The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(85)
“The touch?”
“Yah know—” Lou gestured, blunt, calloused fingers and bitten-down nails, spreading them out as though she were smoothing a cloth in front of her. “Territory’s touch. Makes you likely to do things, like scrying or growing.”
April, back in Patch Junction, was a grower; she could make flowers bloom and crops flourish by her touch. Isobel had never thought much of it; that’s just who April was, the way Gabriel could find water and Grace, the blacksmith’s daughter, sang birds into the pot.
“Anyhows, that’s how it touches some. And some other of us”—Lou indicated herself—“it passes right by.”
Isobel shook her head, not to say no to whatever Lou was saying but to try and rid her head of the buzzing, like someone’d let a hive of bees in between her ears.
Gabriel had said that everyone could feel the Road if they just listened the right way. She’d just assumed wards were like that, that all you had to do was listen.
The buzzing slipped down into her chest, making it difficult to breathe. All the things she’d done since taking the Road, since signing her Contract, she’d tacked up to the sigil on her palm, her doing the devil’s will the way she’d bargained to, but she’d been able to feel the wardings long before then, long as she could remember. And not just feel them but hear them humming in her.
The way the whisper had, when it urged her up onto the hills, when it coaxed her into reaching for the haint, up in the valley.
When it had called to her, outside the mine, up in De Plata.
Something inside her.
Molten strength pushing through her, wrapping itself around her. Pushing up into her, hot metal into cold water filling the forge filling her with steam and stink.
Dizzy, she tried to walk away, thinking if she moved aside she could think again, breathe again. Instead, she stumbled, although her feet would have sworn the ground was smooth, her arms coming up in reaction, hand outstretched, fingers and then palm coming into contact not with dry wood or warm flesh but dry, crumbling, burning bone.
Isobel screamed, the sound torn from her throat with Reaper’s talons, and the air around her went black.
The men pulling the sledge seemed disinclined to talk, which Gabriel supposed he understood; saving your breath for breathing was wiser. Still, he had a rider’s natural curiosity, and if they had no interest in answering his questions, there was nothing to say he couldn’t learn by other means. It was hard to stop a man from looking, so long as he kept half an eye on the bodies, too, to make sure they didn’t slide or, Devil forbid, start to wake.
The circle-and-sigil he sketched at that thought was a childhood reflex, making him flush and turn his attention more firmly to his surroundings.
The trail they were walking on had been packed down hard with use; there were occasional puffs of dust but nothing like they’d encountered outside. Wide enough for the sledge or three people walking abreast, but not a wagon; if they hauled anything here, it was by sledge or wheelbarrow, or something equally narrow. Looking up, he noted the stockade walls curved slightly, not quite a circle but shaped more like an egg, and he tracked how the trail they were on curved around as well. The center of the town was a decent-sized green that had the worn look of grass cut not by scythe but teeth—a community graze, most likely, where they’d keep their livestock in the winter.
After the green, the trail split in two again, both forks lined with low cabins, most of them with their doors open. None of them looked new-built, but they were all in solid repair, able to withstand near anything the Territory might throw at them.
So: A well-established town whose founders had been allowed to build on a site that had been in use by the tribe that had lived here first. That spoke well of the first settlers but gave him a quavering sense of worry, too. Why had the tribe abandoned this place? It was well situated, with fertile land close enough for them to farm . . . Had the hunting suddenly gone off??? Surely, the settlers did not lie?—the town had been here long enough to have drawn ire if it were not wanted, and not even the tallest palisade would protect them from warriors determined to take back their lands. Had it been freely abandoned? What had the settlers bartered that was valuable enough to earn them that?
Or, more worrying, had something gone wrong here, that the tribe refused to stay, handing it over instead to foolish whites to suffer the consequences?
He felt his fingers twitch again and forced them still. If there had been something wrong, surely someone would have felt it by now. Two generations they had here, at least. Not the oldest settlement in the Territory, but for as far out as it was, old enough, and isolated.
More likely that was the answer, Gabriel decided, looking at the simple sturdiness of the buildings. The local tribe had been small, the woman had said. They’d likely welcomed the newcomers as potential allies against winter and nearby tribes, and then over time lost their children to those tribes or even the town itself. His mother could tell the same story of her family, trade alliances leading to marriages and children. Even two generations could be enough for a small tribe to disappear, if that were so.
Thus mostly reassured, he followed the men and the sledge down the second trailway, past open, empty doorways, and then a patch of open space, until they came to a halt in front of a wood-and-stone hut. It was small, barely tall enough for a man to stand upright, and unlike the other structures, this door was firmly closed.