Silver on the Road

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “What?”

  “Their names.”

  “I . . .” Her mentor stopped to think, running a hand through shaggy hair, leaving that hand resting on the back of his neck and looking up at the night sky, as though the answer were there. “Karl was the old man. Karl and Sophia. Oldest son was . . . Simeon; younger was also Karl. I don’t remember their wives or any of the kids.”

  She nodded and wrote their names down. Karl and Sophia of Widder Creek. Their sons Simeon and Karl younger. Wives and children, names unknown. Dead of unknown causes, and then the date, near as she could recall. Izzy squinted at the paper, barely able to see it in the firelight. It was likely still May—they hadn’t been gone that long—but the dates slipped away without chores or deliveries to mark the days.

  Gabriel didn’t ask what she was doing or why. If he had, she wasn’t sure she could have told him.

  As soon as the ashes burned out, they saddled up and left, not wanting to linger overnight in proximity to the dead. The wooden planks of the bridge sounded fragile under their hooves, and Izzy felt a shiver coat her arms as they rode over, but neither of them paused until they reached the point where the turnoff folded back into the main road. Only then, with cleaner air in her nose and the memory of what lay behind them hidden by trees, did Izzy let herself feel sick.

  Gabriel reined in beside her, a darker, more familiar shadow in the night, and pulled out the coalstone, clenching it once to create a faint glow in his hand.

  Izzy wasn’t sure if the pale red light made things better or worse. She turned her face away so he couldn’t read her expression and asked, “What do you think killed them?”

  “Could be anything. Like I said, sickness can come fast, especially them all living on top of each other like that.”

  She looked back at him then. “Even the animals?” There had been three horses in the barn, dead in their stalls, and a litter of pigs and chickens in the coop, a mess of feathers predators had not touched.

  He shrugged. “It happens sometimes.”

  Not often. Not like that. Not so swiftly that they didn’t have time to bury the first victims. She felt chilled, worse than cold rain on a winter’s night. “The snake’s warning. Now this . . .”

  He picked up what she wasn’t saying. “Things happen, Isobel. Sometimes they’re connected, but more often it’s just . . . chance. Random.”

  “You think the snake was random?”

  It was the first they’d spoken directly of it since that morning, and she couldn’t imagine a time she wanted less to talk about it than now. Saying the words felt like she’d been punched in the stomach.

  Gabriel looped Steady’s reins around the pommel horn, then took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair with his free hand. “Creatures like that are . . . like your boss. They’re a law unto themselves, even in the Territory, and if you try to figure out the why or wherefore, you’ll never get out of that hole. I told you already: if there was a deeper meaning to it, we’re not going to know until it bites us on the nose, so there’s no point worrying about it.”

  He was harsher-spoken than he’d been before, and Izzy felt a pang of guilt: he’d known these people, known their names, most of them, had maybe shared hospitality before. Whatever she was feeling, it had to be worse for him.

  Folk had died there. Folk who should have been protected.

  Make this right, she heard inside her head, a voice like water, like wind, crackling like fire. Make it safe.

  She dismounted, her body moving without conscious direction, and pulled a square package, wrapped in an unbleached cloth, out of her saddlepack. Inside, there was a cylinder of hard-packed salt about the length of her hand and three fingers thick. She had packed it the way she’d packed everything else she’d been given, without question, assuming it would make sense in time.

  Now, she went back to where the two paths diverged, knelt carefully, and dragged the cylinder across the dirt where the two trails met, leaving a clear line of salt glittering white against brown, clearly visible even in the darkness away from the coalstone’s glow.

  She could hear the horses shifting behind her, leather tack creaking, and the gentle sound of Gabriel exhaling, the way he drew his thoughts together before he spoke. “You think there’s enough left in the ashes for a haint to linger, you need to lock it down?”

