The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(87)

“You do that,” Possum grumbled, and then pretended he was no longer there.

Following Possum’s directions, Gabriel strode down the roadway, touching the brim of his hat in greeting when he encountered locals, all of them older, most of them male, all of them looking askant at the stranger, though none stopped or spoke to him. The lack of curiosity might be pushed off on their age, but Gabriel compared it to the hunger for news he encountered elsewhere throughout the Territory, and felt a return of his earlier uncertainty.

The roadway continued its curve, and to distract himself, he mapped it out in his thoughts, the hard-packed dirt and the low buildings and the stockade walls that rose twice as high overhead, curving like the cup of hands around the town itself. A single entrance at front, anyone entering forced to pause just inside the gate, then splitting around the common area to rejoin in the back . . .

He smiled, satisfied to see his assumption was correct: he came to the end of the roadway, a small smithy on his left and more of the low cabins to his right, with a square box of a structure directly in front of him, the palisade wall rising strong at its back.

More than a cabin, this; Judge Pike had himself a proper courtroom. Gabriel shook his head, half-amused. Some judges rode circuit, same as the marshals, and some set up shop in places where marshals and folk could find them easy, but few of them felt the need to replicate the formalities of Law elsewhere. It didn’t apply the same here in the Territory.

But Gabriel wasn’t going to deny the tendril of anticipation he felt, seeing the scales carved below the marshal’s Tree over the doorframe, even though he was there only to witness, not prosecute. But when he heard yelling coming from within, all humor dropped and he knocked the door open with his hip, knife out of its sheath and in his hand before wiser thought could prevail.

LaFlesche was the one yelling. Another woman, younger and slighter, looked like she was the target. The judge was standing between them, trying to keep the peace.

Isobel. Where was Isobel?

“It wasn’t my fault! She just . . . collapsed!”

Those words reached Gabriel at the same instant he saw Isobel stretched out on a bench, her arms placed over her stomach, unmoving. Another figure hovered over her, holding a cloth, and he realized with a sudden sharp sinking pain that the dun-colored fabric was marked with blood.

“What happened.”

His voice cut through the yelling, a razor against skin, and a dread silence fell. His boots made a heavy, muffled noise against the plank floor, accompanied only by the exhale and inhale of the others in the room as he reached Isobel’s side.

“What happened?” he asked again, taking the cloth from Tousey’s hand and dabbing gently at the red stream still flowing from her nostril. Her eyes were closed, her skin clammy, and the throb at her neck was too quick for his satisfaction.

Had he only just been thinking he could be rid of her? He eased the fury rising and waited for someone to answer him.

“We’re not sure,” LaFlesche said. “She went with Lou here to look at the wardings. And something happened there.”

“Nothing happened! She came and looked, and she asked me a few questions, and then she fell over.” Lou sounded distraught and more than a little afraid. Gabriel could almost feel sorry for her: getting on the wrong side of people who could bring in two magicians without obvious harm to themselves must be terrifying.

Tousey had taken a few steps back when Gabriel came in, hovering just out of reach, his gaze flickering between them all. Poor bastard had been thrown headfirst into the brambles of the Territory; Gabriel wasn’t sure he’d have been anywhere near as calm, were their conditions reversed, but he didn’t have time to coddle him now.

“What questions?” he asked Lou, forcing his voice to stay even, the way he’d once questioned witnesses prone to emotion.

“Don’t remember; something about how old they were? And then she went all pale and pitched forward, I swear it.”

He risked looking away from Isobel to take in LaFlesche and the judge. “I didn’t feel anything flicker in the wards,” Gabriel said. “But this isn’t my town; I might not’ve. You two?”

LaFlesche shook her head, sucked her cheeks in before responding. “No. But we were already in here when it must have happened.”

Judges’ quarters were sigil-warded, same as a marshal’s badge-house and?—he realized suddenly—the lockhouse. Had his being close to Possum’s work kept him from feeling trouble when it reached out?

“She didn’t even touch them; I don’t see how—”

“Touch?”

“The bones.” Lou took in his expression, then turned to look at the judge as though for support, but he shook his head, as confused as she by his reaction.

“Your wards are set in bone?”

“Well, yes. We saw no need to?—” The judge stopped and looked at LaFlesche, as though expecting her to explain, but she merely shrugged.

“The wards were a gift,” Lou said, her voice quavering. “From the natives who lived here at the time. I told her. We’ve used ’em ever since.”

The judge nodded. “Way I heard the story, there wasn’t much choice. To not use them would have given insult.”

Gabriel was putting pieces together, and he didn’t like the shape of any of them. Trusting your safety to someone else, someone else’s long-dead-and-gone . . . it made Gabriel’s skin crawl, but he supposed out here, deep in the winter, you had to trust someone. And it seemed to work for them.