Gabriel gestured to the badge. “The name’s the same, but they’re . . . more prescribed, and at the same time, with a wider—” He broke off as though suddenly realizing that he was lecturing her. “Sorry.” His smile was weak but rueful, and real. “The marshals in the States are more than peacekeepers. They’re answerable to the federal government rather than the states themselves.”
Isobel shook her head, not understanding half of what he was saying, save that the owner of this badge, the man who had somehow convinced magicians to destroy themselves, had come from the East. On orders of their leaders.
Bitterness and bile rose in her, and she flung the badge away, hearing it land in the fire with a sick satisfaction, although she knew the flames were not enough to destroy it.
“Pushing, always pushing, if not Spain, then them. Can’t they leave us alone?”
Gabriel laughed then, and the sound was so clear, so pure, and so lacking in humor, it reached through her rage.
“No,” he said. “They can’t. They never have and they never will. Borders are uneasy things even at the best of times, Isobel. And to them, the Territory . . . It’s a fruit they want nothing more than to bite into and consume.
“But this . . .” He reached for a stick, using it to fish the badge out of the fire, then left it on the ground to cool off. She stared at it, half-resentful that he had rescued it, half-fascinated by it. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
She found it difficult to care. “He led them to their death.” A horrible, unending death she would not wish on any, not even the already-mad.
“Magicians can’t be led to anything, Isobel. You know that every bit as well as I. They can’t be controlled; they can’t even be properly aimed. Whatever they did, they chose to do. And they all paid the price.”
“Why are you defending him?” There was something in his voice, something that wasn’t grief, wasn’t anger. Isobel knew she could dig it from him, could study him and read it off his face, his body, but she couldn’t find the energy to turn and look at him.
“Everything’s paid the price,” she said instead, letting it drop. “The ancient one is trapped, the dead are trapped . . . this meadow, the entire valley, maybe all the way down to Duck’s settlement, who knows how far north . . . ruined.” Poisoned. The scraped lands would never recover, not while the haint—the haints, trapped together—remained. And they were too powerful to bind and ease into rest.
“The tremors?” Gabriel spoke her thought before she could.
She licked her lips, surprised to feel skin peeling from them, as though she’d bitten them raw and not realized. “If the cage holds. I do not think they will worsen.” She reached for certainty, but every certainty Isobel had held now felt like salt between her fingers, sliding out of her grasp.
And tangled in all of that, the memory of claws digging into her, trying to consume her. Claws—and the burning heat of silver, the spirit that lived here scraping out her marrow, curling inside the hollowed-out bones.
“There’s nothing more I can do here.” Admitting it hurt, an unaccustomed failure. “If I try again—I would make things worse.”
The presence, the trapped shape of the ancient spirit and the remnants of the dead magicians: they were aware of her now. She was a reminder of what they could never be again. To remain would be a taunt; it would be dangerous and cruel.
She should have heeded the warnings and never come here at all.
PART FOUR
FALSE CROSSROADS
It took Isobel longer to find the strength to stand than it did for Gabriel to pack up the remains of their camp. She watched him, uncertain in her own skin, shifting uneasily, curling her arms over her knees, her spine crackling when she moved, toes too thick for her boots, elbows and fingers awkward, as though they belonged to someone else, stuck onto her body as an afterthought.
She should get up, help Gabriel. His own wounds were still causing him pain; he paused after saddling Uvnee, placing his hand against his side with a wince. But she saw that the ache did not stop him from bending again to pick up the now-cooled bit of metal from the ashes, sliding it back into his pocket, and something within Isobel sparked with bitterness that he would touch it, claim it, the last remnant of the man who had caused all this.
Her hands slid down the fabric of her skirt, the cloth rough under her palms, as though to wipe something from her skin. She did not know if it were some remnants of the magicians, or the ancient spirit, or the deep bone whisper that lingered within her, or some stirring of all three, or if it would remain once she had left the valley or fade over time, only that she could still feel claws scrabbling at her, the wet, smudged smears of something left within, ground into her, impossible to shake or wipe loose.
