“Good. Soon’s you’re done, we should pack and go. Full day’s ride ahead, and we’ve no idea what to expect.”
A flash of annoyance —she knew that—was tamped down. He wasn’t scolding her, only telling her what the day would be like, seeing if she had anything to add. He’d done such before, often enough; why did she react now?
“Sky looked clear,” she said instead. “If the ground stays still . . .”
Her mood was uncertain, some tingling sense of unease she’d learned to heed, not a push or a pull, but a sense of something wrong. Gabriel frowned into his mug, and she wondered if he felt the same, the sense of needing to look and at the same time needing to turn away, to ignore everything to the north, pretend that the ground had not shaken, that Jumping-Up Duck had never spoken, that she had never felt the push to . . .
Something didn’t want her there, was pushing her away. Why?
“Douse the fire,” she said abruptly, and as though he’d been waiting for those words, he dumped what remained of his coffee on the ground by his feet. “I’ll fetch the horses.”
Rearranging the packs to keep weight off Flatfoot’s wounds took a little time, but soon enough, the camp was cleared and they were ready to go. Isobel shifted a little, trying to find her balance with the additional pack slung over Uvnee’s rump.
“Clear to ride?” Gabriel asked, as relaxed into his saddle as he’d been the day they left Flood, although his long coat was now rolled and stowed on the back of his saddle, and the look he gave her was less judging than expectant.
She listened the way he’d taught her, taking in the feel of her surroundings as well as the sounds and smells, expecting that sense of being watched to return, for the smell of something wrong to touch her nose. It didn’t. “I think so,” she said, but didn’t move. She remembered how she’d known something was wrong the day before and then how she’d frozen just before the attack, remembered the size of the ghost cat, the weight of each paw and the curve of its claws, and the starveling look of its ribs.
“Iz?”
“Yes,” she decided. The cat had been ill, and hungry, its prey fled. With the cat dead, the threat was gone. “Clear to ride.”
Despite her continuing unease, Isobel found herself enjoying the morning ride. Although the trail still climbed through chalky red hills, it occasionally led them through long, narrow valleys filled with summer grasses and the dusty green of sagebrush, dotted with short-trunked pines and white-barked firestarter. There was the occasional waft of something unpleasant on the breeze, similar to the cat’s musk but less sickly-sweet, but it was offset by the smells of green growing things, and the warm spicy scent of horseflesh and sweat that Isobel had come to know as well as the scent of fresh linens and liquor from the saloon.
Home. Isobel took off her hat and wiped her forehead where sweat had gathered. Home had always been the saloon, the town of Flood, the farmlands and riverbank that bordered it: her entire world within the safe-wards, the familiar pulse that surrounded her, fitted itself to her, and she to it. She had thought it all there was, all that was important.
Did they miss her, Iktan, Molly, and Ree, Catie and the others back in Flood? Did they wonder what she was doing, or had she faded from their lives already, only mentioned in stories of things that happened a long time ago, maybe told to the new girl who slept in her bed, did her chores?
When the boss had sent her out with Gabriel, she had thought it punishment. Had thought being sent away the price for what she had bargained for. Respect. Power. The ability to shape and change things, the way she’d seen the boss and Marie shape and change things.
She hadn’t understood what power felt like then. Hadn’t felt the sickening dizziness, the way it stretched her thin, burned and broke inside her. The understanding that it wasn’t hers, none of it: that she was only a tool, a barranca for waters to run through.
Her right hand, still holding the reins, reached for her left, the thumb pressing into the palm where the lines of the sigil had appeared so many weeks ago. They had been faint at first, thin raised lines she could feel to the touch. But now it was as much a part of her hand as the lifelines crossing it, the marks dark and clear, the double-ended loop enclosed within an open circle. An infinitas, Gabriel had called it.
Infinite. Endless.
Then Isobel paused. Marie had no such mark on her hand. Surely she would have noticed it: Marie’s hands were always visible, resting on a shoulder or directing where things should go, carrying a tray or wrapped around a glass. . . . Did the mark fade? Or was she the only one identified that way, like a saddle or some other object, claimed so that it couldn’t be stolen. . . .
“Iz.” Gabriel’s voice cut into her increasingly uncomfortable musings, and she looked up with a sense of relief, to see what had caught his attention.
They’d come to another valley, this one with a creek cutting across it, and on one side of the creek she saw now what he had seen: bare skeletons of wood, curved and bent into the ground, and piles of black ash. It took looking-for, but once she did, Isobel could identify the structures that had been there, imagine the hide stretched over the wood, the placement of campfires and the food cache, now dismantled and taken away.
“A hunting camp?” It did not have the feel of a settled camp, the grasses not worn enough to show well-trod trails or refuse piles.
“Likely,” Gabriel agreed. He had pushed his hat back in a gesture that meant he was thinking about what might have happened, his gaze moving over the scene in front of them carefully, taking in all detail, even the things that she would miss, the things that didn’t seem important, and putting them together to mean something.
Isobel was getting better, but he had years of experience and training. So, she settled herself deeper into the saddle, patted Uvnee’s neck, and waited.
