He didn’t. He was in Evergreen, looking at the authority that governed the rider camp, and what Ridley said in these walls had to be law—including the possibility that Ridley would tell him get out of the village and go somewhere else, weather or no weather. A camp boss always had that authority, and he had to respect it.

But, God, he didn’t know where he or Cloud would get the strength to go on.

Chapter 6

Came, in due course, a thumping in the passage leading to the back door. The door opened and Callie—still with young Jennie, which Danny didn’t expect—came in ahead of a big burly man and three other village types in heavy coats.

That would be the marshal and his deputies, he supposed, the law on the other side of the wall—the dividing wall that existed here the same as it existed in substance and in fact in every town and village in the world, dividing the wicked rider camps from the godfearing and righteous townsmen—who couldn’t live without them. He didn’t trusttown authorities. On principle of that wall of Theirs and Ours and on principle of his days as a bad boy of Shamesey streets—granting his father was absolutely right to have hit him harder than the deputy had—he had several misgivings about turning Carlo and Randy over to the law, and far more about answering questions.

“These the young folk?” the oldest of the men asked, as his companions shut the door and stopped the gale from the passageway. “ This the young lady?” He had thick gloves on, but he didn’t offer his hand, just took off his hat—he had thinning white hair—while Ridley went through the course of introductions identifying village marshal Eli Peterson, his deputies Jeff Burani and Josh Hartley, and, not a deputy, preacher John Quarles—the hat should have told him.

On the other side, Ridley named Carlo and Randy Goss and their sister Brionne.

Then on an apparent afterthought, as riders knew they were always afterthoughts to townsmen of any stamp, “This is the rider that got them through. Name’s Dan Fisher.”

“One hell of a job,” the marshal said. Danny decided he liked the man. And was almost moved to get up and shake the man’s hand. “Damn,” the marshal said then, “you’re half a kid yourself.” Or maybe not, Danny thought, and stayed where he was, leaning back against the warm stones. His hand hurt too much, anyway.

“You’re saying Tarmin’s gone?” another man asked, him in the black hat, Reverend Quarles.

Danny nodded soberly, with a quiet in the room so deep there was just the fire-sound and the howl of the wind across the roof.

“Lord have mercy,” was the preacher’s reaction, that and a shake of his head.

“Don’t want to talk here,” Danny said. His voice had deepened with hoarseness, and he was having to force it as was. But it made him sound older. “Tomorrow. I’ll come over villageside. Tell you all you want to know.”

“The Lord was surely with these boys,” the preacher said.

Danny remarked to himself that of course the man carefully didn’t say that God could ever possibly be with a rider—just with the village-bred Goss kids. But he was a polite preacher. He’d come into a rider barracks without fuss and didn’t outright insult the roof he was under.

And maybe it was true that God had gotten the Goss boys up the mountain and just had to do it with the help of a damned-to-hell rider because, thanks to original sin, that was the way God regularly did things in the world beyond town walls. Or something like that.

Truth, he’d been halfway religious before he became a rider. He was still trying to figure the ins and outs of the preachers’ religion as it applied to him now that he’d heard the Beast and damned himself—because right and wrong just didn’t work out with neat edges any more when you saw beyond the neighborhood you grew up in, and from what he saw on the outside looking in, it never really had. Not even inthe old neighborhood, once you started seeing the rights and the wrongs you’d learned to ignore.

“Nothing left down there?” the second deputy asked—not able to believe the extent of the disaster down there, Danny thought, and didn’t blame him.

“Just the three got out,” Danny said, “them and one Tarmin rider. One border rider camped with her, in the last shelter between first-stage and Tarmin. The two of them’ll come up here, come spring. I—I brought themup.” He didn’t want to go into question and answer. He wanted Brionne away from the horses, behind the solid division of a village wall. “The girl needs a doctor, pretty quick.”

“We’ll see to it,” the marshal said. “Carlo, can you walk, son?”

Soundedlike a decent man. Soundedkind. He approved, then.

“Yeah,” Carlo said. “Randy can’t.”

“Might put ’em with Van,” Ridley suggested. “If he’ll take ’em. Under threat of God he might. They’re the smith’s kids, from down in Tarmin. Van needscompetition, doesn’t he?”

“We’ll talk to him,” the marshal said.

“We’ll lay the fear of the Lord on him,” the preacher added.

Carlo was meanwhile trying to pull his socks and boots back onto sore and swollen feet—his boots laced with cord, and he had a chance of making it in fairly short order. Randy didn’t even wake

“You want a tea and a shot?” Callie asked the official delegation.

“Thank you, no,” the marshal said. “Better we get these kids settled. This the girl?” The marshal turned back the furs.

There followed that small silence that Brionne’s pretty, doll-like face could well engender.

“Are her eyes affected?”

“She won’t shut them without the bandage,” Danny muttered, tucked down in his spot. “She’s been like that. Beast-struck.” That was what the town preachers called it if someone went out like that and wouldn’t come back. It happened, legendarily, to townfolk who either got stranded out in an area with beasts, or who, in the safety of town, had started hearing them. He’dnever known a case but this one. Legendarily, it happened to the innocent faced with the beast-mind. Practically—it happened to truckers and such that got caught out and survived. So he’d heard. Most didn’t survive.

He watched the preacher sign God’s mercy over her. But they were finally leaving. With Carlo managing to lever himself up by way of the wall behind him and to carry himself; the marshal’s deputies picked up Randy.

The marshal himself picked up Brionne, furs and all, like a father carrying a baby.

She was thirteen. She was blond. Blue-eyed. Even with her hair tangled and the scratches on her arms she looked like a saint in a painting.

Danny tried not to pay attention to any of it after that, just praying to God for them to get her the other side of that wall with nothing whatsoever happening while they were carrying her like that. Carlo asked for Randy’s boots and socks, and Danny just shut his eyes and ducked his head, wishing them to get moving, telling himself there wasn’t any good saying good-bye to Carlo and Randy— he’d be here all winter if Ridley didn’t order him out into the snow, and they weren’t his business now. He wasn’t in their acceptable social class, and once the desperation wore off he didn’t expect Carlo or Randy to have much more than a polite word for him when and if they next met.

The door shut.

So he didn’t have to be responsible for them anymore. He’d meet Guil and Tara up here when the thaw came—whenever a thaw came to the High Loop, which was probably well toward summer in the lowlands. He’d do the job they’d hired him for and then he’d go down to Shamesey and let his family know he was alive.

And—give it about an hour into Sunday dinner before his father started preaching at him about hell and his horse and he wanted out of there.

In that light, maybe stuck on a mountaintop for several months wasn’t so bad.