“We went in the morning, to check and offer ’em water. ’Cause we assumed they needed to drink.” The other man said it almost as a question, wringing his hands and speaking down to his boots. Without seeing his face, Gabriel couldn’t guess his age, but his hands were thin and age-spotted, not Gabriel’s first choice to send to care for two madder-than-most magicians. “Only, when we got there and had Possum open the door . . .” The speaker looked up then, grey eyes wide and terrified, and younger than his hands would suggest. “It was like some beast got in there. Got in there and tore them up but good.”
Gabriel’s hunger turned to a cold curdling in his stomach. Breakfast be damned, his dream be damned: he wanted out of this town. Whatever had happened when Isobel touched the ward post had been bad enough, but for her to then see the marshal die under her hands, to not be able to save her . . . She was only a girl, for all that she was asked to carry. She shouldn’t have spent last night washing cold blood off her hands and out of her clothing. She shouldn’t have to see this. . . .
The judge turned back to him, the wrinkles in his face deeper than they’d been even a day before. “I’d not ask this of you, rider, but it would be days before another marshal could be summoned, and if there’s something hunting within our walls, we need to know now, not after more are dead.”
Unspoken but clear: anything that came hunting magicians was nothing any of them could stand against.
Nothing except Isobel.
Gabriel bit his teeth against that knowledge, the urge to flee battered by responsibility, obligation. But the dead were already dead. He would let her sleep until he knew more.
The inside of the lockhouse had a dirt floor rather than the planks he’d seen elsewhere, and no furniture or windows, the walls—lit by pale morning light coming in through the open door—covered with sigils and scratchings laid over each other, some carved, some painted, some old and some brightly new. But the walls were only a distraction from what lay on that dirt floor.
“River have mercy,” Gabriel breathed, then gagged, the smell too much in the enclosed space. He backed out, breathing into his sleeve in an attempt to block it out. “I’ve seen bear maulings prettier than that.”
“The last time we had a bear inside the walls, it was a half-grown cub the children smuggled in,” the judge said, his face no better than Gabriel’s, a faded blue kerchief held against his nose and mouth, “and we had to deal with the mother trying to knock the gate down. That mistake has not been made again.”
Another time, the story would have amused Gabriel. But with the memory of bodies torn and strewn about, he couldn’t even muster a smile. “Then what?”
He knew, even as he asked the question. It was possible that a beast or man might kill a magician, especially one that was already bound. But both, within the wards? There was only one thing Gabriel could think of that could do that to two magicians. Another magician.
“Tousey said they came on two magicians in a duel and recruited them, and then five more. All accounted for. But if they reached one and he decided not to participate, didn’t want to play with others . . .”
The judge considered his theory. “He might have thought they were easy prey, with the máitre’s bindings on them.”
One of the people who’d followed them from the judge’s cabin and gathered outside the hut while the judge and Gabriel investigated, asked. “And got to them how?”
“Does it matter?” Gabriel eyed the woman: younger than most, pale-skinned and leaning heavily on a wooden crutch. That would explain why she wasn’t working a field?—and possibly the look of distrust that seemed etched on her face, as though she expected everyone she met to lie to her. “Trust me, trying to think on what magicians can and can’t do will keep you awake in the small hours. Best to be thankful they chose to destroy each other and not us.”
Except they might have chosen exactly that, if what Tousey said was true. If they thought it was in their best interest to turn on the Territory in exchange for riper pickings . . .
No. This, all of this proved that no magicians could work together, not even for a wanted goal. They were too mad, would turn on each other from instinct and need. Even Farron, for all that he seemed fond of Isobel, had warned her that a moment’s faltering on her part, and he would not be able to resist, like a fox in a hen yard. And that had been a magician in full control of himself. One touched by the madness Isobel described?
“You think we need to increase our wardings?” a third voice asked. Gabriel couldn’t pick him out of the small crowd, but it didn’t matter; they all looked the same just then, as though Gabriel had begun speaking Hollandic?—the words might be familiar, but the meaning escaped them. That was the problem with settlements, he thought. They became accustomed to things working and stopped thinking about why they worked that way, just blindly following along. . . .
Gabriel thought of Isobel laid out cold and bleeding on the bench merely from having touched one of the ward posts they all took for granted. “I think whatever medicine could reach through what you have already, there isn’t anything anyone here could do to stop it.”
Isobel, his thoughts supplied. Isobel might.
Might. Would try, if she knew. And might fail.
He was not her guardian. He should go wake her, tell her what had happened. Let the Hand decide what to do.