Silver on the Road

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Izzy narrowed her eyes at the odd emphasis but nodded. “Yes.”

  “Oh, Isobel.” April put her cup down, the china clinking faintly against the saucer, and sighed. She looked carefully at Gabriel and seemed to consider her words. That was new: April had never been the most careful girl, more prone to spilling her thoughts than hoarding them. “Do you really think that was wise?”

  Izzy put down her own cup, still untasted. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t mistake me,” April said quickly, glancing again at Gabriel as though she thought he might stop her. “We know who we’ve to thank for our safety, the way things work here. There’s not a soul who knows better how fair he is, nor how he’s kept the natives calm, and we respect him greatly.”

  Izzy could feel the way Gabriel tensed, even across the table. Something had changed, something important, but she had missed it. Her gaze rested on April, trying to read her. Earnest, worried . . . excited? She held a secret inside, but so deeply, Izzy couldn’t see.

  “I hear a hesitation in those words,” Gabriel said.

  April turned to address him, her eyes alight, her hands fluttering like butterflies. “It’s only that there’s so much else, too. So many opportunities for someone able to—” She turned back to look at Izzy, her voice more plaintive than excited, now. “The Territory hasn’t changed for a hundred years, Isobel. But the rest of the world moves on, embraces change! Don’t you ever wonder if things might be different?”

  Isobel’s eyes remained narrowed, and she saw Gabriel tense slightly, as though anticipating what April might say next. “Different how? I have no desire to leave the Territory.” She thought of how Ree had described cities, how Gabriel had spoken of his time across the Mudwater, and wondered how April could think that would be better.

  “Not to leave, no, of course not, but we could bring change here. To keep what is good and bring in what is better. Mister Kasun, surely you’ve heard of things occurring beyond our borders, to the East, and in Europe?”

  “I have,” he said. “Some of them good, some bad. But I take it you’re thinking more to the good? Mister Murdoch’s gas lighting, I suppose?”

  “Oh, things, of course, yes. But more than that, Mister Kasun! With Mister Jefferson as president, the United States are—”

  “Are across the river,” Gabriel said abruptly. “Where things are very different.”

  “Yes, but—” April seemed unwilling, once started, to heed Gabriel’s warning tone or the distinct chill in the air around their table. Izzy’s heart raced, and her palms were clammy with sweat, reacting to some threat she couldn’t identify. Surely not Gabriel; Gabriel would never hurt her or April. Would he?

  “Isobel.” Gabriel rose from his chair, his expression still pleasant, but she could read his intent to be gone without delay. He took out his wallet and placed a few coins beside the teapot. “We’d best be on our way.”

  Izzy made her apologies to April, who had the most hurt expression on her own face, then followed him out to the street, her heart still hammering too quickly for comfort.

  “What was all that?” she demanded, daring to grab at his elbow. “That was incredibly rude!”

  He stopped and swung back to face her. “You’re green and you don’t know better; that’s why I’m here, to keep you from trouble. And that woman inside there is trouble, Isobel.”

  “For admiring the States? The boss himself—”

  “The devil may do as he pleases, and he will.” Gabriel’s voice had lost all of that slow, soft drawl, clipping his words as though they’d been shaped with an ax. “But don’t ever start thinking he’d welcome folk looking ’cross the River for their governing. Because there’re folks there who would take that interest for an invitation.”

  Izzy bit back a retort, aware again that they were beginning to attract attention from other people on the street. “It was still rude,” she said instead, as prim as she could manage.

  “Yes, it was.” He sounded utterly unapologetic as he started to walk down the street again, without waiting for her.

  Izzy drew in a sharp breath, then dropped her chin and hurried to catch up with him. She had read him as a sharp, yes, but not one easily angered or driven to cruelty, particularly not to a woman who had offered him no direct insult. And the boss had given her over into his guidance. So, if Gabriel thought April was somehow a danger, a risk, she needed to abide by his decision and learn from his lessons, even if they didn’t make much sense to her. At least until she knew enough to argue against them.

