Silver on the Road

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Well, that wasn’t disturbing at all. She huddled deeper into her bedroll and looked up at the sky, the half-moon bright enough to blot out some of the stars, casting odd shadows on the land. But there was nowhere anything could hide, not unless it was knee-high to a grasshopper. They hadn’t even heard a fox or coyote hunting in the past few nights. In fact, the only thing they’d seen was . . . ah. But dust-dancers weren’t anything to be feared of, certainly not someone as road-savvy as her mentor, and he’d been worried days before they saw the first one.

  Since Widder Creek.

  She swallowed her uncertainty and spoke into the chilled darkness.

  “You think whatever it was, it was what spooked the hens, too? Back at—”

  “Maybe.” She couldn’t read him in the darkness with that single terse word.

  “Might not be a threat.”

  “Might not.”

  He didn’t think so, though. She could see it now, in the way he moved during the day, the way he looked over the area even as the horses picked their way along the trail, the way he’d drawn the mule in closer instead of letting it amble at its own pace, keeping it within reach. As though he thought something might attack, going for the unridden animal first.

  She considered the terrain again, trying to see it the way Gabriel might. A ghost cat might blend into the brush, and they’d never see it coming, but the horses would smell it before it got close, surely. What could be silent, near-invisible, scentless, or . . . oh.

  Izzy swallowed hard and touched the silver ring on her finger, rubbing it until the smooth metal warmed under her touch. She wished she had something larger, more than the handful of coin Gabriel had given her, tucked into the pocket of her jacket folded just out of reach with her dress and stockings. Like natives, demon acknowledged the boss’s power but didn’t fear or need it. She’d never thought that she might need to fear them.

  What had the rattlesnake said, again? The memory had turned to haze, but it had been something about enemies and friends and not being who they thought. Demon weren’t friends. And the snake had been speaking to Gabriel, not her, hadn’t it?

  Her palm itched, and she scratched it absently, then inspected the skin for sign of bite or rash. But there was nothing there other than an ordinary bruise on the heel of her hand and a line of dirt under her nails.

  Just nerves.

  Izzy went to sleep that night trying to remember the familiar, comforting feel of her old coverlet under her hands, the sounds of the saloon at night, the smell of brimstone and smoke in the morning air, but her dreams were filled again with the sound of running water and the dry, whistling sound of the something crackling underfoot.

  The next day, they both woke tense and watchful, the small fire put out as soon as Gabriel had poured the last coffee grinds into the dirt. Izzy reloaded the mule’s packs and saddled Uvnee with only half her attention, the rest torn between the sense, still, that something was following them.

  They saw no more dust-swirls in the distance, and eventually, the feeling of being watched faded. She caught Gabriel’s eye at one point, and he nodded slightly: he’d felt their watcher leave too.

  Izzy let the reins drop to her lap, trusting Uvnee, and stretched her arms to the sky. Her menses were gone for another moon, her muscles felt loose and limber, the sky overhead was blue, and the air, while still too dry, now smelled of fresh growing things, and the watcher was gone.

  “Things come and go out here,” Gabriel said. “Best never to assume anything. And pick up the reins. Uvnee’s a good horse but even good horses can spook.”

  Chastened, she picked up the reins again and paid attention to her surroundings.

  The change in mood seemed to make her mentor more talkative, and he picked up her lessons again. “What was that?” he asked, lifting his chin to the left of the trail, at the form disappearing into the grass.

  “Grouse,” she said. “Young one?”

  “Do you know, or are you guessing?”

  “Guessing,” she admitted, bracing herself for the lesson on how to identify a bird by the flick of its tail feathers.

  Midmorning on the fourth day since leaving the farmstead, they came to a split in the dirt track. Gabriel led them onto the left fork, slightly wider but otherwise unremarkable from the trail they had been on, and Izzy reined the mare in a few paces after that, feeling an odd shock run through her body. It was like what she’d felt when she crossed that first stream but different, somehow. She turned in her saddle and looked back, the mule looking at her quizzically, as though to ask what she thought she was doing.

  The trail behind them looked the same as it had before: dry, packed dirt surrounded by brush and rock.

  She looked ahead. The trail they were on looked almost the same. But almost wasn’t the same. If she were trying to read it the way she’d read a person . . .

  It was half again wider. The ground underneath was smoother. And it . . . felt different.

  “This is a road,” she said out loud. “That wasn’t; this is.” The difference between a road and not-road, that she’d asked Gabriel about when they passed the burned-out homestead weeks ago: this was it. Not a thing to be seen but to be felt.

  The realization, the knowledge that she could tell the difference, made her dizzy, enough to catch at the pommel so that she didn’t fall. She looked back again, letting her gaze linger on the ground, then rise up into the sky, the pale colors around her whiting out around the edges, her eyes watering until she blinked, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyelids.

  When she opened her eyes again, the world had gone back to normal, the sensation of difference gone. But she had felt it. She knew.

  The knowledge—the ability to see—tucked into her hands like a precious thing, she urged Uvnee on to catch up with Gabriel, who had not paused while she figured it out.

