She didn’t know how to do that but nodded and followed him out the door.
They’d been invited to eat with the judge and his wife, a square-faced, solid woman with skin a shade lighter than her husband’s, her curls the color of pewter, her eyes surprisingly blue. Their children were grown and working land just southeast of the town, she explained, but she was too old and lazy to wield a hoe any longer.
Looking around the cabin, simple but neat as a pin, with walls carefully chinked against winter winds, braided rag rugs on the plank flooring, and neatly sewn curtains over the windows and door, Isobel suspected that neither of their hosts had ever spent a slothful day in their lives.
They did not speak of judgment, nor the man closed in a room awaiting his own punishment in the morning, nor the two still unconscious and warded in the lockhouse; Gabriel and the judge exchanged news of the Territory and beyond, of people and places Isobel had never heard of, and she, defaulting back to the girl she’d once been, stayed quiet, opened her ears, and listened for what wasn’t being said.
They had not felt the quaking of the earth. The conversation touched on it, briefly, and then moved on: they were not aware that it had been worse, that game had fled the area, that people beyond their walls suffered.
She remembered what Lou had said, about so many here lacking the touch, and wondered if that lack of concern were connected or coincidence. You did not ask where someone came from or why they’d come; no more so could she ask if they could feel the Road, the wards, the Territory itself around them. She could not ask why the people here did not seem to care. But not knowing made Isobel uneasy in ways she could not explain.
The sigil in her hand remained cool, the whisper absent. But—despite judgment—the day, the events, did not feel finished.
Gabriel, across the table from her, wiping the gravy from his plate with the last of a bit of bread, seemed to have no such discomfort.
She pushed at the feeling the way she pressed on the sigil in her palm, gentle, steady pressure, but nothing shifted underneath. There was nothing wrong here save her feeling of wrongness.
Trust yourself, Gabriel had said.
“If you’d care to,” the judge said as his wife cleared the plates from the table, “we’ve a bathhouse you might make use of. I remember . . . Well, there comes a time when sloughing off all you’ve been carrying with a dose of hot water is just the thing.”
“You go first,” Isobel fiddled with the napkin on her lap, the cloth rough against her fingertips. “I . . . need some air.”
Neither man questioned her, although the judge’s wife gave her a considering look over her shoulder from where she was scraping dishes into a wooden barrel, as though wondering what sort of woman would pass up a bath when offered.
A woman filled with power, and none of it her own.
Andreas might be a bustling town in the winter, when all its residents returned within the walls, but tonight, with the warmth of summer hinted at in the night air and the weight of the day’s events lingering, it was quiet as a boneyard. Some doors were still open, lights visible through windows, but save for an old man smoking a pipe, she saw no one as she walked. The moon was entirely absent from the sky, allowing the stars to shine all the more brightly, as glittering as the cut glassware Iktan washed so carefully every night behind the bar.
A longing for the saloon, for Flood, clawed gently at her. When the boss was distant but ever-present, when folding linens and serving drinks were the routine of her day and helping to unload a wagon was the excitement, when the only things she’d ever seen die in front of her were chickens, and once a dog that’d been kicked hard by a horse.
When she didn’t know the stink of disease, of blood, of death, when it lingered on her hands. When she didn’t feel something else whispering in her bones.
Isobel’s steps took her past the stable where their horses and the mule were, and she hesitated a moment, thinking to go in, rub her hands against that smooth, warm, living flesh, feel grassy breath on her hair, lean her face against the mare’s neck. Instead, she moved on until she came to the lockhouse.
The man Gabriel had said maintained the wards, Possum, was not standing guard, but she did not think he was far away. She breathed the night air, letting her eyes rest on the sigil on the doorframe. The paint was black, but shimmered as she looked at it, as though saying hello —or “stay away.” The protections on the walls and roof kept her from touching her own wards, wrapped around the magicians to keep them still, but she thought they remained intact. But that uncertainty might be the source of her unease.
