Cloud's Rider

“Damn glad it’s not the other horse,” Ridley muttered.

“What in hellare we going to do?” Callie asked. “What are we going to do this spring?”

“Split up if we have to. You go with her. Or I do.”

Meaning if—almost when—young Rain took out with wanderlust.

And it didn’t call for a junior’s opinion at all. But he had at least an alternative. And Callie had asked him to stay at the table.

“There’s also me,” he said, and waited a half a breath for an explosion. He didn’t want to make the offer he made—he didn’t want to tie Cloud down even to a village and even for the summer: he felt like a traitor in that regard. But he was at least partly responsible for the danger he’d brought, and he saw at least a small way to patch it. “I know you think I’m the devil, but if she goes out this spring, I’d stay here through the summer. Or I’d ride with her and you stay here. I’ve got a little brother. I knowkids her age. I’d stay with her and see she got back here safe before winter.”

He wasn’t getting any reaction from them. He decided he’d said enough and maybe enough to offend them. Callie looked like a thundercloud. Ridley—he wasn’t sure.

There was an ambient. But it was all <Je

“It’s to think about,” Callie said. And then added: “It’s not you in question. It’s that horse out there. It tried to get Je

“It didn’t,” Ridley said. “It can’t, now.”

“It’s still got to be stopped.”

“I agree,” Da

They hadn’t said what they’d do about Je

He got up to refill the teapot.

The ambient stayed as it was, a contented kid, contented horse, both silly, both louder than anything on the mountain. That horse if it was out there had to know it had lost Je

Maybeit would be discouraged. But it had lost Rain as a rival, too. And that might well figure in the situation.

“There’s something you can do now,” Ridley said. “Which is asking a bit. But there’s three riders at Mornay—that’s the next village down the road—and they could spare one.”

“You want me to ride to Mornay.”

“If,” Ridley said, “if we don’t get that horse in the next couple of days, weather permitting. And supposing it comes back. We could go out with the hunters—escort you out to the first shelter between us and them and you make the trek over to Mornay and come back with help.”

So Ridley wasn’tjust getting him to go winter over at the next village.

Counting that one of them had a pregnant mare, one was a stranger to the area and one of them was an eight-year-old just this week trying to figure out how to get onto her horse—getting help from another village was a real good notion.

“Sure,” he said. “Sure, I’ll do that.”

“That’s saying we have to,” Ridley said. “Chances are—Rain’s settling with Je

“Drink to that,” Callie said, and got up and got the spirits bottle. She poured three glasses, gave one to Ridley, second to him—which she sipped beforehand. Third for herself.

Proof enough, Da

“We did it,” was Callie’s second. “She’s still alive and we are.”

Je

And they talked about having gotten Je

But he didn’t think they expected it would be easy after this.

Nor that they wanted help waiting up for the kid. So he excused himself to his bed and lay there listening to an ambient as new and full of foolishness as could be.

Thinking of Cloud and himself. And begi

Darcy had made supper that evening and Brio

But Brio

Once it sounded like, “I want to go home.”

And another time, “Go away!”

But when Darcy started to leave Brio

Darcy came back and sat down by the side of the bed. The girl had been dreaming awake, she thought. Not really sleeping, but not entirely aware, either. There was a strange feeling to the night—her own elation with the child’s waking, or the unaccustomed feeling of life in this room, or just the knowledge that the days would change now. Everything had stopped at some time around Mark’s death, and no day had brought anything different from the last. And now every day brought a possibility of things changing.

Now she went to bed at night thinking about tomorrow, and what she’d do, and what she’d try. She hadn’t done that kind of pla

And tonight she lay abed thinking of Mark as she sometimes did, just thinking about him in the dark and the things she’d tell him— and wanting to tell him about all the things that had happened.

But there was so much, there was so very much she’d done that thinking about it became a job in itself, and made her sleepy.

Her edge-of-sleep thought seemed infected with cheerfulness. With recklessness and sheer anticipation that just wasn’t like her.

She felt equal to anything. That in itself was unprecedented.

If the girl had come a year ago Mark wouldn’t have died. Mark would have wanted to live if he’d seen this child, if he’d seen how much she was like Faye. But more, if Mark had feltthe things she felt tonight, he’d never have wanted to die.

Right at the edge of sleep she pretended that Mark had seen her and that Mark was sleeping in the bed beside her. She knew better, of course, but she could think that for the night, the way she could tell herself that the empty room had a child again and that mistakes were all revised, and that she had a chance to do right all the things that had for a year been so wrong.

There was a tomorrow again. She’d run to the very edge of the money she had on account. She’d not collected fees for things she’d done on call, or at least not pursued any of the late ones—because she’d not cared.

But tomorrow she’d open the lower-floor shutters and open her office again, and she’d take patients. The miners always had complaints and aches and pains. Miners always had money on account.

And she’d buy Brio

Things feltbetter. Maybe it was going to church. Maybe it was just getting another number of days between them and disaster and church days were markers.

But, sleeping in a proper cot alongside his brother in the warmest place in Evergreen village, with the banked coals making a comfortable glow and the stones lending warmth to a peaceful night, Carlo let go a sigh that seemed to stand for so much that had been piled up on him, so much debt, so much fear, so much anxiety.

Things were working out. Rick wasn’t happy—least of all in the public scene this morning, with them being welcomed by the congregation and all. Ordinarily he’d have found it excruciating notice on himself, and had, for the duration, but it meant something. It meant something vitally important, to have the preacher’s backing and to know that they weren’tto blame for that horse that had scared hell out of the village.

Rider business. A horse didn’tcome within his responsibility. Wasn’t fair for Da