Silver on the Road

by Laura Anne Gilman

Approaching Graciendo’s home at night wasn’t wise even for someone who was expected, much less strangers. But it wasn’t exactly safe even during the daylight. Gabriel had Isobel dismount as they approached the cabin, the mule halter-tied and the horses on leads.

  The cabin itself was barely visible until you were within shouting distance, the planks blending into the trees around it, the roof overgrown with plants, and no windows to let light escape, merely a single wooden door.

  “You’re both gone distressingly quiet,” Isobel said. “Who is this Graciendo, anyway?”

  “Old,” Gabriel said. “Very old and crotchety. And not fond of strangers. You’ll stay here with the horses.”

  “But—” Isobel started to protest, then subsided when he gave her a sidelong look.

  “You too,” Gabriel said to the magician.

  “Oh, believe you me, I have no interest in getting in the old bear’s face, and he has no interest in seeing mine. I will keep our little rider company here, and we shall while away the moments until you return.”

  Gabriel snorted, then took off his hat and hung it on the pommel horn of Steady’s saddle, and rooted in his bags for a battered envelope, about the size of a lady’s reticule and the thickness of two fingers, and checked to make sure that there were no rips or tears.

  “What would you do if it had been damaged?” the magician asked, idly curious.

  “Left it on the doorstep and run,” Gabriel said easily. “Stay here.”

  He walked forward, trusting that they would do as they’d promised. But before he could even reach the cabin, the wooden door slammed open and Graciendo emerged.

  “Oh, hellfire,” Gabriel said.

  “You’re late.” Graciendo, in a bad mood, filled the entire doorframe. He had the bronzed skin and broad cheekbones of half a dozen native tribes, but his chin and cheeks were covered by the same glossy brown hair that ran from his scalp down to his shoulders, curling wildly; his jacket and trousers were styled like a northern trapper’s, and his style of speech was curt enough to be American.

  “I told you I’d be back in the spring. It’s spring. I should have come earlier?” Gabriel went on the offensive, hoping to distract Graciendo from the fact that he’d brought companions. When it had been only Isobel, he could have justified it, playing the girl as weaker than she was, helpless and therefore not a threat. But the magician changed that story too much and—

  “And you bring that to my door?”

  “Technically, I am not at your door, nor even within your yard.” The magician’s voice carried clearly, but Gabriel was relieved to not hear the usual half-mocking sneer in it. “Consider me passing by, with no interest in your pettish and petulant self.”

  Gabriel was convinced he was the only one on this mountain with a lick of sense or survival. Well, him and the mule, mayhap, since Flatfoot was quietly minding his own business, grazing on a bush.

  “I wasn’t talking about you, you misbegotten abomination.”

  Isobel looked up at that, her eyes wide, and then they narrowed again. Gabriel groaned. She was an even-tempered soul most of the time, but he knew that look, now.

  “Iz,” he said, getting her attention, and then turned back to his host. “Graciendo. Please. It’s been a difficult trip and I’d rather not have to clean blood off my boots if we can avoid it.” He didn’t bother appealing to the magician’s better nature; he had none. “I brought your letters.” He held the packet out as a peace offering. The hand that reached out and grabbed it moved faster than expected, but not so fast that the thick claws tipping each finger weren’t visible.

  “Hrmph.” Graciendo didn’t even look at the letters but shoved the entire packet into a pouch slung at his side. “Wait.” And with that, he disappeared back into the cabin, slamming the door shut behind him.

  “Well,” Isobel started to say, and the magician placed a hand over her mouth.

  “Whatever you were thinking, keep it inside your skull,” he advised. “Even the wind skirts carefully around that one when he’s in a mood.”

  The door opened again before Gabriel could say anything, and Graciendo emerged again.

  “I thought you wiser than to travel with such,” he said to Gabriel. “The Old Man plays games the likes of you should stay away from. He’s got nothing to offer you.”

