The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(69)

“These men have claimed insult given to them.” The marshal studied Isobel, ignoring Gabriel. Her eyes were light-colored, her skin tight against her bones the way some folk aged, sun-spotted, and he thought she’d been a handful and a half when she was younger and with more to prove.

“Insult, against magicians?” Isobel’s voice skirted scorn and amusement, but only just, and he thought that was a thing she’d sucked from the devil’s teat, for it to be that perfect.

The marshal extended one arm and flicked her fingers inward, telling the two figures to come closer. They did so, though reluctantly.

“Magicians are still men. You say they have no right to that claim?”

The younger man opened his mouth as though to protest the marshal’s question, but his companion—an older man, dark hair trimmed close to his scalp and greying at the temples—placed one hand on his shoulder, silencing him. Like Gabriel, he knew enough to stay out of this.

The younger man shook off the hand, and on closer inspection, Gabriel decided he was not young after all, but merely carried that air of youthful arrogance. His hair was long, pulled into a queue that fell halfway down his back, and his worn cloth jacket and boots told Gabriel he was Eastern-born, likely a military man turned scout. His kind?—restless, quarrelsome?—were fleas on the back of respectable folk, but like fleas, there was no escaping them.

The other man’s clothing was of better quality, if equally worn, and his boots said he, too, was a riding man, not accustomed to long miles of walking. There was a look about the man’s eyes, though, a steadiness where his companion shifted, and Gabriel thought of the badge tucked into his pocket, and thought for certain there’d be a matching pinprick in the man’s lapel where the sigil should go.

But he didn’t offer it back to the man. Not yet.

“I say, first, that claiming insult against a magician is a fool’s walk.” Isobel’s tone was tart, her hands fisted at her hips, shoulders back and chin up, all signs that she was bracing for a brangle. “And second, that they drew the insult on themselves by meddling where they had neither right nor reach.”

Her gaze shifted from the marshal then to the men behind her, and Gabriel couldn’t say for certain, but if he’d been the recipient of that stare, he might have apologized for anything he even thought he might have done. These men were either made of sterner stuff, or they were in fact fools, because the older man tried to rebut her charges.

“If I understand your use of the term, I gave no insult, none that any sane man would take.” Sharp tones, clearly bitten off, eyes narrowed. “I merely offered these men an opportunity to better themselves, to bring under harness forces that—”

“Your first mistake was thinking that they were sane,” Isobel snapped at him, cutting his words mid-shaping. “And your second was approaching them at all. Are you yourself mad? Or did you have some deeper intent in your actions?”

Gabriel stilled, the letter from Abner suddenly a burning-hot coal against his skin, despite the fact that it was safe in the pack draped over Steady’s saddle, his earlier fears confirmed. If this man had been sent by the president, if Jefferson thought somehow to utilize the medicine of the Territory for his own use . . .

Only a madman would do so. A madman or a fool . . . or someone who did not believe the stories that came out of the Territory. Someone who thought with a logical mind, searching for explanations that could be turned and controlled.

Someone who thought the Territory merely another parcel of land to be owned and used.

Isobel, unaware of his thoughts, had turned on the older woman. “Are you aware of what you protect? What they have done?” She didn’t wait for a response but plowed on, her body practically shaking with rage, hands clenched at her sides. “These fools, for some reason I cannot scry, thought to make use of magicians—not one but many.”

The marshal scoffed at that. “No one can convince a magician to do anything it does not chose to do. And there is no insult in bad ideas, else we’d all be up before judgment on a regular basis.”

“If you offer them something they want badly enough, magicians are manipulated easy as any,” Isobel said. “Enough to come together, enough to perform abominations without honor, to entrap an ancient and force it back to flesh, to strip away its medicine for their own use.”

The marshal’s eyes widened and she drew a breath in as Isobel’s words sank home. “Impossible.”

“I would have agreed,” Gabriel said before Isobel could lose her temper, “except it seems to have been more improbable than impossible.”

The woman’s gaze flickered between them, then to the two Americans, staring at them as though seeing them truly for the first time.

“They failed.”

“They succeeded,” Isobel corrected her, her voice the edge of a blade. “Well enough that those magicians slaughtered buffalo for their medicine, well enough that those magicians were then powerful enough to use that to pull an ancient spirit into their grasp—but not well enough that they could hold that grasp. Well enough that the Territory itself had to intervene.”

Gabriel’s attention flickered to Isobel at the mention of the buffalo, his fingers tightening in reaction to what she had described. The primal heart of the Territory, slaughtered . . .

No marshal who lived past their first year carrying the sigil was slow on the uptake. “Blood and stone . . . The quakes. That was their doing?”