Cloud's Rider

“Where’s Brio

“With the doctor. A widow. Has a big house. She’s all right. Well, —as all right as she’s likely to be.”

“She doesn’t deserve it.”

“She’s off our conscience. We did what we could do. Wedon’t have to worry about her, all right?”

“Maybe we should go to the camp and ask Da

“I want to be here, hear me? Da

“We’re going to starve.”

“We won’t starve. I opened the outside door a while ago. The storm’s winding down. I figure they’ll fire the forge tomorrow morning. Then I’ll talk to them.”

Randy didn’t look happy.

“Nice house she’s in?”

“What I hear. Yeah.”

Randy didn’t say anything else, just tucked up, arms across his chest, and shut his eyes.

“However this works out,” Carlo said, trying to comfort the kid, “we’ll get some kind of work in this place, and if we don’t like it here, we can stash some money and move on. We’ll be all right. There’s got to be jobs for us somewhere. There’s villages up here, there’s camps on Darwin—”

“Not much on Darwin,” Randy muttered.

“We’ll manage,” Carlo said.

So it wasn’t home, so they were hungry for a day. They’d found a place to sleep. They were out of the storm. They didn’t have Brio

He sat down next to the furnace wall. His head ached and his body ached, and he just wanted to shut his eyes. The stones were warm. He didn’t need the blanket. He’d gotten used to the cold.

Randy waked him once with a coughing fit, had a drink of warm water without complaining and went back to sleep again.

But, left awake, finding the light had gone entirely from the cracks that had admitted it earlier, Carlo found himself sitting by the forge looking at hands that had taken about all they could bear, and thinking, and growing more and more worried about the situation. He’dargued for going up. Da

Now they’d gotten into a place where the local smith wasn’t happy to see another smith in town—and might notbe willing to take on help.

Randy looked to him for a way out. Randy slept now, expecting his older brother to do something to get them breakfast next morning.

But going back to the rider camp wasn’t the answer. The riders couldn’t take them. And close relationship with the village riders wouldn’t give them respectability at all, when their only source of help might end up being the church.

Maybe, he thought, maybe if he showed the smith he knew what he was doing—firing up without leave would be impertinent, but there was a lot of other work that wanted doing, right in front of him. The smith might in fact be shorthanded, considering the fact that the floor wasn’t swept and that the stock was lying and hanging in no particular order—there was just a lot out of order in this place.

He was awake, it was night. There was a broom leaning against a support post.

So he used it.

There was a slovenly stack of wood and he put it in order without making too much noise. Randy snored, oblivious to the movement around him.

There were leather aprons and such thrown about and he hung them up on pegs where they logically belonged.

He located the rag-bin and, ignoring the pain of his frost-burned hands and the stiffness that had set into his fingers, began the kind of cleanup his mother and father had insisted on, wiping up along the edges of the furnace, around the vent. If the forge was ever cooled down, you scrubbed everything you couldn’t get to when it was fired up, that was his father’s and his mother’s cardinal rule. You kept things in order. You set the tools out by kind and by size. If you didn’t know you had it you couldn’t use it, his mother was in the habit of saying. If you didn’t know you had it, you couldn’t sell it. If you didn’t know you didn’t have it you couldn’t make a likely item during your downtime so you could sell it next time somebody wanted it in a hurry.

The surly man in charge might thinkhe didn’t need a couple of assistants, but he at least wasn’t going to turn them down in the mistaken idea they didn’t know how to work or that they didn’t know up from down in the trade or in his shop.

He’d done all that and sat down to catch his breath and salve his aching hands by the time he heard the opening and shutting of doors somewhere nearby. Inside the house, he thought, which meant—he cast a look at the cracks in the door, confirming the guess—it was daylight again. There was just a smidge of ham left. Randy had eaten all of his, so he saved half for Randy and had enough breakfast at least to take the wobbles out of his legs and the complete hollow out of his stomach, on half the remaining ham and a cup of hot water.

He heard footsteps coming and going next door. The day was definitely starting, and he was ready to make as good an impression as he could or know he couldn’t have done more than he’d done.

The door opened—the man they’d dealt with when they’d arrived came in, big man, wide of waist as well as chest, big jaw set in what seemed habitual glumness.

“You’re still here.” It sounded like a complaint.

“Yes, sir. Name’s Carlo Goss. That’s my brother Randy. Thank you for the place to stay.”

“So what in hell are you doing up here? Tarmin, is it?”

What did he say? Protect the marshal’s information and say there was trouble down in Tarmin, but not say what? And that they’d run from it? What was the man to think?

“Tarmin’s wiped out,” he said. “We’re the only survivors.”

“Damn-all,” Mackey said. “That the truth?”

“Yes, sir. It is. Gates came open.” He didn’t say how. He tried to obey the marshal’s instruction by not saying enough. Making it sound like mischance. “Snow was coming down. The whole town was overrun with vermin. We were smiths down there.”

“Huh.” The man shook his head, scratched his chest and walked over and picked up a piece of wood. Threwit on the fire, scattering ash over the freshly swept stones. Tossed another on, carelessly, scattering more soot. “Sad story. Not my business.”

Not hisbusiness. Tarmin was dead, everybody he knew was dead, and it wasn’t Van Mackey’s business?

Carlo drew even deep breaths, asking himself whether the whole truth could have shaken the man, but he’d never know. Randy was waking up and he went over to take hold of his brother’s arm and drag him up to his feet where he had the ability to jerk him hard, in the chance Randy had heard the exchange or might hear something else to inspire an outburst of indignation.

Meanwhile the man was poking up the fire, opening the main flue, starting up for the day, as it seemed.

“Randy,” Carlo said, “this is the man who owns the place. This is the man who’s put us up for a day or so. Say good morning to Mr. Mackey.”

“Morning,” Randy mumbled.

The man didn’t say anything. Didn’t even look at him.

“What’s the matter with him?” Randy asked, aside.

“Quiet,” Carlo said. “Don’t say a thing.”

“So what’s he say? Are we staying here?”

He gave Randy’s arm a hard squeeze and Randy took the cue and shut up. Mackey went on poking about the fire. Somebody else came in, a young man maybe Da