The Cold Eye

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “You were late,” Gabriel scolded her, finally, his voice dry as dust.

  She wiggled free, indignant, then rubbed at her face, letting out a faint laugh. “You found me.”

  “I found you,” he agreed. The skin around the scar on his face was stubbled, as though he’d had trouble shaving around it, and his dark blue eyes looked more tired than they had before, when she’d left him to rest. Guilt spiked through her, unfamiliar and unwelcome.

  He pulled back a little, looking over her shoulder at something, then back at her carefully. “Something’s wrong.”

  “I . . . No.” Yes. But she couldn’t explain it, couldn’t add to that exhaustion with things he couldn’t fix. Instead, she gripped him by the sleeve of his jacket, pulling him forward.

  “Jumping-Up Duck. This is my mentor, Gabriel Kasun, known as Two Voices.”

  The older woman gave Gabriel a thorough once-over, then lifted her gaze to meet his own. He took his hat off and stood quietly, his hands clasped behind his back, shoulders at ease. Isobel had become so accustomed to him wearing that battered, flat-crowned hat from morning to night, it was a shock to see the sunlight catch on his hair, picking up glints of gold in the dark brown, the edges of it curling over his collar. The claw mark was more visible from the side, where the scar tissue lifted from the tanned skin of his cheek, and she found herself staring at it, then had to shake herself to look away.

  “You are welcome” was all the older woman said, then turned away without introducing the others, who had hung back a few paces. Isobel was surprised, but Gabriel didn’t seem offended, instead turning to her, hat still in his hand.

  “Let me get the animals settled, and then you can tell me what’s going on, hmmm?”

  The gelding and mule were quickly unpacked and picketed to graze with Uvnee, who seemed to have forgotten entirely about the ground moving beneath her hooves. Steady, once he was assured of a picket next to the mare, settled down as well, but the mule remained uneasy, pushing its muzzle back into Isobel’s hand before finally lowering it to graze.

  “How did you find me?”

  Gabriel hesitated, then dusted the brim of his hat against his thigh. “I had a visitor to camp,” he said. “Lean, dusty fellow.”

  Isobel raised her gaze to the sky, seeing only pale blue overhead. “The Jack.”

  “He may have mentioned where he saw you last and under what conditions.”

  “And you raced out to rescue me?”

  “I broke camp to come support you, as is my right and my obligation. So tell me, Isobel Devil’s Hand, what brings us to these forsaken, shaken hills, and what mischief have you found?

  Isobel opened her mouth, then shook her head and fetched a low wooden stool from her campment and settled on it, cautiously, half-expecting it to roll out from under her without warning.

  Gabriel paced back and forth slowly as she spoke, beginning with the discovery of the buffalo corpses.

  Gabriel held a hand to pause her. “Arrows or bullets?”

  “Bullets.” She hadn’t thought of it then. “Settlers?”

  “Mayhap, may not. Natives’ve been trading for guns since they first caught sight of ’em, same as horses. Stealing ’em, too. And there’re fools on all sides. Did you clean the site?”

  “Best I could, yes. But I made a promise to them.”

  “To the . . . Iz.” He let the rebuke die unspoken. “Did that promise say you were going to do something right away?”

  “. . . No.”

  “The dead have time to be patient. Tell me the rest.”

  She did, through to the quake they’d felt just as he’d ridden up. He listened without further interruption, although his eyebrows lifted when she told him of the whisper that had woken her, and then again when she spoke of the sensation of being rejected when she tried to reach the Road.

  “It’s odd,” he said when she finally ran out of things to say, lapsing into an exhausted silence. “After the past few months, I’d have sworn I’d never utter those words again, but that is . . . indisputably odd. Then again, the hotlands have a reputation that reaches all the way to the Mudwater.”

  “The whatlands?” Isobel was certain she’d never heard that name before.

  “I told you that past here, the land’s riddled with hot springs?”

  She frowned, then nodded, remembering.

  “They’re not like the springs we saw down south, where you can dip a toe in, maybe even bathe. These are nasty things: you don’t always know they’re there, until suddenly the skin’s boiled off your bones.” He shoved his hand through his hair, pushing it away from his face, and grinned briefly, without humor. “Or so stories say. I never had cause to ride up there. I don’t know the peoples up there, and the tribes’ve no need of me.”

  His services as an advocate, he meant. Gabriel had trained for the law back East, had been riding circuit when they met, doing small services for people as needed ’em, although she’d never quite understood what those things were. Here, if there was an argument that couldn’t be settled, the marshals got involved, and if someone got hurt, or you needed to formalize a thing, then you went before a judge, like she did with her contract. Not so much need for an advocate, but Gabriel didn’t seem to lack for folk to visit everywhere they’d gone.

  “You think it’s connected? The quakes, and the . . . the quietness, up that way?”

  “Don’t know.” He sat down opposite her, wincing a little as he leaned against his pack, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Might be nothing, might be you just being tired, might be something. But if we’re going up thataway, which it seems we are, we’ll find out ourselves, won’t we?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, the memory of the ground shaking still too near for joking. “You needn’t look so pleased about it,” she muttered. “The ground moved.” The ground moved and the Road was silent, and something had scraped the power from this valley, and who knows how far beyond. And he was looking pleased.

