lover and hers, from time to time, as Chad was Luisa’s—or hers, from time to time, but not so often as Vadim. She caught the imaging from Mina and from Luisa, both her own most-times partners—and for a moment it was an intimacy rider with rider and horse with horse that took the breath and scared hell out of her. It was love, it was friendship, <vivid and warm and smelling of straw and sex> and the boys were about to ride out the gate.
“You’re senior,” Vadim said, and Chad’s Jumper passed by her with a whip of a well-groomed tail.
“Latch down tight,” Chad said.
Then Vadim and Chad passed the gate with a pelting of trodden snow from their horses’ heels, and rode away on a trail of young girl’s footprints.
They wouldn’t find the hope the blacksmith wanted to find, she was well sure of that.
Worse, the first hint of sunset color was already in the sky: light didn’t last long in autumn, on this eastern face of the mountains— they had a treacherously short while they could ride, to find what an uncompromising Wild might have left of Brionne Goss, and to get back again safely.
She dragged the gate shut. Mina helped. Luisa dropped the latch and shoved it down hard, to be sure.
<Rider-stone in green grass,> Guil remembered. <Trees.> But Burn remembered not. The accompanying rider-shelter as Burn had it in his thoughts had not even brush around it, with precious little grass at all, a desolate place with <bad-tasting grass.>
And when, as they rounded a bend of the road around a long hill, Guil saw the rider-stone with his eyes, not his mind—he rubbed them to be sure.
Indeed the image, wrapped in the murk of rain and twilight, did stop when he pressed his fingers against his eyes.
Burn was right. There was no pasturage worth considering. The stone stood in a widening mud-puddle filling a slight depression— a sight that afflicted Guil with a shiver of some kind, be it chill of weather or doubt of the future he’d bargained for, listening to Cassivey, committing himself to the man’s employ.
Anveney was death. He didn’t know how he could have forgotten it, talking to the rich man, taking his hire. It didn’t matter if Cassivey was affable and convenient and talked an extravagantly good deal—Anveney was still death.
And when they reached the stone and he chanced to glance at the signs scratched on it, old marks and new—the first thing his eye fell on was a plain circle with a crescent.
Aby and Moon.
<Us on the road,> he urged Burn, unreasoning, spooked. He wanted nowhere near this place. He wanted no part of this trail, this direction, this chain of events.
But Burn thought, <warm log shelter,> and carried him willy-nilly along an eroded rising trail until the dark, rain-dripping shadow of the log shelter was in front of them.
<Aby staying in this place,> Guil thought, and ducked reflexively as Burn passed under the roof edge, into almost-night, into an east-facing recess where the wind had to come clear around three walls to enter, and where the rain had to ride those gusts or seep weakly through cracks in the roof in order to fall on them.
Something small skittered past Burn’s feet, out into the rain. Burn stamped at it, imaging <nighthorse> and <fire> until whatever it was vacated the place glad to be alive.
All the same, the jolt of that move hit Guil’s nerves and sent him light-headed. He had to lean on Burn’s neck until he could muster the strength to slide off under the weight of the rifle and pistol and the rest that he carried.
He committed himself finally, leaned and swung. His feet hit the ground at the same moment he shed the rifle strap into his hand. He stood very precariously for a moment, sight and hearing fading.
Then he saw and heard the rain falling in a night-lit curtain outside—felt random drops dripping through the absolute black of the chinked logs onto their heads, and breathed the mist gusted in from the open side, but the air inside the shelter felt breathlessly warm and strange to his cold-numbed skin, all the same, after the rush of wind-borne water outside.
He dragged the pack down from Burn’s shoulders and wobbled over to the wall, wet below the knees and around the cuffs of the sleeves. He couldn’t just sit down and wait to dry out, when rain could easily turn to sleet or snow and temperatures could drop below freezing with no more warning than that mountain wind out there already gave him.
He felt along the wall and leaned the rifle in the corner, then dropped the pack in what he hoped was a reasonably dry spot. Then he unbuckled and shed the weight of the sidearm to pegs he felt, some rider’s thoughtful addition to the accommodation.
Lastly, light-headed, he sat down on the damp earthen floor on the spot to strip off the wet boots and the trousers, wrapped himself below the waist in a dry blanket from the canvas pack, still wearing sweater, coat, slicker and all, because the plastic was holding in his body heat and he needed everything he had that was remotely dry to keep that heat around him.
He knew one thing for dead certain: he wasn’t moving on in the morning. If a man got soaked at the edge of winter, a man already possibly concussed, to judge by the hellish headache he carried behind his eyes, then that man if he wasn’t a total fool didn’t travel out of shelter till fire or sun had dried his clothes.
And Burn’s better night vision, in the black inside of the shelter, told him that a fire wasn’t an option. He sent Burn out into the rain, <looking for woodpile against shelter wall,> but Burn didn’t find one, came in wet and shook himself.
Nobody’d restocked the shelter. Wood wasn’t available in the land any longer.
No wood. Aby’d been the culprit, maybe Hawley and Jonas. Couldn’t blame them, damn their lazy hides. But if it had been woodless when they used it they’d sure not ridden after any, either. He’d have restocked the damn shelter unless there was a life-and-death hurry about getting out, and he didn’t think there had been. If it were anybody but Aby he’d have said careless.