“Not a hunting camp,” he said finally. “Summer camp, maybe. They were here for a while, a few months, and then they left. And they left quick.”
Camps weren’t abandoned; she knew that much. They were chosen carefully, returned to every year. “Like something scared them away?”
“If I were to place a bet . . . yes.”
“The quake.” She said it with certainty, although she knew nothing for a fact.
He shifted in his saddle to look at her. His face was scruffed again, the lack of fresh water meaning he didn’t bother to shave, and the shadows under his eyes were darker, making his face look sallow. She suspected his wounds were giving him pain but knew he would not admit it if she asked.
“Mayhap.” Something about his tone was odd. “Probably,” he went on. “But this is their land, Isobel. They know it like . . . like you knew your saloon. There’s nothing here that they should be that afraid of, to run rather than face it. Not even the ground shaking.”
“Duck said —”
“Duck wasn’t born here.” His words were sharp, stopping her objection mid-throat. “There’s something you know when you’re born a place. You feel it, different from anywhere else. You know when the wind’s wrong, or the water’s running slow, if the birds are flying too low or too high. . . .
“I’ve never been up this way before,” he said, “but stories say the ground’s always been unsteady. There are places out there where the land cracks open on a regular basis and steam rises into the sky.” He sounded almost wistful, as though he’d enjoy seeing that. “Duck and her people, they came here from elsewhere east. Hearing stories isn’t the same as understanding. But the people who hunt here . . .”
“The people who hunt here?” she prompted when his voice trailed off.
He looked up into the sky then, and she followed his gaze to where a single raptor was now circling, far overhead. Not a Reaper, something smaller. She had a sudden thought it might be an owl, even the one she’d seen, but it was daylight: owls were creatures of dusk and dawn.
“This is their home,” Gabriel said. “Even if they thought they’d offended a spirit, angered enough to sha
ke the ground, they’d try to appease it, not run. This”—and he indicated the abandoned camp in front of him with a jut of his jaw—“doesn’t make sense.”
“Neither does a cat that can check its prey before leaping,” Isobel said without thinking, and then stopped when his attention skewed directly, fiercely, on her.
“What?”
Gabriel had been born to the Territory. He’d seen and heard more oddities than most would believe, walked in true-dreams, and broken bread with creatures of legend. Isobel’s tale should not have made his hair curl—and yet it did.
“Tell me again,” he said, after Isobel finished explaining her reaction to the cat’s attack the night before.
They had dismounted, walking the horses as they moved through the deserted camp, and he could see when she took a deep breath and then exhaled before she responded.
“It will not change no matter how many times I tell you,” she said, her voice terse. “I knew we were being followed in the valley. And when we were untacking the horses, I knew there was something behind me, and I wanted to turn around, but I couldn’t. It was like . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she shivered once. “Like dreaming, when you know you have to move but you can’t; your limbs won’t respond.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t simply fear? There’s no shame in that,” he added quickly. “A ghost cat, up close, can turn even the hottest blood into ice.”
Her eyes narrowed in a glare, and she looked like she would have liked to’ve taken a swipe at him, had she claws. “I wasn’t scared,” she said with asperity. “I didn’t even know the cat was there, not until it was already on us. I was uneasy, I knew something was wrong, and then I couldn’t move.”
She was aware of things he was not. It was possible, Gabriel supposed . . .
“And I wasn’t afraid,” she repeated. “I know what fear feels like now. This was . . . I just couldn’t move. My body wouldn’t listen to me.”
He sucked at the inside of his cheek, thinking.
“Gabriel?” Her voice had lost that edge; no longer defensive, she was asking her mentor for reassurance.
“These are strange hills to begin with,” he said finally. “And becoming stranger. If you feel . . . odd again, Isobel, tell me.”
“If I can speak, I will.”
“Brat.” He glanced sideways at her, relieved to see some of the tension gone from her face, although he was not fool enough to believe that she had let the worry go. Fair enough; neither had he.
Nor was the deserted camp easing his fears. There were no indications of illness or attack, nothing to suggest an outside cause for this to have been abandoned in such haste.
They’d seen abandoned settlements before, in Clear Rock, where the Spaniards’ magic had touched and eaten all that was flesh. But this ruin lacked the uncanny echo of that place, the sense of something having passed through. Those living here had gone of their own will. He couldn’t say why he was so certain of that, but he was. And yet.
The horses seemed calm, but the mule stayed close to the horses, its ears and tail twitching more nervously than its wont. That might be a reaction to its wounding—or it might be sensing something none of them could.
“Spaniards,” Isobel said, and her voice made it a curse.
“Are you certain, or is that a guess?” He would defer to her call, but he needed to hear her evidence before he would agree.
“A guess,” she admitted reluctantly. “It doesn’t . . . feel like what happened before, but . . .”
