The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(71)

A heartbeat, stretched and tense, and the marshal dipped her chin, dark eyes intent on Isobel’s face. “Agreed.”

Gabriel broke the awkward silence that followed. “If we’re to travel together then, might we know your name?”

The marshal looked surprised, as though only now realizing that she had never identified herself. “LaFlesche. Marshal Abigail LaFlesche.”

Gabriel took her offered hand first, shaking it firmly. “You’ve Umonhon work on your jacket,” he said. “You’ve kin there?”

“My mother’s sister’s husband.” Her hand brushed the design on the arm of her jacket, as though to reassure herself it was there, then she offered her hand to Isobel, who took it. The marshal’s fingers were narrow and hard, and Isobel thought that she would not fumble with either knife or gun if the need arose. But not all threats answered to blade or bullet.

Then again, she had crafted a false crossroads that caught not one but two magicians, however distracted. Isobel would not underestimate the marshal either.

“So, these two, we can bind and walk.” Gabriel gestured to the Americans. “But how now do we deal with the remaining two?”

LaFlesche smiled then, the long bones of her face at odds with the sudden gleam of intelligent mischief in her eyes. “Well, it’s a fine thing you came along when you did, then, isn’t it?”



The magicians had stilled once Isobel had added her own warding to the trap, but they were aware of her now; their eyes followed her as she came closer, tracking her movement the way she thought a ghost cat might, waiting for the ripe moment to leap, to rend and tear. . . .

She reminded herself that the massive ghost cat had died when it tried to attack them, and that these two were already bound by the marshal’s work, and weakened by their struggle against each other. But she would not underestimate them, even so.

“You should have kept to your ways,” she told them, although she was not certain if they could hear her through the bindings, or if they were still able to comprehend human speech. Magicians went mad enough, but what she had touched in the valley had traveled past that madness into something far worse, a windstorm of thorns, thunder, and lightning. Simply because these two retained human shape, she should not assume anything human remained within.

The only way to tell would be to push at them, push herself through them, and that was the very thing she had no intention of doing; if the whisper came back to suggest it, she would cut it from her head with a dull knife before listening.

One of the magicians, slender-built with eyes the color of a coalstone, hissed at her again when she drew close. His face was hatch-marked with scars, raised white lines that looked too regular to have been accidental, and he had only four fingers on the hand he raised to her, as though to scratch at her eyes through the binding, only to draw back his arm with a yelp.

The wards held. But for how long? The false crossroads had drawn them with the promise of power without there being anything in truth for them to draw on—and she was still vastly curious as to how the marshal had managed that—and they had near-drained each other in trying to escape, but . . .

Magicians. A wise soul ran from them; they did not draw closer.

“Odds are no one ever claimed a Hand was wise,” she said to herself, and then raised her voice so that the two inside the warding could hear her but the others behind her could not.

“If it were left to me, I would crack you open and scatter your ashes back to the winds. But false claim of insult has been brought against you, and the Law says that you must stand by while they answer for it.” She didn’t think they understood what she was saying, but the second figure, bulkier, his face hidden by thick chunks of dust-black hair, turned slightly when she spoke, as though he were listening. “You will come with us, without struggle, to stand before Law.”

And once there, well. The Tree might carry the Law, but its roots were deep into the Territory itself. What they had done, to the ancient one they’d abused, to the buffalo-spirits they’d slaughtered, to those harmed by the quakes that followed . . . that would not go unanswered.

“Do you understand?”

Isobel waited for a response but expected none, and none came. Accepting their silence as consent, she dropped to one knee and placed her palm not against the ground itself but on the joint lines of the warding.

It hissed and hummed against her, identifying her as not-to-be-contained but not yet willing to yield to her.

She spread her fingers, feeling delicately along the tangled lines. Some push of the winds from within, driven by the magicians’ madness, tangling with the warm, earthy feel of the Tree, a sense of the marshal’s own self that matched that hard, capable hand and the intelligence in her face. And there, the tang of sulphur and bone where her own warding took hold. One overlaying the other, tangling where they met, neither giving way.

Another time and place, Isobel would have been tempted to sink down, unpick the threads of the Tree, reweave them into her own understanding, learn how the marshal had crafted a crossroads where none should exist. But now was not the time, and this was never the place.

Instead, she followed the scent of sulphur and bone, catching and pulling at her own work, reweaving the barrier into a net to cast over the two figures rather than the crossroads entire. But the lines were too tangled, the living thrum of the marshal’s sigil and the hollow echo of the crossroads beneath it knotting them up, barely able to contain the cold-fire fury of the souls trapped within.