Rider at the Gate

<Camp walls,> Tara imaged, and swore that if they just made it to Tarmin camp there’d be warm blankets and whatever Flicker wanted. Ham. Eggs. A rub-down as long as Flicker wanted.

Flicker wasn’t taking bribes. Flicker wasn’t listening at all. Flicker just kept going, in a fear that wasn’t at all panic, a fear that just didn’t let go, didn’t allow rest.

Until between one stride and the next… the fear dropped away from them, different than its prior comings and goings—it just all of a sudden didn’t exist, might never have existed, leaving a nighthorse ru

Flicker slowed to a shuddery walk, snorting and blowing and slavering onto a chest spattered with ice—walked, with wobbly steps, and Tara slid down, her fears of phantoms in the dark replaced by a real and present fear of Flicker collapsing under her rider’s weight.

<Warmth,> she imaged. <Camp and light and warm air, Flicker walking, Flicker just walking, safe now, safe… >

Flicker wasn’t sure. Flicker was confused where she was, but in that confusion she kept listening to her rider, and Tara kept walking, holding a fistful of Flicker’s mane to be sure they stayed together. She cast through the haze of snow and blued night, picking out what the markers told her was the trail, despite the trackless blanketing of snow.

She smelled the smoke of cookfires, then. She imaged <camp walls,> and <rest,> and shoved at Flicker’s shoulder, terrified of the ordinary dark for the first time in her adult life. She imaged it without intending to, and that got Flicker moving, a last shaky effort uphill and onto the flat road outside the gates.

<Gates opening,> she imaged, before she reached the bell. But it was a snowy, sleepy night, and she had to grasp the rope with a numb, gloved hand, rouse the sleeping horses inside, and ring fit to wake the whole town, telling them there was a rider in from a dark that seemed deeper and more threatening at their backs now that they had the gate in front of them than it had a moment ago out in the midst of the storm.

“Come on,” she muttered to the insensate wood, and hammered on it with her fist. <Tara and Flicker, freezing, snow on both of us. Vadim. Chad. Sleepy, lazy riders. Gate opening. Gate opening. Danger in the woods.>

The spyhole opened. They were being careful tonight. An eye regarded her before someone lifted the bar.

“Need help,” she said. It was Vadim who had answered the gate-bell, and Vadim who shut the gate behind her as she led Flicker in, heading for the nighthorse den where warm bodies kept the air a constant temperature—where other horses, other minds, were solid, friendly, ordinary.

Images flashed back and forth as she met that warmth, Flicker’s <white-white-white>, the other horses’ queasy, unsettling fright at the dark outside.

She couldn’t stop it—she couldn’t get Flicker to stop—couldn’t come out—couldn’t escape—couldn’t stop the light—

“God,” Vadim said quietly, coming into that flood of panic.

She was lost in it, trying to shut it down. She felt smothered when Vadim put his arms around her, hugged her against him— <fright and love and warmth.> Vadim was sending <danger> and <horse> but it was remote from her, lost as she was in cold, lost as she was in her desperation to get air, to breathe, to move. She writhed free without meaning rejection. She felt Vadim’s consternation at that fleeting contact, felt it in the ambient, the horses all waked to fear and malady… they didn’t know, at first, what had come among them: <Cold,> Flicker sent. And <white.> no ordinary calm-sending. Flicker was lost, too. White was a veil of snow and light behind which they’d both taken refuge, and now in its shifting substance, Flicker couldn’t find the exit.

“Tara!” Vadim shook her till her head snapped back. Till she couldsee the dark around them. He hugged her till her joints cracked, kissed her, breathed warmth on her.

“Get help.” She’d been too cold to shiver. In the still warmth of the den, in Vadim’s attempts to warm her, his sending that she couldn’t take in—she found the ability. “Water. Cold water. Need more hands.”

When you were this cold you started with cold water compresses, and you kept increasing the heat in the water little by little. If she and Flicker were alone she’d do it herself, but there was help. Chad and Luisa and Mina were in the barracks, and with a <Tara sitting, Tara waiting in the den> Vadim went ru

Vadim hadn’t been where the danger was. He hadn’t felt it stalking behind him. He only had the echoes. And by that shapeless, dark fear of his, she knew how desperate it had been—still was, in her mind.

“We’re all right,” she said to Flicker, pressing close against Flicker’s shoulder, thinking <den, camp, riders and horses, all around us… >

In not very long at all, her partners came ru

<Safety, > Tara kept saying, half-aware of them, shuddering at the thought of them going out into the woods unprotected. But it was constantly Flicker uppermost in her thoughts, it was Flicker she desperately tried to make aware of the camp, the den—the horses Flicker knew as her den-mates, as close to her as her human partners were to her rider.

Flicker just kept imaging <white,> only <white,> as if, even in safety, she still couldn’t come back from that place.

Chapter viii

MAN’S A DAMN GHOST,” HAWLEY SAID, AT THEIR WIND-BLOWN campfire that night, high on the road, in a clump of evergreens that gave them a little shelter. There was no sign of passage but the ruts the trucks had made in the road. The prints of horses on the dust were old, hardened mud; the tracks of game were newer. They hadn’t turned up tracks or sight or scent of Guil Stuart or, for that matter, any sight at all of whoever they’d sensed following them.

Maybe we imagined it, Da

Maybe I misled everybody.

“It’s sure a steep climb if he’s gone straight up the ridge,” Luke said, meaning <Stuart.> “Question is, how bad was he hit? He could have gone to ground somewhere, if he was bleeding heavy.”

The question turned unexpectedly to Da

Jonas wanted, Jonas was impatient, that came through, and Da

“Boy,” Jonas said. “You’d tell us if you had a thought of Stuart’s whereabouts. That so?”

“Yeah, but I don’t. Sorry.”

Jonas kept pushing at him. Friendly in the morning. Jonas’ back to him all afternoon. Everybody talking. Except him. <Cloud increasingly unhappy—>

He rolled to his knees, intending to leave the fireside and go over to Cloud’s vicinity, where he was comfortable and welcome.

“Kid,” Luke said, not half so harshly. Luke was the friendlier, youngest one, the one he didn’t want a fight with—Luke maybe knew it. He couldn’t tell what got through to other people. “Sit down. Sit down, all right? Just a question.”