Silver on the Road (The Devil's West Book 1) (40 page)

Put that way, it did seem the least he could do. But there was still a tremor of unease and distrust as he stepped into the crossroads, half expecting something—beast or magician—to attack him without warning.

The magician’s skin, unlike Isobel’s, was cool and clammy, but he was able to get to his feet, even if he wobbled once there. His clothing was torn and shredded as though someone had taken knives—or clawed hands—to them, but there didn’t seem to be any visible blood, and like Isobel, his breathing was clear and his movements easy enough to likely rule out broken ribs.

“What happened?”

“I was hoping that you would be able to tell me that,” Gabriel said, walking just to the side of the magician. He would catch the man if he fell but didn’t want to get any closer if he didn’t have to. “Last I saw, that thing folded in on you like a bear going for salmon.”

“Not an inappropriate metaphor,” the magician said, reaching to where Isobel and the animals waited. He swayed a little, and then his long legs gave out on him and he folded down onto the ground like a wobbly foal, blinking a little in confusion.

“You’re not dead,” Isobel said.

“No. I’m not.” He sounded slightly uncertain about that, however.

Gabriel took a step back from both of them, then went to check on the animals. Whatever had happened just then, if they weren’t sure, he certainly wasn’t going to be the one to figure it out.

“You walk away from magicians; you don’t ask ’em to join you,” he said into Steady’s ears, checking again to make sure the animal hadn’t suffered any ill effects. The gelding seemed perfectly unfussed: horses would be the first to spook when something started them, but if it didn’t seem like to eat them, they settled down the first, too.

Away from the others, the immediate threat gone, Gabriel shuddered. He hadn’t been able to see the beast clearly: it had moved too fast, and there had been almost a haze around it, a constant puff of dust, but it had gotten the upper hand early and never let go. The magician and Isobel both should be dead. But they were alive, and it was gone.

He rested his hands on Steady’s warm hide and thought about the mark on Isobel’s palm. Thought about how that blast should have broken her spine or at least cracked her skull. Thought about the things he’d seen, the stories he’d heard even as a child. And then he thought about his Bargain with the devil and sighed.

Bound. He hadn’t understood, hadn’t been told, until it was almost too late. Something in him
needed
to remain within the Territory, even as he
wanted
to be elsewhere. Every day he’d spent in the States had come at a cost, one he’d thought he was willing to pay . . . but in the end, he’d crawled back across the border, only feeling alive again once he’d crossed the Muddy’s waters and stood in the Devil’s West again.

The Territory might own his body, but it could not have his soul. Or so he’d thought until the devil’s promise to give him peace if he would only mentor a young girl on her first ride. . . . But better to live with the fate he knew than be tangled up in
this.

Too late now. And Isobel . . . His jaw tightened. Bargain or no, magicians and monsters be damned, he would not abandon her.

“Come on, you two,” he called back. “Soon’s you can mount up and walk, do so. It’ll be dusk soon enough, and I don’t want to make camp anywhere near here.”

Her heart had rested in her throat while they strode through the crossroads, some part of her half expecting the beast to return, but nothing happened, and soon enough the hills were at their backs, and a wide-open grassland spread out in front of them.

Izzy paused and took a deep breath, then urged Uvnee into a swift lope simply because they
could
. The mare seemed inclined to agree, and she nearly lost her hat as they raced down the road, tears forming in the corners of her eyes and her braid streaming out behind her.

When she finally turned Uvnee around and trotted sedately back to where the others waited, she half expected to be scolded. Instead, she found that Gabriel had discovered a creek a little ways off and decided they would make camp there for the night, rather than riding on.

It must have rained while they were in the hills; the long grass was green, seed-tips bending in a gentle breeze, and the soil under their bedrolls was soft, less dust kicked up as they moved about, setting up camp. Here, out of the mountains, where she could see the horizon and the open sky above her, Izzy felt herself relax, if only a little.

But when they’d settled by the fire as the sun began to sink behind them, a lap of bridles for cleaning, that ease disappeared with the magician’s words.

“It’s not gone, you know.”

“I know.” She let her fingers linger on the metal of Steady’s bit, checking it by feel for any sharp edges or worn areas. She could feel the lingering taint the same way, less seen than sensed, but distant.

“Out of the crossroads, it didn’t have enough strength to come after us.”

Izzy nodded, but she wasn’t sure she agreed. That wasn’t what this
felt like. It wasn’t gone, wasn’t dead, but for now, it had no interest in them.

Ribbons fell from the sky, striking ground and disappearing.

“I’d thought I needed to go back to Clear Rock, but now I’m not so sure,” she said, instead. “Not if it’s following us.”

“You think that thing was the same as what was in Clear Rock?” Gabriel asked. “But you’d said . . .”

“It didn’t feel the same,” she agreed. “But it is. Somehow. Maybe . . . more than one thing came in on the storm?”

“That . . . doesn’t make me feel better,” Gabriel said. “But it makes as much sense as anything. So, what now . . . we wait for it to come back? We set a trap?”

“What would you do?” she asked in return.

“If I were trying to draw something out but didn’t want to show my hand? I’d stick to whatever my original plan had been. Wait and gather more evidence. So . . . continue on the route we’d set.”

“That’s what we’ll do, then.” Her words sounded disquietingly like a question, not a statement, but neither man commented on it, merely nodded.

Izzy went back to cleaning the bridles, and Gabriel his whetstone, when the magician asked, “So, I wonder, rider: how did you come to be such a boon and trusted companion to one such as Graciendo?”

From anyone else, it would have been impolite, asking about a man’s past. But Izzy thought, once again, that the magician seemed beyond all common courtesy or restrictions, instead like a child asking for a bedtime story, utterly unaware of anything beyond his own desires.