“But you don’t want to think about there being something else that could do this,” he suggested. “It may be purely natural. The ground shaking . . . I told you, it’s not so unusual, not up here.” He dragged through his memory, trying to find something else to tell her to ease her fears. “You didn’t like the story of drumming the mountains; another story says the He Sapa, the Black Hills, were born when the spirits underneath were so angered by the pride of those who dwelled on the surface, they thrust upward, killing all who made such prideful noise, and left the Hills behind as a reminder that we are not so powerful as we like to think.” He’d seen those mountains himself, felt the palpable sense of presence that lay on them like a mantle; he would not be the one to say the stories were untrue, however improbable. “So in the memory of the elders, it’s happened.”
Isobel was listening, but he wasn’t sure if that attentive pose was for him or something he couldn’t hear. “The boss said the same, only far west of here, that the land shook so terribly . . .” Her words trailed off, and she tilted her head and knelt down, her fingers plucking something from the ground. She twisted slightly to show it to him. Three long, narrow barbs lay flat across her palm, glinting a dull red in the sunlight.
“Quills,” he said, picking them up and rolling them between his fingers. “Dyed, flattened . . . That’s Apsáalooke, maybe Nakoda work? I didn’t think they were this far south.” He looked around, reevaluating the deserted campsite, still rolling the quills between his fingers. “Or we’re further north than I thought.”
“You don’t know?”
She was right; he should know. He carried a map of the Territory in his memory in addition to the ones he had rolled in his packs. But more than that, even without a Road here, an experienced rider should know where they were, have some sense of location.
But when he tried, there was nothing there for him to touch. Something blocked him the way Isobel had described earlier. Gabriel swallowed, his throat suddenly tight. Ground that shook, ghost cats that could freeze a human as easily as a hare, and something keeping him from reaching any sense of the Road itself . . . The Territory was an uncanny place on the best of days, but he was a betting man, and the odds kept shifting in a way that made him want to quit the game.
“The devil runs an honest game,” he said, almost to himself. “But that doesn’t mean someone else can’t cheat.”
“Gabriel?”
“Strange hills,” he repeated, twisting his mouth up in a smile for Isobel’s benefit. “Spell or natural, monster or man, you’ve been drawn to look, and so look we will.”
She didn’t seem reassured.
“Whatever’s hiding itself here, Isobel, it’s not able to block everything. I can still sense water; you still know when there’s danger. It can’t stop us.” He looked at the quills in his hand, then tucked them into a pocket of his jacket. “Mount up. Whatever happened here, they didn’t leave stories behind. We need to find someone who can talk to us.”
Assuming there was anyone left to speak.
The abandoned campsite was soon out of sight but not out of Isobel’s thoughts, keeping them shadowed and sharp. But the land around her tugged her back as the trail wound its way higher. The air felt thinner, dryer, but the scent of things warm and growing filled it, butterflies clustering around them whenever they paused, flitting through the air as they rode past, and Isobel thought that, under other circumstances, she might have enjoyed this ride.
Had she not been woken out of sleep and driven to a place where the land shook, the animals fled, and the bones went silent under her touch. If not for the fact that butterflies and insects were the only other life they now saw. If not for the fact that she felt the prickling against the back of her neck again.
“We’re being followed.”
“I’d be more surprised if someone wasn’t following,” Gabriel said, his gaze sweeping the surrounding hills without an outward show of concern. “We’re strangers, whites, and whoever lives here was spooked enough to abandon a hunting camp mid-summer.” There was a bite of something in his tone at odds with his outward calm. “If anyone’s remained in these hills, they’d be fools not to keep an eye on us.”
“Natives, you mean.”
“Likely, although I wouldn’t rule out a trapper or two, maybe done with civilization and looking to be left alone. If so, they’ll likely just watch us and not interfere. If we’re on tribe lands, though, they may take a greater interest.”
&n
bsp; “Why don’t they ever just come out and say what they have to say, instead of stalking us like . . . like rabbits?” Her voice rose as she spoke, until the last words were more a challenge, thrown out into the landscape.
“Because they don’t.” Gabriel’s voice was still terse, but she could hear the faint tinge of amusement underneath, and it infuriated her. The need to do something pressed from the inside, struggling to reach into the bones below her, even knowing that it would push back, that she was somehow unwelcome, unwanted, despite being a rider, despite the sigil in her palm.
And yet Gabriel rode as if nothing had ever bothered him, shoulders loose, his entire body practically melting in the saddle, like the ground might not shake under them at any moment, nor some beast or native leap out.
Isobel reined herself in, Marie’s voice in her memory schooling her. If Gabriel was calm, there was a reason. If he was amused by her worry, then there was a reason. It might not be one she liked, but there was much that she did not like, and that did not change the fact of it.
She exhaled through her mouth, reaching out to stroke Uvnee’s neck, tangling her fingers in the mane briefly for comfort. Learn, she told herself. That is why you are riding with him.
“Fine. Why don’t they?”
His shoulder raised in a shrug. “Because they don’t. If you’re aiming to ask me the whys and wherefores of how a native behaves, Isobel, I’m going to think you haven’t learned a thing in all this time. They do as they will, and each tribe does it different, and none of them do it as we might.”
He laughed a little, a faint chuckle. “If it makes it sting less, I’ve observed we confuse and confound them equally as much.”
“The boss understands them.” She knew she sounded like a sulking child, but it seemed unfair, that this was the way it was.
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