Gabriel had told her that buffalo hunts began with offerings to appease the spirits of those killed, that every part of the animal was used, that waste would offer insult and ensure that none of the beasts gave of themselves to those hunters again. Buffalo pelts were prized, but so too were the meat, the horns, the tail, the bones . . . not left to bloat and rot under the sun.
This . . . this was nothing short of desecration. The word came from nowhere, the taste of it like ashes and dry bread on her tongue, and the bile churned again.
The ground needed to be cleansed.
Isobel went back to the mare and rummaged in her saddlebag, her questing fingers resting briefly on her journal, the leather binding worn soft at the corners now, before pulling out a winter apple, slightly mushy but still edible, and a handful of loose salt, crumbled from the stick no Rider went without. Almost an afterthought, she reached for the canteen slung over the saddle, hearing the water slosh inside, then went back to where the bodies lay.
The buzzards shifted as she approached, moving away but refusing to relinquish their meal entirely. She placed the apple on the ground, drawing a half-circle of salt around it, then splashed some of the water, soaking the grass where blood had dried. Salt to cleanse, and offerings of grazing and water to appease. There should be smoke, and a better offering, but this was all she had.
“I’m sorry,” she said to them, her gaze touching on each beast in turn, memorizing their shapes, even their smells. “You should have been better honored, in your death. I—” She hesitated, unwilling to promise a thing she was not certain she could perform. “I will carry your memory with me. I will honor your gifts, although they did not come to me.”
She couldn’t promise any more, not faithfully. But as the words left her mouth, one of the buzzards lifted its bald head and swiveled its neck to look directly at her, and a burning chill touched her face, even as the sting in her palm faded.
Something had heard her, and accepted her promise.
Isobel made camp that night soon after the sun fell below the horizon, stopping only when it became clear she would not reach the Road before full dark.
The stars were bright, the low moon waxing crescent, and Isobel paused while burying the remains of her dinner to appreciate the way their light echoed against the darkness, silent counterpoint to the occasional howls and hoots rising from the land.
She had been raised under a roof, and the first few nights on the Road, the vast open space had unnerved her beyond the telling, the sweep of stars brighter than any lamp, the sheer emptiness of the land a weight pressing her down into the ground until she could barely breathe.
Slowly, over weeks, that sensation had faded, until the open air became familiar as walls and windows, the light of the stars and the passage of the moon the only comfort she needed, the emptiness filled with the less-subtle noises of the night, the howl and barks of predators, the flutter of wings as soothing as the sound of slippers in the hallway.
But that night, she missed Gabriel, his low voice telling stories of how Badger pulled first man from stone, or Buffalo created the plains, or teaching her to identify an animal by the flick of its tail, or a plant by the turn of its leaves. She missed the sound of his breathing as he slept across the fire from her, the snort and mumble when he dreamed. She missed the collective sighing and grumbling of his horse, Steady, and Flatfoot the mule when they were picketed together with Uvnee.
Even the Jack would have been welcome company, simply to feel another person nearby.
“Foolishness,” she told herself, startling a stripetail that had crept close to see if she’d left scraps for it to scavenge. She kicked the ground to discourage it, and it fled.
Unwilling to sleep just yet, Isobel took her journal out, wetted her pencil, and wrote down what she had seen, how many bodies and how they had been butchered, what had been taken and what had been left, and a description of the hollow where she’d found them, the shape of the hills from where she’d stood. The boss might want to know. More, she had promised to remember.
When she slipped the journal back into her pack, her hand touched something else, not cloth, that crinkled under her fingers. She’d almost forgotten about the letters. Two waxed envelopes had been at the postal drop, one addressed to a Matthew Smith someplace called Tallahatchie, and one . . .
And one for Gabriel. The envelope had been battered at the edges as though it had traveled a long way, but his name was written in clear script on the dun-colored envelope. Master Gabriel Kasun.
You didn’t meddle in another’s business in the Territory. You didn’t ask questions you’d no need the answers to. She left the envelopes where they were, refusing to indulge any curiosity in who might be writing to her mentor, and lay down, pulling the blanket more closely around her shoulders. Sooner she slept, sooner she’d be on her way again, sooner she wouldn’t be alone.
Wake, Hand.
Isobel couldn’t move. Nothing bound her, nothing held her down, but she could not convince her limbs to lift, a soft indolence encasing her as securely as if she were swaddled like an infant.