She thought of her journal, the leather cover worn, the pages nearly half filled in, the basis of her reports for the devil, part and parcel of her contract. She should write this down, too. But she didn’t move, even though it was in her pack, within reach. It felt unpleasant, all this, and she would rather not touch on it, not even in her thoughts: too raw to put into words, too close to write down yet.
And she wasn’t sure what to write about her anger at Gabriel.
“We’re set.” Gabriel stood over her, blocking the sky, casting a cool shadow over her skin. He offered her his hand, and she took it, letting him help her to her feet, his hold lingering while she tested her balance. Her head no longer swam, and her knees held, so she nodded once at him and he let go, stepping away.
“All right?”
A weight of things asked in those two words, but she could only answer one. “I can stand.”
“Can you ride?”
She nodded and went to Uvnee, who for once held still as Isobel fitted her boot into the stirrup, as though aware her rider was not entirely steady yet. When she had the reins in her hands again, her legs wrapped around the rounded sides of her horse, the weight of the saddle against her backside, Isobel felt something give a little, the brittle crackling softening back to flesh and muscle.
Gabriel had waited while she mounted Uvnee, not offering help, and then swung into his own saddle with only a hint of stiffness.
“We’re a pair, we two,” she said without thinking, not meaning to admit her own aches nor comment on his own. Thankfully, he merely grinned at her, teeth showing briefly before he tugged his hat lower over his forehead and told Steady to get a move on.
It would be all right once they left this place. She hoped.
The sky had clouded over since dawn, low-hanging white streamers now obscuring the mountains, turning the sun’s light into a warm, hazy glow. It felt peaceful, restful, save the silence made it ominous. The world was not meant to be so quiet, reminding her that every living thing save them had fled, that the ground below them was neither solid nor safe, that the furious, rage- and sorrow-mad presence still lingered, trapped not by any warding but something far greater, far crueler.
Part of her ached to go back, the sensation of a chore left undone. The other part longed to flee, to never look back.
At that thought, Isobel looked into the clouds, almost expecting to see the Reaper hawk soaring overhead, but the sky was empty. Behind them, the great deer was nowhere in sight. She resisted the urge to look down; no snake would be lurking under Uvnee’s hooves, no trail visible in the low grass. Once spirit-animals had their say, they did not linger.
Alone save for each other, they picked their way across the meadow, Gabriel leading them not south the way they’d come but east, where the hills rose up in jagged, reddish-dun slopes, the green patchwork against bare stone, sharp arrows of white-barked pine stretching into the sky. It looked inhospitable, as though to set a single hoof or boot would cause the slope to crumble, but when they came to the edge of the meadow, she saw a narrow trail leading up and out.
“How did you know it was here?”
Gabriel rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, gave her a half-shoulder shrug as his only answer. There were s
till things her mentor knew that she didn’t.
Isobel reined Uvnee in and stared at the head of the trail as though it would apologize. Instead, all she felt was the scrabble of hard claws prickling in her skin, the restless flutter of something attempting to plant itself within her. . . .
Gabriel paused as well, watching quietly as she slipped out of Uvnee’s saddle and drew the salt stick from her pack. There was barely a palm’s length remaining, cool and moist against her skin.
Isobel bit her lip, rubbing one thumb along the stick, feeling grains of salt scrape loose, sticking to her skin. Whatever lingered within her, she could contain. But she carried only a memory, a shade. The greater threat remained.
There was no warding she could add, no way to hide this meadow the way she had done for Widder Creek. It was too vast, too much power contained within. One unwary traveler, one foolhardy magician drawn by the scent of power, curious about the rumbling of the earth . . .
Isobel did not know what might happen but thought it would not be pleasant.
