Neither did Cloud. Cloud sent an uncomfortable hostility, daring the Westmans or their horses to stop anything Cloud wanted.
“You embarrassed me,” Danny muttered to the darkness under him, blacker than that gathering around them. He couldn’t make Cloud understand ideas like that, he didn’t think so, at least. Senior riders said that horses did come to understand, eventually, about human thinking—but a young horse was full of horse notions, and it wasn’t until they were ten or fifteen or so that they began to take up on fine points like embarrassment.
Or the politics of humans with each other.
Well, so maybe young humans didn’t pick up on things like human politics too well either, the way he didn’t understand why older and wiser riders would have left him. Why boys his own age would have done it, he could figure just fine: plain stupidity. But he didn’t think that was the case with the Westmans, who were borderers like Stuart, who understood what the dangers were.
So borderers played rough jokes on each other, and expected juniors to take more than they dared hand back, the way every other senior did… but they were friends of Stuart, and Stuart hadn’t laughed at him.
He tried to think it was some sign of trust that they did leave him, and figured he’d catch up, and figured he’d take care of himself. Maybe it was a sign of respect, or an expectation of him—or something.
Cloud vehemently didn’t like the Westmans. Cloud certainly hadn’t indicated anything about that when Cloud had nudged him into going. Maybe it had always been Cloud’s notion that they could kite up to the High Wild and desert the Westmans to their business with Stuart, but that wasn’t the way Danny Fisher understood an agreement, thank you. Humans made promises and humans had to do what they said they’d do, and that was that. Maybe he hadn’t made Cloud understand that point, or maybe Cloud didn’t want to understand.
Or maybe, with somebody following them, it was time for Cloud to use his nose and his horse-sense and get them out of danger.
Whoever was following them could be somebody who didn’t like the Westmans. It could also be somebody who didn’t like Stuart, like that bunch in the meeting… and they’d cut your throat soon as look at you: Danny had that feeling, and Cloud didn’t disagree.
Whatever went on among riders, there was usually—and always before in his experience—a convoy and a lot of riders, or at least a boss of some kind, to buffer the feud, and if nothing else, to give one rider or a group of riders excuse to ride apart from one another and keep out of each others’ thoughts. But here there wasn’t any convoy boss to provide a young rider fearful of being put upon by his seniors the least small contact with town law.
He was off with people where there just wasn’t law at all… where seniors ran off and left you at a pace faster than any convoy was ever going to travel. He’d thought of helping somebody, their friend, no less, and this was the pay he got. The preachers said, Do unto others. And it wasn’t working that way.
It was darker and darker. There were singers in the grass he couldn’t identify, there were images that could come from a goblin cat pretending to be something small and harmless for all he knew…
Cloud snorted suddenly, and
Danny took a fistful of mane and a deathgrip on his pistol butt. Cloud was imaging the smell, that kind of fluttery darkness a horse made on the landscape ahead of them, which was growing more frequently wooded than he liked, and generally uphill for a long while now.
But Cloud didn’t act disturbed, just disgusted, and jolted forward into a trot.
Then they went jolting right off the road and through brush that made Danny have to duck his head and hold onto his hat with the hand that was supposed to be holding the pistol in its holster.
< Smell of smoke, > Cloud sent then, even Danny could smell it; and he could see the nighthorse as a blackness going quickly through the stand of trees in front of them. Danny had a terrified thought that it might be the rogue come downland…
But smoke led to fire and the gleam of fire through the brush to the stray nighthorse who had clearly come out to look them over as they approached; and the nighthorse—he was sure now it was Froth—led to three riders seated at a campfire and cooking supper.
“Well,” Jonas said, hardly looking up. “Made it, did you?”
“My horse and I worked it out.” He wasn’t sure he wanted now to say anything about people following them. He wasn’t sure he wholly trusted present company to be friends of his, any more than the people behind them, but the thought that he might say something was enough, with the horses all about.
“What riders?” Jonas asked, with no levity whatsoever.
“I don’t know,” Danny said. “I didn’t stay to ask. We were downwind as we caught scent of them…”
“But you don’t know whether they got wind of you.”
“Possible they did, sir. I don’t know.” They thought he was stupid. He wouldn’t exaggerate what he did know: it was too serious a matter. “We kept the wind with us and got out of there, crosscountry. Cloud thinks there were more than two, less than ten, that’s all we could tell.”
Hawley was stirring the coals with a stick. He flung it into the fire. There was silence, and a confused group image of the meeting, of the principal rider who kept arguing to shoot Stuart.
“Harper,” Jonas said. “Damn him.”
It was undeniably the right image. Danny recognized the face. He didn’t know what more than the business at the meeting lay behind Jonas’ knowledge of this Harper, but he got a confused image of a fight, blades flashing, fringes flying—imprecise target in a knife fight, that was what the fringes were good for, he’d heard that. Borderers.
