Trust yourself, Gabriel had said.
“If you’d care to,” the judge said as his wife cleared the plates from the table, “we’ve a bathhouse you might make use of. I remember . . . Well, there comes a time when sloughing off all you’ve been carrying with a dose of hot water is just the thing.”
“You go first,” Isobel fiddled with the napkin on her lap, the cloth rough against her fingertips. “I . . . need some air.”
Neither man questioned her, although the judge’s wife gave her a considering look over her shoulder from where she was scraping dishes into a wooden barrel, as though wondering what sort of woman would pass up a bath when offered.
A woman filled with power, and none of it her own.
Andreas might be a bustling town in the winter, when all its residents returned within the walls, but tonight, with the warmth of summer hinted at in the night air and the weight of the day’s events lingering, it was quiet as a boneyard. Some doors were still open, lights visible through windows, but save for an old man smoking a pipe, she saw no one as she walked. The moon was entirely absent from the sky, allowing the stars to shine all the more brightly, as glittering as the cut glassware Iktan washed so carefully every night behind the bar.
A longing for the saloon, for Flood, clawed gently at her. When the boss was distant but ever-present, when folding linens and serving drinks were the routine of her day and helping to unload a wagon was the excitement, when the only things she’d ever seen die in front of her were chickens, and once a dog that’d been kicked hard by a horse.
When she didn’t know the stink of disease, of blood, of death, when it lingered on her hands. When she didn’t feel something else whispering in her bones.
Isobel’s steps took her past the stable where their horses and the mule were, and she hesitated a moment, thinking to go in, rub her hands against that smooth, warm, living flesh, feel grassy breath on her hair, lean her face against the mare’s neck. Instead, she moved on until she came to the lockhouse.
The man Gabriel had said maintained the wards, Possum, was not standing guard, but she did not think he was far away. She breathed the night air, letting her eyes rest on the sigil on the doorframe. The paint was black, but shimmered as she looked at it, as though saying hello?—or “stay away.” The protections on the walls and roof kept her from touching her own wards, wrapped around the magicians to keep them still, but she thought they remained intact. But that uncertainty might be the source of her unease.
“Are you awake?” she called out, standing next to the door. “Are you aware?”
There was sound of something—someone?—shifting. She touched her left palm to the door, asking the wards under the sigil to let her see.
They resisted: she was not the one who had laid them; she had no sway over them. Isobel felt a flash of irritation: she would accept the earth’s refusal of her, but not this. The devil’s sigil was not greater than the Tree, but it was no less, either.
Kneeling, her skirt tucked under her legs, Isobel placed her palm instead on the ground. It was night-chill and dry, and she remembered the feeling of the valley, where she had been cut off from the bones, cut off from the Road.
Choose, the spirit-animals had told her. Was this what they meant? She hesitated, unsure, then she pushed down, feeling the now-familiar dizziness and disorientation as the bones reached up, drawing her in and spreading her thin.
The Road sang to itself, miles distant. Closer, rock grumbled and shifted, cool water trickled and pooled, steam gathered, constant pushing and pressing, building and breaking. All the Territory, as close as her fingertips. Isobel was tempted to linger within, tempted to go deeper, to look backward, to see if she could reach the damaged circle and the power constrained within.
She resisted; she dared not disturb further the spirit or the madness trapped with it. All she needed to know was what waited on the other side of the door in front of her, quench the sigils that flared like a forge as she approached, warning caution to all flesh.
Her breathing rasped in her throat, heart too large to rest within her ribs, thumping to escape. She felt as though she had a fever, skin too tight over bones too warm, the world colorless but too sharp, as though the shapes might cut her eyes if she gazed on them for too long. She could break the wards if she chose to. Sliding from the roof and walls, shattering at her touch, ripping the Tree out by the roots.
She shook her head violently, to rid herself of that thought, and her braid knocked against her shoulder, the feathers braided there tickling her chin, as though familiar fingers stroked her skin, gentle, gentling.
Calls Thunder, the dream-speaker who had gifted her with those feathers. They’d had no great meaning, no significance, Broken Tongue had said. Just . . . feathers.