The last was only half a lie. It spooked Burn. Burn jumped forward, <going forward> with a thunder on the new, loose planks, imaged the gap as <gaping hole,> and spooked across it.

Right for the next gap.

<“ Burn!”>

Burn cleared it. Thump-bang!.—and stopped, scared and confused.

Guil grabbed up his gear and ran, heart pounding, as far as the gap Burn had jumped, before his knees wobbled and gave out.

He squatted down. Burn was standing sideways on the bridge, looking back in distress.

It took a considerable while of catching his breath before Guil slung his rifle to his back, threw the two-pack across the gap, and crossed it, astride the support boards, with the wind out of the gorge blasting up under his coat and whipping his hat this way and that.

<Guil on bridge,> Burn imaged to him, wanting him safe.

<Burn standing still! > he flung back, scared, and with his teeth chattering. He was mad, he was furious with himself for going ahead, but back wasn’t any easier than forward right now.

Something white flew across his vision. Several more followed.

Snowflakes, scattered, few, and from a partially cloudy sky. But it was a warning. It was a clear warning.

<Snow.> Burn saw it. <Cold wind.>

“I’m trying,” Guil muttered, and tried to will the headache into some inner dark. Let his temper and the headache go off together and trade insults. They’d this bridge to cross. He didn’t know how many more. He didn’t know this road except by Aby’s image, and that was the way an experienced rider killed himself and his horse, just too damn good, too damn cocky with the weather and an unknown road a junior wouldn’t think of trying.

Burn deserved better. Wasn’t going to leave Burn to freeze on a gap-toothed bridge.

Two more gaps. More laborious board-movings, a twice-mashed finger, a bashed knee, a splinter through his right glove, that he couldn’t get all of with his teeth and he didn’t want to take the glove off for fear of losing it, the wind was blowing so and his fingers were so numb. Cold helped the headache, only thing he could say for it.

Don’t do anything, a doctor would say—and the wind blasted at him at the worst moments of his balance, so he lost one plank that caught the wind, spun him around, and off his balance. He let go and fell, it went sailing off into the gorge: he didn’t follow it. The pistol damn near did, spun past his face to the gap: flat on his belly he grabbed that and recovered it as something else, small and shiny, slipped his pocket, skittered across the wind-scoured boards and over the edge. He’d saved the pistol, but the lighter was spook-bait.

He got up and got another board.

He didn’t want Burn to try another jump, even if he could talk him into it. A nighthorse walking the old timbers was one thing. A nighthorse landing on them was another. He didn’t trust the wood. But the far side hove closer and closer, plank after laboriously gained plank, and Burn crossed the next to last gap when he told Burn it was safe.

<Burn standing,> he sent. But once Burn was across that, Burn realized <solid ground ahead,> dismissing the intervening gap as <small hole.>

“ Burn!” Guil yelled, at the same time Burn gathered himself for the charge, hoof-toed feet thundering down the board.

Burn sailed across the gap, landed. A board broke—Burn went in halfway up to his hock, and Guil stared, heart stopped as Burn clambered across the last few boards to the solid bridgehead.

Guil took a wobbly few steps forward, remembered his gear, gathered it up and followed, far more scared than Burn was. Burn stood on solid ground again. Burn was pleased with himself— raised a hind foot to lick a scrape, but that was all.

Burn’s rider crossed the last gap above sharp rocks and mountainside and tottered to a rock-sheltered spot to sit down, dizzy, dry-mouthed with exertion, and feeling his skull trying to explode.

Which wasn’t something he’d regret at the moment.

But they were safe.

And the smells on this side of the gorge he suddenly realized were evergreen and not chemical smoke—clean, pure evergreen, rocks, nighthorse, and the tang of snow on the wind…

<Guil riding.> It was a feeling as much as an image Burn sent him: Burn’s feeling, Guil’s sensations when they were touching, the working of muscles in unison, the warmth in his body and Burn’s at once. They could do that, when they touched, could be one mind now if he let go and let Burn have him.

And Burn lipped his ear. His hands met a soft nose, velvet nudge at his cheek—Burn’s tongue licked the side of his eye with utmost delicacy and tasted salt.

The taste came into Guil’s mouth, too, and identity melted. He scratched Burn’s chin where Burn liked to be scratched, he shut his eyes and saw through Burn’s, <the mountain, the sky, the snow making white caps on the rocks.>

Not a full-out storm, only a spat of snow. Not thick enough yet. Burn stood there, a barricade against the wind. His head still reeled, and he thought it hurt: it was one of those ghosty kind of headaches. Half-blind, feeling the altitude after his stint in Malvey and Shamesey lowlands, he uncapped his canteen and took a sip of water to ease his throat.

<Guil riding,> Burn sent, wantinghim, wanting reassurance he was all right. <Guil riding in sunlight. Evergreens. Sweet smell of evergreens and horse.>

It took maybe a half an hour for him to get to his feet, and to climb, belly-down, onto Burn’s back. But on this side of the gorge the wind was less, and the next switchback came up among sizeable, snow-blanketed evergreens that cut off the sight of the valley.

They’d made the Height. They were on the lower loop of the Tarmin road.

<Snowy branches> had long since given way to <cold nighthorse> and <hunger.> That was the only assurance Danny had of safety in the woods: Cloud was complaining about the game, which they hadn’t seen (another bad sign, Danny thought: something had scared it) and the lack of berries (which argued game had recently been here).

And, no, lichen wasn’t edible—or it was, but it wasn’t something a human palate or a human stomach wanted to try again. He’d chewed evergreen trying to get the taste from his mouth. And it had mostly worked.

Cloud imaged a better taste for the stuff. Cloud didn’t believe his.

And his gut hurt, since he’d eaten the stuff, and his heart had raced and his vision had tunneled for at least an hour afterward, which wasn’t at all a good sign. That had scared him off further trials of anything fungus-like.

The effect had finally passed. The stomachache had eased, and become the stomach-empty feeling that had gone past mere light-headedness. He wasn’t near starving to death. He knew that. A human could go a whole moon-chase with nothing at all to eat, he’d heard of people doing it who broke a leg or something where they couldn’t get help, and who had to crawl for days.

He thought about warm beds and his mother’s cooking.

And maybe Cloud interpreted that as a wish Cloud should do something about, because he felt a fairly purposeful change in direction.

Within a few minutes Cloud came down a steep, snowy slope onto a clear-cut that extended in either direction, a track across the Wild.

More—he saw phone lines.

Chapter xviii

THE EVENING SHADOW ROLLED DOWN EARLY, THICK WITH CLOUD, and the black, bristling evergreens were white with snow. Snow made a fine dust in Burn’s mane and in the folds of Guil’s coat— still a spat, not a storm, but advising a traveler it might be well to think about camp: it was all too easy if a real blow came up—as well could happen with the weather like this—to stray off the road in the dark and the snow, and right off the edge of a cliff.