  Gabriel huffed a laugh. Graciendo was old and had mostly taken himself from the world. He’d forgotten what it meant to live in it. “He had something” was all he said. “This is Isobel,” he went on. “She’s new come to the roads, and I offered to show her the way.”

  “Hmmph.” Graciendo made no move to go toward her, and she made no move to come forward but inclined her head slightly at the introduction. “And you, Long Nose?” Graciendo said, still not looking at the magician. “What’s your reason for venturing near my home?”

  The magician made an elegant gesture with his arms and fingers, as though to give the answer up to the heavens. “I go as the wind wills me,” he said. “And it seems the wind wills me here.”

  “With them.”

  “With them.”

  There was something going on between the two of them, but Gabriel wasn’t even going to try and figure it out. Graciendo was old and odd, and the magician purely odd. Nobody was growling, shouting, or smiting, and that was good enough for him.

  “I’ve a passing fondness for this one,” Graciendo said, jerking one clawed thumb at Gabriel. “If I hear you’ve gamed with him, I’ll be displeased.”

  “He’s born bound,” the magician said. “What could I do to him that’s not already been done?”

  Graciendo growled, and Gabriel decided they’d already tested their luck far too long.

  “We need be on our way, old friend,” he said, not waiting for a token protest of hospitality that would not come. Normally, he would ask to refill his water at the well, but the magician had proven that they need not ask for that, and the sooner they were on the road again, the better for his nerves. Graciendo had never offered him any harm, and he did not think he would injure any companion Gabriel brought with him, but he seemed to take Isobel badly, although Gabriel was unsure if was her femaleness that offended or where she hailed from.

  He didn’t even question the fact that Graciendo knew where Isobel had come from: Graciendo knew everything. And told nothing, save it suited him.

  “You’ll want to avoid the eastern trail down. Go back the way you came or take the broken trail. It’s safer.”

  Safer and would keep them from returning, if the eastern trail were blocked. Gabriel nodded, and the old man grunted at him, then went back inside. This time, when he closed the door behind him, it was quietly but firmly.

  Whatever had been following them had abandoned them at some point—Izzy suspected it was when they’d approached Graciendo’s cabin—and had left them alone since then. She looked back over her shoulder, but the cabin was out of sight now, hidden behind several twists in the road.

  “Graciendo. He’s not . . . entirely human, is he?”

  “Not even slightly,” Gabriel said, then reconsidered. “Well, slightly.”

  There was more there, but Izzy didn’t push it, still slightly off-­balance from the encounter. She focused instead on feeling the stretch of her legs, the faint, ever-present ache in her back, the familiar creak and sway of the saddle underneath her as the horses picked their way down the stone-studded trail they’d found soon after leaving the cabin. Unlike the way up, this was a true road: she knew that even without touching it directly, the way she knew the sun had risen simply for the sky being lighter. If she pushed a little deeper, she could feel it, but it was a comfortable hum, easy to ignore for now. She looked at the back of the magician’s head where he strode ahead of them, his moccasins more surefooted than the horses’ hooves, his strides longer. His hair was nearly as long as hers, clubbed at the back of his neck,
the sandy brown strands untouched by hat or brush, and his hands moved constantly as he walked, long arms waving as though he carried on a conversation with himself—or something the rest of them could not hear.

  She traveled with a magician. She had just been insulted by what she thought might be an animal spirit in human form. She was on the trail of a malign storm that could and would kill them if given opportunity. Was this the sort of thing she should expect from now on?

  Izzy rubbed her thumb into her palm, but the mark there was quiet, offering no help. A tinge of bitterness crept into her thoughts. The boss knew she liked to have the details well in hand, know every step she needed to take. So, he’d sent her off with no warning, no telling, no idea of what was to come—even discounting what had happened—and that had to be deliberate.

  Even if he hadn’t known what was to come, hadn’t seen the storm, predicted what she would find, there was still so much she’d been clueless of, ignorant as a child.

