The Cold Eye

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Does it look like a fight took place here?” Gabriel asked, and she bristled before she realized that he wasn’t making fun of her; he was asking her.

  Isobel stilled her temper, forced her heart to slow. It was not Gabriel’s fault she was upset, not Gabriel’s fault the bones had rebuffed her, that the sigil was silent, that her doubts tried to strangle her. He was her mentor; he was here to help.

  When she felt calm enough, she turned to look at the circle again.

  It was only grass, undisturbed, unbroken. Browning in places from lack of rain, likely, but nothing that should catch the eye. What had she sensed? She could not bring herself to touch it, would not cross the line of the circle she had walked, but moved along the outside, her feet knowing where to step, as they had before.

  Nothing above, where men would stand. Something below the surface, but something above as well, some movement in the air, unseen yet present. Lingering.

  Some haint, not yet bound to a boneyard? Some mountain version of a dust-dancer, driven by instinct to move, destroy? No. It didn’t feel right to her in the marrow and gut, where she’d known other things, and she had to trust herself, especially now, when other strengths were kept from her.

  The devil had chosen her, Gabriel’d said. She needed to trust that.

  Their guide had said white men. Coming down from the north? Trappers and hunters came down often enough but rarely meaning harm, unless one were a wolf or beaver. And she could think of nothing a trapper might do to cause the earth sorrow or anger. She thought again of the buffalo she had seen, and shook her head. The coureurs des bois were not so foolish, nor would their métis cousins be so wasteful, and even if they were, that had happened days from here, where the earth did not quake, days before Duck’s people said the first quake had struck. She could not see how it was related.

  And yet. She could feel a cord running through them all, a thread stitching the fabric, connecting them . . . and she had been stitched into the cloth as well, drawing her to this place.

  Were these more men of Spain come across the border, from the northernmost of their lands? She had allowed the surviving monks to depart the territory unscathed; had that been a mistake? Or had the strangers come from the east? It was not unknown for scouts to venture in from the States—she and Gabriel had seen a rider wearing American colors, not so long ago —but to ride so far from their shared borders? Unlikely, but not impossible, and if it was possible . . .

  Isobel felt something curl inside her, and she recognized it for anger, hot lashings needing expression, a target.

  “Many men, not together,” she said out loud. “A meeting.” The thought of others coming from outside, gathering here where the devil’s hand could not see, sent a shiver down her spine. Nothing good could come of that.

  “But how could a meeting of anyone cause the ground to shake and the animals to flee?”

  “Animals are your first warning that something’s amiss,” Gabriel said, and she hadn’t realized he was standing so close to her, his voice quiet near her ear. “If the birds go silent, if the hare freezes, or deer stampede, you’d best look to your horse and knife.”

  She knew that; he’d taught her that.

  “The animals fleeing, the ground shaking, they’re the wound, not the weapon?”

  “Or a symptom of a disease,” he agreed. “Like swelling of the pox, or fever. Ignore them now, Isobel. They’ve told you everything they can.”

  Gabriel fell silent, and she stepped forward, hesitated, then took another step, past the unseen line in the grass, into the circle. The smell intensified, the impression of something bubbling under the surface growing stronger. She remembered what Gabriel had said, about the hot springs lurking under the crust, boiling hot enough to scald flesh from bone, and paused, fighting the urge to move backward, cross back over the line, to safety.

  Except that safety was an illusion. She needed to know what rested below the surface.

  “Isobel?” Gabriel, paces behind her. He called to her, not to call her back but remind her he was there.

  She was afraid to reach, afraid to feel the stillness again or, worse yet, rejection. But she hadn’t been given a choice. Isobel took hold of the anger that thought brought, stoked it, and then fed her fear to it until it snapped and crisped into ash.

  Nothing remained. Not fear, not anger. She risked exhaling, then took a deeper breath in, tilted her head and let her eyes go hazy, waiting.