With that in mind, she slipped the knife from its sheath at her side and used it to cut across her palm, sliding the edge across the sigil marked there. The blood welled up without any pain, and she closed her palm around the stick of salt, letting it stain the white.
“Iz.” Gabriel’s voice, nearby. Not a question, merely telling her he was there, if she needed him.
She nodded, then used the bloodied salt to draw the devil’s sigil once, twice, three times on largish rocks several paces apart. Salt, for protection. Blood, the blood that had been sealed to contract with the Master of the Territory, to bind it to the stone and hold it there.
Bad hunting, the sigil would tell hunters, thinking to find game here. Angry spirits, the sigil would tell wanderers unwarned. Danger, the sigil would tell the unwary. Stay out.
When she was finished, she placed the remaining stick back into her pack and looked at her palm. The cut had healed, the sigil quiet in her hand. Isobel felt nothing but cold.
“I should mark the other entrance,” she said faintly. “Someone might come. . . .”
“The wapiti guards that entrance,” Gabriel reminded her. “If the spirits are so concerned, let them do a share of the work.”
“But . . .”
“Isobel.” His voice had gone hard, shoulders tense, the battered brim of his hat pushed back so she could see his face. “Back on your damned horse before I throw you on and tie you there.”
Her eyes wide, she remounted and followed him onto the trail, the mule grumbling behind them.
The path Gabriel had found led up into the ridges, hardscrabble trail and bare rock covered by low brush. The footing was unsteady, dirt barely covering fist-sized rocks, occasionally winding along steep cliffs, and Gabriel couldn’t stop his thoughts from contemplating what might happen if another quake hit while they were here, imagining the way the ground might ripple and fold, shaking them off the way a horse might flies, and with as little concern.
Telling himself that the cause of the quakes was contained, that they were fewer and further between, did not ease him, not when Isobel kept glancing around her as though expecting something to rise up or fall down on them, how careful she was to not look back the way they’d come, as though the haint she’d riled might be coming after them.
It would not. He was mostly certain of that, as he was mostly certain the ground would not shake under them now.
Steady picked his way along the trail, living up to his name, and Gabriel distracted himself by studying the ground itself, the way the peaks stuttered to jagged stops, the runnels where water had flowed. He wondered if the local people had a story to tell of that, about why the peaks were flattened like tabletops, why the water deep within the bones tended to explode upwards with heat rather than flowing calmly into springs or pools. He wondered who might live here, with the dry air and the poor soil where nothing could grow, and the only thing to hunt would be sure-hooved sheep that would laugh at a stumble-footed mortal on two legs.
Catching a glimpse of a rabbit or squirrel would calm his nerves, he thought, but there still wasn’t a songbird to be heard, much less anything land-bound. He glanced again at Isobel, her own hat pulled forward, her shoulders rounded until she might almost be asleep in the saddle, save for the look-arounds and occasional pat along her mare’s neck, stroking encouragement.
The sun rose higher, and the trail led them through a thick, sudden mist and then above it. When the trail broadened out enough, they paused to stretch their legs, allowing the horses to rest. There was nothing to be seen but more jagged-edged peaks of dun rock and green pine to every side, the sky wide open above them, the sun filling the pale expanse with glare intense enough to slide even under the brims of his hat, making his eyes squint and water.
They also discovered at that point that the insects, at least, had returned; they managed to surprise a flock of butterflies rising out of a scrabbly patch of flowers, and when they paused for lunch just before the sun reached apex, Isobel was itching madly where something had bitten her.
“You can see forever from here,” Isobel said, shading her eyes to look out over the peaks. The angular shapes of trees dotted the slopes below them, broken by blotches of grey rock and red cliff and the occasional sparkle of sunlight off water, where a creek or lake hid in the folds. “What’s that up there?” She pointed to a more-distant peak, where the reddish-brown faded to white.
“Snow,” Gabriel said after a moment to follow where she was looking. “It’s still cold enough there for snow to linger.”
