Silver on the Road (The Devil's West Book 1) (43 page)

Gabriel was both amused and worried when Isobel fell asleep as they rode, waking only long enough to help untack the horses when they halted to make camp. Her eyes glazed with sleep, her hair loose over her shoulders, a smudge of dirt on her chin, the facade of adulthood was cracked, if not shattered. He gently pushed her aside when she would have tried to follow her usual routine of cleaning and storing the tack, and made her sit down on a flat stone set just outside the fire circle.

“You did most of the hard work today,” he told her. “Rest.”

She looked as though she wanted to argue, but he scowled at her,
and she ducked her head, busying herself finger-combing the tangles in her hair, then rebraiding it.

“I did no hard work?” the magician said, his voice mock-offended but low, meant for his ears, not hers, as they unloaded the packs from the mule and set up camp.

“I’m not sure what you did today,” Gabriel said sharply. “Why would a demon be following us?”

The magician looked down at him, his face schooled in a mask of quiet confusion even as he smoothed a place for the bedrolls to lay out. His hand barely touched the grass, rocks and sticks stirring themselves to the side. “You ask me? It follows you.” He cocked his head, considering. “Or her. Most likely her.”

“Why?” Gabriel set his own bedroll down a distance away and turned back to face the magician. “As you said, they’re ancient and care nothing for our doings, have no truck with the devil’s workings, any more than your kind do. Nor do they travel under the open sky.” Demon lingered in shadows, in caves or riverbanks, not well-marked roads.

“She is new. It may be curious. That is a trait we all share, even demon.” His smile did nothing to warm his face, and Gabriel distrusted it.

“What do you mean, new? She’s green, you mean?” Between them, working in surprising harmony, the camp had been established, and only the fire remained to be started. But he hesitated, waiting for the magician to respond.

“There has been no Hand on the road in decades. No—” He frowned, this one an oddly open, honest expression. “Longer than that. The devil had his players, his dogs set to track deal-breakers, his jacks to do his bidding. But none with such . . . authority. None who bear his mark so clearly.”

“What does it mean? Why now?”

The magician laughed and shook his head, no humor in the sound or the action. “You ask me to interpret the devil? Madness only drives
me so far, rider. But the winds are restless, the natives uncertain, and settlers disappearing and dying, all as she rides by? Something trembles the bones below our feet? You think all that coincidence?”

“I think that not all events are connected. She came of age and offered bargain; that is why she was chosen now.”

“Spoken like a true advocate, clinging to the facts. But this is the Territory, and you are bound. You know better.”

Gabriel grimaced and turned away from both the man and the comment.

“Whatever the devil promised you, he cannot change that,” the magician said, and for the first time, there was neither mockery nor threat in his voice. “He cannot change what you are. And he has no wish to.”

“I know.”

Gabriel left the magician standing in the gloaming and went to the fire circle, where Isobel had gathered a handful of twigs and small branches, waiting for him to set the new coalstone he’d acquired in the mining camp. It was smaller than his old one and twice as expensive, but it did the trick.

“You should have your own,” he said, kneeling to light the kindling. “A rider should always have the means to make fire, unless you’ve learned to snap your fingers and make it spark?”

Her smile was a faint, wan thing. “Looking to be rid of me soon?” Her voice was low, and she was not looking at him, staring instead into the slender, flickering flames.

He sighed, sinking back onto his haunches. “No. And even were we not on the trail of this thing, not for some weeks yet—I’ve not taught you nearly as much as I should have by now, and letting you out on your own would disgrace my name.” The fact that they’d been distracted and beset for much of that time was no excuse, nor were her own surprising—not surprising, but startling—abilities. Not the first time, Gabriel cursed the devil for sending them out unprepared, ignoring the fact that Isobel was, in fact, no less prepared than any
other novice. No other novice was asked to do the things she was asked to do.

If the devil had known what waited for her . . .

“I’ve been thinking.” Her voice was low, and she still wasn’t looking at him, but her fingers were no longer tightly clenched, and her shoulders were not hunched forward. He took that for progress.

“Yes?”

“The boss didn’t tell me anything. He threw me at you, threw me out on the road, and didn’t tell me anything. Not about what I should be doing, not about . . .”—she made a vaguely desperate gesture at herself—“any of this. Why?”

He’d just wondered the same thing, so he had no answer for her. Even if the trouble they’d found was unexpected, had the devil not known what would wake in her? That sort of carelessness seemed impossible, and yet the alternative, that he had intentionally not told her—

That felt right, actually. Cold, harsh, possibly cruel, but right. The Territory was no gentle place, and its lessons were equally harsh.

“I think . . .” He wasn’t certain, but he had to say something, not leave her sitting there, looking at him like that. “I think that there are things we need to learn on our own, that being taught, or being told . . . it wouldn’t stick. Or we’d take the wrong path because we already knew what lay down the other.” That scratched uncomfortably close to home, striking the same sore place the magician had already touched tonight. No one had warned him. Would he have listened if they had?

“So, he didn’t say anything because . . . you needed to learn on your own, not what he said was best, not what someone else had done, but what
you
would do?”

She drew sharp, shaky breath in, and he thought maybe something he’d said had been right or close to right.

