“She’s our sister,” Carlo said urgently. “She might listen to us.”

“She might not. You want your brother to be there?”

Carlo was scared, too. Cloud moved up and nosed in between them, jealous of anything that wasn’t him. Danny shoved him with a hand on his chest, not even thinking about it. Carlo put his hand on Cloud from the other side. Cloud didn’t offer to bite.

“I want her alive,” Carlo said, and it was the truth. “I don’t like her. But I want her out of this.”

“What about Randy?”

“Is here safe?” Carlo asked. “Even if you stayed, is here really safe?”

It wasn’t. Not with Harper loose. Not with a lot else that was going on. But he couldn’t avoid Jonas.

There was leisure for shaving, for washing clothes to dry in front of the fire—not damn much else to do. They washed up the pans they’d used and then, with the wind still howling over the roof, Tara spent a long, long time working over Flicker’s mane and tail.

That made Burn jealous. <Mare’s rider combing mare’s mane. Guil sleeping. Burn with twigs and leaves. Burn covered in mud.>

Mud, hardly. But he owed Burn on this trip. He got up and combed until Burn’s tail and mane were drifting silk. Brushed a perfectly good nighthorse hide until Burn was starting to complain of pain.

“Pretty fellow,” Tara said, and stroked <pretty nighthorse neck.> Burn did have male muscle and a healthy sheen that made ripples when he flexed it. As he did. Of course.

With Tara <scratching Burn under chin.>

Hell, Guil thought, seeing desertion and conspiracy. He wasn’t feeling at all sociable this afternoon, if it was afternoon. He was stuck inside, under roofs, with the hearing company of a woman he liked, to whom he was bound to be polite, while irreconcilable facts were churning around in his head and he was wanting to shoot Jonas Westman for suspicions he couldn’t fix in any world of fact.

So he skulked off with his surliness and his suspicions to clean his guns, which could take a considerable time if it needed to; and he took all the time and care he could justify at it.

But a man could only spend so long oiling guns and doing mending and washing dishes, while two fool horses were at a whole damned afternoon and evening of foreplay. It was going to be a lot worse come nightfall—he only hoped to God the storm kept going long enough to let two lovelorn horses get it worked out and at least quieter. He didn’t want to imagine the rogue coming calling when the ambient was as erotically charged as it was—particularly since Tara was sure, at least in the ambient she’d relayed, that the rogue was female.

A scary situation if you were the one on the damn lunatic autumn-hazed male. He couldn’t hold Burn. No way in hell he could hold Burn from going right off a cliff, the same way Aby couldn’t have held Moon, on that road, with an edge too close.

A tightness hit his chest. He was a lot better. He really was. Temper wasn’t helping it. Suspicion that Aby’s death didn’t need to have happened if people had been sane—wasn’t helping it.

Aby’d been carrying secrets all right, secrets that the villagers had guessed and a horse would pick up on. Aby’d been carrying just too damn muchwithout her partner. She’d picked up something from Jonas she didn’t like. She couldhave thought it related to the gold. She was trying to protect Cassivey’s contract—and if the word got gossiped about, Cassivey wouldn’t be happy.

Jonas might not be after the gold as money. But the deal Aby had with Cassivey—Jonas could want that real bad. Aby and her regular partner hadn’t been together much in the last two years. Maybe Jonas had just gotten ideas and thatwas why Jonas wouldn’t face him at Shamesey. Aby’s good living off Cassivey sure as hell explained Jonas coming back up here. She was making money. She was making a lot of money; by what Cassivey was paying him, she was stuffing it in that bank account hand over fist, —and for what? What did a rider need, beyond her supplies and her guns and her winter-over?

Time.

God. Time.

They talked aboutgoing into the hills and not working for a while. And they’d always made just about enough for winter-over. They spent too much. He’dspent too much. He hated towns. Hated the crowding, the noise—hung about them for her sake. She’d said—hadn’t she?—that someday they’d make the money, buy the time, take the break to go back to the high country—and he’d known it would never happen.

Aby had pleadedwith him to join her at Anveney. He’d refused. She’d gotten mad. And hurt. And they hadn’t talked about it. But winter at Shamesey let her do those jobs at Anveney. And make money she wasn’t spending.

Thatwas what she’d been doing with her secrecy. That was why she’d been hurt. The big plan. The trip back to the south. The year off work. And Jonas moved in on her.

Tara sank slowly down on her haunches in front of him and rested her elbows on her knees, chilled hands in front of her mouth. The air was scarily tense. The wind screamed a steady song into the world.

Good man, Tara thought. Honest man.

And so damn much <anger,> so much <pain>—which he was so, so careful to contain in himself—all the signs of someone who’d been with the horses so early and so long that, hurt and hit, he had only the instinct to hold pain close and kill it, before it killed him, his horse, his partner.

She knew. She was smothering a lot of it herself. And she didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t intrude where only that partner ever had. Different from her—who’d had a set of lovers, interchangeable and easy. But with Aby Dale—and him—she got images of <children.> Of <yearling horses.> Of a whole life—

Fights. Reconciliations. Arguments.

Love had never changed, in all of it.

“Listen,” she said, in the face of his skittish suspicions. “Don’t— don’t shoot Jonas Westman. All right? You don’t know. If he shows up—and he could, when the storm quits, don’t—”

“My business.”

“Yeah,” she said, and knew when to back off. She began to get up.

He caught her wrist. Not hard. Didn’t have words framed— just—image. <Jonas Westman and the others. A gate. Village gate. Big town gate. Shots fired.>

“At you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Now—I think so. But I’ve known them a lot of years. I don’t know how to think. Maybe they just knew there was a secret. Maybe they were prying at it. Maybe they were just worried about her. —Maybe—I don’t know how shethought, you know? —I don’t know.”

“I don’t either,” she said, and was going on to say—But Aby would care what happens to you. I don’t want you to do something you could be sorry for—

She was almost to saying— Icould care. I don’t want you hurt.

But another image overrode.

<Horse wanting out.>

“Hell,” she said. It was Flicker. But it was Burn, too. One had the idea, and then the other did.

Guil shook his head, and then looked up.

In silence. Or near silence. The screech of the wind on the shingle had sunk away to an occasional flutter.

“Storm’s letting up,” she said. “Or we’re covered up over the roof.”

Burn was pawing at the floor. Nudging the latch with his nose.

“Damn, Burn. Hold it, can you?” Guil got up, snapped the loaded cylinder closed and gave it to her as she got up.

Meaning guard the door.

He went and shoved the latch up.

The door wouldn’t budge. Burn shoved it, and it gave a little. Not much.

“Well,” she said, meaning it had to be the snow-door, which meant moving a table, and unscrewing two heavy bolts that held a wooden bar as thick as her arm. Bear-bars, they called them. With reason.

She moved the table, he unscrewed the bolts, and pulled the door open on a shoulder-high wall of snow with dark above it and a wind still fit to blast cold air and snow into the room.