The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(43)

He sat down and watched her face, how her lips pursed, bright eyes hooded as she concentrated on what she could feel between her fingers rather than what she could see. There was an intensity to her that he’d admired since the first he saw her, a determination to do, to be something, with an intensity that would accept no obstacles.

It was a quality he’d admired, even knowing it attracted trouble the way a carcass attracted buzzards.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better.” Her hands didn’t pause until she reached the end of the braid, tying it off with the loop of leather cord he’d cut for her. She then reached into her pack and pulled out the two small feathers Calls Thunder had given her, back in De Plata, one greyish-blue, one banded white-and-black, both slightly ruffled along the edges now, each barely the size of his thumb. She wove them into the braid with that same nimble surety and seemed oblivious to the fact that her actions had attracted the old man’s attentions.

“Tsigili,” he said. “Et jasur.”

Isobel looked at the old man, then at Gabriel, clearly expecting a translation.

“Je m’excuse, qu’est-ce que vous avez dit?”

The old man gestured at Isobel with two fingers held upright. “Des plumes.”

It was, Gabriel thought, a question more than a statement. “étant données à elle par la parleur-des-rêves dans De Plata.” If the feathers did have some medicine-meaning, better the old man know Isobel had been gifted them by someone with the authority to do so, rather than claiming them for herself.

The old man pursed his lips, dropped his fingers, and that seemed to be the extent of his interest.

Gabriel pushed, delicately. “Vous savez ce que signifient-ils, grandpapa?”

He grunted. “Le devin et le potin, le messager.” More pursed lips, then, almost grudgingly: “Elle comporte de nombreux symboles forts.”

Isobel was watching them, her gaze flicking alertly between them. “What did he say?”

“Your feathers. I told you someone would know what they meant.”

Her expression livened at that. He had told her that feathers meant something, but he hadn’t known what, specifically, and Calls Thunder, who had given them to her, hadn’t explained.

“And?”

“The birds they come from, one is far-seeing, the other carries messages.” Gossip, the old man’d said, but Gabriel wasn’t going to tell her that. “He says that they’re strong medicine.”

“But what do they mean?”

Gabriel was suddenly immensely tired. “I don’t know. Calls Thunder gave them to you, so I’ll assume that it’s for you to learn, not me.”

Her face fell, and she cast her gaze down toward her lap. “I only gave them a hairpin,” she said, soft-voiced, reaching up to touch the feathers gently. “It didn’t mean anything.”

He hadn’t expected her thoughts to turn in that direction. He forgot, at times, that she was barely past sixteen; for all that the devil had laid on her, for all the power she held, she was still in many ways so very young.

“Was it something you treasured?” He knew it was; the hairpin had been made from bone polished smooth from care and use. “That was all Calls Thunder would consider, if you gave them something you valued in return.”

Gabriel had long suspected that the dream-talker had given Isobel not a gift but a marker. Isobel of Flood, Isobel Devil’s Hand, could claim no special standing among natives. By giving her those feathers, he thought, Calls Thunder had marked her as someone of worth, of power. They might be enough to keep her safe in awkward situations, if she stepped wrong or the Agreement was in doubt.

Might. He would not rely on them, nor allow her to, either.

“The thing that attacked me, in the circle.” She changed the subject as she took the coffee pot, now boiled, off the tripod and poured it into mugs, giving the first one to the old man. “I thought at first it might be a haint, that someone had died here and not been properly warded. But the feel of it . . . was wrong.” She paused, then handed him the second cup. “Haints sorrow, and sometimes they’re fierce-mad. But this didn’t . . . this didn’t feel right.”

Gabriel blew on his coffee to cool it, then took a sip and winced. She’d over-boiled it again. “Well, it wasn’t a fetch, or we’d be trying to sew our faces back on.”

“I don’t know what it was.” Her voice was tight, too high, and he waited while she stirred what was left in the coffee pot, frowning at the grounds as though they could tell her something but wouldn’t.

“You think whatever it is”—he made a vague gesture with his cup—“is causing the quakes?” It would follow: this was where the old man said the quakes began. “And the magicians . . . were they trying to contain it, or did they create it?” His bet would be on the latter.

“I don’t know. Yes. Whatever happened there, it’s tied in somehow. I just . . . Magicians. Plural. That’s worrying.”

Her matter-of-fact tone surprised a laugh out of him. “Just a bit, yes.”

“Corbeau, pas de buse,” the old man said, and lifted his mug to indicate the area behind them. “Ils ne sont pas . . . ici juste pour manger la vieille viande.” His hands lifted and spread, one following the other to the right, then down. “Ils sont venus pleins de connaissances, et les bêtes sont parties, et le ciel est devenu vide, et la terre a tremblé.” And then he stopped, as though he had run out of words.