“How bad?”
“Bad.” Worse than bad; Isobel caught a glimpse of something pink and pulsing under the wound: the source of the smell. The knife had been yanked out so hard, it had tried to take her insides with it. “Gabriel!”
She could hear the noise of the fight going on behind her, though she couldn’t take her eyes away from the wound, pressing her hands against it as though to stop the bleeding through sheer willpower.
“Boss, help me,” she said despairingly. “Please.”
Then Gabriel was there, his hands over hers, pressing down, and the marshal started to swear, the shock wearing off and the pain setting in. “Son of a bitch, oh damn Anderson you quivering pustulent sack I’ll—oh!” LaFlesche arched away from their hands, cursing fit to curl Isobel’s hair, and she looked at Gabriel, hoping he would tell her what to do.
He shook his head side to side, forehead creased, his eyes sorrowful.
“He cut you something fierce,” Isobel said, surprising herself at how light her tone sounded, as though she were talking about a broken leg, something that might heal. “Please tell me there’s a curandero in this town; otherwise, we’ll have to rely on me for the stitching, and mine are never as neat as they should be.”
That got what might have been a laugh from the marshal, a gasping, dry noise. “I still got a nose, girl. I can tell when my gut’s been ripped open. Your finest hand won’t do much save make me pretty for the night birds.”
Gabriel’s lips pressed tight, his hands still holding torn flesh in place. “Can you . . .” His eyes asked the question his mouth couldn’t complete. Isobel pressed her hand down harder against the wound, letting her palm slip against the slick surface, not flinching from the unpleasant texture.
“Iz?”
She felt the pulse of flesh underneath stutter, then begin to slow.
“I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure who she was saying it to, Gabriel or the woman dying under their hands. “I’m so sorry.”
She had been warned before she left Flood: the Left Hand did not carry mercy but judgment.
There was no bench observance for murder committed in front of witnesses. The knife, a viciously sharp skinning knife, light enough to be overlooked and slid up a sleeve, had been clenched in Anderson’s hand, slicked with blood, when they finally wrestled him down to the floor, still flopping like a fresh-caught fish.
Tousey had been the one to subdue him finally, they were told, with a boot to the neck of his former companion. The US Marshal was solemn-faced now, his shirt bloodied, standing off to the side, nearly forgotten as judgment was carried out. The small sounds of a blunderbuss being primed were too loud in the air, the crowd who had gathered to watch quiet save for their breathing and the rustle of their coats as they shifted. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked and birds called, and farther off Isobel thought she could hear the lowing of cattle, but then the tamping rod was inserted, and the faint clicking noise seemed to overwhelm all else.
Anderson stood, sulkily defiant, scowling at his executioner. “Didn’t mean t’kill her,” he said, given the option to say last words. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll be handed over to savages.”
“You’d be damned either way,” the judge said, and nodded to the man with the blunderbuss. A square block of a man, he raised the gun to his shoulder, braced, and pulled the trigger.
Isobel closed her eyes, the echoes of the shot knocking against the walls of the town until it faded back into silence, the smell of black powder chasing the tang of blood from her nose.
“It’s done,” Gabriel said.
They laid the marshal to her rest after sunset, when the winds were still and the bright blue points of the Eagle barely visible in the darkening sky, the moon’s circle dimmed, as though it, too, grieved. The same thick planked wood they used for the walls made up the platform, higher overhead than Gabriel could reach, wide enough to rest two bodies side by side. There were thick gouges in the supports where something with claws had stretched, but they went only halfway up; Gabriel’s people had encaved their dead, and even then, burrowing scavengers had made their feasts. Back east, he’d seen, they buried the bodies whole and never looked at them again.
Dead was dead, he supposed, and the dead cared not for flesh. But the thought of a body decomposing below ground, locked in a wooden box, made his own flesh crawl. Time enough to be interred once your bones were clean and warded.
She had been washed and dressed in clothing from her packs, her sigil repinned inside her lapel, the silver resting over her breast, her hair washed and left loose, a heavy leather band placed over her eyes. She rested on a fine woven blanket, her arms stiff at her side, her weapons and saddle next to her on the platform.