Beyond that, day after tomorrow, they’d start across the mountain toward the villages on a calm day when they could do it without struggle. There was a doctor in Evergreen, the first and largest of the five settlements. They’d get advice what to do about thirteen-year-old Brionne, ideally deliver Brionne into a doctor’s hands within the village proper, which would do as much for her as ever could be done; after that the boys could find work in Evergreen or one of the other villages and start their lives over, good luck to them and God help them if their sister lived.

That would mean he’ddone all his conscience told him he had to do, and he would have carried out a job that had set Tara Chang free to take care of a friend of his who was wintering down in that cabin beforethis road. Guil wasn’t well enough to make this trip—having a hole through his side. While Tara—

Tara hadn’t wanted to have them snowed in with her and Guil. Danny’d been available to run escort to the next cabin over, which meant Tara didn’t have to do it. He’d saved her from that situation and gotten on her good side, in his fondest hopes, by taking the kids on—because if the kids were going to survive to reach the villages above—if the kids were going to leave that cabin for anywhere in the world—a rider had to escort them: no one, even experienced in the Wild and armed to the teeth, could get from one shelter to another withouta rider to guard him—and village kids wouldn’t be safe even insidea shelter and with a gun if one of the larger, cleverer hunters got the notion there was food inside.

A horse was the protection. A gun was for the mental comfort of the gun owner, so far as he’d seen.

And guns were, unfortunately, also for human quarrels, in which horses were best off if they didn’t participate.

And that was the other half of the reason they were on this road in this weather: thanks to a human quarrel some days before their reaching the place, and not uninvolved with Guil and Tara, the situation at the first-stage cabin hadn’t been safe—and matters had combined to say that up the mountainmight not only be their eventual intention, but their immediate necessity.

Because at first-stage a problem had moved in on them—a horse whose rider had died, a horse attempting to attach itself to any horseless humans in its reach. It wasn’t unnatural that a grief-stricken horse should do that—but the only horseless humans in reach happened to be the two boys he was escorting and, in his worst nightmares, their sister Brionne.

Thathad clinched his decision to move on. To hold that cabin otherwise he’d have had to shoot the horse, which wasn’t an easy choice for a rider. Or he could have run the gauntlet of its presence and taken them all back to Tara and Guil for help.

But the last thing in the world he wanted was to come running back for help as soon as a problem came up with a job Tara clearly, emotionally, didn’t wantback on their doorstep. Next spring he had a rendezvous with her and Guil for a salvage job—a truck that hadn’t been lucky on these same curves. Guil had as good as hired him already, there was considerable pay involved from some company down in Anveney town, and for a junior rider with no working partner, no references, and no prospects of hire this spring, that was an incredibly good offer, one which he didn’t intend to foul up by destroying their confidence in him.

So with the weather seeming likely to hold fair, they’d moved for the next shelter, higher up the mountain, a barren, hard-rock place where the horse that had been haunting their vicinity would have no forage and to which it wouldn’t follow them.

They’d moved again this morning—because of the weather turning foul, on a choice in which he had less confidence he was right; though thank God they’d shaken the horse off their trail somewhere between first-stage and midway. It was lost and desperate—but not thatdesperate; and it might go back to harass Guil and Tara, whose two horses would drive it off, or it might finally find the other strayed horses on the lower skirts of the mountain and find safety with them. So thatpart of the problem he’d handled.

That left getting them to the top of this road.

Truth was, this job of escorting the Goss kids, through all the complications that had so far set in, was the first job he’d ever done completely on his own, and he didn’t know whether he’d ever actually told Tara so. Guil, who knew, hadn’t been tracking too well on anything for the time they’d been there, so the matter of his prior experience hadn’t actually, well, exactly come up. Tara, who knew this mountain, had been concentrating her efforts on giving him a mental map of the landmarks and problems involved.

So he didn’t think he’d made the fact of his inexperience quite clear—but he damn sure wasn’t going to meet two senior riders next spring to confess he’d let these kids die on the mountain. He’d do the job. He might know a great deal by now that he didn’t want to know about the Goss family—but he’d do it.

Then Guil and Tara would trust him next spring and give him the responsibility that would makehim hireable by convoys that were only a distant, hard-won hope for a rider born to a town. He’d lived through enough up here to know he wantedthe high country and that with several good tries it hadn’t killed him. He was high on his own survival, he saw a freedom for him and for Cloud he’d never known, never imagined, in town, and he saw a set of teachers he could otherwise only dream of—if he could deserve their confidence in him.

Wind blastedinto their faces of a sudden. He’d been able to see the rocks on the right just a second ago and he felt Cloud walking ahead of them, so he wasn’t disoriented; but suddenly it was just—white, with an abrading blast of sleet that made him duck his head and shut his eyes.

So had Cloud. Thatdidn’t help his orientation.

“God,” he heard from Carlo, a voice half-drowned in the wind.

“It’s getting worse!” Randy cried.

The boys had stopped walking. Cloud hadn’t. “Keep going!” Danny shouted at the boys. “It’s probably just this stretch! Snow coming off the height up there!”

“I think it’s coming out of the sky!” Randy cried. Randy was fourteen, two years younger than Carlo, a year older than Brionne, and the kid had been gutsy and all right until now—but now <fear> was loud and clear in the ambient of emotions and images that came at them relayed from Cloud.

<Fear> was suddenly feeding on its own substance, upsetting Cloud, upsetting Randy as his own panic flooded back at him. Danny clamped down on the accelerating distress with calm images: <Still water, water flowing over stones. Snowflakes landing soft and perfect on white snowbank.>

And: “Move!” Danny yelled in a ragged voice that didn’t come out of his throat half so fierce or so low as he intended. He pushed at Carlo, who was on the right-hand pole of the travois as Randy was pulling the left, and they struggled into motion—they were starting across one of those rubble-and-shorings sections, by the disorganized way the wind was coming at them.

And soon enough the wind was battering their right sides with a vengeance, pushing them toward the left, where there wasn’t anything but empty air.

Cloud was <mad nighthorse.> Cloud had <cold belly.> Cloud was not pleased with humans lagging back and distracting him with their stupid arguments in a cold wind. Cloud wasn’t panicked about the situation, but he was definitely struggling for footing now, sending more strongly than usual, feeling his way through the whiteout and using senses that even his rider wasn’t used to having at the top of the broth of thoughts that was the ambient. Cloud was feeling <wind on his hide> and getting a vague <mountain-shape> from it somehow, Cloud was <smelling the wind,> and knowing <sky-side from rock-side> with a range of discriminations the human brain might not even have categories for. Humans being sky-fallen strangers to the world and horses being native to it, sometimes a rider just had to take the little information he could get in his own peculiar way of understanding and otherwise cast himself on his horse’s sense of direction and his horse’s four-footed stability.