  “S’not for them,” she said. “It’s to protect anyone else.” He thought she knew nothing, and maybe she didn’t, not the way he meant, but she knew this. Salt and blood to protect the living. She bit her lip, staring down at the line, then took the knife from her boot and nicked the pad of her left thumb, letting a drop of blood fall down. Just a story she’d heard, maybe a thing the boss mentioned in passing, even if she didn’t remember where or when.

  The blood hit the salt and spread, one single drop staining the entire line a deep red that glowed like an ember before fading to dark.

  When she looked up again, the track they’d followed to the bridge had disappeared, the trees closing together as though no path between had ever been there, and she—even knowing the tiny settlement existed—felt a push to move away, go elsewhere. This was one road that would not be found again any time soon.

  “Even folk who knew it was there, they’ll forget,” she said. “And nobody else will think to venture in, or wonder why the trees are there. Give the land time to reclaim the ashes, clean the land.” She knew that the same way she’d known how to do it, the kenning in her like she’d lace her shoes or make a bed. Maybe the boss, or Peggy’s brother the marshal, had spoken of it, told a story of doing the same, and she’d forgotten until it was needed.

  Maybe. And maybe it was something else. Izzy let that thought settle in her bones, heavy and cold, as she wrapped the salt stick back in its cloth and replaced it in the pack, then swung back into Uvnee’s saddle. Her hands were still lightly dusted with salt, and her mouth tasted of ashes and smoke.

  “That was well done,” Gabriel said quietly, his face showing the same exhaustion, and she nodded, although she didn’t agree. It was what she was supposed to be doing, nothing more.

  Make this right. Make it safe.

  “We should keep going.”

  She knew that he had intended for them to stop a while at Widder Creek, overnight there. But his suggestion that they put some distance between themselves and the ashes was one she agreed with wholeheartedly. Even the division she’d placed on the ground didn’t banish the uneasy feeling she’d felt on first seeing those too-quiet houses.

  Gabriel thought it was illness had killed those people, and she couldn’t say it hadn’t been. Illness came fast and hit hard, and could burn itself out like a match once it had nothing more to live on. And yet. And yet.

  Make it right. Make it safe.

  She felt the unease tremble on her skin, curl uncomfortably in her stomach, and she pushed Uvnee to go a little faster, put that much more distance behind them before night fell. The mare seemed to agree, matching Steady’s longer stride without further urging.

  Gabriel wasn’t a fan of riding after full dark—too easy for a horse to misstep and break a leg, he said—but they didn’t reach a place both of them felt comfortable stopping at until well after the waning moon had risen. He’d kept the coalstone in one hand, urging more light out of it despite the discomfort, but there was a limit what it could do without causing actual flame.

  “Not perfect, but it’ll do,” Gabriel said finally, looking at the starlit horizon rather than the patch of grass he’d indicated. “Saddle down.”

  Since leaving Flood, Izzy has learned to ride all day without ache, identify a small animal in the underbrush as they rode, hit a target six times out of ten with Gabriel’s carbine, and sleep through the night no matter what rocks found their way underneath her bedroll. In short, despite being shaken by what they’d found at Widder Creek, she felt capable and compe
tent. So, when she slid out of the saddle and felt her knees buckle when she hit the ground, forcing her to grab the stirrup to stay upright, Izzy let out a swear word she wasn’t supposed to know, humiliated at the way her body had failed her.

  “Iz?”

  Gabriel was there suddenly, holding her elbow.

  “I’m all right. I just . . .”

  The faint stomachache from earlier resettled low in her gut now that she was standing, a too-familiar sensation, and she let out a sudden, irritated huff of air. “I’m fine.” She removed her arm from his grip, pushed away from Uvnee, and went to pull her kit from the saddle. “I’m fine.”

  She wanted to ask him to finish untacking Uvnee, but then he would ask what was wrong, and nothing was wrong. So, she finished the chore, making sure that the mare was settled and comfortable in her hobble, before settling her bedroll a few feet away from Gabriel’s, then picking up her pack and walking a safe distance away from the camp.