  They’d taken a half dozen more too-long strides before she judged it safe to speak again. “We are going to reclaim the horses?”

  He glanced at her and slowed his pace down to match her legs. “One more thing left to do in town first.”

  Isobel thought he was angry, Gabriel knew. It wasn’t anger that drove him but fear, irrational and overwhelming. The years since he’d been East fell away, and he could feel it again, the sense of wrongness, of unease and discomfort that had hounded him those years, had driven him back to the Territory simply so he could breathe again.

  And this girl, this ignorant child, thought it would be better to bring that here?

  But he said none of that to Isobel.

  Confident that she would follow, Gabriel turned left onto the side street, heading for the way station. Like most stations, it was a simple wooden box twice as wide as a man and about as high, its once-bright yellow paint faded but still clearly visible, as was the devil’s sigil, the infinitas encircled, burnt into the wood: a warning to all that the contents were protected, not to be tampered with.

  There was customary law, the rules that kept the Territory orderly, tended to by judges and marshals, and then there was the devil’s Agreement, which kept all else secure.

  The letter he drew from his pocket seemed to weigh more than two sheets of paper possibly could, and he hesitated before shoving it through the narrow opening as though glad to see it gone.

  When the post rider came through next, they would add that letter to the packet they were bringing back East. With luck and good weather, Gabriel’s letter would reach its destination within the month. He felt a twinge of shame for being a hypocrite, for snapping at the girl, April, when he himself kept correspondence with his former classmates, now members of the very government he did not trust. But that lack of trust was why he maintained contact: not to aid them but to keep himself safe.

  The devil had promised him an end to that. If he succeeded.

  “Are you mad at me?” Isobel’s voice was soft again, not frightened but seeking to placate.

  “No. No, I’m not mad.” He turned to face the girl. She was wearing her new hat tilted too far back on her head, and he reached out to pull the brim down slightly so it shaded her eyes and nose properly. “You’re under a hard weight, being green and needing to be whatever it is he’s wanting of you,” he said. “Likely your thoughts are all a jumble, and being away from home’s only making it worse?”

  She nodded, clearly reluctant to admit any such thing.

  “That’s to be expected,” he said. “A few weeks from now, I mightn’t have interrupted, but you don’t need more confusion in that handsome head of yours. Not just yet.” She didn’t know what the Territory was yet, not really. She needed that before people started filling her ears with nonsense and trouble. Although, having a bit of doubt planted in that sharp mind might not be such a bad thing. . . .

  “When people start telling you how to fix things, Isobel, it’s best first to make sure those things need fixing.”

  He looked down the street the way they’d come, then, his trouble-­sense pricking. Maybe April, maybe something else, maybe nothing, but the need to be shed of town and back on the road gnawed at him. “Let’s collect the horses. We’ll head west, give you a taste of the wide-open lands.”

  He’d
planned to head for Widder Creek, a few days out, then they’d follow the road into the high plains and, eventually, De Plata. That should take a few weeks, allow him to see the folk he needed to see, and give Isobel the chance to get a little dirty without actual harm before they swung back northeast, to civilized towns.

  “I know what the plains look like,” she said, scowling.

  He smiled at her indignation, briefly. “No, you don’t. You’ve spent your entire life in a protected circle, sheltered by the devil’s name. But you’ll learn, right soon enough.” Her scowl didn’t ease, but he could tell she was thinking on what he’d said, wondering what was out there. Good.

  They collected the horses and mule at the stable. While Isobel double-­checked their tack and started reloading the mule’s packs with their new acquisitions, the boy who brought the beasts out waved off his pavement.

  “The devil pays for his riders,” the boy said, giving Steady an affectionate slap on the flank. “And yours weren’t no trouble at all.”

  The mare’s tack was marked with the devil’s sigil, but his wasn’t. But he didn’t want to shame the boy by insisting. “For your time, then.” And he slid a quarter-coin into the boy’s hand, then clapped him on the shoulder. “A good horseman’s worth his weight in silver, no mistake.”

