Burn went over and got <nasty, mouth-prickly brown stalk,> and brought it to him and dropped it on the ground in front of him. Burn pawed it with a three-toed foot, head lowered, <looking for fire in the stalk, > but Burn didn’t find it.
<Burn bringing another stalk, > Guil imaged. God knew what Burn thought in Burn’s different world, maybe that he was looking for the right stalk, so Burn went and dragged back another of the man-tall stalks. And another.
And another, under Guil’s insistence. His head had cleared enough that he could see. He broke them up in chunks, split them with his thumbnail to expose the pith, not trusting himself with the bootknife. Burn nosed into the pile of stalks, still doubtful.
Guil got out the pocket lighter, flicked the wheel, far faster than the burning-glass, more reliable with the broken cloud overhead— and Burn jerked his head back as a little flame jumped from it to the redleaf pith.
He fed his tiny fire more redleaf pith, and then redleaf stalk, and a small pile of only moderately wet evergreen needles swept from off the ground around him.
<Burn breaking down quakesilver deadwood,> Guil sent, imaging the quakesilver grove near them. <Burn dragging deadwood back to Guil and fire.>
The headache was still killing him. The pants hadn’t dried, he was icy chill from the hips down, he hadn’t felt anything at all in his feet in at least an hour and the wind was kicking up. But it helped to have something to do. And his fingers at least could be warm in the tiny flame, so long as the wind didn’t scatter his work, or another spate of rain come and drown it.
Burn knocked the deadfall down. Burn was good at destruction. Burn forgot what he was supposed to do—enjoying destroying the tree, Guil supposed, and re-imaged <bringing the wood,> and <bacon.> As the preachers’ tempter to evil and corruption, Guil thought in the extraneity of delirium, Burn was remarkably easily distracted. <Wood,> he imaged, “dammit…”
It arrived. At least half of it did, the stick Burn carried dragging other brush with it in a haphazard string. He wanted Burn to trample it where he dropped it. Burn wouldn’t. Burn went back to get more wood, having figured the rest of it belonged with this part.
So Guil cracked up the sticks he could reach and stuck them in the feeble fire. And cracked others, the bark, the ragged pieces, whatever there was.
Burn brought him a live quakesilver branch with the last sodden autumn leaves still on, but, hell, by now the fire could handle the sap-rich wood. He threw in whatever Burn brought and the fire grew. The heat grew. He felt it against his soaked knees.
And faithful to his promise, with <Burn bringing wood,> Guil hauled out <pan> and <bacon,> and put it on to cook. He needed more wood. Burn wanted more than one bit of bacon. It seemed a workable bargain.
A second supper—was baked potatoes and sausage, which took no thought, no effort, and nobody in Tarmin camp was much interested in food. Tara ate. She didn’t taste it. A quiet, worried day, it had been. She supposed that she ought to report to the village that Chad and Vadim were still out, but the village was wrapped up in its own grim business over the blacksmith’s murder, and there was still the chance—still the chance—that the boys would turn up before she had to explain to the marshal.
She took potato and grain mash with sausage bits out to the horses and listened into the gathering dark, standing between Flicker and Luisa’s horse, patting Mina’s Skip on an insistent nose as she set down the pan.
Then she did something she’d never willfully done, and drew Flicker’s attention first—that was effortless. But she wanted to hear <outside,> and asked for it.
Flicker heard the usual little spooks around the edges. Tara kept listening, putting her attention out to the ambient, and nudged into Green; and still it was spooks, a lorry-lie, maybe.
Skip’s attention came in without much noise at all, and of a sudden they were reaching far, far out, listening for <Quickfoot and Jumper, Vadim and Chad.>
What came instead was a disturbance of other minds, and she tried to shut it out, but it was noisy, much too noisy: <Boy with gun. Crowd in the village.>
She didn’t know what that was. She didn’t like it. She didn’t want panic in the village, some villager picking up on her query outside the walls.
She drew away from the horses, wished <silence, still branches, > and walked completely out and away from the den.
Not a ripple in the ambient from Vadim and Chad. But, she said to herself, the likelihood was that the boys would come riding back with some gruesome story they truly didn’t want to take to the grieving family. That in itself could keep the boys out a little longer—if they found something they couldn’t get quiet in their own minds: a rider didn’t put as first priority the friends waiting and worrying about him. A rider had loyalty to his horse first; his actual working partner second; his partner’s horse third; his responsibilities to his hire somewhere after that; and his lovers wherever they crossed the ranks of partners or friends—
Which meant neither Vadim nor Chad would desert the other out there, where two horses might stand off what one horse couldn’t, and where two minds might find a calm one mind couldn’t recover.
But it damned sure left three women in Tarmin camp pacing the floor and sweating out the hours, while reasons for them to hold back bad news at least from the Goss family had evaporated on a gunshot: the Goss family was shattered. Chad and Vadim couldn’t know that unless they heard her sending. And there was no sign they had.
The sky was headed for its second full dark, and cloud was moving in, girding Rogers Peak now with a gray, impenetrable ceiling—heralding earlier dark, the chance of snow, and a chance of storm, if that cloud just kept coming, as well it could—this eastern face of the mountain had better weather, but it gave you surprises you didn’t take lightly.
The shadows had already gone blue and vague. Tara took the by now well-worn trail toward the porch, not quickly. But the feeling of harm was in the air.
She walked as far as the wooden steps, had her foot on the first when the summons bell rang a gentle request for attention on the village side, and the rider gate opened.
Townsmen came in, the mayor and the marshal.
Mina and Luisa had heard the bell. They came out onto the porch, hugging sweatered arms against the cold as the delegation trudged closer across the cracking, potholed ice.
“Need to talk to Vadim,” the marshal said.
Tara took a deep breath. “Not here.”
“Where is he?”
“Out looking for the Goss kid.”
“He didn’t say—”
“There wasn’t a need to say.”
“Not a need!”
“He’s doing his job, that’s all. He and Chad. They’re looking around out there. What can I do for you?”
“Talk,” the mayor said. “Inside.”
Light was fading fast. A wind was getting up. Tara nodded, uncertain in her capacity as senior rider—it was unprecedented that village authorities should ever have the urge to cross through that gate unless it was something involving the whole village-rider agreement, but she nodded, and Luisa and Mina went inside as she preceded the mayor and the marshal up the steps and into the lamplight.