When they took the ladder away, the judge stood there, half-lit by torchlight, and looked up at the platform.
“She was not a friend. She was not my family. I did not know her well. I cannot speak for her, but there are none here who may better, and so I must. I never heard it said she made a promise she did not keep, or gave insult where none was earned, nor was she cruel or petty. And she was gentle when she could be. More than this I cannot say.”
Someone else should speak for her, Gabriel thought. That alone was not enough of an epitaph. But they were far from any people she might have had, and he could not think of anything; he had not known her either.
“She did not deserve this death.”
Isobel, standing beside him, her voice low and steady.
“She did not ask for this death. And yet, the day she took the Tree into her hands, the day she pinned the sigil to her cloth, she chose this death.” A brief gulping swallow, so faint only he could hear it. “To walk the road of justice. To cleanse the road and make it safe for all. Those are the oaths they make. I did not know this marshal, but I rode with her. She was strong and honest, and saw clear where others perceived shadows. She died in service of the Tree. The Territory honors her for that.”
There was weight in her words, warm in the cool night air, and in the silence afterward, he felt her hand reach for his own, fingers curling for comfort and reassurance. Gabriel squeezed once, and then they turned around and followed the others back along the narrow trail, through the gate, within the safety of the palisade walls, leaving the dead behind.
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.