The Cold Eye

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Will he be all right?” Isobel crouched to the side, her gaze switching between him and the mule, her face ashen, her eyes too wide and wild.

  “If we can get him up, I think so.” Gabriel tried to infuse certainty into his voice, knowing he failed when she flinched. “Need to see how deep those claw marks are. They’re not too bad, I don’t think.” He ran his hand gently over one, and the mule shuddered, but new blood didn’t gush from it.

  “Just scoring,” Gabriel said. “No worse than mine. We’re a matched set now, you little idiot.” He coaxed him up gently, hands under thick-furred belly. “Come on, up, there you go, old man. Iz, water and the coneflower salve now!”

  She scrambled to her feet again, racing to dig the items out of their packs. She came back with the salve and a canteen, and a pale blue cloth clutched in her hand.

  “Good. Clean the wounds,” he told her, taking the packet of salve from her other hand.

  “But your—”

  “Iz. Now.”

  He waited to watch her uncork the canteen and splash a little water over Flatfoot’s side, using the old shirt to wipe away the blood. He’d been right; the claw marks were ugly but shallow, and the bleeding had mostly stopped already. There were deeper wounds by his tail where the beast had tried to bite down that looked ugly but weren’t bleeding. She cleaned those out too, keeping up a steady stream of nonsense words while she worked, her left hand stroking the mule’s flank as she worked, reminding him that it was her touching him there, not another predator.

  The mule shuddered under her touch, its eyes rolling nervously, but it allowed her to work. Gabriel added a little of the water to the salve and let it soften, then stepped away to check on the horses, running quick hands over their sides, murmuring nonsense into their ears. He didn’t have time to picket them, but when the salve had reached the proper consistency, he dabbed a pinch of it on their muzzles, near the soft skin of flaring nostrils. The bitter smell would not mask the dead cat, not entirely, but it should be enough to distract and calm them.

  “Just a bit,” he told them, letting them lip at his palms, hoping for a treat. “Just a bit longer, can you do that, hmmm?”

  Steady leaned against him, Uvnee looking over the gelding’s neck, and he decided the risk of them bolting was likely over, assuming nothing else crashed down at them. Returning to Isobel’s side, he checked the job she’d done, then nudged her aside, showing her how to apply the rest of the salve over the wounds, the pale blue paste drying quickly on the skin.

  “It will keep flies out, too, while they scab over,” he told her, then frowned at her hands. “Is that my shirt?”

  “Hush, it’s the one you tore last week and never got around to repairing. Now sit down and take off your jacket and let me see.”

  Gabriel eased himself out of her grasp. “After we get—”

  “Now”—and Gabriel found himself sitting on the ground and letting her check his bandages. Fortunately, nothing seemed to be bleeding again, the remaining scabs white and firm, the scarring pale red and fading.

  “You’ll live,” she said, relief making her voice crack.

  The mule had wandered a few steps closer to the horses, the three of them calm, although they kept a distance between themselves and the corpse, pressing against the outer ring of trees as far from the rock as they could get.

  “It must have had its den there,” Gabriel said, following her gaze to the rock. “That’s what we smelled when we came into the clearing.”

  Isobel had recovered the loose feather, twining it back into her braid, smoothing the strands down with nervous hands. “I led us right to it.”

  “No way you could have known,” he said. “Cats are sneaky bastards, quiet and smart. You don’t know they’re hunting you until they’ve decided to attack—but mostly, they won’t, any more than a bear or Reaper. We’re not their preferred meal. This one was too ill, too hungry to be cautious.”

  She wanted to believe him, he could see it in her eyes, but something held her back. He cursed the devil’s face for making her so responsible for things outside her control, but merely reached up to tug at her braid, drawing her with him as he went to inspect the corpse.

  “I’ll own I’ve never seen one this big.” Gabriel bent carefully and lifted one massive paw up to examine it. “Male, doesn’t look like he lost too many fights before this one. If the quakes were scaring off smaller animals, no wonder he was desperate enough to try us. Good thing they’re solitary; would hate to think there was another around.”

