Cloud's Rider

And the chance of Brio

He’d felt the darting, fragmented— thing—that wasthe rogue the night Tarmin had gone down. He’d seen and felt her half-waking in the cabin with Guil and Tara, and he had nodesire whatever to deal with her awake and within reach of a horse that could carry her thoughts outside herself. She’d gone out cold after that brief incident the night they’d joined Guil and Tara—and nobody, not even her brothers, invited her to come to again. If it had been Tara who’d gone with the Goss kids to the first-stage shelter, he suspected now that Brio

He’d been—not horrified, but at least disturbed, and knew right then he was talking to a rider forged in a fire he’d no concept of.

But after a handful of nights at first-stage with that horse outside he’d begun to weigh what one life was really worth relative to all the others. He didn’t at all have the cold-heartedness to have shot her; he didn’t right now have the conviction to see that travois take a plunge down the mountain; but he’d gotten scared enough by now that the thought did come to his mind.

Sleet kept coming at them, falling from the sky, swept up off the road, blown down on them—he didn’t know, but thunder above them suggested it wasn’t all blowing off the heights. The light was a gray and sickly color, and he didn’t like to look to the left, because there wasn’t any dimension to it. They reached a place where the darkness of Cloud’s tail streamed first sideways and up and around and sideways again—and when they reached it in Cloud’s wake, wind literally blew him and Carlo a little sideways on the icy surface.

He found traction in patches of snow. He began counting thirty, forty steps in that struggle against the wind. It was an effort to keep his knees pulling straight. His scarf slid down. He grabbed it and stuffed it into place as best he could.

Carlo jolted down to one knee. Wind straight off the backbone of the continent had scoured the roadway here to bare, frozen, lumpy rubble, and there they were, braced, not at a good angle, on what looked and felt like ice.

“Are you all right?” Randy’s thin shout came from behind, and Da

Treacherous ground, treacherous wind. “Change hands!” Carlo yelled against the blast, and if Carlo was losing his grip on that side, Da

The travois bucked up under a gust, spun, half over, girl and supplies and all, and tried to sail up and out of their hands as Carlo struggled to hold it.

“Look out!” Randy cried against the deafening buffet of the wind, and Carlo desperately elbowed aside his brother’s help with: “Dammit, get out of the way! I can handle it!”

Randy bid fair to get himself, Brio

Randy flung himself atop Brio

It skidded.

Da

He didn’t move for a minute after that, just panted a series of deep breaths through the icy and soggy scarf, lying on Carlo, lying on Randy, lying on Brio

Then, waiting his time between the blasts of wind and bracing first his other toe and then the foot carefully on the surface, he got up, let Carlo up, and snarled “Stay down,” at Randy.

And again, when Randy tried to get up, “ I said stay down, dammit!”

Randy and his stubborn helpfulness was ballast. Carlo was real help. Da

There’d stopped being sky and earth and this time he couldn’t tell himself they’d just walked into a gusty area. This was the wind picking up and sleet coming down so thick they breathed it.

There was one thing—one thing Tara hadn’tknown: that there’d been a horse loose that Brio

Now look where he was.

What in hell were two senior riders expecting him to do with the job he’d been handed?

Not what he was doing, damn sure.

“Lousy, lousyweather,” Guil Stuart said from the vantage of the cabin he shared with Tara Chang and two nighthorses. His horse, Burn, and Tara’s Flicker (two names having nothingto do with each other, since Burn imaged himself as fire and dark and Flicker’s name was sunlight in rapid flashes) were out cavorting in the storm, chasing some hapless creature they’d roused out of hiding—hapless since it had fallen afoul of nighthorses looking for fresh meat. Guil limped back to stand at the fireside where Tara was mending the bullet hole in his coat and, staring at the embers of a comfortable fire, he thought about a handful of kids he’d rather have counseled stay put, maybe back at Tarmin rather than first-stage.

He and Tara had disagreed on that point. But the village down the road (or what was left of it) might not have been much safer for the boys to hole up in than the first-stage shelter.

Tarmin would have been readily accessible and closer to them, there was that.

But Tara might have been right to insist the kids move out of their vicinity altogether. Cloud was a young male. With Burn possessive of Flicker and Cloud in the mix—there was no telling. But the fact of winter and horses in rut had been only a part of the consideration: the other part was a girl who could trigger an explosion out of all three of the horses, a girl Tara for both considered and unconsidered reasons didn’t want near her.

That was the part of the reasoning that weighed on his mind.

It was remotely possible that the kids hadn’t gone on to first-stage, that they’d trekked on down toward Shamesey before the snows came and were down by now and making their way across the flatlands.

And that, in cold clear consideration, scared hell out of him.

Tara didn’t need Flicker’s attention to know, not what he was thinking, but the subject he was thinking about. She frowned at him and glanced up. The next stitch pushed too hard and sent the needle through into her finger. She sucked the wound, scowling.

But she didn’t ask and he didn’t say anything—or intend to dwell on it in range of the horses. He wasn’t usually one for recriminations. A decision was a decision was a decision, as they said down south, which was his usual range.

He didn’t know as much as he wished he knew about Tara Chang orher mountain. But that was the way of winters. You ended up in some small cabin or in some encampment, pi