Danny struggled for calm, said, on a breath, “Yeah, I figured,” and shrugged his arm free.

He went over then to stand in the rain in Cloud’s close company and think about Shamesey, because Cloud was mad, and Cloud could get hurt—<gun firing,> Danny sent, and stroked Cloud’s shoulder and neck and held on to him tightly. <Quiet grass. Quiet water.>

But Cloud thought about <Ice and Froth,> and even of <Shadow, > which he thought might be Cloud’s way of saying they’d been much better off where they’d been, and if Cloud’s rider hadn’t lost his temper they wouldn’t be here.

Danny tried not to think about the camp. He thought instead about the mountains where they were going, and high-country cold, and tried not to think about Jonas, or guns—they’d pushed hard and late in their traveling and still not managed to catch Jonas and his crew. They’d found Jonas’ abandoned campsite with no trouble: the horses could smell <smoke> even when a fire was dead and buried.

But they hadn’t caught Jonas and his company, and Danny wasn’t at all sorry about it. He feared there’d be shooting if Jonas and the Hallanslakers met, and he didn’t want himself or Cloud to be in the middle of it. He skittered nervously around the thought that maybe Jonas and his friends could win a shootout, if one happened; or that Jonas might lie in wait for Harper; or that Jonas being out ahead of them might warn Stuart and team up against the Hallanslakers.

Most of all he tried not to think about Stuart, since he’d as good as told Harper aloud what way Stuart had gone, and by that, how and where to lay an ambush.

Ambush was very much what Harper intended. He gathered that from the lot of them. They wanted no fair fight. And he didn’t know why—except they hated Stuart because of a dead man whose name he didn’t know, and because of a quarrel they’d had when they’d worked together. It seemed to him a thin reason to want to kill somebody, since by what he could gather, Stuart hadn’t killed the man he’d fought, and it had been a fair fight—but that didn’t matter to them or to Harper.

And the Hallanslakers in general kept imaging Stuart and the rogue as one and the same, as if—as if somehow they’d become the same thing in the Hallanslakers’ minds, an ugly thing, a tricky, shifting thing in their thoughts. They wallowed in their notion of Stuart as the enemy and their image grew and grew even off things heknew and hebrought to the ambient: they caught his image of < Stuart on the porch > and twisted it until it was an evil, cheating man, giving a kid bad advice. They caught his memory of <Stuart shot on the hill> and twisted it around until it was <riders defending Shamesey gates > against <man meaning harm to them.>

He felt sick at his stomach with the shifting-about they were forcing on his memories. They didn’t beat him, and on the evidence of tonight’s camp, they didn’t intend to starve him. They just thought their skewed thoughts at him so insistently and so often and so vengefully he felt the edges of his world curling up, as if the images he cherished of Stuart were about to peel away and show something else underneath.

But when the Hallanslaker images came thick and fast, Cloud just imaged <dung-pile> and <white, crawling maggots,> continuing surly—a noisy horse, Jonas had said of Cloud.

And Cloud was. The ambient several times in the afternoon had gone crazed with conflicting images and Cloud’s disgusting commentary, until the man who’d appropriated his supplies had started calling him names of a sort he’d never in his life tolerated, and then threatened Cloud.

That was Quig, no other name, Quig. There were three of them, counting Harper. Quig and Watt—he gathered they were cousins. Harper’s horse was an image of shapes and dark—Spook was how he thought of the beast, but he never heard Harper call its name; Quig’s horse was flashes of light; and he didn’t even catch Watt’s big horse: it just slipped around in the ambient. Watt had a hellacious scar running back into his hair, and a dent in his skull where it looked like he’d been kicked once upon a time. They all carried rifles. From what he could tell they’d rather shoot from far off than confront anybody on equal terms.

He heard movement. He felt it, simultaneously, from Cloud: < Harper walking, > and looked behind him, where Harper stopped, hat brim dripping with the rain. Harper was mad.

“Smart-ass kid,” Harper said. “Damn troublemaker. You don’t know all you think you know.”

He didn’t want to listen. He turned his face away to avoid a fight and Harper punched him in the shoulder.

That got his attention, and a move from Cloud that he stopped with a shove of his hands.

“Smart-ass, I’m saying. Big threat, kid. The Wild doesn’t give a damn.”

<Dark. Separation. Forest, trees thick-shadowed with night. Body in the shadows, lying on the leaves, bones broken, face mottled with shadow and blood, bone bare on cheek and forehead. Body in the woods, gunshot in the forehead—>

Harper’s thought. Cloud shied off, the horses around them shied, catching the rogue-feeling implicit in the sending, and Danny didn’t know when Harper grabbed him. Harper was suddenly holding his arm so hard the slicker clasp parted at his throat. They were together in a woods where it wasn’t raining, and this… thingwas around them.

“You don’t like it?” Harper asked him. “Don’t like it?”

Harper had cared for the dead rider; Harper had felt pain and guilt then that Harper felt now, and it was all one thing with Stuart, < Stuart with a knife, Stuart inviting attack, a different Stuart than he knew, angry and deadly serious.> And <the woods and the rogue and the hillside above Shamesey—> Everything was muddled up together in Harper’s mind, and <rider and horse going off a road> and <blood on the rocks > and <body in the woods > were all together with <rogue-feeling.>

Danny couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think straight. <Quiet water!> was all he could fight with. And it wasa fight: Harper was angry and Danny used what streetwise and campwise skills he had, twisted at Harper’s grip, insisted on his own thoughts—but Harper twisted back with a stronger grip and imaged gruesome detail of the battered, dead face.

“My brother,” Harper said. <Dead face. Gunshot between the eyes.> “My brother. You think you’re going to go up there on the mountain, facing that thing, and be a hero, kid? You think it’s all that easy? You think you’ll sleep easy after that?”

He began to be afraid, afraid Harper was crazy, afraid that Harper was going to spook Cloud into an attack and they’d shoot: he kept sending <no> to Cloud as hard as he could, aware of Cloud’s anger, Cloud’s revulsion and the spillage of thoughts of violence all around him.

“I’ve seenit,” Harper said, up in his face. “It wants you, that’s what it does, it wants you so bad, and it’ll get right up to you and you’ll let it, you can’t help it. It wants you, and you can’t hear anything else. And that’s when you’ve got to hold firm, that’s when you’ve got to want to kill it, you got to want to kill it before it kills your horse and it kills you, you hear me, kid? You shoot it fast, because you want it so bad it’ll haunt you, it’ll be back in your brain every time you put your head down to sleep, it’ll be there behind your eyelids every time it’s quiet. It’ll be there. It’s always there. I’ve seen it. I’ve shot it. I shoot it every time it comes back to me, because I won’t let it near me, you hear me?” <Man shot between the eyes> was the image. <Rogue-sending> was the feeling.

“Yessir,” he breathed, “yessir,” because it was the only way he knew to get loose. He felt sick at his stomach. He wanted <free of Harper.>