And he wondered if they were going to put out the fire at the news and run for it, maybe higher into the hills, and off the trail. It was what he might do if he were Jonas and he thought Harper and several of his friends were behind him with hostile intent.
“Sit down,” Jonas muttered. “We’re not budging.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, and sat down and shed his baggage on the ground beside him. It was dirtier and more scuffed than it had been in the morning. Maybe it looked a little less like a novice’s gear. By some miracle he still had the gun in its holster and it made sitting uncomfortable. He took it off, and decided, in the smell of bacon and sausage starting to cook, and the sight of tea on to boil, that he was very glad they weren’t going to budge.
But he thought he should figure out what the rules were.
“Do I put in, or cook my own, or what, sir?”
“What’re you carrying’s the question.”
“Bacon and biscuit-makings mostly.”
“You can put in tomorrow. We made enough. You got jam?”
“Yessir,” he said, thinking then that he’d been too judgmental, and they’d figured all along that he’d make it. “Got jerky, too. Fair deal of it.”
“Save it. You mix up the breakfast dough, leave it set the night. There’s clean water. You wash up.”
“Yes, sir.” That was Luke Westman who gave him that order, and it was fair. “So what about this Harper, sir?”
“There’s time,” Hawley said. “There’s plenty of time to settle with that one.”
; How? he wanted to ask. Did they mean have a fight, or wait in ambush and shoot them, or what?
“Scared?” Jonas asked.
He hadn’t planned to shoot anybody. Jonas had talked about it in meeting as something they’d do if there wasn’t a choice… but it hadn’t seemed what they had any intention of doing.
And now there was this Harper following them, who might, Danny thought with a lump in his throat, shoot them as easy as thinking about it. Harper had been all too eager to go shooting at people and horses right up near Shamesey walls, which was unthinkable and dangerous as hell to the camp and the whole town. It didn’t encourage him to think that Harper was any more reasonable out of reach of those walls.
No camp-boss out here and nobody to tell town law what had happened between a group of stray borderers with feud on their minds.
There was a real chance he might not get home next spring. Things could happen out here, very final things, he began to take that into truly serious account—things nobody would ever know about except the ones that pulled the triggers.
He just didn’t know right now why these men had ever needed a junior in their midst, or what good he really was to anybody. He wished he hadn’t come. He wished he’d asked somebody like Lyle Wesson what his mature judgment was of his going off like this, somebody who might have said Don’t do it, kid, you don’t count for anything out there.
He got a dark, chilly feeling then. There was one of the horses he couldn’t pin down—Froth was easy to identify, agitated most of the time and full of temper; and Ice just didn’t communicate much.
And that left the horse named Shadow, just the faintest thought, just the skitteriest images, a hostility you couldn’t get hold of.
Shadow didn’t like him and didn’t like Cloud, that much he picked up, and Shadow was always there, behind the other two, lurking behind Froth’s jittery everywhere images and Ice’s unfriendly quiet… Shadow didn’t swear like Cloud did, Shadow just sent hostility slipping out around the edges of what was going on, so maybe it was easier to feel unwanted, and easier to feel danger in the night.
That last was surely Cloud, and Shadow didn’t like it.
“Keep it down,” Jonas Westman said, while their supper cooked. “We’ve no need for that, boy. Calm that horse of yours.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, asking himself what about the situation deserved calm, and how, the same as at home, everything got down to being his fault.
They didn’t have any preachers here to say so. But it seemed a reliable commodity, guilt. You could get it here cheap, handed out like come-ons to a sale.
“Not my damn fault,” Danny muttered. “Cloud and I can go by ourselves if you don’t need us.”
“Did I say that?” Jonas asked. And Hawley Antrim, Ice’s rider:
“Nobody said that. Just calm down. Horsefights feed off quarrels. And we don’t need that kind of trouble.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. Everybody was sir, being senior. And they weren’t telling him in any sense what they were doing waiting here, or whether they’d found any sign of Guil Stuart. He knew he hadn’t come across any tracks but the ones he’d been following. But he’d been up in the hills a good deal of the time.
“Gone overland,” Luke Westman said. “Same’s we could, but we know where he’s going.”
“We don’t need to hurry.” Jonas said, put another stick on the fire, and adjusted the frying pan. “Stuart won’t appreciate interference. He’s an independent type. We let him handle the business up-country, if he can.”
It seemed dangerous to him, and not too helpful to Stuart. He wanted not to have an opinion, but they kept coming up. He kept his eyes on the fire and tried to keep his mouth shut.
“Don’t trust us?” Hawley asked.
Nosy question. It scared him just thinking about it. There were a lot of ways a junior could get into trouble with men like this, as rough as this. He didn’t want trouble. They had Stuart’s gear in those extra packs they shared out, everything he owned. Hawley carried Stuart’s rifle, having none of his own. At least he thought they meant to deliver it all to Stuart.
“Easy on the kid,” Jonas said. “He’s noisy enough. Quiet mind, kid. Quiet. Think about supper. You’ll be fine.”
