The woman seemed to realize Isobel was female at the same moment, but other than pushing her hat back to better study the newcomer, she did not react, her attention only a quarter on Isobel, the rest returning to the scene within the crossroads.
Silvering hair glinted under the sunlight, a high forehead and sharp bones below, and Isobel realized that she knew that face, although she couldn’t place it. Had this been someone who had come through the saloon, someone she had read for the boss? That didn’t seem right, but she couldn’t figure it closer until the woman reached up and tugged at the lapel of her coat, revealing something that also glinted silver in the light.
“Stay where you are,” the road marshal told her calmly, her attention still on the crossroads. “Don’t be a fool; you don’t want to get any closer to this.”
Isobel’s memory for faces placed her then. The dining hall in Patch Junction. The woman had been seated at a table with another woman, the only table without a man at it, and Isobel had noted that. It had also been the first time Isobel had ever seen a woman in trousers. Months later, Isobel understood the appeal when most of your day was spent in the saddle.
“We’ve been tracking the same prey,” she said to the woman, careful to keep her body still; this woman had the look of someone who slept with both eyes open and a hand on her weapons, and only a fool would give her cause to violence.
“Then you’re a fool, girl, and like to be a dead one soon enough.”
Isobel didn’t react to the insult, digging her fingertips into the flesh of the sigil to remind herself of what mattered, keeping her gaze on the marshal, with only a flicker of her eyes sideways to where the magicians still circled each other. “No fool, and not dead yet. Unlike you. How long do you think you can hold them there?”
Isobel knew the answer already; she could feel where the makeshift crossroads was already beginning to fray under their assault. It might have been enough to hold one, but two, driven to an even deeper madness than usual? The marshal was fortunate it had not broken already.
The owl had done them all a good turn, directing her here, and she thanked it silently, hoping it would hear.
“That’s none of your concern,” the marshal replied, “and nothing a posse should be poking at.”
Isobel almost laughed, even as she heard Gabriel ride up behind her, the creak of leather telling her he’d swung down out of the saddle. She lifted a hand to tell him to stop but didn’t look away from the marshal, willing the woman to listen to her.
“We are no posse, following no bounty,” she said, and then turned her hand so that the palm faced the marshal. It was perhaps too far for her to see the mark etched into her palm, but as the woman had shown her sigil, so too would Isobel.
“My name is Isobel. And your trap is fading. Will you allow me to aid you?”
The marshal glared at her suspiciously, and Isobel suddenly understood the expression she’d seen more than once on the boss’s face, when someone took heavy losses at the table but refused to come out and ask what they’d come for, and end the game.
“They are not fugitives under the Law,” Isobel said, and there was more ice in her voice now, irritation surging again. “You have no right to hold them, even if you could.” The Law gave road marshals the right to bring those accused of crimes before a judge, to intervene in arguments between settlers, to negotiate quarrels between natives and settlers if requested to do so, but the Law, like the devil, held no sway over magicians. Only the winds themselves held that, and the winds did not care.
“Complaint has been made against them,” the marshal responded, and Isobel realized?—belatedly, annoyed at herself for the failure?—that the marshal was not alone. Two men stood behind the woman, far enough away that Isobel had not noticed them, faint shadows compared to the flame of the figures in the crossroads.
She narrowed her eyes at them, frowning. “What complaint have they made?”
“What right is it of yours to know?”
“You’ll dance all day if you keep this up,” Gabriel growled, and before she could stop him, he was striding past Isobel, the edge of his coat flapping behind him as he walked, hat in his hand, indignant, heedless of the magicians still pressing their will against the trap that held them.
The marshal did not back down but stared back, left hand dropping to the butt of the pistol at her waist, right hand reaching up to touch the space where her sigil rested.
Isobel had never considered that a marshal’s sigil might be more than identification, and called herself a fool even as her attention was drawn again by the crossroads, the impossible-to-ignore flickers of madness and sorrow growing fiercer as the trap lost power. Whatever Road medicine the marshal had used to construct it, the magicians were perilously close to erasing it—and when they did, they would consume each other. And, without thought, caught in that madness, anyone within reach.
Gabriel must have sensed her desperation, because he wasted no more time.
“Marshal, this is Isobel née Lacoyo Távora, the Devil’s Hand, and she ranks you in this regard. Stand down and let her aid you.”