The Cold Eye (The Devil's West #2)(96)
In Flood, when someone died, there was a gathering in the saloon after. The tables were put up, and the boss hosted the first round, and even though no one mentioned the dead person’s name, it was almost as though they were there, until morning came and it was time to bury the bones. Andreas was more solemn, or perhaps it had been because the marshal was a visitor, a stranger, and they could not bring themselves to care.
It made Isobel wonder where she would die, if there would be anyone there who would know enough to speak for her.
“Stop that,” Gabriel said.
“What?”
“You’re thinking on your own death. Don’t. It comes when it comes, where it comes, and that’s the only certainty we have.”
They’d been given a small cabin for the night, two rooms, with a square chimney in the center for heat, the same plain wooden planking they’d seen elsewhere. The beds were covered with blankets woven with colored bands of different widths, like Gabriel’s, only unfaded, and feather-stuffed pillows that had Isobel immediately wondering if she could possibly shove one into her pack when they left. Gabriel had put his kit on one bed and dropped his jacket over the single straight-back chair. “The dead are dead,” he added. “Let them go.”
She didn’t know how to do that but nodded and followed him out the door.
They’d been invited to eat with the judge and his wife, a square-faced, solid woman with skin a shade lighter than her husband’s, her curls the color of pewter, her eyes surprisingly blue. Their children were grown and working land just southeast of the town, she explained, but she was too old and lazy to wield a hoe any longer.
Looking around the cabin, simple but neat as a pin, with walls carefully chinked against winter winds, braided rag rugs on the plank flooring, and neatly sewn curtains over the windows and door, Isobel suspected that neither of their hosts had ever spent a slothful day in their lives.
They did not speak of judgment, nor the man closed in a room awaiting his own punishment in the morning, nor the two still unconscious and warded in the lockhouse; Gabriel and the judge exchanged news of the Territory and beyond, of people and places Isobel had never heard of, and she, defaulting back to the girl she’d once been, stayed quiet, opened her ears, and listened for what wasn’t being said.
They had not felt the quaking of the earth. The conversation touched on it, briefly, and then moved on: they were not aware that it had been worse, that game had fled the area, that people beyond their walls suffered.
She remembered what Lou had said, about so many here lacking the touch, and wondered if that lack of concern were connected or coincidence. You did not ask where someone came from or why they’d come; no more so could she ask if they could feel the Road, the wards, the Territory itself around them. She could not ask why the people here did not seem to care. But not knowing made Isobel uneasy in ways she could not explain.
The sigil in her hand remained cool, the whisper absent. But—despite judgment—the day, the events, did not feel finished.
Gabriel, across the table from her, wiping the gravy from his plate with the last of a bit of bread, seemed to have no such discomfort.
She pushed at the feeling the way she pressed on the sigil in her palm, gentle, steady pressure, but nothing shifted underneath. There was nothing wrong here save her feeling of wrongness.
Trust yourself, Gabriel had said.
“If you’d care to,” the judge said as his wife cleared the plates from the table, “we’ve a bathhouse you might make use of. I remember . . . Well, there comes a time when sloughing off all you’ve been carrying with a dose of hot water is just the thing.”
“You go first,” Isobel fiddled with the napkin on her lap, the cloth rough against her fingertips. “I . . . need some air.”
Neither man questioned her, although the judge’s wife gave her a considering look over her shoulder from where she was scraping dishes into a wooden barrel, as though wondering what sort of woman would pass up a bath when offered.
A woman filled with power, and none of it her own.
Andreas might be a bustling town in the winter, when all its residents returned within the walls, but tonight, with the warmth of summer hinted at in the night air and the weight of the day’s events lingering, it was quiet as a boneyard. Some doors were still open, lights visible through windows, but save for an old man smoking a pipe, she saw no one as she walked. The moon was entirely absent from the sky, allowing the stars to shine all the more brightly, as glittering as the cut glassware Iktan washed so carefully every night behind the bar.
A longing for the saloon, for Flood, clawed gently at her. When the boss was distant but ever-present, when folding linens and serving drinks were the routine of her day and helping to unload a wagon was the excitement, when the only things she’d ever seen die in front of her were chickens, and once a dog that’d been kicked hard by a horse.
When she didn’t know the stink of disease, of blood, of death, when it lingered on her hands. When she didn’t feel something else whispering in her bones.
Isobel’s steps took her past the stable where their horses and the mule were, and she hesitated a moment, thinking to go in, rub her hands against that smooth, warm, living flesh, feel grassy breath on her hair, lean her face against the mare’s neck. Instead, she moved on until she came to the lockhouse.
The man Gabriel had said maintained the wards, Possum, was not standing guard, but she did not think he was far away. She breathed the night air, letting her eyes rest on the sigil on the doorframe. The paint was black, but shimmered as she looked at it, as though saying hello?—or “stay away.” The protections on the walls and roof kept her from touching her own wards, wrapped around the magicians to keep them still, but she thought they remained intact. But that uncertainty might be the source of her unease.