we fight for power, she understood.
The haint had no voice save to howl. The shivering didn’t slow, the furious and frustrated anger sharp and clear as icicles, loud as hail against a wooden roof. It bit at them, battered them, trying to find a lie in their words, a weakness in their defenses it could lash out against. If the magicians had been mad, so too was their victim. Mad, and filled with the power it had scraped from earth and wind before it was caged. There would be no reasoning with it, no freeing it. It was ancient, and mad, and desired only to destroy.
Hold, the whisper asked of her, pressing her down further. Wait. Hold. It would hold forever, but Isobel could not. The haint sensed her weakness, claws scrabbling, tearing her inside out the better to feast on what was within, jealous and resentful; she had come to it and it would keep her, all that she was, for the price of what had been done to it.
Isobel felt it within her, howled her own rage, and as though summoned, the void flowed, molten and hot, pumping around and into and through her, forcing the haint back enough that Isobel could pull at that flow, drawing one swirl then another in pure instinct, looping in her thoughts; You will not consume me.
A desperate, flailing thudthudthud of hollow-boned wings battered at her, then there was a cold flare where her palm would be, and Isobel screamed, her eyes—she had eyes again and hands and form—opening to find herself covered in sweat, gritty with dust, still sitting in the middle of the infinitas warding, in the middle of Gabriel’s circle.
Beneath her, the presence raged, still trapped, still lost, but it could not touch her.
When she looked up, Gabriel was on his knees just outside the circle, his hat off and his face visible in the light . . . the fading light—how long had she . . . It didn’t matter, save that now she could feel the hunger rumbling inside her ribs, the ache that came from sitting too long without movement, the slow fade of the molten silver from her blood, until she was only flesh and bone again.
She lifted a hand to her face, and her fingertips came away grimy and wet, her eyes sticky and sore. “I am Isobel née Lacoyo Távora,” she said, barely able to speak, her throat thick and swollen. “I am the Devil’s Hand, the strength of the Territory, and you will not have me.”
Gabriel made a motion as though to reach for her, then checked it. “What happened?” His voice was cracked, as though he’d been yelling.
“It . . .” Pity and despair and grief chewed on her, understanding what she had seen burned into her bones like a brand. “They trapped a spirit, something old and powerful.” Something beautiful. “They pulled it from the air and trapped it, reshaped it the way we carve wood to make a boat that they would ride. . . .” Great, choking sobs wracked her, pulling the dust from within to scatter on the trampled-down grass in front of her. Gabriel reached across his wardings then, breaking them without ceremony, and pulled her into his arms, his body sheltering her as she wept, the infinitas under their knees glowing with a faint green light.
Gabriel felt as though someone had dragged him through a berry bramble?—the price for breaking his ward-line so roughly—but that was the least of his concerns. Once Isobel cried herself out, he’d reached back for his canteen and rinsed her mouth, her spittle laced with a greyish-blue foam that he didn’t want to think about. After her first flood of words, she’d gone silent, shaking and shivering, her skin cold to the touch, then flaring too warm before going cold again.
He had no idea what to do, so he left her there, within what remained of the wards and the fading green glow, and fetched blankets and another canteen of water, and came back to her, draping her in the blankets and letting her rest against his shoulder until the worst seemed to pass and her shivering calmed.
This was Isobel, he told himself. Izzy.