  And she thought, maybe, she understood, a little. That didn’t mean she liked it. “I’m doing what I can,” she told the mark. “But you could have warned me.”

  Uvnee’s ears twitched, but that was the only response she got, save an odd glance sideways from Gabriel riding next to her. Nothing came to her, no whisper of understanding or sense of what to do next. She was on her own.

  Or not. She had Gabriel. And while the magician wrapped his responses in madness, he hadn’t ducked their questions entirely. And he had said he wished to help.

  “Farron!” she called, loud enough that he could not pretend he hadn’t heard her. “What did you mean when you said the balance had been tipped turvy?”

  The darkness he’d spoken of, the “eater” Calls Thunder had seen, those she knew. But balance? She thought he meant something more than the dizziness she had felt when the boss’s medicine worked through her. He must.

  The magician’s arms paused midgesture, then his shoulders eased and he dropped back enough for the horses to catch up with him, walking to Izzy’s right. He was tall enough that Izzy didn’t need to look down to speak with him, his head coming to just below her shoulder.

  “Flesh is but the youngest brother. The winds move through it all. The winds sift through the bones, drive water, wear down stone. The wind was here before land, was here before water. Far before flesh.”

  She waited. He seemed to think that he had explained something, but she was unsure what that might have been. He took a sip of water from her canteen and handed it up to her, as though knowing before she did that her throat had become parched. She took a sip, then frowned. The canteen had been latched on Uvnee’s saddle—on the other side from where the magician was walking. With a sigh, she rehooked it in its proper place.

  “Wind gives us knowledge, power. We see what it sees, know what it knows.” The words came slowly, pulled from him almost unwilling. She silently urged him on, afraid to speak and break the thread. “We see . . . things you cannot.”

  “And it drives them mad,” Gabriel muttered from behind them, and she raised a hand over her shoulder, one finger lifted, to tell him to hush.

  The magician didn’t seem to hear the comment, or if he had, he ignored it. “The world tilts and tips and rests, events shaking and resettling it, over and again, the rise and fall and rise again. Now, something shakes it, turns it sideways, will not let it settle. That is what we see. Something terrible. Something ill.”

  He exhaled, and Izzy knew he’d said all he would, or in fact all he could. They moved along with only the clop of hooves and the call of birds in the trees, out of sight, keeping them company. In the distance there was a rough bark, a fox startled out of its midday den, and the answering angry caw of crows.

  “The thing that swept Clear Rock clean came on the winds,” Izzy said. “The ill wind Calls Thunder saw. Farron, are the winds bringing this?”

  “We don’t know. Everything is turned turvy and we cannot tell. But it fills the bones and cracks them. Cracked bones cannot bear the weight.”

  His words were madness, and Gabriel would tell her she was a fool for expecting anything else. And yet . . .

  Molly had broken her foot once. The curandero had told her to stay off it for weeks, and she’d spent all evening in a chair, ordering them about like a queen. Cracked bones cannot bear the weight. Weight of what?

  “The miners said that something was stalking them,” Gabriel said, his voice carefully even. “Something lurking in the hills, maybe even under the hills. It may’ve come from the sky, but it’s gone to earth like a badger.”

  When she looked at the magician, he was carefully staring elsewhere, his lips pursed as though to whistle.

  “Badgers . . .” An old story stirred in her head, the familiar echo that had been haunting her taking on more solid form. “Badger shaped the bones of the world.”

  An old story, a clapping game children played. Turtle dove the waters of the world and brought up the bones, and Badger claimed the bones and buried them, and from the buried bones, Spider spread out the land. . . .

  Every people had a story of how the world had come about, the boss said, and every one was as valid as the next and just about as true.

  If the storm had gone to ground, cracked the bones that made up the world . . . She thought of the dead bodies in Widder Creek, the sudden illness coming from nowhere and killing everything it reached. Iktan told stories of ill-wishings like that, meant to harm, not heal or grow, to teach a lesson or shame someone too proud. . . .

