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It was all that they could do: outlast the storm and look for the sun to rise. The night and the howling white were all about them, a thunderous snow that echoed off the mountains and shook the nerves.
And the white remained a veil, and the dark was too ready to seep into the image, as if the sun would never, ever rise.
Chapter ix
SOMETHING WANTED, THAT WAS THE FEELING. SOMETHING CALLED and called, lonely and desperate, and itwasn’t scary at all, just so terribly sad that Brio
In her dream she stood looking toward the dawn, where gold and rose sifted through the evergreens. She stood knowing that she was the only person in the wide world, herself, Brio
In her dream a nighthorse came out of the woods and across that smooth, gold-glistening snow, a black horse with a midnight mane that all but floated on the dawn winds, a tail that drifted like a cloud of blackest smoke. The horse made the only other tracks in the world. Its neck arched as it regarded her with a wary eye, its mane and its night-black coat glistening with the golden light.
It called to her aloud with that soft, strange sound a nighthorse could make when it chose. It called to her in the silence with unbearable longing, with all the power of a nighthorse mind.
She wasn’tjust the blacksmiths’ daughter. She knew that. She instinctively hated the smoke and the soot that lived about her parents’ shop and her parents’ house and about her brothers. She knewthat someday somebody magical would come and lift her out of the ordinary and workaday. She had an artist’s hands, too fine ever to wield a hammer, her father said. She had fair skin, and a face that— her mother said it—would break hearts, and she should never scar it with the sparks from the anvil, or let the soot get into her skin.
Papa called her their own angel, pretty and fragile, but gifted, everyone said so. Mama said her face, if she took care of it, could be her fortune, and theirs, and she’d go down to the valley to marry and live with a rich merchant, in a fine carpeted house with linen closets and a fine brass-grilled furnace, the sort of house Tarmin village only heard about.
But most of all she knew… she knewin her heart she wasn’t like the rest of Tarmin village. She was never meant for the soot and smoke of her family’s trade that was irrevocably to her the preachers’ very hellfire.
Sometimes she’d dreamed that the ships from the stars would come back, that they’d look over all Tarmin village, and take just her, because she was special, and the star-folk would see it.
She talked to the little, harmless creatures that came at forest edge, a small wickedness, by what the preachers said, but she’d learned she could hear them. Shecould hear them, and her two older brothers couldn’t—it was her special gift, and she kept it secret. She tamed them to her hand. She had names for them all and fed them with scraps, and they fought with the cat, dreadful squalling at night, but the cat always won.
And sometimes she went to the rider camp and talked to the riders, who admitted to her how, for reasons no one knew, sometimes horses came for people who weren’t born riders.
So maybe the ships wouldn’t come—she was older and wiser now, all of thirteen. The ships hadn’t come, not just in her thirteen years, but in hundreds of years, and the preachers said they never would, that the wickedness of humanity had surely destroyed the star-folk. But if that was so, there were the horses.
The riders’ horses whispered secrets to her. The wild things ate from her hand. She clung to that gift of hers as something of promise, that if there weren’t to be ships (which she began to decide now was, after all, unlikely) still— somethinghad to account for the feeling of difference she had, somethinghad to come of her special gifts. Somethinghad to offer her an escape from the humdrum of Tarmin village. And escape that meant going down to some strange town in the valley was no good, if she couldn’t have her mother and her father and the neighbors seeher fine things.
So in her dream of dreams the escape should come to her, the very way the wild things came. It was a sign, she decided, the sort that the preachers talked about, and it wasn’t wicked, her talking to wild things, it was never the wicked wild creatures she talked to, it was only the pure little nibblers at grain and the little teases that skipped about at forest edge: they weren’t what the preachers called creatures of lust and blood. They didn’t think such thoughts.
Most of all, the nighthorses ate from her hands, and she could image to them in her mind, and hear them, too: she imaged to them that they should tell all the wild nighthorses they saw, and particularly the stallion of the herds, that there was a very deserving rider to find in Tarmin village.
Because that was her dream. Some wild one would come searching for her, a wild horse, maybe the king horse, more beautiful than any horse had ever been, and that wild horse would know immediately that she had qualities no one in town, no one even among the riders remotely imagined she had. Neither of her brothers, and no Tarmin rider, not her mother or her father, no one in all the world knew what she imagined and what she imaged, otherwise—because she told secrets to the horses in her mind, the way the riders did. She saw their images from farther away than her brothers, or anyone, and she didn’t run away scared the way they did just of the shallow ideas they could pick up: she could talkto the riders’ horses—she could talk even to strangers’ horses that came with the truck convoys. Oh, the riders who didn’t know her were always anxious about her walking about inside their gates, but she immediately made friends with the horses. She brought them sugar-treats and sat and talked for hours to them in the way horses liked humans to talk. They imaged her in their minds as <sun-hair> and < sugar> because they loved her.
And in this dream she had, that wild horse came, not an ordinary horse, like Flicker and the others that served the riders, but the most beautiful, the most special horse came treading softly over the snow, eyeing her sidelong from under its long forelock, and saying its secret name in her mind, which she could just almost hear…
But she waked, for no reason, with that Name still just echoing at the edge of her sight.
It wasn’t just a dream. It wasn’t. She lay awake in her parents’ house in which you could always smell the soot and the stench of hot iron, and even with her eyes open she could feel a strange, wild stirring in her mind. She lay still, afraid that the dream would escape her, and she wanted very much to hold the textures of it, the feeling of it in her heart.
The vividness of it stayed a long, long time. She could shut her eyes and have it back, that place, that moment, that vision.
She hugged the feeling to her, knowing now it was real, undoubtedly outside the walls, one of the wild ones. She heard it calling and calling to her.
The preacher man said if she said her prayers every night God wouldn’t let the beasts talk to her, and she wouldn’t have to worry about anything in the world if God was taking care of her. The preacher man said she could tell God if she was afraid and God would blast the beasts that wanted to talk to her.