Cloud's Rider

“I mean it. Grow up. This is serious.”

“You could still beat him up.”

“That’d be real useful, wouldn’t it? We’re in no damn position to start trouble, we’ve no place to live, it’s the middle of the winter, we’ve no tools, nothing to our names—figure it out, kid. He wantsme to fight him. Doesn’t that give him everything he wants?”

“You could still beat him!”

“Then what?”

Randy sat and scowled and hugged his stomach.

“So what’s the matter?”

“I’m still hungry,” Randy said.

“So stoke the fire. I’ll go next door and talk to the man about cash and where we get some kind of breakfast. —Which we don’t get by bashing his son. Got it?”

Randy didn’t answer him. His answer wasn’t the way Randy wanted the world to be. Randy was going to sulk about it because Randy’s belly hurt. Sometimes he wanted to bash Randy hard until Randy used the brains he had.

But that wasn’tthe answer, either. Getting the fire started and getting an ember bed going was ahead of breakfast, at least if he was going to ask for an advance on their earnings.

Wouldn’t hit Randy. No matter what. He’d hit Randy to keep him alive on the way up. But he wouldn’t do it here. Randy had seen too much of hitting. A whole lot too much.

And finally Randy quit sulking and got up and brought a few logs for the fire.

Chapter 9

No, sir,” Da

“And it got inside,” the preacher said.

“Reverend, it did, but it wasn’t all that did. It was just vermin everywhere. I don’t claim to know much. I’m a junior rider, only two years out, but the things they say about the vermin going in waves when there’s a big kill, I saw it. There was blood all over—” You didn’t talk about the ambient with religious townfolk or villagers, and, he guessed, least of all with a preacher. “All over. Willy-wisps were ru

There were dismayed shakes of heads. The preacher gave a sad sort of sigh and mouthed something that looked like merciful God. And they didn’t have anything to say right off.

He’d taken the excuse of his feet to avoid a walk out to the den— or over to the marshal’s office—and it was partially, but not insurmountably, true that he was lame. At least he was still limping and sore as hell, and neither Ridley nor Callie had pushed him to do anything for the last number of days but eat, sleep, and sit by the fire and tell stories and play kid-games with Je

He’d dreaded this meeting fit to give him nightmares.

But he was embarrassed to go on claiming that feet that had gotten him up the Climb couldn’t quite get him over to the marshal’s office, or that the small crack on the head was still affecting him that badly. On the day he’d for good and all agreed to walk over to the village side of the wall, a howling cold had set in, and he’d really, really hoped they might cancel the meeting at the last minute, but Evergreen, having its snow-passages, didn’t let a little thing like that stop them. Ridley had brought him through the dank, timber-smelling dark of the tu

The marshal’s office where he sat was just a desk, some pigeon-holes stuffed with various papers, a board hung with keys, and a door that could lead to the marshal’s house, or the village jail, or even the courtroom. The mayor was there. The preacher, who seemed to be a particular friend of the marshal, had shown up to ask questions. So had one deputy—Burani was his name, he remembered that—and a couple of other people, one man, one woman, both gray-haired, whose position and reason for being here Da

On that ground, he didn’t want to say anything indelicate—that was his mother’s word—about the dead down there, or paint the situation too vividly. He just wanted to let them know what the kids had been through without saying too much.

Those were two of the anxious points he was skirting around. And he kept having to remind himself, as he’d never had to remind himself down in Shamesey, that he couldlie comfortably, that as closely as he’d lived with other minds in all the wide open space of the mountains, and as small and claustrophobic as the villages felt to a Shamesey rider, both things were illusion. Cloud and the rest of the horses were far enough away when he was in the barracks, let alone on this side of the wall, that he was as safe from Cloud carrying unintended images as he had been in Shamesey town before he ever met Cloud.

That kind of privacy wasn’t always true in Shamesey’s huge camp, where a thousand horses wandering around among the barracks meant anything you thought could travel. But here, without Cloud near him, he could lie with all a townsman’s skill at it—and if he could get his mind onto other tracks and calm down, once this meeting was past, he could afford to go near the horses again in Ridley’s company—he was sure Ridley had been wondering why he wouldn’t go out to the horses, and why he’d get uneasy when Cloud or one of the other horses came up near the windows of the barracks, as they’d done. He’d fed Cloud treats from the porch.

He’d tried to keep his thoughts on very mundane things—and didn’t know how successful he was.

Until, dammit, he was absolutely ashamed to face Cloud, who couldn’t know whyhe wasn’t out there when the food buckets came out. Cloud was stiff and sore and being put upon by the other horses, particularly by Slip, who was boss horse in the camp. Cloud didn’t understand being left alone in the den or cared for by Slip’s rider while his own rider was lying about the barracks.

Meetings on the porch weren’t enough any longer. Not as of today. His feet that had walked him over to the marshal’s office could support him while he worked in the den. The headaches had stopped, and even young Je

Not that for any guilt of his own he didn’t want to tell the village the truth; but there were details he was still convinced he had to be as careful of as a loaded gun. What he’d seen in Tarmin was nothing to show Je

There were also matters of Carlo’s and Randy’s business he didn’t want to bring up—things that didn’t help Tarmin and couldn’t help the dead.

Fact was, he knew he was badly shaken in his ability to keep his thoughts private—and knowingCloud would spill everything in his mind to the local riders made it likely that was exactly what would happen, early and fast, with the worst possible implications.