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She wanted to ask Vadim if they’d heard anything last night. She was bubbling over with excitement about her dream, and she knew, she just knew that he’d be happy for her and tell her if there were any secret things she should do or say to call the wild one in.
If just Vadim and Chad were there, she could ask their advice and know they’d listen and tell her what to do, whether her horse was waiting out beyond the walls and she should go to it, or whether her horse might have gone away by now. She might have to wait until night, and she might have to stay in the rider camp— they might hide her, so her parents couldn’t keep her in.
Because now she belonged—and as she came toward the den, she tried to feel what the riders called the ambient: that meant the images that were going on. But she could only get an impression of snow, and of course snow was the weather—it was snow lying everywhere, snow thick on the roofs, a blanket of almost untracked white across the yard from the shelter to the horse den this morning, and the sun coming up in a golden glow above the palisade wall—so, so like her dream.
By the tracks she expected just Vadim, but, just by something odd in the ambient, perhaps by her newly quickened senses, she suspected something strange even before she slipped into the entry of the horse den—walking carefully, carefully between the shoulder-level entry walls, because they’d cautioned her about startling the horses.
She was astonished and dismayed to see Tara back, Tara, looking exhausted, with her arm over Flicker’s back, and Chad and Luisa sleeping in a stall, on pallets on the wood-chip bedding the horses used.
Odd, she thought. It was very odd, them sleeping in the den. She was completely unprepared for Tara to glare at her out of the deep shadow and equally unprepared for a sudden wash from somewhere across her vision, like a veil of blinding white.
“What in hell are you doing here?” Tara snapped out of that whiteness.
Brio
“Get out, go home. Dammit, get out of here!
Flicker had waked up, and again all Brio
“Flicker’s sick,” Vadim said. The haze of white was thick and cold, very much like snowfall. But where Vadim stood was dark, and solid ground. “This isn’t a good place for kids right now. Do what she says, go on home.”
“I brought biscuits and some bacon.” She decided to be generous. It was important to her to have the riders like her. Even Tara. “Would Flicker like it?”
“No,” Flicker’s rider said sharply. Tara was purely jealous, Brio
But Flicker did truly look not to be well, and the feeling in the air ran up and down Brio
“Go home, Brio
She was hurt, all the same.
Angry. It was all Flicker in their attention. They were supposed to be so sensitive to the horses, and they didn’t even know that she had special news, they didn’t know why she’d come—
But then, maybe Flicker was occupying all their attention. They looked as if they’d not gotten much sleep last night. Even Vadim seemed cross with her. It was a dreadful disappointment.
So she retreated outside into the dawn and scuffed her way across the snow-carpeted yard, wondering what she was to do if she didn’t have their help.
And what if, because Flicker happened to be sick and the riders were being surly and Tara was jealous of her, her horse got discouraged and heard Tara’s nasty temper and didn’t come back? It was Tara who was against her: she knew it was Tara’s fault. Tara was always telling her get out and leave the horses alone, and she wouldn’t even put it past Tara to pretend Flicker was sick just so she could get everybody’s attention on her.
Clearly Tara was having things her way right now. The riders were all out there in the horse den or out on the road fixing washouts, and Tara had the center of attention right now in camp.
But just then, just when she was thinking that, she felt that strange prickly feeling the horses sometimes made on your skin when they were trying to get your attention.
Maybe, she thought, feeling that strangeness ru
Maybe it didn’t go away last night.
Maybe it’s still waiting.
And nobody at all guarded the main rider gate, that, with a simple inside drop-latch, led to the outside and the snow.
<Horses with riders, daylight on the road.>
Da
Cloud didn’t recognize the horses—didn’t know who he heard, but Da
The Westmans were in the other direction, and the riders coming from the downhill of the road were near enough to have waked Cloud—nighthorses wouldn’t miss them in the ambient if they got any closer at all: the group of horses was louder in the ambient than one horse was, but there was no way they could stay hidden as those riders went past, and they had a steep wooded hill at their backs, a sheer drop across the road…
<Memory of the riders at dusk, smell-shapes spooking them lower down the mountain. Men following us up the road.>
Cloud bet on <us ru
“Cloud!” Da
Da
He was leaving his blanket and all his baggage behind. He’d at least slept with his gun, scared of the isolation, but he couldn’t stop; he clung desperately as Cloud headed uphill, with the sheer drop off the road on their right hand. He tried to get Cloud to go <off the road, into the woods,> thinking that he could take the steep, wooded way over the rise of the hill and come down again after the oncoming trouble had passed them.
Cloud was willing. Cloud bolted through a battering of evergreen branches, took the uncertain footing of laddered roots and rock, and wove among the trees, headed aslant up the rise.
A shot splintered bark off a trunk beside them: Cloud veered uphill, and he slewed entirely off Cloud’s back on the downhill side, still hanging onto Cloud’s mane, trying to get footing to swing up again.