  “Just the thought makes me close to wetting myself,” Isobel admitted. “How are you so calm?”

  Gabriel gave a choked laugh and held up his free hand, showing her the gentle tremor rocking it. “After, you’re allowed to panic. The trick is in remaining calm during an attack.”

  “How do you learn to do that?”

  “You don’t,” he said, letting the paw fall back to the ground. “Help me move this somewhere not here. I don’t want to move the mule tonight, if we can avoid it, and I’d rather not have a scavenger find its way in here while we’re sleeping.”

  Assuming either of them slept at all that night.

  Dragging the corpse out into the meadow took longer than expected, and smell lingered on their hands and clothing. Isobel had paused on their way back, plucking something from the ground and then handing him a handful of roots that, when crushed, gave off a light, greenish foam that, rubbed into his skin, made the smell fade.

  “Catie used to break out in a rash from lye,” she said, wiping her own hands down. “She used to do this instead. Called it soaproot. I don’t know that this is the same plant, but it looks close enough.”

  Isobel was talkative, fussy, but there was something she wasn’t telling him, her thoughts bound tight inside her head, those sharp eyes clouded in a way they hadn’t been just that morning. Gabriel was too tired to dig at it tonight, though. Isobel was a sensible girl: she would come to him in her own time, when she was ready.

  They didn’t build a fire, but Isobel sketched out a circle with a charred stick and followed it with grains of salt to create a temporary boundary around their campsite, while he checked the mule’s wounds again and made sure they had enough water and grass within reach, then sorted through their supplies for a cold dinner.

  “Cheese,” he said with triumph, then peeled back the cheesecloth. “Soft rind; it won’t keep long. Here, cut this into thin slices, fold it with the venison. Better if you can melt it, but still good cold.”

  She looked dubiously at the combination, but her expression after the first bite was nearly blissful, and they worked their way through the meal without speaking, then settled their kits for the night, the horses and mule darker shadows against the trees.

  “I’ll take first watch,” he said as she came back from performing her private acts on the far side of the horses—neither of them comfortable going farther than that, despite being reasonably certain there was no more threat nearby. “Get some sleep, Isobel.”

  She removed her boots and wrapped herself in her blanket, laying her head on her pack. But he could tell that her eyes were still open.

  “Gabriel?”

  “Mmm?”

  “If another quake hits, will the trees fall on us?”

  He looked straight up, the tops of the trees lost in shadows, the only illumination coming from the coalstone dully glinting between them. “They’ve stood tall for a very long time,” he said. “Go to sleep, Isobel. We’ll be all right.”

  He waited, but she only turned over, pulling her blanket over her shoulders, and soon enough he heard the quiet huffs that told him she’d fallen asleep.

  He should close his eyes and try to rest, too. The mule had saved his life, but he’d still taken a blow, and everything from his collarbone to his knees ached in sympathy. And now that Isobel had raised the thought of another quake, he was reasonably certain he wouldn’t be sleeping well that night, no matter how exhausted he felt.

>   What he wanted was to be able to talk with someone else, someone wiser or at least more experienced. What was the point of knowing medicine folk if he couldn’t use their wisdom?

  Graciendo, the old bear of the mountain, would tell him to go to sleep. Old Woman . . . Old Woman Who Never Dies would tell him to do the things he was avoiding before it soured in his heart.

  Old Woman had always been the wisest, anyway.

  The envelope was creased in half from where he’d shoved it into his pack, a corner now dog-eared with use and travel. He held it in his hand but didn’t remove the letter from within. There was no need: the words lingered in his thoughts, like flies on a carcass.

  He might have left the States, but he hadn’t forgotten them, and he never made the mistake of thinking the States had forgotten the Territory. He tried to keep an eye on the political machinations, more out of wariness than actual interest, but he hadn’t seen a broadsheet since Patch Junction, and even that had been weeks old.