  “There’s a story,” Gabriel said, pulling his legs up so he could rest his arms on his knees, what she’d come to think of as his storytelling pose. “There’s a story that comes from before we were here, before the devil claimed dominion from the Mudwater to the Knife, back when there was only the one People, with skins the color of clay and eyes like an autumn storm.”

  She snorted at that, and he glared at her until she cast her eyes down in apology so he’d go on.

  “Back then, the story says, the land was flat, just rolling plains, and you could see from one end to another. But then one day, a child found a hollow log and started to hit it with a stick, and the sound was so pleasing to the spirits that they began to dance. And as they danced the land shook, and as the land shook, it rose, until hills formed, and then mountains. And that’s why the land isn’t flat anymore.”

  Isobel wrinkled her nose. “That’s just a story.”

  He shrugged. “It’s an old story, and old stories have truth in ’em somewhere, most of them. This might be nothing to worry about, just the spirits dancing, or the earth shrugging ’cause we’re itching its back. But you were driven here by something, and you’re worried about what you’re reading, then yah, maybe it’s something new or worrisome. So, we poke our noses in and see what bites us.”

  She gave his ribs a pointed look. “You haven’t gotten tired of being bitten yet?”

  “You volunteer this time, then,” he said, cheerful enough to make her want to bite him.

  “Don’t know who we’ll encounter up there,” Gabriel went on, thoughtfully. “Your friends probably splintered off a Shoshone or Cheyenne tribe east of here, maybe some of their kin went farther up mountain, but if so, I don’t speak much of their tongue. Never had need to learn it.” He sounded regretful but resigned. “Don’t suppose you could talk one of these folks into coming with us, as guide?”

  Isobel shook her head, finding a thread that was beginning to pull loose on her skirt and trying to poke it back into the weave.
The clothes that had been newly stiff when she’d first packed them back at the saloon were soft and faded now; sun and dirt and washing with a poor excuse for soap had left their mark. She should have bought a new skirt and underthings at the mercantile, back at La Ramée, but she’d been distracted by the ill post-rider and Gabriel’s injury.

  “They don’t want to leave. This is their home, and I don’t think they’ve anywhere else to go.”

  “They’ll defend this past dying,” Gabriel said. “Foolish, but understandable, I suppose.”

  Driven by that thought, Isobel reached out once more, bending from the stool to place her palm flat on the ground, trying to sense again what lay just beyond the small valley they were in.

  Nothing. She could feel where she was, and where they had been, but the way north was still empty, like an unfinished map fading into blank parchment.

  No, not blank, she thought. Scraped clean.

  The feeling shuddered through her, made her want to ride for Flood without stopping, spill everything she knew, everything she had seen, everything she feared, and ask the boss to deal with it. He was the Master of the Territory; she was only his Hand, and a poor one at that. The boss might—

  “Stop that.”

  She looked up at Gabriel, blinking. “What?”

  His eyes were narrowed to slits, his face set in too-stern lines. “You were thinking that you had no idea what to do, bordering on panic, mayhap. That this was beyond your handling. That from the girl who locked horns with a magician, who took on Spaniards, who faced down a spell-born creature, and made them all behave?”

  Gabriel was an excellent card player when he chose to be, and his body gave off little he did not want known. But at that moment, he practically shouted derision and disbelief, and Isobel felt her mouth twist into a reluctant smile.

  “Not alone, I didn’t,” she said.

  “And you’re not alone now. If you’re done being foolish?” he asked, and she huffed at him but nodded. “We’ll need to barter in the morning, if your new friends have provisions available. If there are more quakes, odds are game will be harder to find.”

  She made a face. “They had goats, but they all ran off. Dried meat again?”

  “I thought you liked it.” He was teasing her now, trying to change the mood, and she let him.

  “Not for every meal. My jaws ache”—and she opened and shut them to make the point. “We’ll be able to forage, though? It’s not as though plants can turn tail and run.”

  “All the bitterroot and lamb’s-quarter you can eat,” he promised, knowing full well how much she hated lamb’s-quarter. “And this time of year, odds are we’ll find berries, too. But better to be prepared.” He glanced up across the clearing, studying the tiny garden visible from where they were with a dubious expression, as though not expecting them to have much to share.

  “Lamb’s-quarter and soaked beans,” she said, trying to work up some enthusiasm. “Maybe trout?” Fish were limited in how far they could flee, after all. Although her previous attempts at catching trout had been less than successful, so maybe she’d make sure they packed —

  “Oh.” In the shock of everything, she had nearly forgotten. “There was a packet for you.”

  “What?”

  She took an obscure pleasure in having surprised him. “At the waystation,” she said, reaching over to pull at her pack, dragging it within reach so she could dig the envelope out and hand it to him. “For you.”

  Gabriel had taken the letter from Isobel, his fingers near numb with unhappy surprise, but there’d been no time to open it before several of the children ran up to them, wanting to see the horses, and he’d shoved it into his bag before putting the two youngest on the mule’s back and leading him around in a small circle, while Isobel showed the others how to offer Steady a handful of grass in their open palm until he lowered his head and let them pet him to their heart’s content. And then one of the women came to chase the children away, inviting them to join them for the afternoon meal.