  “How am I supposed to stop that?” Her voice might have cracked on that last, and she dared anyone to blame her. A thing powerful enough to ill-wish the Territory . . .

  “The old man claimed the bones,” Farron said with a shrug, looking back at her, his gaze still distant. “Thus, the bones have claim on him. And by proxy, little rider, you as well. If you did not want this, you should not have chosen this.”

  “I didn’t choose this!” she said, exasperated. “I chose . . .” There was silence from her companions, neither of them looking at her now, and her words fell back into her throat.

  “I want to work for you. Not the saloon, not . . . I don’t want to work the back rooms or the bar. I want to work for you.”

  “Respect. Power, maybe.”

  “And what do you have to offer in return?”

  “Myself. All I have is myself.”

  Izzy felt bile rise in her throat and forced it down, the bitterness in her stomach a match to the taste in her thoughts. He was right: she had chosen this, however blindly. However foolishly. She had given herself over of her own free will. The judge had tried to warn her, and she had said . . .

  “All right.” She tried to calm herself, refusing to acknowledge the way her heart was thumping, her palms sweating, the sigil etched into her skin silent, useless. If the boss wouldn’t tell her what to do, she’d figure it out for herself.

  She would earn what she’d been given.

  “Farron, what can you—” she started to ask, when the magician suddenly jammed his shoulder into Uvnee’s chest, jolting the mare sideways into Steady, who snorted and nipped in protest, even as their riders were hauling back on the reins.

  “What the blazes are you doing?” Gabriel demanded, but the magician ignored them both, holding up a hand to tell them to stay still, then striding forward a pace. A rockfall had blocked part of the trail at some point up ahead, obscuring the way. He disappeared around the rocks for a breath, then returned almost immediately.

  “What?” Izzy asked, seeing something on his face that hadn’t been there before, some flicker of expression she couldn’t quite place.

  “Something waits ahead.”

  “In the crossroads?” Gabriel wasn’t asking, but the magician nodded once.

  Gabriel said something in another language, guttural and harsh enough to be a curse. “Any idea what?”
<
br />   The magician shook his head once.

  “But it means us ill,” Izzy guessed.

  The look Farron gave her was scornful. “Nothing lurks for good intent, little rider. And never in a crossroads.”

  “Damnation. The only way around is to go back nearly half a day,” Gabriel said, rubbing wearily at the bristle on his chin. “And Graciendo said this was the safest trail.”

  “So, we go through.” Izzy swallowed hard, not feeling anywhere near as brave as she’d tried to sound. “We’ve silver and a magician on our side; what could go wrong?”

  “And to think we once worried about raiders and haints,” Gabriel said, and his laughter might have been mostly bravado, but it helped.

  Still, none of them moved forward. That, strangely, also helped: she would rather they all be nervous. That made her fears seem less foolish, more wise.

  Her hands shook nonetheless, and she rested them on her knees to hide it, the tug on the reins making Uvnee flick her ears backward as though to ask what the matter was. The horses didn’t seem fussed at all. She took some courage from that and the fact that Flatfoot was already poking its head around the rockfall and then looking back, as though to ask why they were all simply standing there instead of moving.

  “You first,” Gabriel said, and she kneed Uvnee forward, only to have him grab at her reins. “Not you. Him.” He jerked his chin at the magician.

  “But—”

  “Your mentor does not believe in the goodness of my intentions,” Farron said, his strange, hard smile back in place, “and would happily sacrifice me to whatever malevolence may await us in the crossroads ahead.”

  “That’s right,” Gabriel said without shame. “So go.”

  Izzy wanted to protest: she was the one who was meant to discover what was wrong; it was her duty to do this. But by the time she gathered her thoughts enough, Farron had already gone around the bend again, whistling a jaunty, unfamiliar tune. She wrenched the reins free of Gabriel’s grasp, giving him a glare, and pushed Uvnee into a trot to follow him down the trail.