Except they had died here. Died and been trapped with the creature they’d sought to summon, unable to break free, unable to pass on. Had it been their own working that trapped them mid-death? Or something else?
And the haint . . . its bones were likely so ancient, they not been warded at all, the rituals unperformed. Whatever she did could affect it as well, and to what end she could not imagine.
“I should be accustomed to uncertainty by now,” she said, torn between resigned bitterness and dark amusement.
“The surest way to get killed is to stop to think about what you’ve already decided to do,” Gabriel said, not looking up from his task. “You’ve been given the tools for the job, Isobel. Trust that.”
She looked at him, carefully scraping grains of salt from the stick, gathering them onto a scrap of cloth, and then looked up at the sky, thinking about what he had said. About trust, and tools, and if the boss had truly sent her out unprepared. If Marie, who had likely packed her things, would have sent her out unprepared, without whatever she might need.
Opening the pack she’d just taken off the mule, she dug her hands deep along the sides, trusting instinct, sliding questing fingers past her journal and pencil, past the seemingly essential odds and ends she’d taken with her from her bedroom and never unwrapped, until her fingertips found a bundle wedged into a corner of the pack, slick and hard and unfamiliar, and curved her fingers around to pull it free.
The object inside the wrappings was not more salt, or silver, or anything she recognized, merely a stone a little longer than her hand and wide as three fingers, worn flat on either side, the ends blunted. It felt smooth to her fingertips, but there were figures etched into one side, the lines stained a deep red. If she looked too long at them, she felt dizzy—the same sort of dizziness she felt when she reached too far into the bones, went too far from herself.
Isobel was certain it hadn’t been among the things she’d packed, and equally certain, although she hadn’t asked, that Gabriel hadn’t brought it with him or picked it up along the way.
She rubbed the pad of her thumb across the wrapping, feeling it slick and cool, and thought, not without some unease, that it might have been a parting gift from Farron.
She closed the cloth back around it, wrapped it again in an old stocking that needed darning, and shoved it deep into the pack. They were not in such need yet that she would test a magician’s gift, however it was meant. But neither would she toss it away.
“Here,” Gabriel said, closing the bundle of salt grains to make sure none spilled before he was ready. “Not that I’m certain salt is enough to keep magicians from more mischief. I’d be more pleased if we’d enough silver coin to ring them in as well.”
They’d been over this already, the coins they had, polished and replaced in Gabriel’s pocket, already beginning to tarnish.
Silver warned and silver cleansed, but it could not compel.
“They summoned a force of wind and fire,” she said. “Summoned it, trapped it, tried to force it against its will to submit to theirs.” Insult thrice over. “And it in turn tore them to shreds. Releasing them from that would be a kindness. I only need make them understand that.”
She moved past him, picking up a charred stick where it lay in the smoldering remains of their fire, letting it drag against the ground as she moved with a measured pace, steering well clear of the dead grass and the swirling steam rising through the dirt.
“I’m not certain they’ll see it that way.” Gabriel dropped the remains of the salt stick onto her pack and studied the bundle in his hand, then looked up at the sky dotted with pale strands of clouds drifting southeast. “They’re mad to begin with, magicians, and I doubt being dead has soothed them in any way. Do you truly think, even within a warding, you will be able to control what comes to your call?”
“No.” She saw no point in lying. “I might have been able to stop Farron one on one. But he was as curious as he was mad, and seemed fond of me?—that would have worked in my favor. More than one . . . only if they were distracted. If they turn on each other, I might . . . but if I waited to challenge the survivor, they would be so glutted with stolen medicine, I would fail and die.”
Gabriel put his head down into his hands as she spoke. Isobel ignored him.
The only way to stop another magician was to steal their power. Only another magician was mad enough to try that; the eight winds did not respect flesh or blood and wore down even earth’s bone. Having brushed against the winds, Isobel wanted no part of it. But power could be emptied from a thing. That was how crossroads were kept safe; part of a road marshal’s obligation was to test and drain them as they rode through. A magician was a container for power; all she had to do was empty them.