Her face fell, and she cast her gaze down toward her lap. “I only gave them a hairpin,” she said, soft-voiced, reaching up to touch the feathers gently. “It didn’t mean anything.”
He hadn’t expected her thoughts to turn in that direction. He forgot, at times, that she was barely past sixteen; for all that the devil had laid on her, for all the power she held, she was still in many ways so very young.
“Was it something you treasured?” He knew it was; the hairpin had been made from bone polished smooth from care and use. “That was all Calls Thunder would consider, if you gave them something you valued in return.”
Gabriel had long suspected that the dream-talker had given Isobel not a gift but a marker. Isobel of Flood, Isobel Devil’s Hand, could claim no special standing among natives. By giving her those feathers, he thought, Calls Thunder had marked her as someone of worth, of power. They might be enough to keep her safe in awkward situations, if she stepped wrong or the Agreement was in doubt.
Might. He would not rely on them, nor allow her to, either.
“The thing that attacked me, in the circle.” She changed the subject as she took the coffee pot, now boiled, off the tripod and poured it into mugs, giving the first one to the old man. “I thought at first it might be a haint, that someone had died here and not been properly warded. But the feel of it . . . was wrong.” She paused, then handed him the second cup. “Haints sorrow, and sometimes they’re fierce-mad. But this didn’t . . . this didn’t feel right.”
Gabriel blew on his coffee to cool it, then took a sip and winced. She’d over-boiled it again. “Well, it wasn’t a fetch, or we’d be trying to sew our faces back on.”
“I don’t know what it was.” Her voice was tight, too high, and he waited while she stirred what was left in the coffee pot, frowning at the grounds as though they could tell her something but wouldn’t.
“You think whatever it is”—he made a vague gesture with his cup—“is causing the quakes?” It would follow: this was where the old man said the quakes began. “And the magicians . . . were they trying to contain it, or did they create it?” His bet would be on the latter.
“I don’t know. Yes. Whatever happened there, it’s tied in somehow. I just . . . Magicians. Plural. That’s worrying.”
Her matter-of-fact tone surprised a laugh out of him. “Just a bit, yes.”
“Corbeau, pas de buse,” the old man said, and lifted his mug to indicate the area behind them. “Ils ne sont pas . . . ici juste pour manger la vieille viande.” His hands lifted and spread, one following the other to the right, then down. “Ils sont venus pleins de connaissances, et les bêtes sont parties, et le ciel est devenu vide, et la terre a tremblé.” And then he stopped, as though he had run out of words.
“They . . . came full of knowledge? And the beasts left, the skies emptied, and the ground trembled,” Gabriel translated, although he wasn’t quite sure he’d gotten it entirely correct. It made no sense to him, and from Isobel’s expression, she fared no better.
“Ground trembled” was reasonably clear, though.
Isobel jerked her head as though dislodging an unhappy thought, then reached over and took the mug out of his hands, drinking half the contents in one long pull before handing it back. “And the magicians? Did they flee too when the ground shook?”
When Gabriel asked him, the old man lifted his shoulders in a gesture that needed no translation. He did not know.
Isobel had just refilled the mug with the last of the coffee, Gabriel scraping the last bit of corn mash and honey from his plate, when the old man stood up without a word, walking away from the fire. They watched as he clucked to his pony, sliding the woven halter over its head and draping his pack over its back like a blanket.
“He’s leaving?” Isobel glanced at her mug, then at the camp’s morning disarray. “Are we supposed to follow?”
Gabriel made no move to get up. “I don’t think so. He’s satisfied his curiosity and led us to where we needed to be. He’s done.”
“But . . .” Isobel stopped herself from complaining like a child, biting her upper lip. She didn’t like the old man, and he clearly didn’t have much use for her or her boss, but he had helped them when he’d no obligation to do so. Isobel had no right to ask more of him. She stood up, stepping in front of the old man and his pony before they could leave.
“Merci,” she said, and made one of the few gestures she knew for certain, hands up and palm down, fingertips pointed at the old man and sweeping in until her thumbs pointed at her own chest, almost a reverse of the boss’s gesture when he spoke of the Territory. “Thank you.”
He looked at her then, and his right hand clenched and rested over his heart, then he brought a single finger up and touched his forehead, opened his hand and placed it palm down at his heart again, sliding it out to the right. Then he smiled, a narrow squint of his eyes more than his mouth, and reached forward, his finger pausing just shy of touching her, before his hand clenched again and dropped to hip high.