“You’re Isobel of Flood. Isobel of the Devil’s House. Isobel Left Hand. Isobel of names yet to be earned. We’re none of us who we were when we began, Isobel. That’s the point of taking the dust roads.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.” She shifted uneasily, looking down at the stone in her hand as though she’d forgotten she held it, then shoved it into her jacket pocket. “Back in town, those magicians. I stood outside the cabin, I looked at the sigils, and I knew that I couldn’t allow them to go free. Not the way they were, not what they were.” Her eyes wouldn’t settle on him, shifting right, then left, always at an angle, never looking directly at him. Her hands were shoved into her pockets, her body braced as though expecting a blow. “You said . . . you said they were torn apart, bloody. I never touched them, Gabriel, I never even saw them, but I did that. I did that to them, something in me did that to them, and I don’t remember it.”
A breeze touched the tendrils of hair that had escaped her braid, and the tips of her two feathers danced lightly, even as the air cooled the sweat the sun had raised on his skin. He thought a cloud might have passed across the sun, although the sky had been pale blue all day, but he didn’t dare look away from her, even for a second, to check if the weather had changed. It wasn’t storm season; they should be safe enough for now.
“You made a decision, and you carried it out.” He didn’t like what he was about to say, but it was his responsibility to say it. “Sometimes those decisions, those things, will be ugly. That you didn’t do it with your own hands? Doesn’t make it any less your responsibility any more than it wasn’t the judge’s responsibility when he had a man executed, for all that someone else primed the shot.
“So, you take responsibility. Could you, in any conscience, allow the magicians to be released, despite the fact that they had committed no wrong under the Law?”
“No.” There was no hesitation, no doubt in her voice. “The madness, I could feel it in them. They had no control; they didn’t want control, only to consume. They would have gone after anything that fed them—anyone with even the slightest hint of power, and they would have gone after the weakest first.”
Someone like April, her girlhood friend they’d met in Junction, whose touch was to grow things green and bright. Or Devorah, any rider; anyone who could touch the Road could feel the bones beneath their feet. Or even himself: Gabriel might resent and resist, but he knew what he was, what he could not escape. His water-sense would mark him, no matter how slight.
The things that made them part of the Territory, he thought, and wondered why he’d never thought that before, so obvious and yet invisible.
“They would have gone after anyone with even a scrap of power. I couldn’t let them. But”—and there was the thorn in her heart, the crack in her chest; he could hear it, see it in her, and his own chest ached for her—“if I am the cold eye and the final word . . . what is there to stop me?”
“Nothing, save your own sense of where to stop.”
That brought her up short: she had been expecting him to say something else, mayhap tell her how to limit herself, or some secret, but he had none, had no answer save what he gave her.
“You are the devil’s eye, Isobel. What do you see?”
She stared at him finally, and then turned away, looking out over the expanse of grass, the clustered line of trees, the rise of the hills and mountains around them, and then back to him. Her eyes were nearly all pupil, like a cat’s in candlelight, and he felt the urge to remain still and make no sound.
“Infection,” she said finally, her voice heavy and slow. “Things ooze where they should be solid, hot where they should be cool, cold where they should be warm, soft and brittle as it eats into the bones, and the bones cannot hold, even as the spirit cannot break free. Poison, seeping into everything. If it were a wound like yours, I would slice it open and wash it until your blood ran clean.”
His hand touched the scar on his side reflexively. It was healed now, only giving him the occasional twinge, but he could remember the pain he’d felt those first few days, when every breath made him wonder if he would ever rest easy again, much less ride.
“But the left hand is not the giving hand,” Isobel went on. “If I do this . . .”
“You’re afraid you’ll hurt the spirit, do what the magicians couldn’t?” He wanted to scoff, to tell her that a single mortal couldn’t do more than an impossible banding of magicians, but then he remembered the scene inside the lockhouse, the bodies torn and strewn across the hard-packed ground, and was uncertain.