Cloud's Rider

“If Brio

That didn’t matter to her. Money didn’t matter. Their separation from Brio

“I’m well set,” she said, and walked out to the head of the stairs, luring them to follow as she kept talking. “I can take care of her. Of course you’ll come and see her.” By spring—by spring if they changed their minds and wanted their sister back, she’d argue the child was too delicate to travel with them and live in a ravaged village. It was a stupid idea for them to go back there, and by what she’d heard of Tarmin, though the buildings might be intact and all, they’d still have to get supplies there. By the time the boys were in any fashion set to want her back she’d have Brio

“We’d really be grateful,” Carlo Goss said; and the younger brother said, as they followed her down the stairs:

“Carlo and me get along all right. But it’s pretty rough down at the forge.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” She knewthe smith, his surly brat. And his wife, as vicious and self-seeking a woman as ever she’d met— only woman in town who could have made Van Mackey worse than he was. “Your sister owes her life to you. It was a miracle you got up the Climb at all.” She reached the front door and, since they had never taken their coats off and seemed in a hurry, gave them no grace at all of invitations to stay and talk. “You come back whenever you want. You’ll know she’s just down the street.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” the older boy said. “I’m grateful. We are. Really.”

“Any time.” She opened the door, waited just long enough to see the boys leave down the snowy steps.

Then she shut the door and latched it against the kind of drunken fools that sometimes mistook the private door for the office, and calmed herself enough for a sigh of relief.

The girl was hers. They hadn’t, after all, come to make any other arrangements. They were no more than kids themselves, the younger boy young enough to need someone’s care—but not hers. It didn’t need to be her business. Nothing about them needed to be her business.

But in one thing she was puzzled—the impression she’d gotten that, after all they’d done to save her, they’d not been shattered by her condition—or cheered by her improvement. They’d just offered money—and left with nothing in evidence but relief.

Odd, she thought. That certainly wasn’t the behavior of loving brothers. It just wasn’t. And Brio

The kids hadn’tcome back down from the midway shelter when the weather cleared—which meant the two of them had a choice of going up what Tara called a hellish road, or going up a straight-up-the-mountain route that Tara swore she could make, and that Guil maintained, against her protestations, that hecould make.

There were, Tara said, logging shelters and miners’ cabins, and she knew with a local rider’s knowledge where they were.

There was supposedly such a shelter ahead of them on their ascent, not of the road, but of the broad mountain face. It was a shelter, as Tara had imaged it, <clinging precariously to the mountainside, buried among the evergreens.>

But thus far Guil saw it only through the i

The reality was <evergreen branches drooping low into the snow blanket, rocks and ledges lurking hazardously under snow> and it was a good thing, Guil thought, that they had two experienced high-country horses feeling their way through the snow, knowingby the way trees grew and brush situated itself that there might be a ledge, knowing the soft, attractive snow was not at all reliable. It wasn’t a rapid progress and, hazy as the snow-sifting branches had become to Guil’s perception, he walked, or staggered, used Burn’s tail to help him up the generally steep slopes.

It wasn’t Burn’s favorite way to make a climb, with a human pulling on a fairly important part of Burn’s dignity, but Burn tolerated it, as Burn tolerated the baggage knocking about his ribs, <nasty thumpy things,> because otherwise his rider wasn’t going to be able to follow Tara and Flicker up this damn slope—and that would have meant Burn, torn between <Guil> and <Flicker,> faced an unthinkably inconvenient choice.

Which would of course be <Guil,> but damnablydreadful to make.

<“Burn…” waiting.> Guil didn’t talk out loud much at all—or hadn’t, until the last few days. He didn’t know when he’d last had someone to talk to—last time he’d ridden with Aby, he guessed; but it surprised him, now, the unaccustomed word coming out of his mouth, the way it surprised him that the snow was so gray and the world that was going around in such an unaccustomed way.

It was a very inconvenient place to fall. He had empty air at his back, rock under his feet, and feeling himself overbalanced, he grabbed a sapling evergreen, which bent, but which kept him on his feet and on the small ledge somewhere on a fairly steep slope. Even when the whole world went <gray> and an attempt to find footing failed; he only swung around with the tree in his embrace—facing he wasn’t quite sure what direction, but it felt like sideways on the mountain.

“Guil? Guil, hang on!”

“Oh, I will,” he said, and kept his arms full of tree, hoping that his sight would come back—he had Burn’s view of <nightmare’s rump> and <worried Tara standing on the crest,> but he didn’t think that was directly in front of him. It seemed rather, like the rest of the mountain, somewhat to the side and behind him.

That persuaded him, along with the general inclination of the very flexible, smelly and prickly sapling, which stabbed right through his gloves and through a gap that had developed between his glove and his jacket cuff, that if he let go he’d fall—which would hurt his side and his headache far worse than hanging on was hurting him. So he clung.

Eventually he heard, through the gray that beset his vision, the scrabble of human feet and felt <worried Tara> much closer to him.

“Here.” A hand closed on his arm. “I’ll steady you.”

“I’m not seeing.”

“You can’t see?”

“It’s not bad. It’ll come back.”

“The hell it’ll come back!”

“A little knock on the skull. A while back. I’m just dizzy.”

“But you can’t see.”

“It’ll go away.”

“You’re a damn fool, Guil!”

“Just wait here a minute.”

“You should have told me you were having blackouts!”

“Just gray. It’s fine.” He blinked several times. He could see <Guil holding tree and Tara with Guil> quite plainly, looking down on the scene and slightly overlapped—his brain having temporarily lost the knack for sifting skewed images into one image. It made him dizzier, and for a moment he thought he was going to lose his breakfast into the bargain, which might make him let go of the tree.

Not a good idea.

And he supposed if it were just him and Burn, Burn would get back down here and give him something besides a tree to hold to; Burn had four feet, and he’d feel a lot better about that, than about Tara’s trying to pry him loose.

“You can’t hold me,” he said.

“I want you to put your arm around my shoulder and I want you to put your right foot in the direction I go. All right?”