The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(113)
Someone like April, her girlhood friend they’d met in Junction, whose touch was to grow things green and bright. Or Devorah, any rider; anyone who could touch the Road could feel the bones beneath their feet. Or even himself: Gabriel might resent and resist, but he knew what he was, what he could not escape. His water-sense would mark him, no matter how slight.
The things that made them part of the Territory, he thought, and wondered why he’d never thought that before, so obvious and yet invisible.
“They would have gone after anyone with even a scrap of power. I couldn’t let them. But”—and there was the thorn in her heart, the crack in her chest; he could hear it, see it in her, and his own chest ached for her—“if I am the cold eye and the final word . . . what is there to stop me?”
“Nothing, save your own sense of where to stop.”
That brought her up short: she had been expecting him to say something else, mayhap tell her how to limit herself, or some secret, but he had none, had no answer save what he gave her.
“You are the devil’s eye, Isobel. What do you see?”
She stared at him finally, and then turned away, looking out over the expanse of grass, the clustered line of trees, the rise of the hills and mountains around them, and then back to him. Her eyes were nearly all pupil, like a cat’s in candlelight, and he felt the urge to remain still and make no sound.
“Infection,” she said finally, her voice heavy and slow. “Things ooze where they should be solid, hot where they should be cool, cold where they should be warm, soft and brittle as it eats into the bones, and the bones cannot hold, even as the spirit cannot break free. Poison, seeping into everything. If it were a wound like yours, I would slice it open and wash it until your blood ran clean.”
His hand touched the scar on his side reflexively. It was healed now, only giving him the occasional twinge, but he could remember the pain he’d felt those first few days, when every breath made him wonder if he would ever rest easy again, much less ride.
“But the left hand is not the giving hand,” Isobel went on. “If I do this . . .”
“You’re afraid you’ll hurt the spirit, do what the magicians couldn’t?” He wanted to scoff, to tell her that a single mortal couldn’t do more than an impossible banding of magicians, but then he remembered the scene inside the lockhouse, the bodies torn and strewn across the hard-packed ground, and was uncertain.
“This is not part of the Agreement, Gabriel. There are none under the devil’s protection who are harmed here; the men who did this have been punished, either by death or worse, and the ancient one is not mine to interfere with. This is . . .” Her voice slowed, grew more strained. “This is not the devil’s due, nor were those magicians. And yet I carried out that sentence, without hesitation, as though . . .”
The ground swelled underfoot as she spoke, a rumbling he could feel with his skin, and behind them Steady let out a ringing cry, part defiance and part fear, even as the hills rising above them shook hard enough to cause, in the distance, the crashing sound of a rockslide.
“No.” Her eyes were wide, her face ashen. “No?—”
She wasn’t speaking to him, he realized even as Isobel picked up the salt stick and threw it at him. “Ward yourself and the horses,” she told him. “And stay there.”
She grabbed the fabric of her skirt in both hands and hitched it, then took off at a dead run for the center of the valley, going three quarters of the way across before stopping as though she’d hit a wall, spinning around, and collapsing to her knees.
A heavy wind slicked through the valley, low along the tops of the grasses, the ground shuddered, unruly, and the blue sky overhead seemed a distant, peaceful joke. He ground the salt between his palms and tried to draw a warding circle, but the wind scattered the grains faster than he could pour them. Giving up, he stuck the salt stick between his teeth, wincing at the bitter, sharp taste, and ran for the horses, grabbing their reins and bringing them close together. If he could, he would have sent them back through the passage, but he worried that a rockslide there would be deadly for all three of them.
Better to stay here, as far from rocks or trees as he could, and pray the ground did not open up and swallow them—or Isobel.
And then the world broke loose.
The moment Isobel had dropped to her knees, her palm down on the ground, she felt slapped between two impossible weights pressing the air from her lungs, the strength from her limbs.
“Please.” She wasn’t sure what she was asking for, or who, but the word was all she could squeeze out. “Please.”
They did not listen, could not hear her. The wind picked up, nearly knocking her sideways, the grass sharp-edged and harsh against her hands and face. Her hat was knocked clear off her head, only the leather cord under her chin keeping it from blowing away, digging into the soft skin there until she jammed it onto her head again, defiant as though to tell the wind to keep its hands off her and hers.
She didn’t hear it laugh; that had to have been her imagination.
She turned her fingers downward, nails digging past the grass into the dirt, all her weight pressing into her palm until her arm and shoulder ached with it, doing her best to ignore everything but the knowledge of the sigil on her palm and what it meant, what it meant she was, what it meant she was required to do.
“Please,” she said again, asking the barrier that met her to allow her through, the way she had moved past bone and stone and warding, to reach the magicians within the hut. The valley shuddered under her, the disorientation outside and around her as well as within, as though she were trapped in a fever rather than the fever being under her own skin. The spirit raged; she could feel it, this close, as though she’d grabbed a heated poker, no, something hot but spiked, a handful of gooseberry vines or a cactus pad that wriggled and fought within her grasp, and each wriggle sent another rumble through the bones as they pushed back, pressing that rage flat in an attempt to calm it.