  She’d gotten accustomed to doing her personal business by walking far enough away, maybe behind a rock or taller grasses for some privacy, but there was nothing here save grass and more grass, and a small hill too far away to be safe. She was uneasy going too far away from the camp, as though the illness might have followed them in the darkness, lurking like a wolf for stragglers. But she trusted he’d keep his attention on the camp, and anyone else who might be watching . . . well, there wasn’t a thing she could do about that.

  “Idiot,” she told herself. “Losing track like that.” Back home—but back home, the days hadn’t melted into one another the same way. She remembered Devorah and how comfortable she had seemed in her trousers, and the woman in the restaurant back in Patch Junction, so dignified in her leathers, remembered thinking she might try the same some day. For now, however, she was just as pleased for the modesty of a skirt, as she removed a set of clean rags from her pack and folded them the way she’d been taught, placing them inside her drawers.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it would do.

  Next to the rags in her pack was a fist-sized paper wrapper. She opened it and took a pinch of the crumbled yellow buds, keeping it in her palm as she replaced everything, and returned to the campfire.

  Gabriel had started a small fire already, despite the lateness of the house. He watched her but did not ask what she was doing as she pulled out a battered tin pot and set water to boil for a tisane.

  Gabriel watched out of the corner of his eye as Isobel crumbled leaves into the pot of water, murmuring something under her breath. He’d been worried at first, thinking her collapse was a reaction to everything that had happened that day, and short of offering her a slug of whiskey, which she didn’t like, there wasn’t anything he could do to ease that. People died, sometimes badly, often unfairly, and that was just that. The tea suggested women’s medicine, though, which he could stay out of with clear conscience. She likely wouldn’t welcome any comment, no matter how kindly meant.

  Nonetheless, he visualized the road in his head, trying to determine how far they could push tomorrow, and if he could call a halt earlier than usual without making it appear as though he were ­coddling her. By the time she’d poured the concoction into her mug and taken it back to her bedroll, where she’d curled up in a clear sign that she didn’t want to talk, he had a rough plan in mind. Originally, he’d thought to stay overnight at Widder Creek, then push through until they got to Clear Rock, a few days’ ride west. But now he thought they would swing north and stop at the Caron place instead. They weren’t always the friendliest of folk, but if Isobel were one of those women who became snappish during her time, she’d have a suitable foil with the missus, and if she needed coddling, well, they’d have a warm bed and another woman’s comfort to offer, without him being obviously complicit.

  And it would be good for both of them to see living folk.

  Satisfied, he pushed against the ground, meaning to get up and start preparing the evening meal, when something made him pause. A faint whisper from the stream deep belowground, the taste of rotted meat and fouled water in the back of his throat, all gone as quickly as he’d noticed them, leaving the lingering weight of something behind him. He knew the clearing was bare, the lack of cover proof that no one was watching.

  And yet he knew they were being followed. They were being watched.

  He tried to convince himself that it could be anything—a big cat, curious about the smell of humans and horses, or even a bear, fool-­hungry after a winter’s hibernation. Risks, but known ones, things you could deter and avoid, and run off with gunshot if needed. But none of that would have touched the water that way.

  He looked over his shoulder at where the horses had been staked for the night. Steady had his head down, cropping at the grass, Uvnee already dozing, her weight on three legs. Only the mule was alert, looking up, but not even remotely spooked, the way he would be if an animal predator was around.

  He hadn’t lied to Isobel. There wasn’t any point in worrying about what the snake had said; whatever was coming would come, and they could only hope being alert would be enough. But first the snake, then Widder Creek, and now this?

  He thought that being alert might not be enough.

  Those thoughts made him glance over to where she lay curled on her bedroll, the empty mug still clutched in one hand as though for comfort. He should tell her, warn her.

  He reached down to touch the silver clasp on his boot, a habit he’d picked up when he was still green on the road himself. No, best not to alarm her, not when they were already spooked enough.

