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Da
He went over then to stand in the rain in Cloud’s close company and think about Shamesey, because Cloud was mad, and Cloud could get hurt—<gun firing,> Da
But Cloud thought about <Ice and Froth,> and even of <Shadow, > which he thought might be Cloud’s way of saying they’d been much better off where they’d been, and if Cloud’s rider hadn’t lost his temper they wouldn’t be here.
Da
But they hadn’t caught Jonas and his company, and Da
Most of all he tried not to think about Stuart, since he’d as good as told Harper aloud what way Stuart had gone, and by that, how and where to lay an ambush.
Ambush was very much what Harper intended. He gathered that from the lot of them. They wanted no fair fight. And he didn’t know why—except they hated Stuart because of a dead man whose name he didn’t know, and because of a quarrel they’d had when they’d worked together. It seemed to him a thin reason to want to kill somebody, since by what he could gather, Stuart hadn’t killed the man he’d fought, and it had been a fair fight—but that didn’t matter to them or to Harper.
And the Hallanslakers in general kept imaging Stuart and the rogue as one and the same, as if—as if somehow they’d become the same thing in the Hallanslakers’ minds, an ugly thing, a tricky, shifting thing in their thoughts. They wallowed in their notion of Stuart as the enemy and their image grew and grew even off things heknew and hebrought to the ambient: they caught his image of < Stuart on the porch > and twisted it until it was an evil, cheating man, giving a kid bad advice. They caught his memory of <Stuart shot on the hill> and twisted it around until it was <riders defending Shamesey gates > against <man meaning harm to them.>
He felt sick at his stomach with the shifting-about they were forcing on his memories. They didn’t beat him, and on the evidence of tonight’s camp, they didn’t intend to starve him. They just thought their skewed thoughts at him so insistently and so often and so vengefully he felt the edges of his world curling up, as if the images he cherished of Stuart were about to peel away and show something else underneath.
But when the Hallanslaker images came thick and fast, Cloud just imaged <dung-pile> and <white, crawling maggots,> continuing surly—a noisy horse, Jonas had said of Cloud.
And Cloud was. The ambient several times in the afternoon had gone crazed with conflicting images and Cloud’s disgusting commentary, until the man who’d appropriated his supplies had started calling him names of a sort he’d never in his life tolerated, and then threatened Cloud.
That was Quig, no other name, Quig. There were three of them, counting Harper. Quig and Watt—he gathered they were cousins. Harper’s horse was an image of shapes and dark—Spook was how he thought of the beast, but he never heard Harper call its name; Quig’s horse was flashes of light; and he didn’t even catch Watt’s big horse: it just slipped around in the ambient. Watt had a hellacious scar ru
He heard movement. He felt it, simultaneously, from Cloud: < Harper walking, > and looked behind him, where Harper stopped, hat brim dripping with the rain. Harper was mad.
“Smart-ass kid,” Harper said. “Damn troublemaker. You don’t know all you think you know.”
He didn’t want to listen. He turned his face away to avoid a fight and Harper punched him in the shoulder.
That got his attention, and a move from Cloud that he stopped with a shove of his hands.
“Smart-ass, I’m saying. Big threat, kid. The Wild doesn’t give a damn.”
<Dark. Separation. Forest, trees thick-shadowed with night. Body in the shadows, lying on the leaves, bones broken, face mottled with shadow and blood, bone bare on cheek and forehead. Body in the woods, gunshot in the forehead—>
Harper’s thought. Cloud shied off, the horses around them shied, catching the rogue-feeling implicit in the sending, and Da
“You don’t like it?” Harper asked him. “Don’t like it?”
Harper had cared for the dead rider; Harper had felt pain and guilt then that Harper felt now, and it was all one thing with Stuart, < Stuart with a knife, Stuart inviting attack, a different Stuart than he knew, angry and deadly serious.> And <the woods and the rogue and the hillside above Shamesey—> Everything was muddled up together in Harper’s mind, and <rider and horse going off a road> and <blood on the rocks > and <body in the woods > were all together with <rogue-feeling.>
Da
“My brother,” Harper said. <Dead face. Gunshot between the eyes.> “My brother. You think you’re going to go up there on the mountain, facing that thing, and be a hero, kid? You think it’s all that easy? You think you’ll sleep easy after that?”
He began to be afraid, afraid Harper was crazy, afraid that Harper was going to spook Cloud into an attack and they’d shoot: he kept sending <no> to Cloud as hard as he could, aware of Cloud’s anger, Cloud’s revulsion and the spillage of thoughts of violence all around him.
“I’ve seenit,” Harper said, up in his face. “It wants you, that’s what it does, it wants you so bad, and it’ll get right up to you and you’ll let it, you can’t help it. It wants you, and you can’t hear anything else. And that’s when you’ve got to hold firm, that’s when you’ve got to want to kill it, you got to want to kill it before it kills your horse and it kills you, you hear me, kid? You shoot it fast, because you want it so bad it’ll haunt you, it’ll be back in your brain every time you put your head down to sleep, it’ll be there behind your eyelids every time it’s quiet. It’ll be there. It’s always there. I’ve seen it. I’ve shot it. I shoot it every time it comes back to me, because I won’t let it near me, you hear me?” <Man shot between the eyes> was the image. <Rogue-sending> was the feeling.
“Yessir,” he breathed, “yessir,” because it was the only way he knew to get loose. He felt sick at his stomach. He wanted <free of Harper.>