  “True words, those,” a voice behind him said. “You heading out of town?”

  “We are.” Gabriel wasn’t caught off guard, had sensed the man moving closer, with no attempt at stealth. He turned, his hip against Steady’s saddle, to face the newcomer.

  An older man, ordinary enough, with bright hazel eyes under sparse white hair forming a crown over sun-weathered skin, dressed as though he might have cause to throw himself onto horseback at a moment’s notice, age or no.

  The marshal, no surprise, even without spotting the sigil pinned to the loop of his belt. Never mind that Isobel had checked in the day before—by association he, Gabriel, was worthy of a look-over as well. Perhaps even more so: he might be useful—or dangerous, depending on how the marshal stood. Gabriel kept his ears open when he traveled, and he heard what was spoken in a low voice; like Isobel’s girlhood friend, not everyone was pleased with the status quo, and marshals, for all their oaths, were still men, and prone to their own opinions.

  He might be overcautious, likely was, but even an indirect threat to the Territory put him on guard, and his trouble-sense was rarely wrong.

  “You’re riding on the devil’s business?” the older man asked now.

  “Greening run, is all,” Gabriel said.

  “Same as makes no nevermind,” the marshal said, still casual. Too casual, for a man trained to caution. “To a lot of folk.”

  “Makes a whole world of nevermind,” Gabriel corrected him, checking Steady’s girth and tightening it a notch. Turning your back on a marshal wasn’t an insult but a sign of trust. “She’s just learning her way, no challenge to anyone.”

  “She’s his Hand, boy.” The marshal had enough decades on him that Gabriel let that pass without comment. “She may be green, but there’s going to be those who won’t care—or who will take that green for an easy kill. You know that, right?”

  “I know it.” And his right hand was on the marshal’s shoulder, the dagger pricking his stubbled neck, while his carbine rested easy in his left hand, cocked and aimed at the man’s knee. “And I aim to see her trained, not dead.”

  “Good.” The marshal wasn’t even sweating, although he was careful not to move suddenly. His face was battered and wrinkled, but the eyes meeting Gabriel’s were clear, untainted by age. “That’s good. We ride the same road, boy. Now put your toys away before I make it hard for you to hump that saddle.”

  Gabriel looked down then and saw the marshal’s own knife, a good ten inches of straight steel, pointed directly at his crotch.

  Isobel chose that moment to finish with the mule and join them. “Gentlemen? Is there a problem?”

  “No problem at all, ma’am,” the marshal said, stepping back. His blade had disappeared by the time he turned to face Isobel, and Gabriel made his own weapons do the same, the dagger sliding back into its sheath, the gun reholstered on his saddle. Isobel was standing on the wooden walkway, her head tilted at an angle, her expression curious but unshadowed, and for a moment, Gabriel wanted to send her home, tell the devil the deal was off, to send her off to some boarding school where they taught girls how to become gentlewomen, not riders.

  The moment passed. He’d made his deal; the time for choice was gone. And Isobel had never been meant for a gentlewoman.

  “Time to go,” he said brusquely, picking up the reins and swinging into the saddle. When Steady took a few steps back, he reined him into a turn and waited for Isobel, with an apologetic nod to the marshal, to mount up and follow, the mule already at their heels.

  Gabriel didn’t seem inclined to talk once they were back in the saddle, and so Izzy kept her silence as Patch Junction slowly faded on the hori­zon behind them, the grassland unrolling ahead of them. The dirt road, cut by hundreds of hooves and wheels, was clearly visible underfoot, but when Izzy looked ahead or behind, it seemed to disappear below the grasses, as though they wandered without direction. She found herself looking down at the road more and more often, the pale brown dirt reassuring against the endless lines of the prairie grasses, and expanse of pale blue sky overhead, barely a cloud to break the color.