“Are you awake?” she called out, standing next to the door. “Are you aware?”
There was sound of something—someone —shifting. She touched her left palm to the door, asking the wards under the sigil to let her see.
They resisted: she was not the one who had laid them; she had no sway over them. Isobel felt a flash of irritation: she would accept the earth’s refusal of her, but not this. The devil’s sigil was not greater than the Tree, but it was no less, either.
Kneeling, her skirt tucked under her legs, Isobel placed her palm instead on the ground. It was night-chill and dry, and she remembered the feeling of the valley, where she had been cut off from the bones, cut off from the Road.
Choose, the spirit-animals had told her. Was this what they meant? She hesitated, unsure, then she pushed down, feeling the now-familiar dizziness and disorientation as the bones reached up, drawing her in and spreading her thin.
The Road sang to itself, miles distant. Closer, rock grumbled and shifted, cool water trickled and pooled, steam gathered, constant pushing and pressing, building and breaking. All the Territory, as close as her fingertips. Isobel was tempted to linger within, tempted to go deeper, to look backward, to see if she could reach the damaged circle and the power constrained within.
She resisted; she dared not disturb further the spirit or the madness trapped with it. All she needed to know was what waited on the other side of the door in front of her, quench the sigils that flared like a forge as she approached, warning caution to all flesh.
Her breathing rasped in her throat, heart too large to rest within her ribs, thumping to escape. She felt as though she had a fever, skin too tight over bones too warm, the world colorless but too sharp, as though the shapes might cut her eyes if she gazed on them for too long. She could break the wards if she chose to. Sliding from the roof and walls, shattering at her touch, ripping the Tree out by the roots.
She shook her head violently, to rid herself of that thought, and her braid knocked against her shoulder, the feathers braided there tickling her chin, as though familiar fingers stroked her skin, gentle, gentling.
Calls Thunder, the dream-speaker who had gifted her with those feathers. They’d had no great meaning, no significance, Broken Tongue had said. Just . . . feathers.
A gift, Gabriel had said.
She exhaled, reaching up with her free hand to touch the feathers, flicking the braid back over her shoulder, feeling it settle against her back, feeling her spine elongate, a snake stretching itself full length in the dirt, a ghost cat leaping, a Reaper hawk spreading its wings, rising into the sky, the proud line of the wapiti’s neck, prongs limned by sun and moonlight. A thing of the Territory. A thing that belonged to the Territory.
Something settled within her, smooth and heavy as stones, and her heart slowed, thump-thump-thump, then thump-thump, thump-thump, until she could breathe again. The rage disappeared; the power remained.
Her left hand dug into the ground, the sigil burning like a coalstone. Power. Responsibility. The lesson she’d never quite learned: be careful what you ask for, for the devil will give you exactly that. What a magician did was none of the devil’s concern. Until she decided it was.
Show me, she told it. And it did.
One magician had woken, and consumed the other, taking all he was and leaving a husk of flesh and bone behind. Restless, roiling; power still contain
ed behind the wardings, but slowly, carefully, craftily they were being scraped away from inside, layer by layer unraveling.
Bones are strong, but the wind will not be contained.
Isobel sat back on her heels, her skirts covered in dust, and breathed.
Magicians were creatures of the Territory. Like the Reaper hawk or the buffalo, or the waters rushing down from the hills to feed the prairie grasses, or the stone spires rising toward the sky. The eight winds owned them; they answered to nothing less.
But an owl had led her to them. Spirit of the winds, omen of death.
The boss waited in Flood, shuffling decks and turning over cards, watching and manipulating, piece by piece, the Right Hand to succor, the Left to . . . to what?
The great elk had told her to deal with the intruders, to be the knife the devil had sent her to be. The Reaper hawk had told her to walk away, to leave the valley, to survive. Both were creatures of the Territory, but they counseled her at odds.
But the snake, what had the snake said? We tell you only what you already know but will not let yourself hear.
