Burn made another try at his feet. Burn was half-frozen and had a fearsome empty spot inside. <Miserable horse. Hungry horse. Looking for crumbs on floor. Hoping for pack to be open.>
“Hell,” Guil moaned, and crawled over, stretched out an arm as far as he could reach and dragged the pack up close—fed Burn and himself jerky and a couple of sticky grain sweets, the kind he kept for moments like this, except his mouth and Burn’s had been too dry too long out there, and Burn’s throat was too raw, his tongue too dry to enjoy it.
But maybe, maybe there was a little bit of feeling in his feet. He tried moving his toes. Couldn’t quite get all of them to work, but some did that hadn’t—and finally, finally, he got movement out of them all.
Guil sighed then, with vast relief—took a pan out, thinking of other comforts, took his knife to thoroughly frozen bacon, having to lean on the blade to get through it.
There was water, finally. There was oil for biscuits—Burn got the bacon squares; he nipped a couple for himself.
By then his feet and hands had begun to hurt. Really hurt.
But the toes wiggled quite nicely, and he sat there content to watch that painful miracle while the biscuits nearly burned.
Meanwhile Burn, with water to drink and with the ambient a lot less <Guil scared> and <Guil hurting,> had his head blissfully in the grain bin, fending for himself in the absence of more bacon.
<Beautiful horse,> Guil thought, and offered Burn the first biscuits out of the pan.
They disappeared without hesitation. He made more, got one for himself out of the next pan. Burn got six. He found he hadn’t as much appetite as he had thought—but before he lay down he stood up, hobbled painfully over to the door and pulled the latch-cord in to protect their sleep.
Then he stirred up more biscuits for the morning, put them on to bake over the coals; and after what felt like a second, Burn had to wake him up off the warm stones to get him to take them out. Burn knew <scorch> when he smelled it.
He ate one more biscuit then, put the rest by, and in shaky self-indulgence, made hot tea, assured now his teeth wouldn’t crack if he drank it.
Among his Anveney purchases was a little metal flask of spirits, for steeping medicines, as he intended, not the luxury of drink.
But the shelter came, courtesy of the maintenance crews, for which he blessed their kindness—equipped with a bottle on the mantel, and he poured about a third spirits into his second cup of tea; sipped it ever so slowly, letting it seep into dry mouth and dry throat and burn all the way down.
It was the first time he’d looked at the rider board, up above the mantel. His heart nearly stopped.
Some not-so-bad artist had filled a large area of the board with a horse head, all jagged teeth, staring eyes, wild mane, ears flat to the skull.
Rogue horse. A warning to anybody who came here.
And he knew the sketch artist beyond a doubt when he saw, above it, the mark that was Jonas Westman.
Jonas had been in this place, on his way to Tarmin, Jonas and his partners—sitting here where he sat. They’d laid the fire he’d used.
Made that ghastly image.
But that wasn’t the total source of disturbance. He was feeling something—faint, dim sense of presence.
—Something in the ambient, no image brushing the surface of his thoughts, just a whisper of life outside the shelter that sent his hand reaching for the rifle.
It had Burn’s attention, too—head up, ears up, nostrils flared, as he stared toward the door.
<Jonas> was the first thought that came to him. <Jonas, Luke and Hawley coming through the snow and the dark.>
But the sending didn’t seem to come from several horses. It wasn’t strong, it wasn’t loud and it shifted and eluded his conception of it, at times completely disappearing.
Shadow could feel that way—alone.
But Shadow wouldn’t be alone. And he wasn’t sure what it was. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t some passing cat—but no cat in its right mind would be out in a blizzard.
And it didn’t travel. It strengthened, there and not-there, consistently strengthened, while he and Burn stayed still.
Horse. Horse, he was almost certain. Strengthening presence meant it was coming straight toward the shelter.
Single horse.
He grabbed up the rifle, cursed himself as he checked its action—long overdue precaution. He’d used the piece for a walking-stick. God knew what he’d done to it the time he’d gone down and bruised his knee. But it worked. He had a bullet ready.
He waited, conscious of that sketched image staring out across the room over his head. He felt the tension in Burn, felt—now and again—the sense of something reaching out blindly into the dark, feeling about it, looking.
A lonely something. A desperate someone. Burn didn’t make the young-horse mistake of reaching back. They waited, quiet for a long, long while, anxious—but he began to want the thing, began to think about <Aby> and <rocks > and wanted that thing to come in, come to the gun-slit at the front of the cabin; get it over with, get it finished, the first night he was on the ridge.
He got up from the floor. He stood listening into the ambient, quiet, careful, not wanting Burn to commit too far, too dangerously out into that dark.
But it knew now that they were there. It skittered across his mind, canny, and scared, and desperate. He wanted to use his ears—hear it coming toward the door—but the wind screamed that single note across the roof, covering all sound else. He could feel it coming closer, and closer, and filling all the ambient, there and not there. He went to the wall, where the gun-port was—hesitated to unlatch it until he was reasonably sure what he was dealing with.
<Cold,> he felt it. <Hungry. Very hungry.> Then: <female horse.>
Burn made a strange soft sound. <Female,> entered the ambient. <Female wanting in. Male here. Male horse.>
Another thump. Hard. Two. Burn immediately grew excited, throwing his head and imaging back <male, male, male> as, over the shriek of the wind came an unmistakable nighthorse sound outside the door, a female’s sound. Burn did a little sideways dance as Guil left the wall and grabbed a fistful of mane with his free hand.
“Burn, dammit, shut up.” He got a breath. <Burn quiet.> God, <Burn quiet, quiet, quiet.>
“Let me in!” It was hardly a voice. It was maybe a rag of a human voice past the wail of the wind. The ambient was howling <females “Open the door. Open the door, do you hear me?”
Burn jerked the mane out of his hand, <wanting female.>
“Open the door!” the voice outside cried, thin and breaking. “Dammit!”
A blow thumped against the door. He saw <horse and rider, snow blowing. Snow on them.> He saw <shut door> and <fist hammering it.> Most of all he felt <desperate fear. Wanting in. Wanting in, something behind them—>
“There’s a rogue loose!” he yelled back. “How do I know it’s not you?”
“I’m not, you damn fool! God! Open the door! I left my camp, I smelled the smoke—I’m freezing out here, we’re both freezing. Open the damn door!”
<Numb feet, numb hands. Cold horse.> They didn’t feel insane. Bush wisdom held that sometimes a rogue seemed entirely normal. Then wasn’t.
Burn was going crazy behind him, on totally different grounds, Burn was <wanting door open, door open, wanting out—>
But that was the mistake every victim made in the Wild. The voice outside, someone in desperate, mind-shaking need—the reason to open the door.