Cloud's Rider

But Randy stayed. <Randy> was there with them, <wanting Brio

Glass shattered at that house. Wood broke. A throat uttered a sound not human. <Rage> came back at them. <Terror and anger.>

“It’s going up!” Callie cried aloud. “ It’s <heading for the roof!> Get a sight on it!”

Da

Hedidn’t trust he could hit it and not spook it out of the sights of those with a chance. Tara, beside him, and Ridley, had rifles.

More than those two guns went off. A ragged volley made Cloud jump and him blink, and in the stench of gunpowder and the smell of snow around him afterward—there wasn’t anything on that roof.

“Did we get it?” Ridley asked. Randy’s shock was racketing through an ambient that was just them, now, nothing in, on, or beyond that house.

“Don’t trust not hearing it,” Da

Randy attaching himself close to Cloud afoot, and Tara and Flicker going on his other side.

That silence persisted. The doctor’s house stood adjacent to outbuildings, small sheds behind; but a warehouse roof came close, and he and Tara went down the alley it made, rejoining the others along the wall.

The post was absent from the rider-gate. Da

The marshal and his group came now and joined them as, in the very early dawn and among the shadows that still were left, they looked for footprints.

They didn’t find them until they went through the rider-gate. The tracks of one set of long humanlike feet and sometimes two, the second clearly human, went toward the den.

Shimmer was <outraged,> and Slip pulled the rest of them in, as a band of five horses went toward the den intent on <driving out intruders.>

But the tracks went around to the outside, to a rider-gate left standing open to the forest and the light coming through the trees.

Da

So they both thought it more prudent to go back to the village and in a day or so, with full kit and enough gear to survive what began to feel like chancy weather, set out to warn other villages. There was nothing they could do chasing it now; and a great deal they could do by warning the other settlements.

Besides, with the beast’s talent for misdirection, and the possibility of a human mind helping it, they didn’t want to leave things in disorder in the village behind them—in case it didn’t find itself discouraged.

Guil and Carlo came in the early afternoon, with snow coming down heavily. Guil was decidedly hurting, Burn was exhausted, and Carlo had walked, so as not to overload Spook. Both of them had pushed things more than they ought.

They came in the village gates. In the middle of the street and in full view of the curious, Carlo slid down off Spook’s back and held out his arms for his brother, who until that time had held himself reserved and quiet. Things weren’t reserved or quiet for some time, then, in that quarter, among riders and villagers alike.

And introductions went quickly, rider-fashion, the ambient thick with self-protection and reserve for a moment, then warming up considerably. Yes, the Evergreen camp had known Guil’s lost partner, they’d liked Aby Dale, they trusted her lifelong partner; and they knew that the last Tarmin rider hadn’t survived by scanting duty, any more than Tara had done since her arrival at Evergreen.

They stayed villageside, all of them, including Guil and Carlo, with the horses, to survey the damage, to help the marshal sort out the dead and make sure the village felt safe. With the smell of blood on the wind it was certain in their minds and in the minds of very anxious villagers and winter residents that the wildlife wouldcome back to the area, and relatively quickly if the beast hadn’t hunted it to nonexistence: Guil said the ambient had formed at their backs on their ride along the road like water flowing into a gap, as if wild things knew that a horse’s presence in this instance was an assurance of a worse predator moving out of the territory.

And in truth that night and the morning after there wasn’t a sign of it coming back—hard to imagine a creature you had to recognize in terms of the silence that went around it. Slinkwas the name some villager came up with for it, and it might stick, who knew? It was certain at least that the High Wild produced some odd creatures, some strange, some deadly, and that humans who’d come to the world had yet to see most of them.

As Tara said, they just hoped this one stayed wherever it had gone. Weather came howling down, and that, the village hoped, finished that. In all senses.

Even the Goss brothers’ mourning was short.

Chapter 23

Water dripped off the icicles that rimmed the barracks roof—which often happened on su

Likely there was already green in the fields around Shamesey. Da

But with, as Guil put it, water begi

So carts were being built and axles and wheels reinforced. Wood was at a premium. Van Mackey had had more work all winter than he wanted to get around to, and had to do it alone: Rick Mackey had been at The Evergreen that night, and Carlo never had gotten the chance to sort grievances out with him. There was a cave in the mountain that served to keep the dead, and Rick Mackey and twelve others were there, besides Serge Lasierre and Darcy Schaffer. Except Earnest Riggs, whose body they never had identified for certain.

The village was without a doctor, but the pharmacists, husband and wife, served as they’d begun to do during Darcy Schaffer’s year of retirement, and their daughter, Azlea Sumner, had settled down to the notion shemight apprentice to the doctor over in Mornay— the doctor there, in the second and third times the two villages had met for skating outings on the pond, had talked about resettling to Evergreen, as a far bigger establishment. The doctor had a son, and Azlea Sumner was very interested.