The mayor had gone down on her side. He could hear her, not the sound of injury. She hadn't screamed, which was the sound you dreaded, but the sound of weight and confusion of a horse trying to understand why she was on the ground. He got to her. She'd landed on his right leg.
Not all her weight. She'd rolled slightly, but enough. He got to her head and talked to her low and continuous, keeping her calm while she worked out what had happened. And she was listening to him, and he was working through what to do when she began trying to rise. He moved clear and she got her legs under her in stages and she was up and he put his hands on her and ran them down her legs in the dark feeling for anything wrong and found nothing or nothing he could feel in the dark in the cold with hands going numb.
He stood there for a moment in the middle of the north field with the storm coming down on him and the bull gone somewhere and his shoulder aching in a way that was going to matter more when the cold wore off. And he thought clearly and without panic, "You are in trouble. " He'd lost track of the gate. The visibility was down to 5 ft. His hands were losing dexterity and his feet were going wrong in his boots. And the mayor was alive, but he wasn't sure she was sound.
He had a horse and a compass sense of direction that the storm was working hard to confuse. And he had maybe 30 minutes before the cold became the kind of problem you didn't come back from. He mounted up because staying on the ground was worse. He pointed the mayor in the direction he believed the gate to be and let her walk. He was not going to tell Viven later how much he was relying on hope in that moment.
He preferred not to admit it even to himself. He'd been riding for what felt like 5 minutes, which was probably two, when something appeared in the white ahead of him. A light, small and orange and moving, but moving toward him with a purpose that wasn't random. He pulled the mayor up and stared at it. Then a voice, the wind tearing at it, coming apart in the cold, but a voice called his name.
She had the lantern tied to a long length of rope, the other end of which was knotted around her waist, and trailed back in the direction he couldn't see. She was in his sheep-skinned coat and every piece of warm clothing she appeared to own on top of it, and her face was rhymed with ice crystals where the scarf didn't cover. And when she reached the mayor, she grabbed the bridal without ceremony and looked up at him with an expression he had no framework for. "Are you hurt? " she demanded. "Shoulder!
I'm fine. " "How did you? " I tied the rope to the porch post and followed your track while I could still see it, and then I took the angle you'd been riding. She said it quickly, factually, like she was reporting. I've been out here 15 minutes. Come on, Elsie. Elsie is asleep, and the door is bolted.