He had to say it. “We don’t have to do this. It’s not your burden to carry.”
Isobel looked down at the ground, her face hidden for a moment, then swung into Uvnee’s saddle with ease, tucking the fabric of her skirt between her leg and the mare’s side to keep the fabric from flapping when she rode.
“Yes, it is,” she said. “Because they can’t, and I’m here.”
And there was the Isobel the devil’d chosen.
He tk-tk’d at the mule to get its attention, and the three of them followed Isobel and Uvnee away from the small meadow, and up into the silent hills.
Isobel felt the lack of the Road deeply; there was a trail of sorts to follow, if she could describe the faint pattern of trampled grasses as a trail, but only if she looked hard and hoped, and there was no welcoming hum when she reached down, to reassure her. But that feeling of wrongness remained, and for lack of any other guidance, she followed it, Gabriel, Steady, and the mule at her back.
After a while, she noticed something. “The grass is different here.”
Gabriel fell back into teacher voice without hesitation, pulling alongside her to point particular plants out. “Sagebrush, you know. Those yellow flower clumps are wild buckwheat.” They rode along a bit, then he admitted, “I’ve no idea what the blue ones are, though. And oh, bitterroot!”
She scrunched her face up at the reminder. “But no lamb’s-quarter.”
He laughed and quizzed her on the trees they were passing, fewer and fewer as the gentle slope turned into a steeper climb. At every turn, Isobel expected to spot curlhorn sheep or wild goats, but the scat they passed was several days old and dried. It might be that Four Wolves and his kin had hunted this area out, or another predator had claimed it.
Or, like their goats, all the wild things had fled.
That thought made her uneasy, layering on top of the wrongness they’d been chasing. And not only her: when she looked back, Gabriel was checking his flintlock, the tie-down of his knife sheath visibly loosened. She did the same with her own, then asked, “Should I load?”
“Only if you’re willing to hold it ready until such a time as you need to fire.”
“But what if I can’t load in time, if something attacks?”
He kept his face perfectly straight. “Then club it over the head with the stock until I can shoot it.”
She sniffed, then turned back to stare at the ground ahead, the silence broken only by the scuffle of hooves, the trail rising farther into the hills.
Despite her unease, Isobel couldn’t stop marveling at their surroundings. She had been raised with the sweeping flat sameness of grass and sky broken by the occasional tree and the distant smudge of hills. Even when they’d ridden up into the hills to De Plata and along the lower ridges of the Knife to Graciendo’s cabin, she’d been so taken by the trees around her, so many and so tall, she’d not been able to imagine the idea of mountains.
Here, it was impossible to ignore. Bare, reddish-brown rock surrounded them, jagged patches of top-heavy green spires growing at angles, bent before the wind, and beyond that were blue-shadowed peaks taller still, their tips blunted as though they’d run into the sky and been pushed back down again.
Anything could lurk at such heights, anything could hide there, sweeping down on them like a Reaper hawk grown into a monstrosity.
“Impossible,” she said out loud, willing her heart to slow its sudden patter. If there was anything larger than a Reaper, even here, rumor would have made it to the boss, hunters would try to trap it, some warning would have come down. “Stop cooking trouble you can’t eat, Isobel. It’s not as though your plate’s not already full.”
Uvnee snorted as though in agreement, and the mule, who had wandered off the trail to mouth at an unfamiliar clump of yellow-green leaves, flicked its ears at them as though to tell them both they were being foolish.
Gabriel had told her once to watch the horses if she thought there was trouble; that they would know before any person. All three were relaxed, almost playful, their ears easy and their tails swishing lazily against the occasional insect. “Listen to them,” she told herself. “There’s no threat here.”
She remained uneasy, and Gabriel’s knife remained loose in its sheath.
They splashed through a little creek running downhill and reached a point where no grasses grew, only the occasional stubborn sagebrush clinging to rocky soil. As Gabriel had predicted, they saw no game, although birds sang from invisible cover, and as they reached the top of the slope, she thought she saw the brown shadow of deer in the distance, but when she tried to find them again, they were gone.