  Nothing. The air remained still, silent, not even the sound of the breeze around them entering the circle. She looked down, and where the grass was lush and green outside the circle, here at her feet it was sere and cracked, a crusted grey froth seeping through the dirt. She thought if she bent to touch this earth, it would sear her skin, melt her bones.

  The air smelled the same. But the longer it wrapped around her, stroking its way into her nostrils, the less it reminded her of home, the acrid tinge tickling the back of her throat and making her want to sneeze.

  Something burning, but not the smell of the kitchen or the forge, not quite the same. What did it remind her of  ?

  Isobel looked up, away from the ground, letting her vision haze as she stared at some point halfway between there and the nearest mountain as her right hand reached for her left, fingers curling, thumb stroking gently across her palm. The sigil hummed to her; she could almost feel it as a separate thing within her, sliding like a fish under water.

  The thought should have bothered her, but in that moment it simply was. Everything dropped away, her center spinning so slowly she felt motionless. Isobel took her right hand away, knelt down, and despite her earlier fears, pressed her palm against the ground.

  Her lips formed two silent words: maleh mishpat.

  The next thing Isobel was aware, she was on her back, blinking up at the wide expanse of sky and noting that the moon was visible already, a pale white ghost overhead. Two sets of eyes were blinking down at her, the blue ones concerned, the brown unreadable.

  “Iz? What happened?”

  She blinked back up at them. Her head hurt. Her back hurt. So did her ribs, she realized when she tried to take a breath and coughed instead.

  The last time she’d ended up like this, she’d gotten thrown off the back of the pony Marie used to pull her little cart. The pony hadn’t liked being ridden. The pony hadn’t liked much except Marie, actually.

  “Isobel!”

  Gabriel’s shout made her blink again. He was closer now, kneeling beside her, while the old man had backed off, his arms crossed over his chest, staring away from her, as though he’d suddenly realized he’d acknowledged her presence.

  “Why doesn’t he like me?” The words came out unbidden, childlike.

  Clearly, Gabriel hadn’t been expecting that. He ran a hand through his hair, then ran it down the side of his face, glanced at the old man, then back at Isobel. “I think he’s trying to show you respect,” he said. “And you confuse him. Are you all right? What happened?”

  “What happened?” she asked him in return. Thankfully, he understood.

  “You stepped forward and went still, and then you bent down, and then you were flying through the air like Flatfoot had kicked you in the . . . in the gut.”

  She nodded and closed her eyes, opening them a second later to Gabriel’s voice.

  “Isobel. Come on, Iz, open your eyes, wake up, there’s my girl. Can you sit up?”

  She nodded and let him lift her up enough that she could sit on her own. She’d been right: everything hurt.

  “What happened?” he asked again.

  She was about to say that she didn’t know when she realized that she did.

  “Something happened here.” She licked her lips, feeling where she’d bitten herself, a strip of skin tender underneath. They knew that already. What had happened? “They took from here, drained it dry.”

  “Like a crossroads?”

  She nodded, touching the silver ring on her little finger as though to r
eassure herself that it was still there. She looked down and noted —too late —that it had gone from brightly polished to nearly black with tarnish. The power had been drained from here, but before that . . . Their silver had not reacted to the village, had not discolored during their ride. Only here.

  Crossroads gathered power simply by existing, feeding off those who traveled them, until either someone came along to draw the power out or something bad happened. Which rarely occurred, because if a magician didn’t find it first, a road marshal would. Or, now, she would. She was the silver the devil cast into the road, Gabriel said.

  But there was no crossroads here, no Road at all, no power gathered. Why had her ring tarnished? What had thrown her out of the circle when she tried to touch it?

  “My buckle didn’t tarnish,” Gabriel said, twisting to show her his boot. She reached out to touch it, the metal cool under her fingertips, even as he drew his knife to check the silver inlaid in the hilt.

  “So . . . only in there?”

  He slid the knife back into its sheath but left the strap open. “Yah.”