  He wouldn’t coddle her, but he would measure out how much she had to carry and when.

  “There’s still a potato or two left,” he said instead, raising his voice enough that she’d hear. “Common cheese and roasted potatoes sound good to you?” It wasn’t really a question; that was all they had left. He’d been counting on trading for fresh supplies in Widder Creek, maybe convincing the old man to slaughter a lamb for them. Obviously, that hadn’t worked out so well.

  Isobel lifted her head as though it was an effort, her legs curled up into her stomach, arms around her knees. “I’m not hungry.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked.”

  “Potatoes and cheese sounds good.” She made a face, scrunching her mouth up and her nose down. “Mostly I just need the tea and to sleep.”

  “Real bed tomorrow,” he told her. “And a bath.”

  She smiled briefly at that. For a moment, the events of the morning were not forgotten but shifted somewhere out of sight.

  “Eat something, then sleep,” he said, turning back to the fire to give her at least the illusion of privacy. “We’re back on the road at sunrise.”

  Odds were, whatever he’d sensed had moved on by then. And if he was wrong, if whatever was watching them followed? Well, he’d deal with that then.

  Justice Caron was exactly as mean-tempered as Gabriel had warned as they approached the homesteading. The man stared at them from the front of his house, a sod-and-timber shanty that looked as though the next strong wind would finish knocking it over, and lifted his bearded chin stubbornly.

  “Why shouldn’t I fill the both of you full of lead?” His beard quivered with indignation, but the hands on his ancient blunderbuss were steady.

  “Because you’re too cheap to waste shot on us,” Gabriel said, clearly exasperated. “Old man, we’re not here to rob you blind, just to ask for shelter for one night, and perhaps a few drops of human kindness, if you’ve any left in your bones.”

  “Hrmph. You think there’s room for you here?”

  Gabriel glared back. “I know for a fact that you’ve a shelter out back that’s fit for your young ’uns as well as the occasional traveler. Seeing as how I’ve slept in it a time or three before.”

  Izzy bit the inside of her cheek to keep from giggling at the expression on the old man’s face as he realized
he was turning away someone he knew or at least had hosted before.

  The old man squinted harder, as though that would improve his eyesight. “Gabriel Kasun, is it? You weren’t traveling with no flippit back then.”

  “She’s hardly a flippit,” Gabriel said before Izzy could ask if she was supposed to be insulted by that or not. Apparently, yes. “This is Isobel née Lacoyo Távora, late of Flood.” His voice went dry as a summer creekbed. “You have, I presume, heard of Flood before?”

  “’Z’at a place or a person I’m supposed to know about?”

  Before all this, before she’d taken the road, Izzy would have assumed the old man was lying or mad. Anyone who survived more than year in the Territory knew about Flood and who lived there. But this man, his broad shoulders stooped, brown skin grizzled, blocking their way like an old bison facing off against wolves, nearly convinced her of his ignorance. Then she looked past the surface, and something in the old man’s face, or the minute way he shifted, was like a shout. He knew and was trying to get a rise out of her for some reason.

  Izzy had been raised in a gaming house, and two could play that hand easily as one.

  “It’s all right,” she said to Gabriel, making sure that her voice carried the distance between them and the shanty. “I would take no hospi­tality from the unwilling. If Master Justice wishes to shut his doors against travelers who have given no offense, that surely is his right. It takes a strong man to stand entirely alone against the Territory.”

  Her words weren’t a threat and weren’t a promise, exactly—she didn’t have authority to do either thing, far as she was aware—but Izzy was pleased with the curl of curtness she put into the words, leaving the old man to wonder if there had been a threat or a promise made after all.

  He sneered at her. “You Scratch’s kin? Scrawnly little chicken like you?”

  “Don’t,” Gabriel said quietly, and she wasn’t sure if he was warning her or Caron. He needn’t have worried about her. A girl didn’t get to be a woman without running into his sort. A female wasn’t supposed to have an opinion, much less authority.