  Gabriel had been right: she hadn’t known the prairie at all, not really. Not this terrifyingly wide expanse of same-same-same without the familiar, comforting silhouette of buildings grouped together. There was nothing to rest her eye on save the two of them and the mule, and the occasional wide-branched tree solitary in the distance, and the entire world seemed to undulate if she looked at it too long. Even the occasional bird circling far overhead only emphasized how insignificant they all were, horses and humans alike.

  “Is it all like this?”

  Her voice was so small against the vastness, she thought it might not carry past Uvnee’s twitching ears. But Gabriel slowed down enough that they could ride alongside each other, in response, and that helped, a little. “Not all, no,” he said. “Eastwards, there’s more hills, and north and west, there’re mountains, breaks it up some. You’ll see. But here . . .” He looked around as though seeing it all for the first time. “Pretty much like this. Hunting camps and farmsteads here and there, the occasional town where three or four families decided to make a go of it together and succeeded, but mostly . . . like this. Junction and Flood are pretty rare. Mostly, the Territory’s . . . quiet.”

  “You like it.” She didn’t mean to sound accusing, but he just laughed.

  “I do. Not forever, not always, but there are times when a man just needs to remember he’s not all that important in the greater scheme of things, that whatever we do, this”—he waved a hand around them—“abides.”

  She swallowed against a sudden, unexpected lump in her throat. “You must have hated it then, back East.”

  “No.” That surprised her, how firm he sounded. “I couldn’t stay there, but I loved it the same way I love this. When you have so many people, Isobel, it’s almost the same as having no people at all.”

  That made no sense to her, and she said so.

  He only shook his head and handed her a tin flask filled with water. “Think about it. Maybe it will.”

  He lapsed into silence again, and she did the same, taking a sip of the lukewarm water and letting it ease her throat and the thirst she hadn’t even noticed until then. When she offered it back to him, he shook his head, indicating that she should keep it, pointing out the slot in her mare’s saddle where the fist-sized flask would fit.

  That discovery led her to consider the saddle more carefully, noting the loops and ties that she hadn’t noticed before, wondering what they might be used for. She suspected, like the flask, she would find out as they w
ent.

  Unfortunately, her thoughts soon circled away from the workmanship of the leather saddle and how the bag she’d packed hung so perfectly to how her back ached if she sat one way, her legs protested if she sat another, and how her arms ached from holding the reins, causing her entire body to feel as though Hiram the blacksmith had used his hammer on her, rather than his anvil.

  But there was no point in complaining; it was what it was. She would simply have to accustom herself to it, toughen herself to it. Was that what the boss had wanted her to learn? No; she rejected that thought almost immediately. Nothing so simple, she was certain. Her gaze was drawn again to the far horizon, and she felt a warm shiver move from scalp to spine. This, she thought, maybe this. How small she was, in such a larger world. Or simply, how large the Territory was.

  The sun was midrise now, angled enough that Izzy was glad of her new hat, although it did nothing to keep the dust of the road from her mouth and nose. The mule plodded along at Uvnee’s shoulder, the mare periodically turning her head to nip at its ears, making it shake its head and snort at her. Izzy smiled and patted the mare’s neck, taking comfort in the warm feel of flesh under her fingers, the rise and fall of the mare’s flanks under her legs, even the occasional flatulence from the mule and the inevitable sight of Gabriel’s horse lifting its tail to relieve itself as it walked. Small, pungent things to bring her back to herself.

  She studied the man riding in front of her as well, trying to let her shoulders soften, her backside relaxing into the sway of the saddle the way Gabriel’s did. It was harder than it seemed, but after a while, her hips and legs ached less, at least, although her arms and shoulders still burned.

  To distract herself, Izzy thought over the confrontation she’d interrupted back in town that morning. She’d watched players stare each other down over the felt, seen Iktan and Marie calm enough fights before they happened to recognize the signs, like two dogs circling each other over a chunk of meat.

  The marshal had seemed respectful enough when she introduced herself. And yet his eye on Gabriel had been strange, almost suspicious. Did he not know he was her mentor? Why hadn’t Gabriel told him? Or had he, and the marshal was still suspicious?