  But it seemed that Jefferson had taken his election to the presidency as justification to run every harebrained scheme he’d ever thought of—or stolen from someone else with even less sense. And Congress . . . Gabriel didn’t have the familiarity that Abner did, obviously, but he knew the type well enough from his time at William and Mary: arrogant with education and privilege, certain that a thing must be right because they determined that it was right.

  And they all thought that they had a right to the land to the west of the Mississippi River, the Espiritu Santo, where the devil had first stopped the would-be conqueror de Soto, the first time the devil had stopped an armed force but not the last.

  Unlike the Knife’s snow-coated peaks, the Mississippi could be crossed easily in force if one had enough boats, enough guns. An expedition, funded with the coffers of a solvent nation?

  The devil did not block anyone from crossing his borders in peace. Settlers, trappers, scouts—even the Spanish monks had been, if not welcomed, tolerated.

  Gabriel smoothed one finger across the envelope, hearing the faint crinkle of paper like a guilty secret. Would this letter prove intent of threat? Would the Master of the Territory—or his Hand —consider it such? And if so, what would they consider him? Gabriel Two Voices, split between two lands and settled in neither.

  He slid the letter back into his pack and picked up the loaded flintlock, resting it across his knees until it was time to wake Isobel for her turn.

  Hand

  Not a voice, not a whisper. A noise, that filled the spaces between heartbeats.

  Hand

  It wanted something. Wanted her to . . . what? She tried to form the question, but she had no mouth to speak, no arms to sign, no eyes to see, only the sense of something pressing and pulling her, needing her, rough and hot under her skin—

  Isobel’s eyes opened, lashes stuck together, a taste like ash in her mouth. Her vision focused enough to tell that sunlight was only beginning to filter through the trees, and most of that was blocked by something large, warm, and bristle-haired.

  She scrunched her face up in disgust at the too-warm breath on her cheek and shoved the mule’s head away, but it refused to move, reaching down again to lip delicately at her hair and then, when she didn’t move, to take a larger chunk and pull.

  “All right. All right.” She slapped at the side of its face until it let go, then reached up and scratched one floppy ear to show there were no hard feelings. It was still the hero, after all, and those strong blunt teeth could as easily have taken a chunk of flesh, but it had been gentle —as gentle as a mule knew, anyhow.

  She shoved its head away again before it could decide she wasn’t moving quickly enough, and crawled out of her bedroll, shivering as the cold air hit her bare skin. The light was oddly green, filtering through the trees overhead, but she thought it just past dawn, if that. Gabriel was a lump nearby, his blanket pulled over his head, only the faint snoring proof that he was alive. In the dim light, the blanket’s colored stripes looked faded and grey. She had fallen asleep on watch, she realized. The thought shoved her into full wakefulness, searching the surroundings for any sign of disruption or danger. The air was still, the horses with their heads down, dozing as well, only the mule awake, staring at her with liquid brown eyes as though expecting her to produce carrots for his breakfast.

  “If we had carrots, I’d be eating them myself,” she told the mule. “And maybe I’d share. But we don’t, sorry.”

  The mule snorted as though it understood, and ambled back to where the horses slept, cropping unhappily at the grass as it went. She dressed as quietly as she could, fastening the buttons of her blouse and skirt, drawing fresh stockings up over her legs, and shaking her boots out to make sure nothing had crawled in overnight before lacing them onto her feet.

  She ran a hand down the fabric of the skirt, frowning. Gabriel had warned her to pack light when they left Flood, but simply airing out her clothing whenever opportunity arose was not the same as a good laundering, and she’d pay all the coin in her purse for a new skirt, one without darns or stains.

  “And carrots,” she said, compiling a list. “And fresh bread and butter, and a pillow and linens, too.”

  None of those things were likely to appear, not here, and likely no time soon. Unless she felt the urge to tan her own hides and make a deerskin shift, like a native, what she carried would be what she wore.

  She thought wistfully of the dresses she’d left behind in her room in Flood, the soft slippers and pretty shawls, and then sternly put those memories aside. Turning to wake Gabriel, she heard a thwick-thwick from behind her, the noise enough like the familiar scratch of cards on table felt to make her pause, thinking her memories were playing tricks on her ears.

