“What?” She thought at first she had misheard him or he had misunderstood her.
“Are we here to help?” He looked at her then and then looked away. “I’m here to help you, and you’re here because the devil sent you to ride, and we’re here because you’ve a feeling, but does that help them?”
Isobel felt like she’d been slapped. “Jumping-Up Duck said . . .”
“She said something shook the land from sorrow. Did she ask us to find the source?”
“I . . . No.” Isobel forced herself to consider the words and motions of the adults at the table. They had refused to leave, had said Duck trusted the devil to protect them, but at the same time . . . they had never asked her to discover what it was. Almost as though they knew and were resigned to their fate.
A growl echoed in her thoughts, that anyone should be so resigned. “We need to know what’s happening.”
“Yes.” His voice was stripped of argument. “We do. But you need to consider why you need to know.”
“Now you sound like the boss,” she said, petulant, and that got another chuckle out of him.
“Then maybe you should listen.”
When the boss said something like that, he didn’t mean for her to spout back with a sharp-tongued reply. So, Isobel shut her mouth carefully and paid full attention to the ground in front of Uvnee, the smell of the summer-warm air around her, the feel of the saddle pressing back against her seat, the feel of sweat slicking down her spine, and the weight of her hat on her head, the brim shading her eyes but not her chin. The feeling against the back of her neck, of being watched. And then she set it all aside and paid attention to what remained.
This wasn’t like the kind of test Gabriel used to set, for her to identify a bird on wing, or the trail of an animal, or a plant by a single leaf. This was like what she used to do for the boss, to look at someone and tell what they wanted, what they were thinking. What they needed.
Only, she thought she had. She’d studied Duck and the others. She’d seen their worry, their fear. And, a faint voice inside her said, she’d added that to what she was feeling, the push that had driven her there. The wrongness of the land there having been scraped clean, when they’d been there long enough for some power to have gathered.
“It wasn’t wrong,” she said out loud. “Something is wrong.”
“Yes.” Gabriel was solid in his agreement on that.
But nobody had asked her to look. They’d given her supplies, hadn’t stopped her, but they hadn’t asked.
A whisper of need had driven her there . . . but she hadn’t heard it since then. Hadn’t heard anything. What had changed?
It started with the buffalo. The buffalo were none of the devil’s concern, outside the Agreement, and had no claim on her. But she had been drawn there, as had the Jack.
The Jack had walked away. Isobel had not.
What had drawn them there?
The sigil told her when something needed caring for, when a Hand’s touch was called for. But the sigil had itched when the whisper was silent, and the whisper had called her when the sigil was still, and then both had gone silent when she rode into these hills.
There was something about these hills.
She only realized she was holding the reins so tightly when Uvnee stopped, turning her head slightly as though to ask her rider what was wrong. “I’m obligated to look, to make sure nothing’s wrong. To deal with anything gone wrong.” That had been the terms of her bargain. To be his Hand where he couldn’t reach, to protect those who abided by the Agreement.
And Duck’s people abided. They’d said so. They had children who were of both bloods, who belonged to the Territory. Isobel had felt that, and the feeling had not set her wrong yet. Yet . . .
Doubt wriggled in her gut, like being water-sick.
“Is there a difference between being asked to do something and knowing it has to be done even if nobody asks you to do it?”
Gabriel blew out a breath. “There are some who’d say that’s the burden of leadership.”
She closed her eyes, concentrating on the feel of the mare’s bulk underneath her, the dryness of the air, the familiar, steadying smells of leather and horseflesh, of dirt and greenery, the sound of hooves and the creak of saddle leather and the soft whuffling breathing of the mule, keeping pace at her heel. “What do you say?”
“I think—”
Both horses pulled up short, jolting their riders in the saddle and causing the mule to let out an indignant protest as he smacked his head against Uvnee’s side. Gabriel slapped his hand down on the stock of his carbine before realizing that there was no threat.