She was aware of things he was not. It was possible, Gabriel supposed . . .
“And I wasn’t afraid,” she repeated. “I know what fear feels like now. This was . . . I just couldn’t move. My body wouldn’t listen to me.”
He sucked at the inside of his cheek, thinking.
“Gabriel?” Her voice had lost that edge; no longer defensive, she was asking her mentor for reassurance.
“These are strange hills to begin with,” he said finally. “And becoming stranger. If you feel . . . odd again, Isobel, tell me.”
“If I can speak, I will.”
“Brat.” He glanced sideways at her, relieved to see some of the tension gone from her face, although he was not fool enough to believe that she had let the worry go. Fair enough; neither had he.
Nor was the deserted camp easing his fears. There were no indications of illness or attack, nothing to suggest an outside cause for this to have been abandoned in such haste.
They’d seen abandoned settlements before, in Clear Rock, where the Spaniards’ magic had touched and eaten all that was flesh. But this ruin lacked the uncanny echo of that place, the sense of something having passed through. Those living here had gone of their own will. He couldn’t say why he was so certain of that, but he was. And yet.
The horses seemed calm, but the mule stayed close to the horses, its ears and tail twitching more nervously than its wont. That might be a reaction to its wounding—or it might be sensing something none of them could.
“Spaniards,” Isobel said, and her voice made it a curse.
“Are you certain, or is that a guess?” He would defer to her call, but he needed to hear her evidence before he would agree.
“A guess,” she admitted reluctantly. “It doesn’t . . . feel like what happened before, but . . .”
“But you don’t want to think about there being something else that could do this,” he suggested. “It may be purely natural. The ground shaking . . . I told you, it’s not so unusual, not up here.” He dragged through his memory, trying to find something else to tell her to ease her fears. “You didn’t like the story of drumming the mountains; another story says the He Sapa, the Black Hills, were born when the spirits underneath were so angered by the pride of those who dwelled on the surface, they thrust upward, killing all who made such prideful noise, and left the Hills behind as a reminder that we are not so powerful as we like to think.” He’d seen those mountains himself, felt the palpable sense of presence that lay on them like a mantle; he would not be the one to say the stories were untrue, however improbable. “So in the memory of the elders, it’s happened.”
Isobel was listening, but he wasn’t sure if that attentive pose was for him or something he couldn’t hear. “The boss said the same, only far west of here, that the land shook so terribly . . .” Her words trailed off, and she tilted her head and knelt down, her fingers plucking something from the ground. She twisted slightly to show it to him. Three long, narrow barbs lay flat across her palm, glinting a dull red in the sunlight.
“Quills,” he said, picking them up and rolling them between his fingers. “Dyed, flattened . . . That’s Apsáalooke, maybe Nakoda work? I didn’t think they were this far south.” He looked around, reevaluating the deserted campsite, still rolling the quills between his fingers. “Or we’re further north than I thought.”
“You don’t know?”
She was right; he should know. He carried a map of the Territory in his memory in addition to the ones he had rolled in his packs. But more than that, even without a Road here, an experienced rider should know where they were, have some sense of location.
But when he tried, there was nothing there for him to touch. Something blocked him the way Isobel had described earlier. Gabriel swallowed, his throat suddenly tight. Ground that shook, ghost cats that could freeze a human as easily as a hare, and something keeping him from reaching any sense of the Road itself . . . The Territory was an uncanny place on the best of days, but he was a betting man, and the odds kept shifting in a way that made him want to quit the game.
“The devil runs an honest game,” he said, almost to himself. “But that doesn’t mean someone else can’t cheat.”
“Gabriel?”
“Strange hills,” he repeated, twisting his mouth up in a smile for Isobel’s benefit. “Spell or natural, monster or man, you’ve been drawn to look, and so look we will.”
She didn’t seem reassured.
“Whatever’s hiding itself here, Isobel, it’s not able to block everything. I can still sense water; you still know when there’s danger. It can’t stop us.” He looked at the quills in his hand, then tucked them into a pocket of his jacket. “Mount up. Whatever happened here, they didn’t leave stories behind. We need to find someone who can talk to us.”
Assuming there was anyone left to speak.