Cloud's Rider

And if things went wrong, it could conceivably touch off a panic in the village or in the camp, and possibly get Cloud hurt by the other horses. Carlo and Randy, under constant threat of the unknown, that horse, their memories—they’d been throwing off high voltage emotional upset nonstop, so intensely so that it had beenthe ambient, with Cloud’s spookiness in the mix in the hour they’d come in, Cloud being upset as hell about Brio

Mad would have been easier to deal with. Callie’s conclusions about him were going to take some long, consistent work to counter, and what he had yet to tell them wasn’t going to make Callie happier with him.

Trouble was, there wasn’t, to this hour, any neat, sure answer to what he’d brought up here except the essential piece of comfort he’d given them: his sure knowledge that the rogue was dead.

But if he let rumor get loose about Brio

God only knew what could happen if she came to and panicked, and some of it got to the horses. Gates couldcome open. People could spook and take up weapons or bolt for imagined safety, or take actions he just couldn’t foresee. He hadn’t talked yet to Ridley or Callie on that score, and while Callie was watching him, he was watching her, and telling himself that while Ridley seemed a calm and reasoning man, a woman who judged that fast and who condemned that quickly might not be the woman he’d trust with a handful of kids who needed forgiveness.

Well, hell, he didn’t anticipate needingto trust her, unless something went wrong.

So he and Callie were at a standoff and it was likely to last a while.

And he sat on a hard chair in the marshal’s office, with Ridley sitting near him, and he answered question after question from the marshal that trod near the center of his concerns: “Does Shamesey know what happened? What did they report down there?”—all the while he was hoping to God none of these people thought to question the locked door story about how Carlo and Randy had survived, never asked whether Brio

So far he was lying with a skill his father would be ashamed of.

But, God, if he could just figure out what to tell and what not to—what they needed to know in order to protect themselves and what they didn’t—

He’d warned them, hadn’t he?

He’d told them not to let Brio

He’d handled everything his seniors had trusted him to handle. Hadn’t he?

And getting this business out of the way would make him calmer. A lot calmer. So he could deal with Cloud and act normal. And maybe he could think more clearly what to do next.

Except—

Except every night they drank a glass of vodka and he wouldn’t swear his wasn’t tampered with. He slept soundly. He didn’t remember his dreams. Maybe he was just that tired. Maybe they just didn’t want him walking about or going out to the den at night.

“Do you happen to know prices on fuel oil down in the flat?”

“Don’t know that,” he said. “I know it’s gone up a little.” The authorities of Evergreen village, deprived of the warehouses down in Tarmin, were worried about their supply and what kind of base cost they were facing: he knew that from overhearing Ridley and Callie on the same topic. “But I do know that it was a good wheat crop this year. Oats, too.”

There was a slight relief in tense, worried faces. He could give them good news in a lot of regards, because the bitter Anveney-Shamesey quarrel had taken a quieter course. The hoarding that had been going on in Shamesey during the spring and even into the summer was cooling down—he knew: his parents had been laying in supplies, and then weren’t. Probably it was the same story on both sides of the long-standing argument, Anveney with its metals and Shamesey with its grain sometimes downwind of Anveney’s smokestacks.

“I think,” he said to their further questions, “that that’s got to bring prices down. I don’t know that much,” he added, “but my father’s a mechanic in Shamesey, and I do kind of know what he pays for supplies, and what wire’s ru

The woman was interested, not alone in the price of wire.

“You’re out of the town itself.”

“I was bom in town. Grew up there. Mostly.”

Evidently not all the information he’d given had gotten passed on—or they hadn’t understood. There were all kinds of riders. Most were born to the life. A few, like him, weren’t. And a man could say .he was a Shamesey rider without saying he had ties actually inside the town itself—which he did truly have.

But after they knew that, the cautious atmosphere warmed considerably. He’d become a human being in their eyes, he guessed, though he wasn’t exactly flattered by it. With town co

He didn’t, however, react to their reaction: he might have, a few weeks ago—before he’d been really on his own, before he’d dealt with the things he had to deal with. Now a distance had come between him and towns and villages of every stripe, a kind of uncaring deadness where it came to town sensibilities and an increasing unwillingness to give a damn where it came to a village accounting him righteous.

So he didn’t come across with a sudden burst of truth for them— he stilldidn’t want to damn Carlo and Randy. Horse business was rider business. Townfblk didn’t understand, wouldn’t understand, couldn’t judge whyanyone down below had done anything—and the conspiracy of silence among riders he’d gotten accustomed to down in Shamesey evidently held here, because Ridley hadn’t said a word about a loose horse, either.

And they didn’t ask about Tarmin anymore. They diverted themselves into meticulous questions about the prices and the market down in Shamesey, which he could answer, his father’s shop’s prosperity or lack of it being tied to prevailing costs.

In the past couple of days, he said to himself, among things Ridley hadn’t told them—Spook-horse hadn’tshown up. That was a benefit. Spook-horse hadn’t come into range or made itself a trouble to the village and, by the lack of questions this morning, apparently nobody had heard it.

That could mean the horse had gone down the mountain again, or in feckless grief slipped off a cliff and broken its neck, or that, with the only humans it wanted out of reach, it had just given up and frozen to death in the storm. He was more sorry for it than scared now that he had the solidity of village walls between Cloud and a horse that wanted company enough to fight for it.