Rider at the Gate

“You didn’t get any kind of shape on it,” Vadim said with a look under the brow. It was a question. Three times now, it was the same damned question. “You still don’t know if it had a rider.”

“I didn’t get any shape,” she said—snapped, and didn’t mean to. “Flicker was too strong. I told you. I couldn’t reach past her.” She’d said that over and over. But she hadn’t said, and she did say, “Truth is, I didn’t ever think of it.”

“Under the circumstances,” Vadim said. “Yeah. No question.”

Another potato went to bits under her knife. She didn’t look up. Vadim said, “Just thank God Flicker isa noisy sod. She kept it out. Whatever it was, she kept it clear of us, if it ever did come close last night.”

Come up to the walls? She hadn’t thought about that, either: her impression of distance and location of the danger behind her at the last had been so absolute she hadn’t questioned it. She’d feared it— at the gate. But everything had threatened her, then.

And with Flicker down, trying to get Flicker’s mind off it—she hadn’t had time for questions.

But she’d had to call and call for Vadim’s attention. Pound at the gate, while no one in the camp or the village was aware of the danger—God, for the same reason they wouldn’t have heard the rogue—because Flicker hadn’t relayed anything. Flicker had shut everybody near her down cold, sending <white-white-white> to everyone in her reach until midmorning.

“Flicker shut us out,” she said. “You couldn’t hear it, either.”

“The thought crossed my mind,” Vadim said. “Flicker could have blocked most anything from us in the den with her. The village didn’t spook, at least—so it didn’t come closer or it was quiet except for someone listeningfor it. But there’s no point looking for tracks. The snow didn’t stop till dawn.”

That was true.

“Hell,” she said.

“If it had a rider,” Vadim said.

The whole conversation was sending chills down her nerves. She didn’t know who’d started it. Vadim was camp-boss. It was his job to find out things. He was doing that. He’d already reported to the marshal and the mayor what she’d encountered in the woods. The marshal said don’t tell the town anything: the marshal and the mayor were afraid of panic and had kept the phone call quiet. But she couldn’t fill in more detail than she’d given. “I don’t think so,” she said. “No.”

“But you never did see it. Never did even imagine seeing it.”

“I’m not one of the kids,” she said, again too sharply. She was disquieted by the thought of touching anything that wild, that unstable. It hadn’t gotten past Flicker’s determination. But a nighthorse was the most powerful thing on the planet.

A nighthorse was… far and away the most powerful thing.

“Could be one of the wild ones,” she said. “A fall, a fever.”

“And it could be anywhere in the hills,” Vadim said.

“It was here, I feltit. It was behind me. I knowwhere it was. No, it didn’t come to the gate. I was scared, was all.”

She remembered <the woods, the rogue’s position shifting>— she hadn’t let herself think of it, however fleetingly, in her long hours in the den watching over Flicker. She hadn’t let her mind stay on that dark thought for two consecutive seconds, since. It was still dangerous to think of too vividly. A going-apart, was how she’d heard it described. A mind going in fragments, bits of it coming together at random—tenderness, hatred, desire, sexual arousal, rage all combining and separating at total random. She didn’t know. She couldn’t swear what she’d heard. But Flicker hadn’t lether hear. That was the point.

“The wild ones will go down to lowland pastures any day now,” she said. “If there should be something with that band—maybe it’ll go down, too. Or maybe it’ll follow.”

“They’d try to drive it off. They’ll kill it if they can. They won’t let it follow them.”

She didn’t think Vadim knew any more than she did—what the wild ones might do or be able to do against a threat like that. Vadim had grown up on Rogers Peak, born to Tarmin; she’d been a free rider, but only on Darwin Peak, ranging between Darwin settlements, and they were both guessing, she knew for a fact. The long riders—they told such stories, around safe firesides. That was collectively all they knew.

“It’d go for people,” she said. “That’s what they say. I don’t know if that’s always true, but, God, if it does, there’s all the villages around the loop, besides Barry and Llew out there in that damn road camp. —Vadim, —”

“You made it in. They can make it in.”

“I was lucky!”

“You make your luck. If you heard it, they heard it, and they’ll take precautions.”

“Fine. Fine. But what if it’s smarter next time? What if the thing shows up on—”

A bell rang—the one at the village side of the Little Gate. Some villager was coming to request something of the riders, God knew what, maybe another trek out to the road crew. Maybe the marshal with worse news—maybe with a notion the weather was going to turn. She hadn’t looked at the glass since noon.

She watched as the blacksmith passed through the gate and shut it. His name was Andy Goss. His teenaged sons trailed him as he made a straight line for the porch where they stood. It sure didn’t look like a delivery.

“You seen my daughter?” the blacksmith asked, coming up out of breath.

“Not since morning,” Vadim said. And Tara remembered Brio

But not since morning—

“For what?” the blacksmith asked, still hard-breathing, sweating despite the cold.

“She brought a biscuit for the horses. Wanted to talk. We said it wasn’t a good time. She left.”

“Then where’d she go?” The blacksmith was angry. “We got the whole village searching, door to door. When was she here?”

The outside gate, Tara thought with a chill. The spook in the woods. The kid’s hanging about the horses… “Crack of dawn.” It was approaching twilight. “You’ve searched the village? You’ve searched all the village?”

“Everywhere.”

“Rider gate,” Tara said, and ran the steps, struck out past Goss and his sons, down across the snowy yard and toward the den, Vadim hurrying to catch up, the blacksmith and his boys close behind.

The snow between the village wall and the exposed side of the nighthorse den hadn’t melted that much during the day. They didn’t go to that side of the den unless they were going to the outside gate and nobody’d been out, none of the horses had been stirring out—truth to tell, they andthe horses had slept the whole afternoon.

But somebody in small-sized boots had gone past the corner of the den and along the wall, and not come back. The pointed-toed footprints led up to the camp’s outside gate, and the gate had been dragged open and shut again—enough, one was sure, for the owner of those boots.

“Those your daughter’s tracks?” Tara asked, indicating the prints, but the horses were near enough she was already feeling the father’s rising panic.

The father didn’t know the half of it.

“Chad and I had better go look,” Vadim said.

“The hell,” she said, imaged <Tara and Vadim riding out,> imaged <guns.> And <long shadows on the snow,> which was the reality out there. It was close to evening.

“You’re not up to it,” Vadim said. “Flicker damn sure isn’t. We’ll look as far as we can follow those tracks.”

She didn’t want to stay and wait. She knew the search wasn’t going to turn up a live and happy girl, and that conviction in her mind might have been what agitated the blacksmith: they were next the den wall.

“What in hell’d she do it for?” the man asked as Vadim went off quickly around the corner, <getting Chad,> and the ambient flared with her distress, her resentment of villager stupidity, villager demands. The blacksmith caught her arm, hard. “I’m talking to you, damn it, Tara Chang! Why in hell didn’t one of you put her back out the proper gate? What in bloody hell was she doing here in the first place?”