Then Vadim and Chad passed the gate with a pelting of trodden snow from their horses’ heels, and rode away on a trail of young girl’s footprints.

They wouldn’t find the hope the blacksmith wanted to find, she was well sure of that.

Worse, the first hint of sunset color was already in the sky: light didn’t last long in autumn, on this eastern face of the mountains— they had a treacherously short while they could ride, to find what an uncompromising Wild might have left of Brionne Goss, and to get back again safely.

She dragged the gate shut. Mina helped. Luisa dropped the latch and shoved it down hard, to be sure.

<Rider-stone in green grass,> Guil remembered. <Trees.> But Burn remembered not. The accompanying rider-shelter as Burn had it in his thoughts had not even brush around it, with precious little grass at all, a desolate place with <bad-tasting grass.>

And when, as they rounded a bend of the road around a long hill, Guil saw the rider-stone with his eyes, not his mind—he rubbed them to be sure.

Indeed the image, wrapped in the murk of rain and twilight, did stop when he pressed his fingers against his eyes.

Burn was right. There was no pasturage worth considering. The stone stood in a widening mud-puddle filling a slight depression— a sight that afflicted Guil with a shiver of some kind, be it chill of weather or doubt of the future he’d bargained for, listening to Cassivey, committing himself to the man’s employ.

Anveney was death. He didn’t know how he could have forgotten it, talking to the rich man, taking his hire. It didn’t matter if Cassivey was affable and convenient and talked an extravagantly good deal—Anveney was still death.

And when they reached the stone and he chanced to glance at the signs scratched on it, old marks and new—the first thing his eye fell on was a plain circle with a crescent.

Aby and Moon.

<Us on the road,> he urged Burn, unreasoning, spooked. He wanted nowhere near this place. He wanted no part of this trail, this direction, this chain of events.

But Burn thought, <warm log shelter,> and carried him willy-nilly along an eroded rising trail until the dark, rain-dripping shadow of the log shelter was in front of them.

<Aby staying in this place,> Guil thought, and ducked reflexively as Burn passed under the roof edge, into almost-night, into an east-facing recess where the wind had to come clear around three walls to enter, and where the rain had to ride those gusts or seep weakly through cracks in the roof in order to fall on them.

Something small skittered past Burn’s feet, out into the rain. Burn stamped at it, imaging <nighthorse> and <fire> until whatever it was vacated the place glad to be alive.

All the same, the jolt of that move hit Guil’s nerves and sent him light-headed. He had to lean on Burn’s neck until he could muster the strength to slide off under the weight of the rifle and pistol and the rest that he carried.

He committed himself finally, leaned and swung. His feet hit the ground at the same moment he shed the rifle strap into his hand. He stood very precariously for a moment, sight and hearing fading.

Then he saw and heard the rain falling in a night-lit curtain outside—felt random drops dripping through the absolute black of the chinked logs onto their heads, and breathed the mist gusted in from the open side, but the air inside the shelter felt breathlessly warm and strange to his cold-numbed skin, all the same, after the rush of wind-borne water outside.

He dragged the pack down from Burn’s shoulders and wobbled over to the wall, wet below the knees and around the cuffs of the sleeves. He couldn’t just sit down and wait to dry out, when rain could easily turn to sleet or snow and temperatures could drop below freezing with no more warning than that mountain wind out there already gave him.

He felt along the wall and leaned the rifle in the corner, then dropped the pack in what he hoped was a reasonably dry spot. Then he unbuckled and shed the weight of the sidearm to pegs he felt, some rider’s thoughtful addition to the accommodation.

Lastly, light-headed, he sat down on the damp earthen floor on the spot to strip off the wet boots and the trousers, wrapped himself below the waist in a dry blanket from the canvas pack, still wearing sweater, coat, slicker and all, because the plastic was holding in his body heat and he needed everything he had that was remotely dry to keep that heat around him.

He knew one thing for dead certain: he wasn’t moving on in the morning. If a man got soaked at the edge of winter, a man already possibly concussed, to judge by the hellish headache he carried behind his eyes, then that man if he wasn’t a total fool didn’t travel out of shelter till fire or sun had dried his clothes.

And Burn’s better night vision, in the black inside of the shelter, told him that a fire wasn’t an option. He sent Burn out into the rain, <looking for woodpile against shelter wall,> but Burn didn’t find one, came in wet and shook himself.

Nobody’d restocked the shelter. Wood wasn’t available in the land any longer.

No wood. Aby’d been the culprit, maybe Hawley and Jonas. Couldn’t blame them, damn their lazy hides. But if it had been woodless when they used it they’d sure not ridden after any, either. He’dhave restocked the damn shelter unless there was a life-and-death hurry about getting out, and he didn’t think there had been. If it were anybody but Aby he’d have said careless.

But maybe with the weather changing, and a need to go on a schedule that couldn’t, by Cassivey’s whim, and needn’t, by Aby’s judgment, wait for spring—he could forgive her.

Still, —damn—

He began to shiver. He huddled there shaking his teeth out, took his hat off, put the blanket over his wet hair, wrapped his arms about himself under the blanket and slicker and tucked his feet up—he couldn’t feel his toes, but he didn’t think he’d been out there long enough for frostbite, thanks to Burn, all thanks to Burn.

<Bacon in dry bright sun,> he promised Burn, clenching his teeth to still the shivers. <Burn coming over the hill in the rain. Burn carrying the packs. Handsome, splendid, shining in the sunlight nighthorse.>

Burn lapped it up like cream; and Burn began to think of <fire, and dry bedding and bacon cooking,> which wasn’t as good as edible supper, but it was far better than the drip of rain in the real world outside.

<Wet, dripping wood,> Guil thought, there being very little convenient way to image a complete lack of any given thing—and Burn wasn’t much on the technicalities of fire-making. Burn knew it was raining, of course, and Burn hadn’t found a woodpile, or any trees, but Burn was hungry. There were three slabs of bacon in the supplies Burn’s rider had lugged an agonizing long way from Anveney—and that of course changed all logic. Bacon was here. <Fire> happened in Burn’s mind when Burn thought of it.

So Burn thought of <fire.> Burn did his part. Burn expectedit to happen.

Well, so the one of them with fingers bestirred himself, teeth chattering, and, for a peace offering, took some beef jerky out of the pack, only then and shakily remembering that food hadn’t crossed his path at all today, either.

So it wasn’t bacon, and it couldn’t be bacon until the rain stopped, until he dried off, or unless a woodpile miraculously appeared, but Burn took the jerky as the best he could do under difficult circumstances, and simply thought <bacon.> Burn chewed the first piece, then heaved a gusty sigh, circled, Burn’s habit when he was tired, and sank down, precarious process in the cramped space between him and the storm, narrowly missing a vertical support pole, arranging himself so that Burn’s rider, who insisted on sitting, could feed him bits of jerky, two, of course, to the human’s own one, considering Burn had a far bigger appetite.