“Purest bad luck,” Gabriel said, not pausing in the slow, steady strokes of the blade against his whetstone. He’d finished his, a sickle-curved piece, and was working on Izzy’s now, the longer knife she’d been given and was still half-afraid to use. “A year or so after coming home, still full of book-learning and thinking it could replace the things I’d known before—and not afraid to say so.” He paused,
chuckling at something in his memory. “Graciendo seemed to find me amusing instead of irritating, and so I lived.”

“You were fortunate.”

“Yeah.” Gabriel let the word draw out. “I was.”

Izzy could tell that there were things happening beneath the surface, that the magician was saying things he was not speaking, and Gabriel could hear them even though she could not. She did not know if it was because they were male, or because they were older, or simply because she had not been on the road long enough. Or perhaps some blend of all three. The boss always said the simplest answer was usually true, but simple didn’t mean it wasn’t also complicated.

She thought she understood that better now. Her thumb turned inward, pressing against the meat of her palm. She could feel the markings there, even though in daylight they weren’t raised at all, laying flat on her skin. The devil’s mark, same as on Uvnee’s bridle and her pack. She was no more than a possession, something claimed. . . .

She’d thought power would make her powerful. That the respect people showed would be to her. But it didn’t, and it wasn’t.

The judge’s words came back to her—was she certain this was what she wanted?

“Yes,” she whispered to herself in response to his echo, to her own doubts. To belong, to be part of something important, something powerful . . . But the yes didn’t fill her entirely this time. Didn’t quiet her discomfort, the sense that she’d made a bad bargain somehow.

But there was no denying that she could do things, feel things . . . important things. It was more than the awareness of the road, deeper, letting her sense danger, letting her know when things were well. What else could it do?

Izzy placed her palm down on the ground, and the quiet busy hum of the earth filled her: things moving, stretching, dying, breaking down and reforming, slow and steady as a heartbeat, the crackle of bones and the whisper of winds, and throughout it all the gentle
awareness of the roads, like the endless
flickerthwack
of cards against felt, the mumble of voices and clink of glass.

“Isobel.”

She jerked up, suddenly aware that she’d slumped forward. “Yes?”

“Go to bed before we have to carry you there,” Gabriel said.

She made a face at him but nodded. Her pallet was on the other side of the fire, Gabriel between her and the magician.

Gabriel. He had looked at them both oddly when tending their injuries, and she had felt his unease, his uncertainty, but his manner to her tonight had been the same as before. She couldn’t blame him, not entire. And yet, while he did not trust the magician—and neither did she, entirely, for his inability to tell them what had happened in the crossroads, why his magic had exploded the way it did—he did not distrust her.

She thought.

Under the remaining scrap of moon and a deep white splay of stars, Izzy forced all thoughts out of her head, letting the earth sing her to sleep, not noting when a long, lean shadow slid up next to her ear, a pointed tongue flickering as it whispered in her ear.

In her dreams, she stood in the middle of a river, although her limbs were not wet, and the water ran bloody and black around her. She let her fingers trail in the red murk, and where they touched, the water ran clear.

Thissssss issss your power,
a voice told her.
To ssssstrike and to cleansssse. Embrace it, ussssse it, or we all will die. . . .

Her eyes opened, and she was awake before she was aware that she’d been asleep, the sound of shouting bringing her to her feet and only after the fact realizing that her knife was unsheathed and in her hand. The sun had broken over the horizon: she had overslept, and Gabriel had let her. Gabriel was the one shouting. The fire was not yet lit, but the animals were tethered where they had been the night before, seemingly unconcerned with anything save their morning meal. She took all this in with one glance, hardly aware she did so, even as she was moving toward the shouting.

“You don’t do that! Not here, not within my circle!”

“It is my circle as well, is it not?”

“It is not!”

The two men were squared off against each other just beyond the horses, the magician relaxed, amused, looking down with a definite smirk on his lips, while Gabriel ran his fingers through his hair, leaving the strands sticking straight up in his agitation.

“No workings within my campsite, not without permission. Not while we’re off the road. Nor while we’re on it, either! You’ve already called one beast down upon us, and it killed you, if you care to remember!”

“Don’t you trust me?” Farron asked, and she could not tell if his offense was true or mockery.

“I’ll assume that’s your idea of humor,” Gabriel said. His body was tense, shoulders held stiffly, but he met the magician’s gaze squarely, without flinching.

She wasn’t sure, suddenly, who was the more dangerous. Everyone knew magicians were powerful, and mad as spring hares, but Gabriel was more than a cardsharp or rootless advocate, even one with water-sense. There was something layers-deep in him, something she hadn’t seen before, and it was stone to the magician’s blade, solid and unyielding.

They glared at each other, or Gabriel glared and Farron stared back, at an impasse. Izzy wondered if she dared speak up, break their confrontation, or if it would be safer, better, to stay where she was, silent, an observer.

Then the morning breeze picked up, swirling around them, bringing the faint smell of water and mud, and the magician laughed softly, tilting his head like a dog and smiling at nothing in particular. Gabriel did not laugh, but she could tell the moment the fight left him.

“You don’t have to trust me,” Farron said. “But I’ve told you twice now: I am not your enemy. Not here, not in this place and time.”

Izzy watched the two of them study each other, and Gabriel sighed, tilting his head back to stare at the sky.

“No workings within camp unless I’ve cleared it,” he said. “Give me no reason to distrust you, and I’ll work on the trust.”

“Fair enough,” the magician said, still smiling, then he seemed to notice Izzy standing there, her knife still bared and ready. “And good morning to you, young rider! No reason to fret; your mentor and I were merely having a tête-à-tête over who is lead dog in this ramshackle pack.”