The mule snorted at her, then turned away, shifting its stance and dropping its head to go back to sleep.
“You do that,” she told it, feeling a twinge of envy. The past few nights, she had not slept well, startling awake in the night, then unable to drop back off, half-waiting for the ground below them to shake again. That it hadn’t almost made the waiting worse. And the whisper this morning . . . Why had it returned? Isobel might have accepted stumbling into things to learn them, but she resented it no less now than she had at the first.
Feeling strands of her hair cling to her neck and chin like fingers, she began braiding them out of the way, although without the leather tie she’d been using, the end of the braid began to come apart almost immediately, adding to her frustration. The feathers she usually tied into the braid were tucked under her bedroll where she’d placed them the night before. Surely, Gabriel would not object to her returning for those?
Before she could convince herself that it wouldn’t be eavesdropping on their conversation to do so if she couldn’t understand the language, Gabriel’s voice rose, calling her name.
The old man was still there, his hands clasped around one of their tin mugs. Gabriel was refilling the second one, handing it to her. She took it, settling herself on the ground next to him, her skirt folded under her legs.
“His tribe is the one whose camp we saw,” Gabriel told her. “The others left when the ground trembled; he stayed. More from stubbornness than bravery, I think. He saw us arrive last night, watched until a sign came to him that we were to be trusted.”
“A sign?” She thought immediately of the great deer, but if Gabriel had been told, he was not sharing. She bit her tongue and nodded at her mentor to continue.
“Near as I might determine”—Gabriel looked at her rather than the old man, who ignored them both—“we were right; something has scared the game away. But it started before the ground began to quake.”
He glanced at the old man then and made a hand gesture, a sharp move of his right hand and elbow. The old man nodded once, although it didn’t seem to Isobel that he was agreeing. She tried to study him without being rude, to read him the way she’d been trained, but it was like trying to watch a sunbeam; no matter how intently she watched, she could never see it move.
“Jumping-Up Duck said that the land sorrowed, yes? He says that the land is frightened.”
Isobel’s gaze flicked away from the old man, down to the ground at her knee. The grass was sparse but green, dotted with tiny blue flowers she didn’t recognize, six-petaled, with a white center. She touched the fingers of her left hand against the ground and felt only silence in response. She pushed deeper, pressing her palm down to the ground and waiting for warmth to tingle through her, spreading her awareness into the earth, along the bones of stone underneath the soil, the connection to the Territory that the sigil—her Bargain—gave her. Power hummed quietly, a spider’s web stretching forever, delicate and thick, and she felt the now-familiar dizziness as her own awareness melted into something far greater. Isobel stretched a bit further, reassured, before a sharp snap hit the center of her hand, the pain racing up to her elbow and making her entire arm twitch away, her body folding in on itself, cutting the connection like a cauterization.
No
All self-certainty Isobel’d had since that first flush of power in her palm shriveled like a leaf in the fire, and her fingers dug into the ground, shoving dirt under her nails, as though to deny what had happened. A pain twisted in her chest, like a sob, a scream, trapped under her ribs. Was she doing something wrong? Had she forsaken her Bargain, somehow broken it unaware? Had the boss . . .
No. She couldn’t bear to think of it, and so she would not. The whisper. She clung to that: something had driven her to that tiny village, something had called to her again that night. Something wanted her here, wanted her to help.
Gabriel was still speaking. She forced herself to put aside pointless worry, to make sense of the words.
“He says he can take us to where it started.”
Isobel was too quiet. Gabriel tried not to watch her as they packed up the camp, saddled the horses, tried not to let his concern show, not for her sake but because he was not certain of their new companion, not yet, and concern could be taken for weakness.