“Tea?” Mina asked.
“We’ll make this brief,” the mayor said. Bay was his name, and by his manner he didn’t intend to sit, take off his coat, or ask any hospitality. “We’ve got a meeting going on right now. Judicial meeting. Andy Goss’ son shot him. The older boy. Carlo. He doesn’t deny it.”
“There were circumstances,” Tara began, but the mayor cut her off.
“The whole village knows the circumstances. The boy hated his father.”
“Loved his father,” Tara said, though she wasn’t quite sure she understood love as villagers had it. It felt the same. “It was his sister he hated.”
The mayor and the marshal didn’t look impressed, just nervous.
“This is a bad time to be down to three riders,” the mayor said. “This is a real bad time.”
“You can’t find anything out sitting inside the walls.” She found herself unwillingly defending Vadim’s decision, and had a sudden dark thought: Damn. Damn! They’re hunting it. That’s what they’re doing.
“No word of the road crew either?”
“No word,” Tara said, “no word from Vadim and Chad, either. I’ve listened.”
The mayor looked as if he’d swallowed something unpalatable. The village couldn’t tell the riders how to run their affairs. They weren’t obliged to like it. Or to accept how riders knew things.
“Is there a possibility,” the marshal, Delaterre, asked, “that the girl was murdered? That the boy had something to do with that?”
“Absolutely not.” Tara was appalled. “The boy’s not a killer. I can swear to that. Brionne, on the other hand—”
“Possible that the boy enticed her outside, knowing the danger out there right now, in the hope she wouldn’t—”
“Marshal, the girl’s a spoiled brat—she sneaked out the gates. She knew the danger out there same as anybody over five. The boy and Goss himself were in our camp looking for her.”
“Goss hit the boys,” Mina said. “Goss beat them.”
She was twice shocked. Mina never spoke her mind in front of villagers.
“There’s no evidence,” the marshal said. “The wife is testifying against the boy—”
“The wife helped,” Mina said shortly. “They beat hell out of the boys. Brionne could do no wrong.”
The horses weren’t anywhere near. The ambient through the camp was all but dead still, quiet, hushed. Even villagers might feel it.
“Will you give a deposition to that effect?” the mayor asked.
“I swear.” Mina held her hand up. “I swear right here. You’re witnesses. You can swear for me in court. A rider doesn’t need to go there.”
There was silence in the room, just the crackle of the fire. The rattle of a shutter in a rising wind.
“They’d no business,” the mayor said, “the senior riders going off the way they did. The village is their first job.”
Tara frowned and plunged ahead. “I’ll tell you something, mayor Bay. There’s something out there scared hell out of my horse. But the Goss girl went out on her own, looking for a horse she heard. That’s what happened.”
“We’re not sure,” the marshal said. “You said it. The boys hated the sister.”
They were wanting to think ill of the boys. They had their case made. She didn’t need the ambient to see that. And it turned a corner she hadn’t expected. She stuck her hands in her pockets and waited for clarification.
“You saw the girl leave?” the marshal asked. “Or not?”
“Didn’t see, didn’t hear,” Tara said. “We had a sick horse. Mine. It was too noisy to hear anything in the camp. Not in the village. Not if that kid was listening to the Wild.”
The mayor and the marshal looked uncomfortable—villagers didn’t want details about the horses, or anything else in the Wild. They wanted their walls to prevent that.
“Meaning you wouldn’t know. You’re guessing.”
“We wouldn’t know,” Tara said. “That’s the point. But footprints went out the gate.”
“Alone?”
“Goss and his kids all accepted it was the girl.” She remembered queasily that they didn’t immediately see in their minds what she saw. She tried to build the picture for men that didn’t see. “The snow hadn’t been tracked. Just the ice-melt from the den roof. The tracks. The gate being pulled inward made a scraped mark. About as wide as a girl needed. Tracks going out, about her size feet, no tracks going back.”
“Where are these tracks?”
“Gone now. Horses tracked over them, all over out there.”
“That’s real convenient,” the mayor said.
“Mayor Bay, there’s one way out that gate. Horses had to take it to go out to look for her. And that’s what the boys are doing— looking for her.”
“Single tracks?”
“Pointed-toed boots.” She had a good mental image of the boys’ feet. Their tracks. Her brain saved things like that. “The boys’ boots are square-toed. The blacksmith’s—his were round. These tracks were smaller and lighter. No rider wears boots like that.”
“Andy Goss identified them?”
Absolutely no doubt in her mind. “The father had just found out,” Tara said reluctantly, “how much the boys hated the sister. They were standing near the horses. They heard more than they wanted to hear about each other. I was there. I heard it. I couldn’t help hearing.”
“You’d better come across,” the marshal said. “Give a deposition, too.”
“I’ve sworn to things before,” Tara said. She didn’t like village justice. And it didn’t take a rider’s word. “I saw what I saw. And heard what I heard. I agree with her. Write it. I’ll sign your paper.”
“Better you should swear to it over village-side,” the mayor said. “Tonight. Where the village can hear. We want this case disposed. Feelings are running high over there.”
A damned hurry, Tara thought, and looked at Luisa and Mina, and drew shrugs there. But the Raths, the mother’s family, were damned well-to-do. Deacons of the church. Pillars of the village council.
“All of you,” the mayor said.
“Got to get our coats,” Luisa said.
“All right,” the marshal said and, with the mayor, headed for the door and out, no hesitation.
“What did you mean,” Tara asked Mina, an urgent whisper, “the wife helped, the wife beat the boy? For God’s sake, you don’t know that for a fact! —Do you?”
Mina shrugged. “Goss is dead. What good’s it going to do to shoot the boy, too? He’s not a bad kid. Goss beat the boys—and what was she doing for sixteen years?”
It was logic. She had to admit that. Save the salvageable. Villagers couldn’t tell truth from untruth in a rider’s mind. They could save the boys. And the Raths weren’t going to like it.
She grabbed her scarf and hat, and went out with Luisa and Mina, the three of them resolved on a lie, and no horse near to tell the mayor or the marshal.
No horse near to tell them what was going on outside, either. They crossed the icy yard behind the villagers and entered together through the village-side gate… it was farther than they liked to be from the horses, Tara felt it and she felt the same from Luisa and Mina.
But they walked, all the same, and heard a commotion out in the winter cold, saw lanterns lit, and a steamy-breathed crowd gathered under the lanterns.
They proved more conspicuous than they liked, as they walked into that crowd in the mayor’s wake, and followed (Tara supposed they were to follow, and nobody stopped them) all the way to the porch of the marshal’s office and the village lock-up, which was mostly for midwinter drunks, if they got to breaking up the village’s single bar.