Mina shrugged, looked elsewhere, hurt—not at her, just hurting, without an ambient to carry it, that was why the rider quarters sat the measured distance it did from the horses, but, God, she could see it. Luisa and Mina were partners. They were best friends, together and with the men.

And because she was the know-it-all newcomer, it didn’t call on her to curse at Mina—she hadn’t access to the ambient to say <I love you> or <I’m scared, too,> and she couldn’t say what she thought aloud—words sounded stupid and lame when the ambient wasn’t behind them.

But she was their senior in years, with Vadim out of the camp. She was supposed to lay down the laws, she was supposed to keep them from driving each other off the edge. She was supposed to keep the camp in order and the village safe—but that hadn’t meant yelling at Mina.

“Mina,” she said, feeling the shakes nudging at her arms—“My fault. Sorry.”

“I don’t like this,” Luisa muttered. “I don’t feel good. Nothing feels good.”

“None of us feel good!” Mina snapped. “None of us feelgood. Can we just not go for each others’ throats?”

Tara was seeing <white> again. She was back in the forest.

Then an ember snapped, wood they’d carried in out of the snow-covered woodpile: it spat sparks and snapped and spat while it dried. But her nerves were raw-ended. She jumped and twitched, and couldn’t for a moment get her breath in the sickly closeness of the air.

The main room was log-walled, chinked with mortar. The corners were refuges for shadows, places the light didn’t reach, and they’d not lit the lamps. The firelight cast their three shadows large on the walls, on the rafters, and the interlocked shadows jumped with the gusts that bested the chimney’s updraft.

Another snap, not as loud as the first. But the nerves still jumped. She’d put off her jacket, but she was all but inclined to put it on again and go out into the yard and touch ambient one more time tonight.

They ought to go the hell to bed. Luisa was right: the boys were surely holed up somewhere and weren’t going to stir out again until the sun came up and they could face the unpleasant job of reporting back a grisly find which had to be the story out there.

If she hadn’t snapped at the kid when the kid had come into the den—

Probably with wonderful, special news to tell them. And they hadn’t fallen down admiring her. If there was a bad horse out there, it was enough trouble. If a bad horse had a rider when it went, the after-midnight lore held that the rider who didn’t shoot it fast went with it, and whoever was his good friend had better shoot him equally fast.

If the rogue snared that kid, then it could get from her what horses got from human minds—an outright addiction to the complexity of human images and an ability to remember and stick to a task until it was finished.

Until it was finished.

And Brionne, precious Brionne, didn’t thinkwhat anybody else wanted. When Brionne got an idea—nobody counted but what Brionne wanted. Did they?

She had gooseflesh on her arms. She didn’tneed to turn over that mental rock and examine the underside.

She found herself on her feet and pacing again. Mina was standing, arms folded, staring at the shuttered window. Luisa was whittling something. Luisa was always making wooden animals—she had a collection of them on the mantelpiece, real ones and fanciful ones. Tara couldn’t see what Luisa was carving. Didn’t want to guess. She ought to set an example and go to bed, but the thought of going off to a separate room and lying in bed alone with her thoughts was not at all attractive.

And maybe it was after all a good idea to check outside again before she tried to rest.

It was something to do, at least. If she just found silence out there, it was some reassurance; and she felt steady enough to look in on Flicker. So far the ill effects added up to a little swelling and soreness in the legs, nothing rest wouldn’t cure. Flicker could lie down and get up at will now, no worry about her going down and her lungs filling; but Flicker’s rider wanted to be sure of that from hour to hour, especially when she was staying a little outside Flicker’s range.

Surely the boys were all right. God, they weren’t a pair of juniors. They could take care of themselves. Fears spread, was all.

Hell, she said to herself then, and got up and went for her coat.

“Where are you going?” Mina asked.

“Just to take another listen,” she said. “Be right back.”

Mina looked worried. “You don’t go outanywhere,” Luisa said. “You want me to come with you?”

“Better just one of us. We’re too noisy tonight. I’ll check on the horses. Get a grip on my temper while I’m at it.” She shrugged into the jacket under two worried looks. She slung on her scarf and went out, not dressed for a long stay in the winter night, not even putting her gloves on.

The first breath of cold night air was a relief. She went down the wooden steps, crunched her way across a new film of ice on the tracked and hole-riddled yard, and trekked out toward the den under a starry, cloudless sky.

But there wasn’t peace. She felt, even at distance, a sense of unease among the horses, even before one of them came out of the den, a shadow in the low, earth-banked entry.

The second horse that showed up was definitely Flicker. All of them were in a surly mood. The first out had been Mina’s Skip, and Luisa’s Green turned up at Flicker’s rump—Green nipped at Flicker, and Flicker returned the favor with real temper.

<Quiet trees,> she sent. <Deep snow. Snowflakes falling softly.>

<White, > came Flicker’s chilling echo.

Then something got to her, a quickness of breath and a speeding heartbeat where everything around her said there was nothing wrong.

<Behave!> she sent to Flicker, and the horses sent a shivery, angry impulse back, on edge about a feeling she couldn’t see in the sky or hear in the air or smell on the wind.

<Vadim,> she sent out into the ambient as strongly as she could. <Chad!>

Then—she was being crazy. She wished she hadn’t made that noise in the ambient—in the remote case the horses together couldcarry it—in case the boys might hear it and do something foolish in the mistaken notion that the camp was in distress.

<Safety,> she thought, and wanted Flicker to carry that idea far and wide. <Forest. Village walls.>

But Flicker was skittish as she walked up. Flicker kept doing a nervous <white > sending and shifted about uncooperatively when she bent to lean against Flicker’s side and listen to her breathing.

Just the harsh, regular breathing of an uneasy horse, heartbeat a little fast, but it kept up with the breathing, and Flicker kept shifting about with her, quarreling with her den-mates.

Tara gave up, since Flicker was healthy enough to be difficult— ears up, nostrils working, disturbing attention outward; but she couldn’t get any sense of direction about it, just a general distress. She went from one horse to the next, patting necks, dodging shifting, restless bodies and swatting Green, who came just too close with a snap of her teeth.

<Inside the den,> she ordered them. <Flicker inside, Green inside, Skip inside.> She got that occasional <white,> and then a grudging compliance when she seized Flicker by the mane and pulled and argued with her.

Then the report of a gun echoed off the mountain—stark, sudden, close. Flicker jerked free of her hand. All the horses were looking toward the palisade wall, not the outer one, but the one that divided them from the village.

A flare of light touched the tail of her vision—she turned her head briefly, saw the shelter door open, a coatless Mina and Luisa standing on the porch.

“What was that?” Mina called to her.