“No? No.” She sounded more certain the second time. She looked up then, too, and seemed to notice the Reaper overhead. “I think we should find cover, get out of sight.”
Gabriel didn’t think she was aware of the timbre that crept into her tone, the dark echo that lingered around her words, but when she spoke in that voice, Gabriel listened. He knew what she was.
And even if he hadn’t, he was not a fool.
“Trees?” To their left, there was a cluster of narrow pines with enough room for a horse to pass between. Gabriel had grown up in the deep woods, spent much of his early life following his uncles and cousins as they gathered their lines, but he didn’t like taking them under tree cover; his line of sight was too limited, and things could be lurking overhead as well as behind every trunk, hiding in every shadow. But if Isobel’s instincts said to hide, they would hide, and this was the only cover available.
She nodded, and turned her mare toward them, kicking the horse into a fast trot. The mule followed her, and he picked up the rear, shifting the reins into his left hand so that his right was free to reach for the knife in his boot or the one tied to his saddle equally. The carbine strapped to his saddle would be of no use except as the club he’d teased her about before, but he loosed the strap around it nonetheless.
Once they were through the first line of trees, Isobel slid down from the mare’s back, picking up the reins and leading her deeper into the gloom. The mule looked as though it might balk, and Gabriel had a moment’s rare sympathy with the beast.
“She knows what she’s doing,” he told the mule as he dismounted as well and followed them into the shaded cover, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. At least, he noted, the trees were old enough that their lower branches had died off, removing one potential source of ambush.
“Here.” She stopped, although that patch of ground seemed no different to him from any of the others they’d walked over. “This is good?”
She’d chosen a natural clearing where an older tree had died, the fallen trunk slowly crumbling back into the soil. The clearing was blocked at one end by a massive chunk of reddish-brown rock sticking out of the ground, a little higher than Steady’s shoulder, two trees bent to grow around it. The space between the remaining trees was reasonably flat, open enough for all three animals to move freely without stepping on one another or their riders, but not much more than that. He wasn’t sure he’d be willing to risk a fire, but the stone outcrop was wide enough to block the wind, and it wasn’t likely to become too cold, or to rain, since the sky had been clear. . . .
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, reaching for the ever-familiar pull of flowing water. For a moment, he couldn’t find it, his pulse racing in near-panic, then he felt the steady trickle of an underground spring, muffled and distant, as though he were hearing it through a heavy fog.
“No fresh water nearby,” he told her, sparing her how difficult it had been to discover even that. “Good thing we refilled the canteens.”
“I thought springs were common here?” She was untacking the mare already, setting the saddle carefully to one side of the fallen trunk, then pulling out a brush to clean sweat-matted hide and hocks.
“Further west,” he said, doing the same for the mule, who had come to stand next to him. “But from what I’ve heard, even the ones that aren’t burning hot aren’t ones you’d want to drink from. Ask me before you drink from anything, unless I’ve already checked it.” He wasn’t willing to risk a bad case of flux, or worse, when simple caution could avoid it. He finished untacking the mule, placing the packs on the ground, and turned back to start working on Steady. “Are you sure?—”
He never got the chance to finish the sentence. Something hit him in the side, a heavy blunt blow that he was able to identify from past experience as hooves, and the world went dark red, and then black.
“Gabriel. Gabriel Kasun. Open your eyes.”
The voice was familiar, strained with panic, tied to a sense that he needed to be up, needed to . . . do something.
Open his eyes. He could do that.
The knife clutched in his hand was bloody, but so were his arm and chest, either from the old wounds reopening or new ones he couldn’t tell, and from the way Isobel’s wide brown eyes kept flicking back and forth, he suspected there was blood on his face as well.
“What happened?”
Isobel shifted back on her heels, and behind her, sprawled on its back, was the largest ghost cat he’d ever imagined?—no, larger than that, nearly as long as a horse, its tawny pelt marked with black at head and tail.
But even from that distance he could see its ribs through the pelt, and when he took a deep breath, the same smell they’d both picked up earlier: something dying.