She had been sent out, not kept. She had set foot on the dust roads, had heard the beat of the buffalo herds in her own blood, felt the scream of a Reaper hawk in her bones, breathed the resin-filled air of the mountains and drunk the dark, cool waters, dug her fingers into the grit and loam . . . felt the whispers of the earth itself in her own bones.
All her confusion, all her uncertainty came from that. She should never have listened to that whisper, should never have allowed it within. And yet, had there ever been another choice? Had the boss intended for her to have no other choice?
The Left Hand was the knife in the darkness, the cold eye. The ease she could offer was not to heal but to ensure no further harm. Isobel pressed her left palm back to the dirt.
The magician inside was restless, tightly twisted; it knew she was there but considered her no threat, not now. She had crept in through the bones, drab-colored and dry, and what threat could earth be to something born of the wind?
The calm amusement she’d always felt in Farron’s power was absent here. No humor, no affection, nothing to soften the madness that seethed, needing more without any hope of satiation, no Law, no limits. Only hunger. Only greed.
Her hesitation disappeared. Isobel placed both hands palm-down on the ground, stretching so that she lay flat on the ground, her face pressed into the dirt, nails digging past the crust, the smell of it in her nose, the taste of it in her mouth; she was the ground, she was the stone, she was the water trickling deep within. And then, faint, soft, the brush of wind, there and gone.
There was no Isobel. The flesh becomes dust, the bones become stone, the blood becomes wind. The touch of the devil on her palm spreading into every speck, curdling her, thickening and softening, hardening and changing. An instant of dropping dropping too far and rising too fast until a sharp wrenching sensation and there was nothing but a narrow pinprick, nothing but a single intent, sharp-edged silver coin turning and turning as it spun through the air, landing in the shadow of a crossroads filled with rage and despair.
Not enough. She was not enough, not against this.
Open, Hand.
She opened, unthinking. And then, agony, her body seizing, sinews contracting, bones crunching, blood steaming from skin, skin burning, lungs collapsing, and the rush of rain-wet wind wrapped around her, the hot agony of molten silver shoved into her, welcomed into her veins as though it’d been formed there, then the taste of mud and sulphur coating her tongue, and slowly, slowly, Isobel returned, curled on the ground outside the shack, and when she opened her eyes, a man sat next to her, sharp nose and red-rimmed eyes and grizzled grey hair loose and tangled.
“That’s done, then,” he said, patting her shoulder awkwardly, as though to offer comfort. “It’s done with ya, for now, and he’s done with the bath and looking for you. Go. I’ll deal with this here.”
She had no idea who he was or what he meant, but she had no strength left to ask or argue.
PART SIX
WAKE THE BONES
Gabriel dreamed of death.
He stood in the middle of a creek bed, dry and mud-cracked, the sun cold and heavy on his bare shoulders, and knew that he should not turn around, that the night bird waited for him.
Not for you.
“That doesn’t make it better.” His dream-voice was higher, lighter, the voice of a child, not a man. That was how the dreamspace saw him, Old Woman Who Never Dies had said. Foolish but teachable.
Be careful, Two Voices.
He was always careful. Too careful, Old Woman had said that, too, in a tone that said it wasn’t a good thing, not like a hunter was careful but like a coward.
Gabriel had never denied it.
“Do you have a message, or is this a thing I needs must learn on my own?”
He was alone in the middle of a dry creek bed, the water and fish long since fled, the sky blue-white and sunless, and then he was awake, a too-soft bed cradling him, and Isobel’s soft snoring across the cabin the only noise he heard.
Sleep never returned. Gabriel finally gave up, pushing aside the covers and reaching for his boots.
Isobel was curled up with the covers pulled to her nose, her head shoved half under the pillow. He suspected he hadn’t looked much better: after weeks on the road, sleeping on bedrolls and using their packs as pillows, even lumpy, musty beds were a gift. But the sticky remnants of his dream, coupled with the events of the previous day, left him feeling too restless to remain.
