Cloud's Rider

Then he saw they’d landed equally directly in sight of Rick Mackey, who was sitting at a table of young village folk. He didn’t like that. Rick and a couple of the young lads had their heads together, looking their direction, and he liked that less.

Then another table came vacant near them, occupied very quickly by a cluster of the older village girls, who generally hung about in a group and talked under the music, and who, Carlo began to be uncomfortably aware, had hada table before they switched seats to put their heads together and talk behind their hands, with frequent looks in their direction.

Then one of the girls got up and swayed her way toward them— got part of the way before Rick Mackey was out of his seat, grabbing her arm to have a talk with her.

Carlo didn’t like the look of that. Especially when the other girls got up from the table and surrounded the argument, shouting at Rick Mackey. The first girl jerked her arm free and, backed up now by her three female friends, allstrolled over to his and Randy’s table.

“Hello,” came the inventive approach from the girl who’d started the march on their table. “You’re Carlo Goss. I know about you from church. But I didn’t come meet you. It was such a crowd.”

She waspretty. You’re Carlo Goss? as if Randy weren’t even in the reckoning. “Yeah,” Carlo said, and gestured with a move of his hand to Randy, across the table from him. “That’s Randy. My brother.”

“My name is Azlea Sumner. We own the pharmacy.”

We, it was. That was fairly pretentious. He wouldn’t have claimed to own the shop down in Tarmin. She was pretty, she was clearly leading the pack of available females in the village, and Rick had just lost his public bid to restrain the contact.

“Glad to meet you,” he said, though he wasn’t sure about it. “You probably know everything about us.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, and dropped into the seat across the table and next to Randy, chin on hands. “What is there else we should know?”

A second girl sat down. A third dragged a chair over. Two more looked up chairs. Rick Mackey wasn’t the only scowling face among the young men of Evergreen. Carlo could see that fact past the wall of eligible females, seemingly constituting allthe eligible young women in Evergreen. It was promising to be a long, long winter: Randy looked to have figured out there was serious trouble, and cast him a silent appeal for quick thinking.

“I don’t know,” he said to her question. He wasn’t interested in playing games. He wasn’t interested in hergames. If she wanted a roll in the blankets and it didn’tentail the jealous observance of every unattached male in Evergreen, he’d still think twice about Azlea Sumner, whose introduction told him nothing but that her parents had money, and whose converse with him was all designed to get himto give herpieces of information.

Hell with that, he thought sourly. He wasn’t that hard up.

“So what happenedin Tarmin?” she asked, giving him the long stare at too close a range.

“A swarm came over the walls,” he said, “and ate everybody but us. Just bones. You could see them in the snow. Just bare bones and little frozen pieces of flesh.” He had another spoonful of stew. “Not a pretty sight.”

He thought it might drive them all off. It brought grimaces and shivers. It didn’t daunt Azlea Sumner.

“So you’re heir to the smith’s shop and houses and everything.”

“Could say, yes.”

“You must have been very brave.”

“Lucky,” he said shortly. “Very lucky. So tell me about Rick Mackey. He seems real interested in you.”

“Oh, him.”

“He’s a jerk,” Randy said helpfully.

“Contagious,” Carlo said. “Nice to meet you. Who are your friends?”

Sumner didn’t exactly plan to introduce her friends. That was clear. Azlea Sumner didn’t like not to be the center of absolute attention.

Fine. He wasn’t interested in playing, not if Sumner had been standing there stark naked. But he maintained small conversation with her and with her four friends, Cindy, Wilby, Lucia and Nilema. Nilema, last to drag a chair up, seemed by far the nicest of the lot.

But Randy was by now tired of being ignored, and very clearly didn’t like being kicked under the table when he opened his mouth to say something. Carlo wanted to get Randy out of the tavern. Failing that, he’d like them away from the table.

Maybe his disinterest came through too obviously, though, because Sumner and her entourage just then spotted some new girl coming through the door of the tavern that Sumner didn’t mind waving to and making a fuss over from a distance.

It was an escape: Azlea Sumner’s, her friends’, and theirs, though he feared they might steer the new arrival back to their table—in which case he was going to call an early end to supper and pocket a couple of sandwiches on the Mackeys’ tab.

He was not quite relieved that Sumner and her entourage, having captured the new girl, retreated to the side of the room where Rick and five or six of the boys were standing, all sending foul looks in their direction and sharing some kind of joke.

“What was she after?” Randy asked. It wasn’t a stupid fourteen-year-old question: Randy knewthe obvious that she could be after. He was asking the serious question: What was she after?

“Finish your supper.”

“Do you think she’s pretty?”

“She’s pretty and she thinks trouble is a lot of fun. Not our type. Thanks. We’ve seen real trouble. Eat your supper before something happens and we have to get out of here.”

“We don’t have to leave for her.”

“There are situations that could make it smart. Just besmart, little brother.”

He downed the remnant of his supper, not without an eye to who came and went: Rickleft, and he decided then he was going to stay longer. But Rick came back, probably from a piss, and the boys were still holding conversation at a table when, at his own pace, and in peace, he had the last spoonful and chased it with the glass of beer.

“Time we went home,” he said then.

“Home,” Randy said unhappily. “It isn’t.”

“Closest we have, kid. Take it as is.” He got up. So did Randy. They left, past the adult area and out into the snowy evening—too short a walk to resort to the passages, though the evening was snowy and very cold.

Twilight had gone blued and strange. The sky was overcast. The evergreens that lined the street and stood outside the smith’s shop were black in the dimming of the light, and the whole street was a row of odd, tall-roofed buildings and of snow-frosted evergreen.

They walked in via the side door.

And feet slipped. It was a sheet of ice they’d hit and they grabbed wildly at each other and at the door.

“Damn!” Carlo cried. There was water all over the floor, frozen, where it came near the colder spots near the walls and the doors.

“What happened?” Randy asked. “What did it?”

His mind was instead on the path the water had taken, over to the passageway door, and probably right down the steps, where it would make a hell of a slick spot for anyone coming to the house door via the passages.

But the source of it wasn’t likely melt off the roof, and it wasn’tlikely an ordinary winter occurrence.

“Water tank may have frozen,” he said, though that didn’t seem likely either, in the warmth of the forge, and there weren’t pipes to leak. “See if that’s the problem.”

He was thinking of that slick spot, himself, and Van and Mary coming home any minute. To forestall a noisy disaster and one with potentially serious effects, he picked up the sand bucket they kept to deal with fires from its place by the furnace. He scattered a little by the door they’d used, and went to the passage. He scattered the largest part of the sand there, and went back up into the forge proper.