You could get fiber from knifegrass. You stripped off both the edges with your fingernails and you braided the strands you got. You could braid as many strands together as you had the skill for, and Guil just round-braided it as he rode, with a little wrap of nighthorse hair when a piece quit and the end wouldn’t quite stay tucked on the splice.
The result was a tough cord. You wouldn’t break it by pulling on it—it’d cut right through the skin of your hands.
It was also fine-gauge enough that it made a fair fishing line; a notched large thorn, carefully scored about for the cord to tie on, made a decent small hook, a dry twig tied into the line a convenient float, while he was sitting on the bank of a fair-sized stream. He dropped a rock into a shallow to trap a handful of minnows, baited his hook, cast near a low branch that touched the water, and waited.
“Pest! You had yours. This is my fish.”
< Delicious fish frying in fragrant bacon grease.>
“Do you see bacon? Do you see a frying pan?”
Burn sulked.
Effectively enough Burn got the next fish. Guil filleted it while he was waiting for another to bite. Burn couldn’t manage the bones, but he so loved the taste, almost as much as Burn loved sugar-cured bacon.
Fish wasn’t bad, raw. He drew the line at other things. He hadn’t the makings for fire, hadn’t the energy for fire-making, even given that he did, now, have the cord for a bow-drill; raw fish was good enough.
And he found a number of spotty-neck shellfish along a rocky edge, which were also fine eaten raw. Burn got a couple of them, which pleased Burn mightily—a knife left them in ever so much nicer condition than cracking them open under nighthorse feet, and Burn liked for his to be washed in water before eating—in beer, if it was available.
It wasn’t. Burn sucked down his dessert and resumed his proper watchful duty, protecting the two of them from goblin cats, feral nighthorse pairs in autumn lust, and other potential hazards, while idly nipping the tops off tasslegrass, eating only the seed-bearing part, the extravagance of autumn.
Meanwhile Guil limped about, cutting soft-needled branches along the wooded streambank. He heaped up a fragrant pile of them in a sheltered spot, and when he had a large enough pile, Burn helpfully sat down in the middle, rolling out a nesting spot.
“Get up, dammit! My bed, Burn.”
“Oh, hell,” Guil muttered, and went on cutting branches, to make their bed wider.
Danny lay down to sleep tucked in blankets, near the coals. There never yet had been a whisper from the riders he was sure were following him, and now he asked himself whether the Westmans believed him that such riders had ever been there.
But of course they had to. Riders couldn’t lie to each other.
At least, juniors couldn’t lie very well. To anyone.
He hadn’t picked up on everything that was going on, that was sure.
He wasn’t wholly surprised when Cloud came over and settled down on the ground next to him, sharing the fire warmth, sharing his own warmth, sharing his muddled, half-asleep nighthorse thoughts with him, that ran mostly along the general content of the ambient.
A ghosty was in the brush watching them, not a specific thing, just one of three very different creatures that townsmen gave the same name to, and he didn’t know much better. Cloud knew what it was, Cloud wasn’t spooked by it, and no cattle-guard needed be, except sometimes the little creatures would spook the cattle just to have them away from their territory.
The ghosty wanted them to
go away, too, probably. But it was scared of Cloud.
Danny just wished other things were. And he was glad that Cloud spent the night close to him. They were clearly on the uphill now, headed into the foothills of the Firgeberg. They were committed to the mountains. To all else it meant.
He really, really wished to keep his mind quiet and let the senior riders rest. Hawley was on watch, he was aware of that. So was Ice, and he didn’t think much would get past that horse.
He didn’t think the senior riders believed that Harper, if that was who it was, intended to do them harm. Harm to Stuart was another matter. But as long as they stayed their pace, the common thought he picked up was
It wouldn’t help for him and Cloud to have another argument. He wanted Cloud to know that. He wanted Cloud to agree to stay with him.
He wasn’t sure what Cloud’s answer was. He shut his eyes, but that made pictures behind them, of the hillside and the dark, fluttery smell-shapes following them. He stared into the dying coals and that was better.
At least the shapes the burning edges made were all random and without motive.
* * *
Chapter vii
« ^ »
SLEET BEGAN TO COME DOWN IN EARNEST, WHITE DUST RATTLING against the evergreens—not an unusual occurrence if it were midsummer on Tarmin Height: the Firgeberg spawned occasional sleet year-round.
But when a flurry came on an autumn morning after quakesilver leaf-fall, a rider, however well prepared, looked anxiously to the sky above the woods and the mountain for a hint of what might be rolling in.
Flicker tossed her shaggy head, shook her mane and still thought differently, sending unease out into the air. They’d intended hunting if they had the chance: they’d escorted the road crew out to their camp yesterday, they’d turned them over to Barry and Llew, who were stuck out there shooting dice for penny stakes, their horses equally bored, making sure nothing ate the road crew, who were all Tarmin folk, and who’d generally, but not universally among the riders, be missed.
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