Burn was going to defend him, that was clear. A shiver ran up Burn’s leg and over his hide and Burn snorted and hissed at an unseen enemy.

“Can you make it out?” Tara asked. “It’s not a swarm.”

“Don’t think so.” He made an effort to get up and did, leaning on Burn’s shoulder. From Burn there was another snort and a violent shake of his mane.

Not good, whatever it was.

Tara was <upset. Haze of snow, night, terror, horses running> came from her and from Flicker, he couldn’t mistake that.

They were armed. They had supplies. But there was that notice on the board that Danny Fisher had written, that <bad horse> warning.

The kid hadn’t been a rider that long. The kid hadn’t ever been into the High Wild. And if he’d heard something real damn confusing—he might not know what he heard. But twoexperienced riders and their horses—

—didn’t know, either.

It was a moral question to Danny—whether his responsibility for Carlo and Randy continued or ought to continue; and it was still a common-sense kind of question whether he could get Carlo in some kind of trouble by running over there to inform Carlo on what lawyers were doing, and including Carlo into matters that obviously involved the rich and powerful people in the village. Such people weren’t as rich and powerful as they might be down in Shamesey, granted, but seeing Carlo was accidentally between these people and a lot of money, he’d spent some extensive worry on the matter, at some times concluding he shouldn’t go, then thinking that while some were for protecting Carlo’s rights, some weren’t. And then again thinking—if Carlo was seen notto know, Carlo had a certain amount of protection, in that ignorance—if ignorance was ever protection, and his own experience said it wasn’t as much as the ignorant thought it was.

Most of all he didn’t know at what point of their own morality these people from the pretty blue-muraled church would conclude they were doing wrong. He was scared of lawyers. He was scared of courts.

Most of all he didn’t want to mess up Carlo’s future by making a decision that he didn’t have the information to make, and he’d held off till this morning hoping he’d hear some kind of wisdom out of Ridley or Callie during their evening talks.

“You suppose they’re going to treat the Goss boys all right?” he’d asked finally in desperation. “Are the lawyers honest?”

“They’re fools,” was all he’d been able to get out of Ridley last night. Ridley was mad about the situation, and that was what Ridley had on his mind: losing people from his village. And to the question of the lawyers being honest— “At poker,” Callie said, which didn’t tell him much about Carlo’s chances with them.

“You suppose I ought to tellCarlo?” he’d asked Ridley then, deciding on the direct approach.

“Don’t know what he could do about it,” was Ridley’s answer.

That put him in mind of what his father had always said about the law, which seemed the only wisdom that applied—just don’t sign anything.

He’d slept with it, and waked with it, and worried over it.

His first trip this morning had to be out to the den, and he left the breakfast table, dressed for the cold—a light snow was falling— and took Cloud a biscuit from breakfast. The other horses, crowding him as he came into the den from the open-air approach, were obliged to wait: Ridley encouraged him to do that, saying that waiting their turn was good for them: they’d gotten out of their summer manners, meaning when they regularly had strange horses in the den, and they could learn they hadn’t a right to every biscuit that came into their sight.

So while Ridley was helping Callie clear the dishes, he fed Cloud his treat and rubbed him down from head to tail and oiled his feet, quiet in his mind for the first time since he’d come to Evergreen.

Cloud was satisfied, making that curious contentment sound, enjoying the importance of the first and only biscuit of the day. Cloud ducked his head around while he was working and licked the inside of his ear, which Cloud knewhe hated.

Both of them were moving a little more freely now, on feet less tender and joints less sore, and, able to go to Cloud and do such basic, ordinary things, Danny felt a great knot of tension that had been in him unravel. Conclusions hard to come to in the guarded ambient in the barracks were far clearer to him when he’d gotten out here to ordinary work.

The truly difficult things were over and done with, the emergencies were all settled, and there was almost nothing to do but brush Cloud’s tail and feed Cloud and bring him biscuits.

Cloud liked that idea. If there’d been females available, the winter would be absolutely perfect. But, next best thing to please his horse, Danny thought about <hunting,> and expected Cloud to approve that idea.

Cloud wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as he might have been. Cloud lifted his head and looked toward the walls and shivered.

Danny found that very odd. He stopped the brushing with his fist still full of Cloud’s tail, and he looked in that direction without even thinking he’d done it.

He’d never been wintered-in anywhere before. Shamesey didn’t have weather to require it, although a lot of riders arrived there to winter-over and the trade died down: Shamesey never felt isolated.

But Evergreen village suddenly seemed very small and very fragile against the mountain shoulder. It dawned on him then for the first time that there just wasn’t any human civilization in the world farther out on the edge than Evergreen and the little string of villages down its lonely road. Over on the other side of the mountain— there was just the Wild, where humans who’d dropped down from the sky had never visited, not on their farthest rides. No villages, no trails, no camps, no riders. Civilization just stopped—maybe just around the shoulder of the rock outcrops on the road they’d ridden. Civilization stopped in the mountains he’d not been able to see from his whited-out vantage on that high turn. Nobody had been out there. Ever.

Cloud’s skin twitched. Cloud snorted and the other horses acted bothered, but the ambient was otherwise quiet, and Cloud settled to being brushed again, rocking gently to the strong strokes Danny put into it.

A rider just shouldn’t think about spooky things, he told himself, not up here, not when the wind had started to blow out of the unsettled Wild.

The snow was coming down thick and hard when he walked out of the den with the notion increasingly sure that in this edge-of-the-world place friends were hard come by.

The end of winter might not see him better settled in the barracks than the beginning had: he had every legitimate rightto be in the rider camp for the winter, but he still found himself in an awkward position as an intrusion in the common room of the barracks— which turned out to be a family’s living room: not that it was supposedto be that, but there just wasn’t another child Jennie could play with—even as easy as the rider camp’s relationship with the village seemed, thatline was one people wouldn’t send their children across—and the barracks that in some places was a very rough and careless environment, was unquestionably a family living arrangement in Evergreen, an arrangement in which a teenaged visitor of outside origins was undeniably suspect in motives and personal habits. He didn’t think even Callie thought he’d do something so awful as have designs on Jennie; but clearly Callie didn’t leave him alone with Jennie, He wasn’t friendswith Callie. He never would be, he strongly suspected. He probably would never be friends with Ridley, on Callie’s account.

He didn’t know what his relationship was with Carlo, and why he hesitated so long and resisted so much going over there, whether he didn’t want to get the rebuff he’d had from some of his old townside friends, or whether he was beginning to believe Callie that he was a fool in the path of rational people, and he was scared to give Carlo advice on something he really didn’t understand any more than Carlo did.