But he got up slowly after a moment, left the fireside and joined the men gathering wood, choosing at the same time to move as far away from the horses as he could, into the teeth of a freezing wind. He started gathering up deadfall, to prove his honest intentions.
But he knew now, all but bubbling over with the discovery, that he could keep quiet enough to have private thoughts, he could do what the senior riders did—and he resolved then and there that he was going to leave these men in a snowbank if he got a chance.
He didn’t know woodcraft the way the long riders did, that was his most serious handicap—like, right now, he would dearly love to know whether, say, common wood fungus was at least moderately poisonous. He could get plenty of it off the deadfalls, and he’d, oh, so gladly put it in their tea, and fake drinking his.
But if it turned out to taste too strong or if it wasn’t debilitating fast enough, they’d shoot him; and they’d shoot Cloud, because Cloud would go for their throats in an eyeblink if things blew up.
So that wasn’t a good idea. Whatever he did, he had to make good on fast, and it couldn’t give them a target. Like maybe if the snow got worse.
Maybe if a blizzard came. The middle of the night. He could slip away.
There had to be riders up here, maybe riders who wouldn’t take to what Harper or Jonas or anybody intended. He wasn’t alone up here. There were whole villages full of people up here—and they had to be close now that they’d come up on the phone lines, where Stuart had to come—
God, shut that thought down. Fast.
But that the Hallanslakers were willing to camp out in the cold like this, when there were supposed to be shelters with free food and firewood, as he understood it, argued to him that they were scared of Jonas. Harper or somebody had been thinking about Jonas earlier—even seniors were sometimes noisy. Harper had been thinking about Jonas and about Stuart—and it hadn’t been pleasant thoughts.
If Harper thought Jonas and his friends were holed up in a shelter for the night, or, probably worse from Harper’s point of view, if Jonas had gotten up here first, he’d have gotten to shelter. That could be the reason Harper had them out here shivering in the cold: they were scared to shoot it out with Jonas at a shelter where Jonas had cover, and maybe get shot at themselves. That was too much like a fair fight.
And they were going to go on skulking in the brush and the cold until they did find a place Harper didn’t mind shooting.
He wasn’t acutely scared anymore: he’d reached a stomach-upsetting kind of terror he could live with—but trouble was, now that he’d figured out how to be quiet—he didn’t know how to do anything else but be quiet without giving everything he thought away; and he didn’t know at what moment something was going to scare Cloud and upset the balance.
At which point Harper might decide he wasn’t any use finding Stuart, and that he was a liability among them if they ran into Jonas.
He stayed out at the perimeter as long as he dared, so long his fingers were growing numb through the gloves. He gathered up a fair armful of wood and followed Watt back to the fire. He dumped it down and squatted down on the edge of the wind-blown heat, chafing warmth back into his fingers, avoiding Harper’s eyes. Harper had never left the fire.
In the same moment he felt Cloud’s attention skitter over him— Cloud just brushing by his thoughts—and he thought of the fire and of <Cloud resting> and <them making supper. Biscuits.> He liked the biscuits. They weren’t as good as mama’s. But they were going to taste good on a cold night. Cloud was going to like the biscuits. He ought to tell them use less soda. That was the taste they could use less of. He’d asked his mama, on one of his visits home, and she’d been making biscuits at the stove and he’d stood right there and paid real careful attention to the measures and everything she did, because he really missed those biscuits.
He stuck a little wood in the fire, not too much. They wanted less flame than coals in this wind. Nothing to carry into the trees. Hope they had a decent meal tonight. Watt scorched everything.
Always on the edge of catching the pan afire. He was better. <Mama saying—>
Close, close, close, he mustn’t look up. Little nervousness among the horses—they could solve it. He didn’t need to look up.
<Mama in the kitchen. Smell of bread and paint. Home smells.>
<Mama saying everybody needed to know how to cook—“You might marry somebody who can’t,” mama’d said.
<Them eating their own cooking. Burned.> Mama said they’d have to. So they got better at it. Even Sam.
<Baking and paint smells, all mixed up together.> Mama would buy some scuffed up table or chair from a shop or another household and do a little sanding and fixing and painting.
Then she’d trade it to a store or direct to an individual for more than she paid for it.
Or sometimes she just did refurbishings for the same owner— any of which paid money that came in handy before he started bringing in money and fixed the place up.
Mama would be sitting there with the bread baking, all the while she’d be painting flowers on a chair—she liked that part—or sanding and swearing—she always swore when she sanded—<her hair trailing around her face, and flour on her chin.>
There was always some piece of furniture in the apartment that you weren’t supposed to touch or sit on, and it always made his nose run when she’d been painting.
But the bread-smell was over all of it, <smell of home. Smell of comfortable things.>
Harper never stopped watching him. Just watching.
They’d warned the village. They’d advised everybody lock the doors and the shutters and stay inside no matter what. People had guns. They had their storm-shutters locked.
The rogue-feeling went away and it came back, maybe two, maybe three hours into the night, as if it was feeling them over, and it wasn’t a thing anybody could catch with human senses. You didn’t know when you’d started being afraid. You just knew by the prickling terror behind you that it was there again. A shutter banging in the wind. Rattle of sleet against the roof. A sense of presence…
Something was near the walls.
“It’s Vadim,” Mina murmured as the three of them, sitting by their fireside in the shelter, listened. “God, it’s Vadim.”
“No!” Tara said sharply, because it was coming by way of their own horses now, she could hear them, could hear Flicker take up that <white, white, white> refrain. Mina shoved her chair back and Luisa grabbed her arm, arguing with her not to go outside, to stay with them.
“That thing could be anywhere on the mountain. It’s no good going out there. God, it’s echoing in every creature in the woods, can’t you hear it? That’s what it’s doing—that’s why it’s so damn loud—”
The whole mountain seemed to echo it, loneliness, mourning over something lost. It echoed failures, or things undone, a terrible melancholy. It gnawed, it burrowed, it ran, it flew, it crawled—it slavered with winter-hunter and ached in rut and leapt along the ground, aching with loneliness and fear—
Then it dissolved, flew apart in screaming rage.
<White-white-white.> Flicker was still there. Skip and Green were, Tara could feel them through Flicker’s noisy presence and, Luisa’s advice to the contrary, she went and snatched up her coat.
“Tara,” Luisa protested.
“I’m fine, dammit, Flicker’s not. I’m going out there.”
“We’ll all go,” Mina said.
So that was the way it was—they went out to the porch and down into the nightbound yard. Snow was gusting on a fierce and biting wind.