  Then it came again, real and true, and a breath or two of searching found the source perched on the stub of a tree branch just above her head.

  The owl was massive enough to make the branch creak underneath it, brown and white feathers fluffed against the morning cold, golden eyes in a flat face staring down at her, unblinking.

  “I’m not a mouse,” she told it, frowning fiercely. She was not a mouse, and odds were, this was nothing more than an ordinary bird, its pre-dawn hunt disturbed by intruders sleeping where they should not be.

  The beak opened as though it were going to respond, then its wings lifted and it swooped off the branch, coming close enough to her head that Isobel ducked instinctively. By the time she straightened again, her hands lowering from her head, it was gone.

  “Well, then,” she said softly, unsure if she was relieved or not. She wouldn’t deny that advice would have been appreciated, but spirit-animals, in her experience, delighted in speaking things that were utterly useless unless you already knew what you needed to know. Her previous encounter with a spirit-snake had left her more confused, not less.

  And an owl . . . No. She had no wish for an owl to speak to her, now or ever.

  A firm cough and a clod of dirt tossed at Gabriel’s shoulder was enough to rouse him, pulling the blanket off his head and sitting up slowly, aware, since she had not shouted, that there was no danger requiring immediate action. She waited until he ran a hand through sleep-tousled hair and nodded at her, before going to check on the animals.

  The salve on the mule’s side had flaked off overnight—he’d likely rolled on the ground at some point to scratch an itch—but underneath the dust, the cuts looked to be healing, without any heat or pus. She washed them out again with water anyway, paying special attention to the punctures. She didn’t think more salve would be needed, but if Gabriel thought otherwise, there was enough left to cover it and still have some left.

  Some, but not much.

  “No one else get so much as a bruise,” she told the horses, gathering up Uvnee’s lead and trusting the other two to follow her through the trees, back to the meadow, checking carefully first to see if there was any sign of another predator lurking. The carrion-eaters had gone from the pale blue sky, and the on
ly things she could smell were the sharp tang of the trees and a thin, cold scent she was coming to identify as “mountain.”

  The sick, musky smell of the ghost cat was gone, buried along with it.

  She staked the horses’ leads to pegs in the dirt and walked a perimeter around them, breathing quietly and listening to the simple sounds of breeze and insects, watching deep blue and pale green butterflies lift and descend, the horses quietly, contentedly cropping at the grasses, moving shoulder to shoulder without alarm. Finally certain that there was no immediate threat, Isobel left them there to graze and went back to their small camp. Before she could see it, she heard noises: quiet, familiar grumbles and thumps that made her smile despite her worry. Like the thump of slippers on hardwood floors and the flickerthwack of playing cards, those were the sounds of comfort, of home, and she had missed them.

  Gabriel had gotten a small fire going while she was gone, and started breakfast.

  He looked up as she approached. “Horses grazing?”

  “Mmmhmmm. Staked their leads, left ’em unhobbled.” If spooked, horses could run enough to lose their way back, and they couldn’t afford to take time to hunt them down or go ahead on foot, but if another cat were around, or a bear, three sets of hooves could mount a fierce defense, time enough for their riders to arrive with loaded guns.

  And hopefully, nothing more fierce than butterflies would appear. Isobel wasn’t sure she believed in luck—she’d grown up in a gambling house, where luck had very little play—but she thought for certain they were due some, if it did exist.

  “Flatfoot looked good,” she said, taking the offered mug when it was ready, and letting the sharp aroma tickle her nose. “Skin wasn’t warm; there was no sign of pus. I washed the cut but didn’t put more salve on.”

  “I’ll check it before we saddle up, but if he’s healing on his own, no need to do more,” Gabriel agreed. “No upsets during the night?” She paused, a bite of corncake halfway to her mouth. “No. Nothing.” No need to admit she’d fallen asleep: the horses had not been disturbed, she’d seen no sign of danger. She simply would not make that mistake again.