  Isobel’s brief telling of their story, as much as she knew of it, had made him curious as to where they came from or why they’d settled here, without kin or tribe, but he pushed his curiosity as far as possible without giving offense, and they merely smiled at him, closed-mouthed, and took another bite of bread, or a drink of water, then turned to someone else and spoke in another language, closing him out until he relented. Isobel was likely correct: wherever they had been was no longer an option for them.This was all they had left, and they would not let go of it, not even to admit that something was wrong.

  Foolishness, he thought, but it wasn’t his call to make.

  Gabriel had not exaggerated when he told Isobel he knew nothing of this region; the Territory was massive, and even he could not expect to ride all of it. But listening to them speak a dialect he did not recognize beyond a few shared trade-words was a reminder to pick up Isobel’s language lessons again. English was the preferred trade language, particularly to the east and north, but she couldn’t always count on that. This might not be the only time the Left Hand rode beyond the pale.

  Their hosts were more forthcoming after the meal, however. He negotiated for supplies with the one called Four Wolves, who quickly separated him from a handful of half-coins left from what the devil had given him. Four Wolves drove a tight bargain, fully aware that they had no other options, but they both walked away reasonably satisfied.

  With all that, it wasn’t until he was curled into his bedroll, the last flickers of a wood fire warming his backside and Isobel asleep nearby, the horses and mule sleeping with their heads lowered together, that he had time to think about the letter Isobel had given him. Or, Gabriel owned, that he couldn’t avoid thinking about it any longer. There were few people who would write to him, and even fewer who would be able to direct a letter so that it would reach him.

  Part of him wanted to toss it onto the fire until it was nothing but crumbled ash.

  Instead, he slowly reached for his pack, catching the envelope between two fingers and pulling it out. The moon wasn’t quite bright enough to read by, so he pulled the coalstone out as well, pressing it down until it began to glow. Without tinder, it wouldn’t spark a flame but gave off enough light that Gabriel’s eyes were able to make out the lettering on the paper.

  Gabriel Kasun, Esquire.

  The weight of the honorific pushed at him, reminding him of the obligations he still carried, that had nothing to do with the girl—the young woman—sleeping on the other side of the fire. The obligations that made him slit open the envelope and pull the enclosed letter out to read rather than set it aflame.

  Gabe,

  I hesitated sharing this with you, for it seems unlikely that you are in a position to do anything beyond fret over it, and I would not add more to the burden you already bear. And yet, the news offends every instinct I have, all sense of proper behavior. I cannot keep it to myself, else I might say something rash in circles where silence best serves.

  Abner Westbrook. Stolid, to outward appearances as plodding as a plow horse, but hiding a mind sharp as a fresh-stropped razor. One of the few true friends Gabriel had made when he went east, and the only one he could say that he had kept.

  He was also a junior member of the federal judiciary, with family in much higher positions. If there was a rumor with even a single root in truth, Abner knew of it.

  Word comes through reliable voices that our new president has determined the need to send a surveying team across the Mississippi and into the Territory you call home. He names it a ‘Corps of Discovery’ and claims it a simple excursion to survey this new land beyond our known borders. Congress seems set to give him as he requests, for they have dreams of expanding our limits, be it for land or metals or simply the need to plant their names into history.

  I know that scouts have come and gone into your Territory without complaint; Congress thinks this a blanket to cover all sins. I am not so sanguine. And I fear that Jefferson, in h
is hubris, plans more than he admits.

  The letter went on a few paragraphs longer, ending with a hope that the missive found Gabriel well, etc., but he barely skimmed the rest, down to the familiar blotch of ink that Abner claimed was a signature.

  Gabriel’s gut tightened, a familiar reaction to unpleasant news. It might simply be curiosity driving Jefferson—the man was well known to have a voracious interest in nearly everything. But the man was president now, and that made him—Gabriel hesitated to say “dangerous,” but certainly a man with far more power than before. And power made men dangerous, no matter their intent.

  But what was that power to him? And what did Abner think he, Gabriel, could do about it? He was not the man he’d meant to be, back East. That man had died somewhere mid-crossing, pulled under and drowned.

  Across the fire, Isobel rolled over, muttering in her sleep, and Gabriel slowly folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope, then quenched the coalstone with a touch.

  Abner worried too early. It was still a matter for Congress to decide, and while Gabriel had only spent a few years on that side of the River, any man with sense knew that approving expenditures on such a scale would not happen overnight. Anything could happen in that time. America’s attention might be directed back across the ocean, away from the west. Congress might decide to withhold approval, use it to control the president, make him dance to their tune. And even if none of that happened, if Jefferson did push the borders, the devil still stood between outside powers and the Territory.

  And anyone, within or without the Territory, who dismissed the devil as a threat was a fool who deserved what was handed to them.

  And yet, even with that decided, Gabriel was unable to fall asleep, watching the moon fade, until birdsong roused Isobel, and he could pretend to wake.

  PART TWO