She was sixteen. Never mind the law, she was too young to commit to anything, much less this. Too young to be so ruthlessly broken,
her confidence, however foolish, destroyed, only so the devil could remake her. He bit his tongue and waited.

There was a faint rustle of grass, and the magician sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire, his face lit by the fire, yet still in shadows.

She looked up, and Gabriel was struck anew by the fineness of her bones, strong under sun-weathered skin, and thought again that she would become a handsome woman. And a terror with it, he thought with no little pride. If she survived.

“I could have done anything, gone anywhere,” Isobel said. “But I chose this. I chose . . . this.” Her right hand made a gesture, fingers spread, making a half circle from her stomach, her thumb pointed inward. “Never mind that I chose for the wrong reasons, not understanding . . . not
knowing
. I made my Bargain.”

And at that, she’d had more freedom than he. Gabriel tried not to be bitter over the fact.

“And?” The magician leaned back, comfortable as though there were a wall to support him, and rested his hands on his knees. “Why should I care?”

“You . . .”

“I can’t help you in this. I can’t guide you or mentor you or whatever lies they tell you any more than your companion over there can.” His voice had no gentleness in it, the sharp crackle of fire, the cold cut of winter’s wind. “Whatever you call it, witchcraft or medicine, it’s power you hold, and there is one truth of power, Isobel Devil’s Hand. And that is that there is no moderation, no easement, no gate to shut. You set your fingers to the bones, stirred the dust, and breathed it in. Now it will remake you as it sees fit.”

“The boss . . .”

“What is your boss, little rider? Understand that, and you will understand yourself.”

Gabriel shifted, intentionally making noise, and they both looked at him, the tension breaking enough that he could breathe again. “That sort of thinking is better done rested and on a full stomach.
Farron”—the name felt odd in his mouth, as though speaking it gave the magician more heft than he’d had before—“we’ll need fresh water to soak the beans.”

He couldn’t see the magician’s face, but his voice painted a picture of eyebrows rising high in surprise. “You’re sending me to errand-boy to find a creek?”

“Or you can conjure some out of the air; I don’t have a particular care,” he said. “Just do it.” He was going over their supplies in his head, counting what they had left from De Plata, feeding three instead of two. “I’m going to go set some traps, see if we can have fresh meat in the morning. Iz, build up the fire and bury—”

“Bury the potatoes and toast the bread. I
know,
” she muttered, and for a moment it was just the two of them again, with nothing more required than preparing a meal and getting a good night’s sleep.

“And use the last of the molasses,” he warned her, “before it turns on us.”

She smiled at that, as he meant her to, while he moved away to see what he could do about the morning’s meal.

Everything else would wait until they had some sleep tucked under their ears. He hoped.

Isobel woke before sunrise, her body slipping from sleep to wakefulness with ease. She breathed in and opened her eyes, the trails of starlight overhead casting the world in a silvery light.

A faint movement caught her eye: a tall shadow a ways from camp, performing a slow, graceful routine. Her lips shaped his name: Farron Easterly. To her left, across the faint glow of the coalstone, Gabriel slept, a blanket-covered lump, but she knew that the faintest unfamiliar noise would wake him, alert and armed.

“What is your boss, little rider? Understand that, and you will understand yourself.”

Farron’s words had followed her into sleep, but she had woken
with no more clarity. She thought of all the things she had taken for granted, living under his roof. The Old Man. The devil. Powerful enough to claim the entire Territory, to keep truce with native tribes for generations, to give dearest hopes and darkest desires for a price. . . . She had lived her entire life under his roof and never once wondered
what
he was.

She thought now of his ever-shifting face, how his eyes could be gentle one instant and cold the next, how he never need raise his voice to be heard everywhere, over anything. She thought of his hands dealing cards, shuffling decks, curled around his glass, holding the cigar he never smoked, the sweet smoke rising into the air.

The Devil’s Hand. His Left Hand. She flexed the fingers of her left hand, watched the silver ring glint as it caught the starlight, thought of the signet ring on the boss’s left hand, to match Marie’s, and imagined it on her own. A tool. A pawn. Not Izzy any more, not really.

They called him the devil because he offered temptation, Gabriel’d said. Outside the Territory, they said that. Inside, he was the boss. The Old Man. But what
was
that?

Understand that, and you will understand yourself.

Gabriel threw off his blanket and sat up just as the first rays of light stretched into the sky, and the horses stamped their feet, grumbling for food.

First things first. Deal with what the storm had blown in, stop it from harming anyone else, and then she could worry about all the rest.

Assuming there was a rest to worry about then.

“It’s not as easy travel, but if we head across here, we’ll pick up the road to the high plains,” Gabriel was saying. He had a map open against the saddle, smoothing the weathered canvas, but he wasn’t looking at it; she knew he’d more maps in his head than could ever fit in a saddle roll, and she wondered how many years he’d had to ride the roads to learn them like that.

He saw her frowning at the map and said, “It’s as much knowing as it is remembering, Iz. A rider’s trick; nothing special about it. You feel the road, you ken where it is under you?”

She let her thoughts drift a moment, feeling the now-familiar, reassuring hum of the road below them, then nodded.

“Follow it.”