“They were layered, old over older. And I could hear this . . . noise. Like a hive readying to swarm.”
She stopped, swallowed, the noise of it loud in his ears. He waited, gaze fixed on a spot somewhere between the drop of the ceiling and the rise of the wall, where some discoloration of the planking made it look as though there was a hole. It was easier to speak when you could pretend there was no one listening; he had spent a few nights like that, in a starlit camp, speaking things that could only be said to the fire, the ashes of your words gone cold and scattered in the morning, never spoken of again.
“And I didn’t touch them, but I almost did, Gabriel. I reached out, and then the world went dark, and . . .” Her left hand flexed and clenched, resting on her lap as though it didn’t belong to her at all. “They burned me, Gabriel. The bones, the oldest bones. When I reached out to them.”
“It was warning you away?” His fears returned that the old medicine left here had taken insult by her arrival. The settlement was non-native now—the devil held dominion. But the wards might not realize that . . . They needed to talk to Possum, and this time the man would be more forthcoming.
“I don’t know,” Isobel was saying in answer to his last question. “I don’t think so. But I don’t know.” Her face scrunched in concentration and distress. “There was something they told me, something important, and I can’t remember . . .”
Her wording eased some of his fears—“told,” not “warned.” “Leave it be,” he told her. “It’s easier to remember when you don’t actively dig at it.” He rested his right hand over her left, still tight-clenched. “Is this telling you anything?” The sigil, he meant.
She glanced down, and an expression he couldn’t read passed over her face. “No.”
“Then leave it be for the nonce. There’s only so much you can pack on a mule and then it’s got the sense to kick off the weight. You’d best be at least as smart as a mule.”
She looked as though she were about to argue, pulling in breath to speak, but they were both distracted by movement at the other end of the hall, the judge pushing himself away from the wall, shaking down the line of his coat and fixing his vest, the image of a man about to make a pronouncement.
Isobel had never understood fury, whiskey-hot rage that made her stomach roil and sparks crackle in her skull, until the judge told them his decision.
“You’re as mad as they!”
“Iz . . .”
Isobel shook off Gabriel’s calming hand, turning to stalk after the judge as he paced the width of the hall. Behind him, LaFlesche looked nearly as unhappy as she felt but said nothing.
“You can’t simply—”
His voice was weary but firm. “They’ve done no injury by the Law that I could hold them, and I’ve no authority to bind such as they for anything less. The magicians go free.”
“They attempted?—” She clamped her jaw shut when he swung around, raising one finger to her, warning her to cease interrupting.
“Whatever they attempted, it’s no business of ours. Magicians are creatures outside the Law, outside the devil’s claim, and unless they’ve wish to involve themselves”—and his expression showed he thought little of the odds on that—“then they are to be on their way as soon as they are able.”
And not a moment too soon, his tone conveyed.
Open the door, unlock the wards, and allow them to saunter away. . . . Isobel could understand his reluctance to keep them within the confines of the town, but to simply wash his hands of what that meant?
“The Law is the Law,” he said. “Magicians are neither mine nor yours to control. You will release them, and they will go. And we will all hope that they do not decide to take offense at your treatment of them.”
She lifted her chin and stared up at him. His gaze met hers evenly, with neither a flinch nor an apology.
She could defy him. She could demand he . . . do what? Hold the magicians forever? Kill them? She knew that they came back from that as often as not, having seen Farron torn apart by a summoned spirit and then reappear not days later as though it had never happened.
Isobel tried to rein in her fury. Judge Pike was correct, as little as she liked it. The magicians had done damage?—immense damage?—but the Agreement did not cover them; the Law did not apply to them. Like all other creatures of the territory itself, they were unto themselves.
She thought of the buffalo she had seen, slaughtered by these magicians for their blood and hide, for the strength they carried, and left to rot without dignity or respect. She thought of the promise she had made?—the promise Something had accepted?—and her heart ached to think that she would fail in that.
But there was nothing she could do.
We tell you nothing you do not already know.
She was sworn to the Master of the Territory. His limits were her own. Weren’t they?
Listen, Hand.
If she could remember what the wards had told her, if she could remember . . . Why couldn’t she remember?