Isobel stared at it, then shook her head, not disputing him but likely not believing him either.
“Snow, in mid-summer.” For a heartbeat, she was young and wide-eyed, then she shook her head again with a quiet laugh, as though that were the most marvelous thing she’d ever heard and she didn’t believe it for a moment.
He made a note to take her north into Metís territory during spring, when the trails were passable again but snow still blanketed the ground, and wondered if they would still be traveling together then.
The meal finished and the horses rested, they remounted and picked up the trail again, finally heading down. The path now was nothing more than a deer track, overgrown at both sides and more rock than dirt underfoot, occasionally falling away on one side to a deep ravine.
They’d just come off one such turn, the sun directly overhead, when he heard Isobel’s voice behind him soft but urgent. “Gabriel. Hold up.”
He half-turned in the saddle, calculating how long it would take him to load and be ready, his hand settling on his knife instead. Mounted, the blade didn’t give him enough reach, but if there were another ghost cat looking for desperation prey . . . And if it were another magician, at high sun, neither gun nor knife would do him any good.
But the look on Isobel’s face when he glanced at her wasn’t worry or concern but amusement. She might have felt him looking, lifting her chin to draw his gaze to a narrow rock overhang just ahead of them. “We have company.”
It took him a moment to see what she meant, then he couldn’t believe he’d missed it: dun-colored and elongated, clinging to the side of the rock like a lizard, its head cocked at an angle that was more curiosity than threat: demon.
Back east, the gimcrack novels wailed of the terrible cruelty and malice of demons, that they existed for nothing more than to lure humans to their death and damnation, that they were tools of the devil himself, with eyes of fire and teeth like a tiger. The truth was that demon were creatures of stone and dust more than fire, and while fierce —he would not wish to fight one —they were more mischief than damnation. To a rider alone or a homestead in the wrong place at the wrong time, that might spell disaster. But he rode with the Devil’s Hand and had less concern.
“Good day,” he said, tipping his hat as he would if they’d met a matron mid-town. “Are you collecting toll for this passage or merely passing the time of day?”
It
had been a long while since he’d had cause to be flippant, and nearly as long since he’d heard his companion giggle.
The demon merely stared at them, alert but seemingly unconcerned, its head swiveling uncannily on its neck as they rode by.
“You think there are others?” Isobel asked.
“In these hills? Likely. But they’re not liable to challenge us”—she knew that, having encountered demon before, trailing after the Spaniards—“and we should be coming down out of the rocks soon enough and be past them.”
“You can tell?” She sounded surprised, then there was a long silence, followed by a relieved-sounding noise. He thought that in her place, he would not have been eager to reach for the Road either.
He waited until they had left the demon a dozen paces behind, the trail widening enough that they could ride side by side, before asking, “Can you still feel . . . it? The valley, I mean.”
The haint, he meant.
He couldn’t read people the way she could, not natural like breathing, but tension practically shimmered in the way she held the reins, turned her face away from him. “A little. Faintly. Like . . . like thunder in the distance, at night. And there’s a . . .” She hesitated. “A sense that I’m not done?”
“Something you’ve forgotten?” His own hands tightened on the reins, and he felt something in his jaw pop. He would tie her to her saddle and lead the damn mare on a rope all the way back to Flood if she even hinted at wanting to go back there.
“No. Not forgotten.” Her voice dropped, darkened. “Just . . . undone. Waiting.”
He looked at her again, but her head was down, and all he could see was the top of her hat and the edge of her chin before it sank into the collar of her jacket. He was reminded of a turtle he had seen once, half-buried in mud, contemplating the riverbank before him, thinking deep and mournful turtle thoughts.
“We should be through this pass well before dusk,” he said, not looking away. “Plenty of time to find a decent-sized stream for bathing, maybe even one deep enough for swimming. You need another lesson or three before I’m satisfied you won’t sink like a stone.”
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