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“Your papa would never shoot anything if he didn’t have to. He’s real smart. So if he ever did, you’d know he did the right thing.”
“Yeah.” Not enthusiastically.
He applied himself to a vigorous brushing of Cloud’s far side in hopes Je
But in the same moment Slip went outside, and from there Je
“Where’s your papa going?” Da
“To the hunters,” Je
“To go out?”
“To the village,” Je
Ridley hadn’t asked him to go along. Which said something, he supposed. He hoped that it didn’t say Ridley was filling the hunters in on his and Carlo’s problems.
He applied his frustration to the tangles that crept into Cloud’s mane. He kept quiet in the ambient and was aware of Ridley leaving it, the other side of the wall.
Je
He thought—maybe he should go to the barracks and try to talk to Callie, personally, reasonably. Nothing worse could happen to him than what had happened yesterday with Ridley.
Well… on the other hand, shemight pull the trigger.
Cloud wasn’t enthusiastic. He didn’t want <Callie shooting.>
“It’s all right, silly.” Da
But Callie had come out onto the porch, dressed for a stay in the cold, and had called Shimmer to her.
Callie spotted him, then, and the ambient went—tense, if not foreboding. Callie, he was sure, didn’t want the meeting with him; but there he was, and Callie knew he was there and knew he was looking to deal with her, he was also reasonably sure. Shimmer, maybe because she was pregnant or maybe because she was protective of Callie with Slip upset, was touchy and standoffish. Slip was occupied trotting up and down along a track beside the village wall, listening for what he could hear out of that strange full-of-people place Ridley went that a horse couldn’t. Slip was frustrated and anxious. But Shimmer was wary in particular of <Da
So was Callie.
Da
“I’d like to talk,” he said. “Mind?”
“About what?”
“About my being here. About my not telling the truth first off.”
“What about it?”
“That I’m sorry. You knew I was holding back. And I knew I was in trouble, but fact was—”
Je
“That’s fine,” Callie said.
“Can I go over to the grocery and get some candy?”
“No.”
“Just one piece?”
“It’s Sunday and the grocery’s closed.”
“But papa went to the village!”
“That’s fine. Papa’s talking to some people. I’m talking to Dan. All right? Run away.”
“Papa’s talking about shooting that horse. Isn’t he?”
“Je
“I don’t want him to shoot that horse!”
“Je
“I don’t want him to!”
“I’ll bet I can find you something to do inside if you’ve nothing better to do.”
“I’ll brush Rain.”
“Good. Go do that,” Callie said, frowning, and Je
“I,” Da
“You’re full of dark spots, aren’t you?”
“I don’t intend to be. I know you’d have been within your rights to have tossed me out. I just—”
“Just kind of miscalculated.”
“More than once. But—”
He could seeJe
But this time Rain didn’t move.
This time Je
Callie didn’t. Callie was very quiet. He caught intense <unhappiness> and <fear,> enough to upset the neighborhood if it broke loose, but she remained very, very quiet. So did Shimmer.
“Look!” Je
Cloud (Da
But Rain had certainly dumped Je
Rain moved sedately, now, skittish at the same time, and Callie stood there—upset that this was happening at all, Da
Shimmer gave out a challenge call that was part <excitement> and part <dismay> mirroring Callie’s restrained distress, and at that, her offspring Rain set into a jog trot, not a nighthorse’s best gait, but comfortable—until the horse in question had forty kilos of human bouncing unskillfully on his back.
But Je
Da
He knew. Every rider had to have known, at some point in his life, that first sense-ridden spring—the smells, the colors, the lifethat was breaking on both horse and rider after the long white days of ice and enclosure. And coupled with a winter pairing—when there were so many, many new sensations to get used to—
“Mama! Dan! See me?”
Oh, he <saw.> A rider could drown all his good sense in it. He found gooseflesh on his arms that had nothing to do with the cold; he felt Callie <struggling for breath and scared—so scared—>
But <Je