Gabriel slid his arm from around her shoulders and stood up. She was so accustomed to seeing him on horseback, or sprawled on his kit once they made camp, that she could have picked him from a crowd a hundred paces away, and yet the man in front of her suddenly seemed a stranger. Gone was the casual slouch of his shoulders or the easy way he placed his boots, like he knew the ground would rise up to meet him. This man’s boots were planted solid on the floor, his hands clasped behind his back, chin up and hair slicked back out of his face.
“I was not privy to certain details Isobel observed, nor the means by which she determines truths. However, I have observed her in detail over the past months and will place my word that she speaks the truths as she observed them.”
The judge sniffed once, not entirely displeased. “Eastern advocate, are you, boy?”
“Trained for it, sir. Not currently practicing.”
There was some joke there that the two men got—three, from the snort that came from the States’ marshal still sitting on the bench across the room.
“And you give your word on her.”
“As her mentor, yes, your honor, I do.”
Gabriel had never had cause to give his word before a Territory judge before, although he’d seen it done, when he was younger: the settlement he’d grown up in had been fractious enough that a judge had made a point of stopping by twice a year to settle things before they got out of hand. Those had been noisy affairs, yelling in two or three languages, depending on who was before the bench, and usually ended with a round of drinking that would inevitably start the next round of arguments.
It was quiet in this bench-hall once they’d finished giving their observations. The judge had not retreated to his quarters, as Gabriel’d half-expected, but rather leaned against the far wall, his eyes hooded, occasionally rubbing his bare scalp with one hand as though to stimulate his thinking.
The road marshal paced, her bootheels a steady, sharp slap against the planking, then a pause as she wheeled, and the slap slap slap again. He wasn’t sure if it was soothing or prone to drive him mad if she kept it up much longer. The woman who’d gotten Isobel into trouble, whatever her name was, had disappeared at some point. A wise choice?—it may not have been her fault, but he couldn’t hold her blameless, either.
Next to him, Isobel was watching the Americans. They were sitting still, not looking at each other, a marked distance between the two of them. The judge had spoken to them, quietly, before he heard from the marshal or Isobel, but if they’d spoken since then, Gabriel hadn’t noted it. Then again, he’d had other things to worry about.
Her nose hadn’t started bleeding again, and her voice’d been steady when she spoke, no stutters or hesitations, but the memory of too-cool skin and too-fast pulse haunted him.
“What happened out there?” He didn’t look at her, and he didn’t feel her shift to look at him.
“I don’t know. It’s still hazy.” Her voice was soft but certain. “Lou showed me a ward post. They were . . .”
“Native work, yeah.” Mayhap his original thought had been true, that the foundation had taken insult at the Devil’s Hand come too close into things that didn’t concern him. Mayhap that’s all there was to it, his deeper concerns baseless.
“They used bones.”
That was a new one to him, but it didn’t surprise him overmuch: bones had strong magic and remembered for a very long time. Likely even forever. “You touched them?”
She bristled under him like a cat splashed with water. “I did not. They were . . . I can’t remember. But there was something about them that . . .”
Her voice trailed off, and he slid his arm back over her shoulders, not pulling her closer but just to reassure himself that she was there, that she was upright and breathing. The memory of her laid out on the bench, her nose bloodied and her eyes vague, still made him feel ill, but his responsibility was to teach and support her, not coddle her.
“Whatever you felt, you didn’t like it?” Her skills were still raw but there had been nothing wrong with her judgment, and if her gut was reacting like his, the odds were high something was wrong.
Her breathing steadied a little, and she leaned in toward him. “Lou couldn’t feel them. She can’t feel her own boundary-wards. She said that not many of ’em here can.”
That surprised him—usually, you went into the wilderness, you found more folk with the touch, not fewer. Insular, he thought again. Incurious. He’d give pure silver to speak with some of the younger ones, those out working the field, see if they were the same. “But they were working?”
“Yes. They were . . . alert?” She wasn’t asking him, he thought, but testing the word for herself. “Awake. They were awake, and that . . . that didn’t seem usual. So, I tried to listen closer.”
Of course she had. Gabriel swallowed a rebuke, knowing it was at least partially his fault, and waited her out.