Why are you dressed up like a sore toe?
It’s Christmas, John.
Is it.
John, you aren’t yourself.
Thank God for that.
You went to that hop-alley den, saw your celestial. I can smell the smoke on—
This is engaging beyond all expectations, but they’re holding up the game for me.
How much?
How much?
Down to my last chip, as they say, although it isn’t really a chip in the conventional—
How. Much. Did you lose?
It would appear that Mr. Carson is now the proud own er of our casa. What?
It was the worst streak of cards any man has ever drawn. Everyone at the table agreed.
You gambled our home?
Well. Yes. But all hope is not lost. The game took an interesting turn.
Lana tugged at the reins and pulled up just shy of the forest, the Teats looming under the brilliant smear of the Milky Way, and saw, not half a mile back, the rider progressing toward her.
She reached down and patted the horse’s neck a moment before booting it on.
The forest dark save for when she moved across glades, the sky like ragged spiderwebs through the branches, the silk glistening with stars, and so quiet when they stopped, she could hear the pulse of the albino’s tired heart.
She shifted in the saddle, the leather creaking.
The odor of the horse smelled strong in the cold.
She listened, heard nothing but the occasional clicking of her teeth, like Morse code in the night. She touched her heels to the horse and rode down through the spruce.
An hour later, she passed through a blowdown, the firs all bent over and tangled up in themselves like spilt matches and dusted with fresh snow, the horse threading its way through the felled trees like it had come this way before.
In the forest below, an elk bugled.
. . .
The moon low in the sky behind a mountain, the stars teeming, the horse wavering, Lana shivering under her white cape, trying to stave off a sleep that taunted her with the rhythm of the hooves breaking powder.
The horse would have crushed her, but it neighed two seconds before toppling, and Lana woke, just managing to drag herself away from where its hindquarters crashed into the snow.
She scrambled to her feet and wiped the powder out of her face, found herself standing among aspen, the snow to her chest and the stars obscured, yielding to dawn.
The horse lay on its side, blowing deep, snorting exhalations that weakened as she listened. She wanted to speak to the albino, give the animal some measure of comfort, but she could only squat by its head and stroke its great jowls until its heart quit beating and its big eyes traded their pained intensity for the empty glaze of death.
EIGHTY-THREE
L
ana struggled on through the aspen, the numbness extending up from her feet into her ankles, her shins. Even her knees were beginning to burn. She was passing through a glade and noting the first rumor of warmth in the sky when she heard the snort of a horse.
As she looked back, a branch snapped somewhere in the grove.
The cold was momentarily displaced by fear.
She bounded into the woods, ripped a spruce branch from a sapling, and doubled back into the glade, proceeding on, using the branch to sweep her new tracks smooth, reentering the trees after thirty yards, thinking if she could find a ramada, or throw together a brush shelter of some kind, maybe he’d pass her by.
The voice stopped her.
“Help!”
She turned and peered between straight white aspen trunks back out into the glade.
Where her tracks branched stood a gray-cloaked girl with long black hair, face as white as china in the dawn light, big black eyes shining. She recognized this child, having seen her in Abandon.
“Please, ma’am!” the child called out. “Help me!”
Lana hesitated, something urging self-preservation, telling her to just keep heading down through the aspen.
A tuft of cloud went pink above her as Lana waded back into the glade.
