Cloud's Rider

Burn was going to defend him, that was clear. A shiver ran up Burn’s leg and over his hide and Burn snorted and hissed at an unseen enemy.

“Can you make it out?” Tara asked. “It’s not a swarm.”

“Don’t think so.” He made an effort to get up and did, leaning on Burn’s shoulder. From Burn there was another snort and a violent shake of his mane.

Not good, whatever it was.

Tara was <upset. Haze of snow, night, terror, horses ru

They were armed. They had supplies. But there was that notice on the board that Da

The kid hadn’t been a rider that long. The kid hadn’t ever been into the High Wild. And if he’d heard something real damn confusing—he might not know what he heard. But twoexperienced riders and their horses—

—didn’t know, either.

It was a moral question to Da

Most of all he didn’t know at what point of their own morality these people from the pretty blue-muraled church would conclude they were doing wrong. He was scared of lawyers. He was scared of courts.

Most of all he didn’t want to mess up Carlo’s future by making a decision that he didn’t have the information to make, and he’d held off till this morning hoping he’d hear some kind of wisdom out of Ridley or Callie during their evening talks.

“You suppose they’re going to treat the Goss boys all right?” he’d asked finally in desperation. “Are the lawyers honest?”

“They’re fools,” was all he’d been able to get out of Ridley last night. Ridley was mad about the situation, and that was what Ridley had on his mind: losing people from his village. And to the question of the lawyers being honest— “At poker,” Callie said, which didn’t tell him much about Carlo’s chances with them.

“You suppose I ought to tellCarlo?” he’d asked Ridley then, deciding on the direct approach.

“Don’t know what he could do about it,” was Ridley’s answer.

That put him in mind of what his father had always said about the law, which seemed the only wisdom that applied—just don’t sign anything.

He’d slept with it, and waked with it, and worried over it.

His first trip this morning had to be out to the den, and he left the breakfast table, dressed for the cold—a light snow was falling— and took Cloud a biscuit from breakfast. The other horses, crowding him as he came into the den from the open-air approach, were obliged to wait: Ridley encouraged him to do that, saying that waiting their turn was good for them: they’d gotten out of their summer ma

So while Ridley was helping Callie clear the dishes, he fed Cloud his treat and rubbed him down from head to tail and oiled his feet, quiet in his mind for the first time since he’d come to Evergreen.

Cloud was satisfied, making that curious contentment sound, enjoying the importance of the first and only biscuit of the day. Cloud ducked his head around while he was working and licked the inside of his ear, which Cloud knewhe hated.

Both of them were moving a little more freely now, on feet less tender and joints less sore, and, able to go to Cloud and do such basic, ordinary things, Da

The truly difficult things were over and done with, the emergencies were all settled, and there was almost nothing to do but brush Cloud’s tail and feed Cloud and bring him biscuits.

Cloud liked that idea. If there’d been females available, the winter would be absolutely perfect. But, next best thing to please his horse, Da

Cloud wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as he might have been. Cloud lifted his head and looked toward the walls and shivered.

Da

He’d never been wintered-in anywhere before. Shamesey didn’t have weather to require it, although a lot of riders arrived there to winter-over and the trade died down: Shamesey never felt isolated.

But Evergreen village suddenly seemed very small and very fragile against the mountain shoulder. It dawned on him then for the first time that there just wasn’t any human civilization in the world farther out on the edge than Evergreen and the little string of villages down its lonely road. Over on the other side of the mountain— there was just the Wild, where humans who’d dropped down from the sky had never visited, not on their farthest rides. No villages, no trails, no camps, no riders. Civilization just stopped—maybe just around the shoulder of the rock outcrops on the road they’d ridden. Civilization stopped in the mountains he’d not been able to see from his whited-out vantage on that high turn. Nobody had been out there. Ever.

Cloud’s skin twitched. Cloud snorted and the other horses acted bothered, but the ambient was otherwise quiet, and Cloud settled to being brushed again, rocking gently to the strong strokes Da

A rider just shouldn’t think about spooky things, he told himself, not up here, not when the wind had started to blow out of the unsettled Wild.

The snow was coming down thick and hard when he walked out of the den with the notion increasingly sure that in this edge-of-the-world place friends were hard come by.

The end of winter might not see him better settled in the barracks than the begi

He didn’t know what his relationship was with Carlo, and why he hesitated so long and resisted so much going over there, whether he didn’t want to get the rebuff he’d had from some of his old townside friends, or whether he was begi