“You saw the girl leave?” the marshal asked. “Or not?”

“Didn’t see, didn’t hear,” Tara said. “We had a sick horse. Mine. It was too noisy to hear anything in the camp. Not in the village. Not if that kid was listening to the Wild.”

The mayor and the marshal looked uncomfortable—villagers didn’t want details about the horses, or anything else in the Wild. They wanted their walls to prevent that.

“Meaning you wouldn’t know. You’re guessing.”

“We wouldn’t know,” Tara said. “That’s the point. But footprints went out the gate.”

“Alone?”

“Goss and his kids all accepted it was the girl.” She remembered queasily that they didn’t immediately see in their minds what she saw. She tried to build the picture for men that didn’t see. “The snow hadn’t been tracked. Just the ice-melt from the den roof. The tracks. The gate being pulled inward made a scraped mark. About as wide as a girl needed. Tracks going out, about her size feet, no tracks going back.”

“Where are these tracks?”

“Gone now. Horses tracked over them, all over out there.”

“That’s real convenient,” the mayor said.

“Mayor Bay, there’s one way out that gate. Horses had to take it to go out to look for her. And that’s what the boys are doing— looking for her.”

“Single tracks?”

“Pointed-toed boots.” She had a good mental image of the boys’ feet. Their tracks. Her brain saved things like that. “The boys’ boots are square-toed. The blacksmith’s—his were round. These tracks were smaller and lighter. No rider wears boots like that.”

“Andy Goss identified them?”

Absolutely no doubt in her mind. “The father had just found out,” Tara said reluctantly, “how much the boys hated the sister. They were standing near the horses. They heard more than they wanted to hear about each other. I was there. I heard it. I couldn’t help hearing.”

“You’d better come across,” the marshal said. “Give a deposition, too.”

“I’ve sworn to things before,” Tara said. She didn’t like village justice. And it didn’t take a rider’s word. “I saw what I saw. And heard what I heard. I agree with her. Write it. I’ll sign your paper.”

“Better you should swear to it over village-side,” the mayor said. “Tonight. Where the village can hear. We want this case disposed. Feelings are running high over there.”

A damned hurry, Tara thought, and looked at Luisa and Mina, and drew shrugs there. But the Raths, the mother’s family, were damned well-to-do. Deacons of the church. Pillars of the village council.

“All of you,” the mayor said.

“Got to get our coats,” Luisa said.

“All right,” the marshal said and, with the mayor, headed for the door and out, no hesitation.

“What did you mean,” Tara asked Mina, an urgent whisper, “the wife helped, the wifebeat the boy? For God’s sake, you don’t know that for a fact! —Do you?”

Mina shrugged. “Goss is dead. What good’s it going to do to shoot the boy, too? He’s not a bad kid. Goss beat the boys—and what was shedoing for sixteen years?”

It was logic. She had to admit that. Save the salvageable. Villagers couldn’t tell truth from untruth in a rider’s mind. They couldsave the boys. And the Raths weren’t going to like it.

She grabbed her scarf and hat, and went out with Luisa and Mina, the three of them resolved on a lie, and no horse near to tell the mayor or the marshal.

No horse near to tell them what was going on outside, either. They crossed the icy yard behind the villagers and entered together through the village-side gate… it was farther than they liked to be from the horses, Tara felt it and she felt the same from Luisa and Mina.

But they walked, all the same, and heard a commotion out in the winter cold, saw lanterns lit, and a steamy-breathed crowd gathered under the lanterns.

They proved more conspicuous than they liked, as they walked into that crowd in the mayor’s wake, and followed (Tara supposed they were to follow, and nobody stopped them) all the way to the porch of the marshal’s office and the village lock-up, which was mostly for midwinter drunks, if they got to breaking up the village’s single bar.

This time, though, there was a gathering of the village officers, the clerk and the justice in front of a lot of the village—men, women, and children—and now the mayor and the marshal and, lastly, themselves, up the steps and onto the wooden porch that fronted the marshal’s house and the jail and the court office, that being all the same building. They’d hung lanterns from the porch-posts and set a table and a chair between them. The judge sat at the table. The village clerk sat at a right angle to him, to do writing.

“Say what you said to us,” the marshal said, and Tara couldn’t feel Mina panic, but she saw the flinch. Mina said it again, in a quiet voice:

“The kid had cause.”

“Louder,” the mayor said, and shouted for quiet, and the judge bashed the table with a metal hammer and said he wanted quiet in the hearing. There was the hammer on the judge’s table. Lying near it, jumping when he hammered for order, there were two large-caliber bullets.

Thatwas the way it was. Tara was appalled; and she nudged Mina, saying: “Tell it good.”

So Mina spoke up. “Goss and his wife beat the boys. He could have killed them. It was real clear. They didn’t want Brionne back.”

A woman’s voice—Goss’ wife, Mindy Rath, Tara saw, off to the side of the porch: “They did it!” the woman shouted. “They were always bad boys! They were always a trouble in the house! I want my Brionne! I want my Brionne! What have you done with her, what have you done with her, Carlo? You put her outside the gate, didn’t you? You lied to her, you made her go out there!”

“That’s not so,” Tara said. The magistrate was pounding with the hammer, and the bullets fell off onto the porch. The clerk scooped them up again and put them on the table.

“Say it again, rider Chang,” the marshal said. “Say it louder.”

“I’ll say it,” Luisa said, and raised her voice. “She’s wrong. There were tracks going alone out the gate! Tara saw them!”

The crowd broke out in murmurs, in calls of “Liar!” from the wife, and “Hearken not to the beasts!” from one of the village religious enthusiasts.

“Say what you know!” the mayor said. “Rider Chang?”

People were shouting. The elder boy shouted, too, all but crying, “I didn’t want to shoot him, he made me shoot him!”

Right then Tara got the same impulse Mina had confessed to; and drew in a guilty breath, and remembered at the same instant that nobody could hear what she thought.

The judge pounded the table, to no avail, until the marshal fired off a gun, into the air and off over the walls.

“Rider Chang,” the judge said. “Ordinance of Incorporation, Article Twelve, a rider can’t take oath. But you can give an unsworn deposition. What did you observe?”

“I talked to Brionne Goss in the horse den this morning. I saw her tracks, alone, going out the gate. I saw, at sunset, Andy Goss, Carlo, there, and Randy, coming in to ask about her whereabouts.”

“ Fornicator!” the religious yelled.

“—and those tracks.” Tara raised her voice, thinking only of the boys now, the way Mina had thought, and with the queasy notion that she could lie or tell the truth on this side of the wall and the minds in front of her wouldn’t hear the difference. “Were only of the girl. Goss identified them and I personally heard Goss threaten the boys, I personally heard the boys complain of beatings and blame unfairly placed on them.”

“Liar!” the wife shouted.

“Mr. Goss agitated my horse with his behavior. I advised him and his sons quit the camp for their own protection. Vadim and Chad went out the gate in search of Brionne Goss. They aren’t back. They’d promised to come straight back. I can personally report—” There was a rising murmur and she outshouted it with what she’d decided the town had damned well better know, and she needed to be surethe town knew. Two nights and no word from Vadim and Chad meant the odds weren’t in their favor, and the Gosses had already made fatal mistakes. “I can personally report, there’s something out there that scared my horse andme. Evidently Brionne heard it and didn’t have the sense to be scared.”