Half a day passed, the sun warm overhead, and Isobel could not shake the chill from her skin. She could feel the blanket over her shoulders, the heat of Gabriel near her, the flickering of the fire he’d built up, making her a tisane he said would warm her blood. None of it mattered. The cold ran deep inside, pushing everything else away. Her gaze dropped down to her hands, and she spread her fingers out in front of her, palms down, looking at them as though they were not her own.
She had done what was needed, had done only what was needed. That made it no better, that she had done it at all. The dead were to be protected, not abused, and yet she had. She had gone among the dead and forced them to her will. Without hesitation, without compassion. She had pushed herself into the sodden mess of what remained and forced them to speak to her, to tell her what she needed to know; had shoved herself into their most pained places and taken what she needed. The fact that she had disturbed no wardings, had uncovered no bones, did not change that fact.
And she knew that she would do it again if it were asked of her.
The elk—wapiti, Gabriel called it—had been right: she had duty, obligation. A sworn contract, turning her into the devil’s tool. Whatever power she contained, it was nothing more than that. She was no more a person than Gabriel’s knife or gun.
She looked at her hands and remembered something else.
“It was an easterner.” Her voice was too steady, too calm. It should shake under the weight of what she had done, what she had learned.
“Who was?”
Gabriel moved away from the fire, took her hands in his, turning them, wrapping the fingers around the handle of her mug, the battered tin almost too warm to hold. Still, all she felt was cold.
“The one who brought them here, convinced them to do this. I saw it in their . . . in them. He came across the Mudwater, American colors on his saddle.” Their awareness of the man was muddled by death, by pain, by the pressure they were held under, mangled by their own madness, but that much she knew: the creak of the leather of his saddle, the smell of him, the flash of the colors marking him as an outsider, giving him passage across the borders, a single man without troops.
But a single man could be as dangerous as an army.
Gabriel sat down opposite her, pushing her hands up, reminding her to drink the tisane. She took a sip, merely to oblige him. It was green, and sharp, and warm, but she did not feel warmed. “He spun them a story of . . . of the power they could gain if they did this. Of power elsewhere if they were strong enough to take it. That he would show them if they did this one thing. . . .” She shook her head, less in disbelief than amazement.
“He made promises.” Scraps of smudged ink, half-mumbled words, the soft flutter of dust in sunlight. “Rewards . . . power if they aided his government?”
“They were fools to believe him,” Gabriel said, his voice hard. “There’s nothing for them out there. Whatever medicine remains east of the Mudwater, it’s been locked down, harder to find. A magician outside the Territory would be like a wolf in a vegetable plot, surrounded by food and yet starving.”
“They wanted to believe.” Isobel understood that much. “They wanted what he promised, enough to work together.”
Only, there was no “together” for magicians. Farron had told her true. Each and every one had turned on the other the moment the spell was cast, driven by fear and greed, each determined to claim the ancient spirit’s medicine for themselves. Had they managed to not . . . She tried to imagine Farron multiplied, even more powerful, but the smudged, bloody, hungry madness was all she could feel, even splintered into death.
“Did . . . did they tell you anything else? About the American.”
Gabriel’s voice sounded strange, strained. He had said he had spent time across the River, that he had studied the law there. He had told her about the city he had lived in, the press of people, and the ways they lived . . . but he had never said if he was happy there, if he’d been sorry to leave.
Doubt scraped its claws at her, and she closed her eyes, refusing it. “I only saw him as they saw him,” she said. “As they remembered him, and what’s left of their thoughts . . .”
“It’s important, Isobel.”
She couldn’t refuse him, not with his voice scraped that raw.
“He was tall and cast a dark shadow.” It made no sense to her, that one man might cast more of a shadow than another, but that was what they remembered. “His face was dark, like a crow’s”—a crow, yes, tattered wings and bright eyes—“but there was a brightness to him”—and her free hand raised up to touch her chest, settling on the left side, just under her shoulder—“here.”
Gabriel said something that sounded rude and pained in that language she didn’t know. She opened her eyes to look at him. “Gabriel?”
He shook his head, then reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out something that glittered faintly in the slant of sunlight. “A brightness . . . like this?”
The metal, when dropped into her hand, was heavy as a stone and burned like a coal, although she knew it was neither. The edges were smooth, well-worn, and the engraving on both sides was almost too faint to see.
“What is it?” It felt familiar, but she did not recognize it.
“A marshal’s badge.”