When he stepped outside of the cabin, stretching the creaks and aches from his back and shoulders, the morning air was cool enough to make his eyes water. Traveling the plains had made him soft, unused to the bite of mountain air even in early summer.
They’d been given a cabin toward the center, near the common green. The air smelled of pine and sap and meat cooking somewhere, making his stomach grumble. He needed coffee. And breakfast. With luck, Missus Pike would be willing to feed another mouth, since the town had no saloon or dining hall.
Walking back toward the back of town, where the judge and his missus lived, Gabriel realized that unlike any other town he’d ever been in, there was no hammer of anvils or clatter of wheels breaking the morning’s silence, no voices raised in argument or muttering against chores. Of itself, that was nothing to be concerned about: Andreas was, as they’d said, a half-empty town during planting. But as he came closer to the judge’s home, he heard the quiet buzz of voices, the unmistakable tone of panic.
That was enough to warn him, even before he saw the small crowd gathered outside the bench, the judge in the middle, already dressed and looking stern.
Yesterday had been bad enough; Gabriel didn’t want to consider what could have happened overnight. He thought about waking Isobel up, then decided that if nobody had come to roust them, this wasn’t their problem. Let the girl sleep.
But he was here, and it didn’t seem as though he’d get breakfast until this was settled.
“Judge.” He cut through the crowd with an apologetic nod and a tip of his hat, but for the most part, they gave way without complaint. “There a problem?”
It was obvious there was, but Gabriel was simply a guest here now. All the judge need do was say that was handled, or nothing was amiss, and he would be able to turn away with a clear conscience.
“The magicians,” the judge said, turning a sour look his way, and Gabriel’s soul went cold for an instant, before realizing that if they’d broken the wards, the judge would have woken them, violently and with a great deal of noise.
A flickering memory of his dream, be careful, and he braced himself for what might come. “What happened?”
“That’s an excellent question,” the judge said, still sour. “Micah, tell him what you told me.”
“We went in the morning, to check and offer ’em water. ’Cause we assumed they needed to drink.” The other man said it almost as a question, wringing his hands a
nd speaking down to his boots. Without seeing his face, Gabriel couldn’t guess his age, but his hands were thin and age-spotted, not Gabriel’s first choice to send to care for two madder-than-most magicians. “Only, when we got there and had Possum open the door . . .” The speaker looked up then, grey eyes wide and terrified, and younger than his hands would suggest. “It was like some beast got in there. Got in there and tore them up but good.”
Gabriel’s hunger turned to a cold curdling in his stomach. Breakfast be damned, his dream be damned: he wanted out of this town. Whatever had happened when Isobel touched the ward post had been bad enough, but for her to then see the marshal die under her hands, to not be able to save her . . . She was only a girl, for all that she was asked to carry. She shouldn’t have spent last night washing cold blood off her hands and out of her clothing. She shouldn’t have to see this. . . .
The judge turned back to him, the wrinkles in his face deeper than they’d been even a day before. “I’d not ask this of you, rider, but it would be days before another marshal could be summoned, and if there’s something hunting within our walls, we need to know now, not after more are dead.”
Unspoken but clear: anything that came hunting magicians was nothing any of them could stand against.
Nothing except Isobel.
Gabriel bit his teeth against that knowledge, the urge to flee battered by responsibility, obligation. But the dead were already dead. He would let her sleep until he knew more.
The inside of the lockhouse had a dirt floor rather than the planks he’d seen elsewhere, and no furniture or windows, the walls—lit by pale morning light coming in through the open door—covered with sigils and scratchings laid over each other, some carved, some painted, some old and some brightly new. But the walls were only a distraction from what lay on that dirt floor.
“River have mercy,” Gabriel breathed, then gagged, the smell too much in the enclosed space. He backed out, breathing into his sleeve in an attempt to block it out. “I’ve seen bear maulings prettier than that.”
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