“You think it’s connected? The quakes, and the . . . the quietness, up that way?”
“Don’t know.” He sat down opposite her, wincing a little as he leaned against his pack, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Might be nothing, might be you just being tired, might be something. But if we’re going up thataway, which it seems we are, we’ll find out ourselves, won’t we?”
She narrowed her eyes at him, the memory of the ground shaking still too near for joking. “You needn’t look so pleased about it,” she muttered. “The ground moved.” The ground moved and the Road was silent, and something had scraped the power from this valley, and who knows how far beyond. And he was looking pleased.
“There’s a story,” Gabriel said, pulling his legs up so he could rest his arms on his knees, what she’d come to think of as his storytelling pose. “There’s a story that comes from before we were here, before the devil claimed dominion from the Mudwater to the Knife, back when there was only the one People, with skins the color of clay and eyes like an autumn storm.”
She snorted at that, and he glared at her until she cast her eyes down in apology so he’d go on.
“Back then, the story says, the land was flat, just rolling plains, and you could see from one end to another. But then one day, a child found a hollow log and started to hit it with a stick, and the sound was so pleasing to the spirits that they began to dance. And as they danced the land shook, and as the land shook, it rose, until hills formed, and then mountains. And that’s why the land isn’t flat anymore.”
Isobel wrinkled her nose. “That’s just a story.”
He shrugged. “It’s an old story, and old stories have truth in ’em somewhere, most of them. This might be nothing to worry about, just the spirits dancing, or the earth shrugging ’cause we’re itching its back. But you were driven here by something, and you’re worried about what you’re reading, then yah, maybe it’s something new or worrisome. So, we poke our noses in and see what bites us.”
She gave his ribs a pointed look. “You haven’t gotten tired of being bitten yet?”
“You volunteer this time, then,” he said, cheerful enough to make her want to bite him.
“Don’t know who we’ll encounter up there,” Gabriel went on, thoughtfully. “Your friends probably splintered off a Shoshone or Cheyenne tribe east of here, maybe some of their kin went farther up mountain, but if so, I don’t speak much of their tongue. Never had need to learn it.” He sounded regretful but resigned. “Don’t suppose you could talk one of these folks into coming with us, as guide?”
Isobel shook her head, finding a thread that was beginning to pull loose on her skirt and trying to poke it back into the weave. The clothes that had been newly stiff when she’d first packed them back at the saloon were soft and faded now; sun and dirt and washing with a poor excuse for soap had left their mark. She should have bought a new skirt and underthings at the mercantile, back at La Ramée, but she’d been distracted by the ill post-rider and Gabriel’s injury.
“They don’t want to leave. This is their home, and I don’t think they’ve anywhere else to go.”
“They’ll defend this past dying,” Gabriel said. “Foolish, but understandable, I suppose.”
Driven by that thought, Isobel reached out once more, bending from the stool to place her palm flat on the ground, trying to sense again what lay just beyond the small valley they were in.
Nothing. She could feel where she was, and where they had been, but the way north was still empty, like an unfinished map fading into blank parchment.
No, not blank, she thought. Scraped clean.
The feeling shuddered through her, made her want to ride for Flood without stopping, spill everything she knew, everything she had seen, everything she feared, and ask the boss to deal with it. He was the Master of the Territory; she was only his Hand, and a poor one at that. The boss might—
“Stop that.”
She looked up at Gabriel, blinking. “What?”
His eyes were narrowed to slits, his face set in too-stern lines. “You were thinking that you had no idea what to do, bordering on panic, mayhap. That this was beyond your handling. That from the girl who locked horns with a magician, who took on Spaniards, who faced down a spell-born creature, and made them all behave?”
Gabriel was an excellent card player when he chose to be, and his body gave off little he did not want known. But at that moment, he practically shouted derision and disbelief, and Isobel felt her mouth twist into a reluctant smile.
“Not alone, I didn’t,” she said.
“And you’re not alone now. If you’re done being foolish?” he asked, and she huffed at him but nodded. “We’ll need to barter in the morning, if your new friends have provisions available. If there are more quakes, odds are game will be harder to find.”
She made a face. “They had goats, but they all ran off. Dried meat again?”