  Something had been drained within the circle. Was it the same something that had scraped the little village clean, that kept them from feeling the Road, kept her from reaching the bones? She could feel the answer fluttering at her fingertips, but there was a soft buzzing in her ears, and chasing those thoughts was like trying to catch a fish with one hand.

  Her knees wobbled as she tried to stand, and Gabriel helped her to her feet, holding her steady until she shook him off gently. Now that she knew what to look for, how to see it, Isobel wondered that she’d ever missed it: steam rose from the ground, a low-lying mist swirling and sinking and rising again.

  Had it been that obvious before?

  “Can you see it?” she asked Gabriel.

  “See what?”

  “That’s an answer of a sort, then,” she said, not bothering to explain. Had it been there before she stepped inside, and she couldn’t see it, or had her stepping over the line been the cause? Had she . . .

  “See what, Isobel?”

  “Shhh.” Their earlier concern, that this was another ribbon splintered off from the Spanish spell-storm, faded as she felt around the edges of what lay in front of her. Whatever this was, whatever this had been, it had not come from outside but within.

  Territory medicine.

  If a medicine-worker had done this, there would be no need for the Devil’s Hand. That left two possible answers, one more palatable than the other.

  “When was the last time a marshal came through?”

  Gabriel turned and asked the old man her question, or at least she assumed that was what he was saying. He listened to the response, then shook his head and turned back to her. “They don’t.”

  Marshals were supposed to ride the entire Territory; that was part of their oath.

  “There’s no Road here, Isobel,” Gabriel said. “They can’t exactly cover a Road that isn’t here.”

  She lifted her gaze again to the circle in front of her and shrugged in resignation. “Magicians, then.”

  Gabriel’s response wasn’t in a language she knew, but the tone was clear enough.

  PART THREE

  VOICES

  Magicians. Gabriel shaped the word in his thoughts carefully, as though the word alone could do damage. Like spirit-animals, he’d spent his entire life having no contact with them, and now . . .

  A fly buzzed at his face, and he wiped the sweat with his sleeve and pulled his hat back over his eyes although the sun was behind him and low enough now not to be a bother. “You could have settled down, been a farmer. Married well, raised a packet of kids, never had a surprise a day in your life that didn’t involve storms or locusts.”

  He looked over his shoulder, up from the narrow, nearly overgrown creek he’d found, to where Isobel was still pacing the meadow, careful to stay clear of the area she’d now marked off with rope and pegs, as though she thought it might break open and swallow her whole if she went too close.

  “Not that I’m asking for locusts,” he said quickly, in case some Power might be listening. With the way their luck had been breaking recently, and this close to the Wilds . . . “Or storms. Let’s not make this more exciting than it has to be, mmm?”

  He might have asked the old man to put in a good word with whatever his tribe worshipped, but the old man was nowhere to be seen. The three horses and mule, saddles and packs removed, were doing a slow graze nearby, picketed to keep them out of Isobel’s way—the mule especially, who’d kept trying to stick his muzzle into whatever she was doing.

  Given his druthers, Gabriel would have marched them all out of the meadow entirely. The idea that magicians—one was bad enough, but more than one?—had gathered here made his gut clench and his fingers twitch to curve around his knife’s hilt. Even when they claimed to be allies, magicians were trouble, dangerous trouble. More? Gathered for a purpose unknown?

  Not that magicians needed reason for their actions. They were mad as March hares, each and every one of them. And he included Farron Easterly in that, despite whatever aid he had given them previously.

  “All else, I can bear,” he told the slow-moving waters of the creek, watching silver-sided fish twist and turn away from his shadow. “Winter storms and dust-dancers, mysterious illnesses, monstrous beasts trying to chew my face off”—and he shifted and winced at the reminder that he was not as healed as he claimed —“and even being dragged off-Road to ride into unsteady ground like a sunstruck fool. But magicians? It’s too much.”