  Her lessons continued as they rode. Snakes, despite their reputation, had been simple: be respectful when you crossed paths, listen when they speak, and if you have an extra egg to leave out for them, do so, but don’t feel obligated; they disliked being obligated in turn. Mostly, though, they left people alone. Rabbits were tricky, buffalo were power­ful, so were ghost cats, and best left alone unless you had a powerful need. Bears could be approached but never twice, and Gabriel told her stories from several different tribes of what happened to foolish hunters who failed to heed that.

  And that brought them to the creatures of air.

  “If an owl calls three times, what does it mean?”

  “That there’s medicine being worked,” she responded. “If it calls a seventh time, someone will die.”

  “And five or six times?”

  “It’s a noisy bird?” She grinned at him, almost impish.

  Gabriel kept his expression stern. “Why three and why seven, but not four, five, or six?”

  “Because . . . I don’t know.” She pushed the question back to him. “Why?”

  He shrugged one-shouldered. “Nobody knows. It just is.”

  She flicked the underbrim of her hat with one finger, clearly liking the sharp thunking sound that made. “I bet the boss knows.”

  “I bet he does.” Unspoken in his response: but the boss wouldn’t tell her, even if she asked. Although Gabriel had no idea what the Hand would be privy to once she returned to Flood.

  The thought was also a reminder that this, her company, was not a thing he should be becoming accustomed to. When he felt she was blooded enough, that she understood the road enough to travel it herself, the mentorship would be over.

  And, having completed his half of the bargain, the devil would pay in full.

  All he had to do was keep her safe until then.

  They both fell silent. Gabriel drank water from his canteen, then passed it over to her, a silent reminder to stay hydrated, while he scouted the road ahead. Just because t
heir shadow had disappeared for a while, there was no reason to assume all was peaceable up ahead.

  Five days since they’d left the Caron farmstead, and the ground was changing, hillocks and valleys making the riding more difficult. The pale, blue-shadowed shape of the Mother’s Knife was barely visible in the distance, if you knew how to look, and that meant nothing could be taken for granted.

  “Do I get to ask questions now?” she asked.

  He made a sweeping gesture with one arm, indicating that she had his full attention. He was curious to see what she felt important enough to ask, half a month into her first ride.

  “How are we able to feel the road underneath us, or the buffalo herd, but it’s not dangerous the way crossroads are?”

  “Ah.” He fell silent, thinking about how to answer her. “That’s a thing, Isobel.”

  “A thing?”

  “A thing I can’t tell you until you already understand.”

  She kneed Uvnee sideways, then took off her hat and swatted his shoulder with it. “That’s not fair.”

  “It’s not,” he agreed. “But it’s the truth. Never assume that the two will ride side by side.”

  “All right.” She had clearly heard some variation of that before, from the twist of her mouth, and he could only imagine the look in her eyes. “But why do you refer to every road we’ve been on, every true road, I guess, as just the road? As though it’s only one, even though they’re not? And is a road always a road? Or it’s a trail sometimes, like the one by the burned-out farm?”

  “Ah.” He sorted through her words, determining that she was actually only asking the one question: what makes a road a road? It was a reasonable question and one that he could explain with what she already understood. “Remember what I told you before about saying good-bye?”

  She frowned. “That you didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . . the road curves around again.” She squinted, staring at the grass around them in a way that suggested she was seeing something else entire, and he could practically smell the thinking going on inside that handsome head. “But that don’t make sense. The boss’s map showed dozens of roads, all through the Territory. Most of ’em run straight unless they have to go around something they can’t get through or over. That’s how we get crossroads.”

  Uvnee stumbled slightly in the road, and she steadied the mare with knee and rein without thinking, adjusting her weight as she did so. Another few weeks, and he thought she’d be able to sleep in the saddle without falling.

  “You’re still thinking like a townsie stuck in one place,” he said, that observation triggering his response. “Think like a rider.” He’d actually expected this question earlier, but to be fair to the girl, other things had happened to distract her. And, likely, she was using this now to distract her from that.

  “Roads go from one place to another,” she said slowly. “Sometimes, like the path from town to the river, it’s people walking, making a trail. Like an animal trail, ’cept it goes somewhere we want to go, so more and more people use it and it widens. Paths that don’t get used disappear. Paths that are used, they turn into roads?”

  He could see her turning that idea over and over, handling it to find the flaws or see where a new piece went.

  “And like . . . like the Law, once it becomes a road, because everyone agrees it’s a road. It’s . . . Once it’s a road, it’s like every other road . . . like water goes from the mountains down creeks, into lakes, but it’s all water?”

  He raised an eyebrow, impressed. “Very like,” he agreed.

  She was quiet for a while, then: “It doesn’t work that way outside the Territory, does it?”

  “Not so much, no.” He thought of the roads in Philadelphia, cobbled over and dead under his boots. “Maybe they are elsewhere; I didn’t travel much. But not in the cities.”

  “But why? And what makes a road safe and crossroads not?” She glared between Uvnee’s ears, as though that particular spot were to blame for her failure to understand.

