A gift, Gabriel had said.
She exhaled, reaching up with her free hand to touch the feathers, flicking the braid back over her shoulder, feeling it settle against her back, feeling her spine elongate, a snake stretching itself full length in the dirt, a ghost cat leaping, a Reaper hawk spreading its wings, rising into the sky, the proud line of the wapiti’s neck, prongs limned by sun and moonlight. A thing of the Territory. A thing that belonged to the Territory.
Something settled within her, smooth and heavy as stones, and her heart slowed, thump-thump-thump, then thump-thump, thump-thump, until she could breathe again. The rage disappeared; the power remained.
Her left hand dug into the ground, the sigil burning like a coalstone. Power. Responsibility. The lesson she’d never quite learned: be careful what you ask for, for the devil will give you exactly that. What a magician did was none of the devil’s concern. Until she decided it was.
Show me, she told it. And it did.
One magician had woken, and consumed the other, taking all he was and leaving a husk of flesh and bone behind. Restless, roiling; power still contained behind the wardings, but slowly, carefully, craftily they were being scraped away from inside, layer by layer unraveling.
Bones are strong, but the wind will not be contained.
Isobel sat back on her heels, her skirts covered in dust, and breathed.
Magicians were creatures of the Territory. Like the Reaper hawk or the buffalo, or the waters rushing down from the hills to feed the prairie grasses, or the stone spires rising toward the sky. The eight winds owned them; they answered to nothing less.
But an owl had led her to them. Spirit of the winds, omen of death.
The boss waited in Flood, shuffling decks and turning over cards, watching and manipulating, piece by piece, the Right Hand to succor, the Left to . . . to what?
The great elk had told her to deal with the intruders, to be the knife the devil had sent her to be. The Reaper hawk had told her to walk away, to leave the valley, to survive. Both were creatures of the Territory, but they counseled her at odds.
But the snake, what had the snake said? We tell you only what you already know but will not let yourself hear.
She had been sent out, not kept. She had set foot on the dust roads, had heard the beat of the buffalo herds in her own blood, felt the scream of a Reaper hawk in her bones, breathed the resin-filled air of the mountains and drunk the dark, cool waters, dug her fingers into the grit and loam . . . felt the whispers of the earth itself in her own bones.
All her confusion, all her uncertainty came from that. She should never have listened to that whisper, should never have allowed it within. And yet, had there ever been another choice? Had the boss intended for her to have no other choice?
The Left Hand was the knife in the darkness, the cold eye. The ease she could offer was not to heal but to ensure no further harm. Isobel pressed her left palm back to the dirt.
The magician inside was restless, tightly twisted; it knew she was there but considered her no threat, not now. She had crept in through the bones, drab-colored and dry, and what threat could earth be to something born of the wind?
The calm amusement she’d always felt in Farron’s power was absent here. No humor, no affection, nothing to soften the madness that seethed, needing more without any hope of satiation, no Law, no limits. Only hunger. Only greed.
Her hesitation disappeared. Isobel placed both hands palm-down on the ground, stretching so that she lay flat on the ground, her face pressed into the dirt, nails digging past the crust, the smell of it in her nose, the taste of it in her mouth; she was the ground, she was the stone, she was the water trickling deep within. And then, faint, soft, the brush of wind, there and gone.
There was no Isobel. The flesh becomes dust, the bones become stone, the blood becomes wind. The touch of the devil on her palm spreading into every speck, curdling her, thickening and softening, hardening and changing. An instant of dropping dropping too far and rising too fast until a sharp wrenching sensation and there was nothing but a narrow pinprick, nothing but a single intent, sharp-edged silver coin turning and turning as it spun through the air, landing in the shadow of a crossroads filled with rage and despair.
Not enough. She was not enough, not against this.
Open, Hand.