  His hand flashed out, the glint of metal in his hand, and he pulled back with a long, fat fish impaled on the blade, still wiggling in a desperate attempt to get back to the safety of the water.

  “Thank you,” he told the fish, knocking it against a nearby stone to end its struggles. “But we need your strength.”

  It took time to land another; the streams were nearly barren as the meadows, although fish lacked the ability to flee entirely. The sun had dipped even lower on the horizon, he noted as he rose to his feet, wincing a little. Two would have to be enough for dinner tonight. He cut off their heads and gutted them both, letting the offal float away in the water, reminding himself to refill the canteens from upstream, and turned to see Isobel watching him—or staring at something he couldn’t see; he would not hazard a guess at this point.

  He moved to her side and dropped the fish into her hands. She caught them instinctively, shocked out of whatever she was thinking, then gave him a dirty look.

  “I catch, you cook.” She didn’t have the patience yet to wait until the fish came to hand; the last time he’d let her try, she’d ended up stabbing herself with the blade, not the fish.

  “What about him?” She jerked her head indirectly at the old man, who had reappeared and was now sitting by the fire. He was working a strap of leather between his hands, winding it back and forth to soften the fiber.

  “Woman’s work,” Gabriel said, just to see her eyes narrow at him.

  A dry, coughing laugh interrupted whatever she was about to say, the old man obviously able to read their body language, even if he didn’t understand their words.

  “You’re wearing yourself to a nub, trying to find something you can’t see yet,” Gabriel told her, two fingers on her shoulder to head off any comment she might make. “The fish will give you something to do with your hands instead.”

  She made a face at him but didn’t argue further, taking the fish to the fire and sitting—markedly—across the fire from the old man.

  Gabriel wiped his hands on the grass, then pulled the frying pan from the mule’s packs and passed it over to her along with a chunk of dried fat.

  “Onions,” she muttered. “We need onions. And fireweed or bitterroot. Would it be rude to ask him to go pick leaves?”

  It would. But when Gabriel made the hand sign for foraging and jerked a thumb away from the fire, the old man put aside the strap of leather he’d been working on
and followed him.

  Isobel finished filleting the fish, dropping them into the pan that was sizzling on the fire. There was enough wood nearby, cracking-dry, that they didn’t have to worry about kindling. She had become accustomed to simply pressing a coalstone to create a small blaze, but Gabriel wanted her to remain proficient with flint and steel, too, just as he insisted she learn to forage and not depend on the supplies they carried.

  She couldn’t argue with that: she might have become accustomed to dried meats and soaked beans, but that didn’t mean she cared to eat them two meals a day, and certainly, her gut was quieter when they’d greens and fresh meat to eat.

  The men came back just as the fish began to crisp, bearing a double handful of the plants she’d asked for. Or at least Gabriel did. The old man’s hands were empty.

  She glared at him, and for the first time he stared back at her, dark eyes under a hooded brow, steady as a hawk until she felt uneasy enough to look away. He wouldn’t speak to her, and when he did look at her, it was like that—Isobel glared at the fish instead, which could not stare back.

  It was because he hadn’t given them a name, she decided. People needed names. Even the mule had a name. If she knew what to call him, he wouldn’t make her feel so uneasy.

  “Broken Tongue,” she decided finally. “I will call you Broken Tongue. And you will not respond, because you won’t know I am talking to you.”

  She glanced up at him from under her lashes, but he didn’t react. She said it again in Spanish, and he tilted his head but gave no indication of understanding or showing any desire to look her way again. Gabriel needed to teach her more sign language, because “friend,” “food,” and “danger” were useless here.

  Gabriel shook his head, handing her the leaves she’d asked for, then set to scraping the dirt off the wild onions he’d dug up. “He’ll know. If he’ll respond or not, that’s another thing entire.” He used his smaller knife to slice the onions against a nearby rock, while Isobel shredded the leaves, lifting them to her nose to make sure they smelled right, then scattered the bits into the pan with the fish. They made a satisfying hiss against the heated metal.