  “Don’t think so hard about it, Isobel. Let it come. It will.” He could see that she didn’t believe him at all. He took another glance at the road ahead of them, letting his awareness open to anything that might be moving. There was nothing but silence until he pointed to where the road led into the hills. “Clear Rock’s up ahead. Last one to the marker-post buys dinner tonight!”

  It was a useless bet—Izzy didn’t have enough coin on her to pay for a meal, even if there’d been a saloon in town to offer one. But the road was clear, and the horses could use a leg stretch after a slow but steady walk all day. He dug his heels in and let Steady go, aware that the mare and her rider were hot on his heels.

  Clear Rock was less a town than it was a stronghold. It sat in a cut on the side of a long hill, looking out over the rolling plains to the east, and was the last decent place to stop before you headed into the foothills proper and the western borders of the Territory. To reach it, riders had to pass by a massive trunk, wider than a man could reach around, hewn from somewhere else, stripped of its bark, and set into the ground just as the road curved around and up the hill.

  Steady, with his longer legs, reached the post first, but Isobel managed to stay on his heels the entire way. Reining the mare in, she wheeled around the post, her hat falling off her head until she caught it, jamming it back down over her braid. “Why is this in the middle of the road?”

  “Border towns use ’em, especially when there’s only one way in and out of town. Slows people down if they’re looking to enter town in a hurry in a group. You ride through here in a group of four or more, you have to slow down and split up.” He frowned at the post, reading the marks carved there by recent travelers. None of the marks looked to be less than a month old. Not that Clear Rock got much traffic, but he’d have thought, with spring coming on, there might have been riders coming down from the mountains, or a marshal on their rounds. “Up here, supplies can get scarce, and folk aren’t always known for asking permission if they need something.”

  Marshals didn’t keep a set route—they weren’t that predictable—but the last sigil carved into the post looked to be months old, maybe even a year past.

  She reached out past where he was looking and touched the marshal’s motto burned into the wood just at eye level. “Act with ill intent and you will be found.”

  “The marshal’s solemn vow,” he said.

  “But sometimes, they don’t find them,” she said.

  He looked at the year-old mark again. “Sometimes. And sometimes they’re just too late. The Territory’s wide, and horses can ride only so far, so fast. Even if we had a hundred more marshals, it still wouldn’t be enough.”

  “That’s why the boss has me.” Her voice wavered a little, as though she was only now starting to realize what she’d let herself in for.

  “I doubt he expects you to be able to track down raiders or outlaw posses all by your lonesome,” he said, although for all he knew, that was exactly what the devil expected. The old man might look human, but anyone with a drop of Territory water in them knew he wasn’t, and what he thought and expected couldn’t be counted on to match what normal folk thought.

  “Maybe” was all Isobel said. “But he . . .” She shut her mouth as the mule caught up with them, its ears more annoyed than usual. Whatever she was going to say, she didn’t share, and they started down the slight slope into the town proper.

  Clear Rock hadn’t been built to be pretty. The first buildings were low structures: storehouses and pigpens. Then there was a corral, blocks of hay shoved in one corner, a horse-sized shed in the other. The houses, built of stone, not wood, were huddled in the center, eleven of them, their doors painted bright colors as though to make up for the ochre dullness of their walls. It was an odd way to build a town, until you remembered how isolated they were, prey to any posse that rode
through.

  “Where is everyone?” Isobel asked when no one came out to greet them.

  “I don’t know.” The last time he’d been there, he’d been challenged just after the marker-post, by a young lookout sitting high up on a rock. The rock had been bare when they’d ridden past it.

  There was a dog sitting in the corral, a lean, dun-colored beast, regarding the newcomers with calm curiosity. But that was it. There were no other animals in the pens, no people on the street or in doorways.

  Gabriel removed his hat, letting it rest on the pommel of his saddle, and ruffled his sweat-streaked hair. “Hey, the town!”

  There was no answer, no movement.

  Unlike Widder Creek, there was no stench of illness or decay, and the silence was less ominous than simply . . . empty.

  Isobel looked around, her gaze skimming from left to right, alert for any movement despite—or because of—the silence. She was a far cry from the girl who’d ridden out of Flood two weeks before, and he felt a touch of pride despite the situation. “They . . . all went somewhere?”

  “Maybe. Stay on your horse and be ready.”

  Isobel gave him a long look, then settled her backside more firmly in the saddle and touched the long knife sheathed next to her leg. She still wasn’t as handy with it as she was her shorter blade, but the only guns they had were on Gabriel’s saddle, and he wasn’t inclined to pass her one. She was still as likely to shoot him as anything that attacked them.

  He rested his handgun across his lap, half-hidden by the brim of his hat, and kept the reins in one hand. The mule shoved its way between the two horses as though it wanted to hide from something. Isobel reached out a hand and touched its neck lightly. “Easy, boy,” she said. “Whatever’s wrong, we’ll protect you.”

  It snorted, judging her words and finding them wanting, and despite the tension, she laughed. That gentle sound seemed to fill the street, far louder than had come from her throat, bouncing off the stone walls and echoing as though more than one person were laughing, even after she had stopped, a hand clamped over her mouth.