Cloud's Rider

Six hours’ ride from here, if Da

“We’ve got to move,” Guil said, in the full knowledge there was no way he could last on that kind of ride. Bells in the night were a cry for help, from anyone in range. It seemed to him he didhear them with his own ears—and it was possible, given the folds of the mountain that made it that long a run for a horse.

It wasn’t saying the beast used the roads. It was past midnight. Since dark—it had had time to move, and itmight well have had a place it wanted to go.

The same place Spook, until tonight, had been discouraging it from going.

Half the bells that had been ringing were quiet now, a sudden, frightening kind of quiet, but the bells of the church and the mayoralty were still ringing. In want of other remedies Darcy Schaffer went about brewing tea. Brio

It was amazingly quiet, yet, but she supposed the barometer at the mayoralty might have dropped and advised the night guards. The air had that feeling about it, and with murder on her doorstep this morning and Brio

Occasion of her own uneasy rest—the Mackeys had come to call in the afternoon. They disavowed all knowledge of their son’s accusations, and wanted to assure Brio

“He’s in the rider camp,” Brio

Even that rebuff hadn’t set Mary Hardesty back. “But he’ll have a place with us when they straighten this ridiculous mess out. Our son thinks now he was mistaken. He thinks it could have been another miner he saw quarreling with that Riggs person.”

A wonder Rick Mackey hadn’t come in for stitches after some fall down the stairs today. She’d put various stitches in him during his growing up, usually for falls on the Mackey stairs. So Mary Hardesty had always claimed, and she’d bet any amount that Rick and his father had gone at it.

She hatedthat woman.

And of course Brio

“You think Rick can do that?” she’d been cold-blooded enough to ask. Rick’s lack of meaningful competence was well known even outside of Evergreen, by what she knew, but Mary Hardesty never flinched.

“Well, until we can hire help. In the girl’s name, of course.”

She’d gotten them out the door shortly after that, smiling all the while she was wondering whether the Mackeys had heard about Ernest Riggs’ proposal to her and whether thathad been the reason for Riggs’ violent demise.

They never had found the body.

She poured the tea. She added spirits to her own. She set a cup in front of Brio

But Brio

She sat down at the table with Brio

“I don’t care,” Brio

Hewas very clearly the brother. And that was at least a clue to Brio

Brio

“I hate him.”

“Don’t hate people, honey. It’s not good for you. —You know what we should do? We should both go to the store tomorrow. You’re strong enough, aren’t you? And we’ll get you a new coat, and some yarn for sweaters if we can’t find one we like. What color would you want?”

“I want a leather coat. Like riders have.”

“What about for church?”

“A red one.”

“And for Saturday nights? We used to have supper at the tavern on Saturdays. And everybody shows off their nice clothes. What would you like to wear?”

Brio

“He hears me,” she said. “He hears me. I can still talk to him. He won’tgo with my brother.”

“Brio

“He’ll come for me. He will!”

Horses. Adolescent fancies. Children pressed to the limit by a violence within the family that had finally found a way to attract outside attention. There was nothing, on the surface, amiss with Carlo Goss. But there’d been something deadly wrong in that household. Maybe it was Carlo. Maybe it had been the parents. But Brio

The thing was to humor the swings from fact to fancy and provide the girl a clear baseline of reality.

There was a battered pack of cards in the kitchen cabinet—hours and hours of solitaire had worn them smooth-edged. But she took them out and began to deal them.

“Do you play cards, dear?”

Peterson said they couldn’t open the gate, that they daren’topen the outside gates and he wouldn’t allow it: even relying on the lesser gate, the rider-gate swung too wide and they wouldn’t risk a swarm such as happened at Tarmin.

So they had brought a logging saw, one logger on the village side of the camp wall and Ridley on his with the other grip, ripping through the substantial vertical post that, buried deep in ice and earth, barriering the camp and the village apart from each other, so that no horse could pass it. It had taken too damned long, first arguing with the marshal about going around to the gates and then getting the saw from the supply store, because nobody wanted to go about the street to open the store, but now that they had it, the teeth made fast progress. The log went down in short order and Ridley and the logger, a man named Jackson, grabbed it up and carried it through to the village side, where they tossed it to the side of the gate.