Another time and place, Isobel would have been tempted to sink down, unpick the threads of the Tree, reweave them into her own understanding, learn how the marshal had crafted a crossroads where none should exist. But now was not the time, and this was never the place.
Instead, she followed the scent of sulphur and bone, catching and pulling at her own work, reweaving the barrier into a net to cast over the two figures rather than the crossroads entire. But the lines were too tangled, the living thrum of the marshal’s sigil and the hollow echo of the crossroads beneath it knotting them up, barely able to contain the cold-fire fury of the souls trapped within.
The magicians, sensing what she meant to do, fought her, pushing her away and tugging her off-balance, bleeding wind and shrieking in silent thunder, searching for a weakness they could seep into and crack her open like a nut.
She flailed under that push and tug, grabbing for the power shimmering and sparking, fingers scratching at the sigil in her palm, demanding the help she had been sworn, that had been sworn to the strength of the Territory.
But rather than the now-familiar dizziness, memories of mornings in the saloon came to her; the softness of how the sun rose, light touching rooftops and sliding into windows where drapes had been drawn aside, the first cry of a cockerel and the stamp-clang of the blacksmith’s hammer, the first slam of a door and the copper rattle of pans in the kitchen, the chiming of the winding clock as the day began. She missed it all with a sudden shocking intensity, her first true understanding of homesickness, and?—trusting instinct—she grabbed hold of it, grabbed hold of the stillness before dawn, the hush before the first waking breath, the stillness of a beloved voice before it spoke and the echo after a farewell, and shoved it all into the warding, binding it with molten threads of silver, even as she gripped the earth and bone with both hands and pulled it tight.
The magicians screamed, the howling of a winter wind crashing over a rooftop, the roar of a spring storm taking down any tree that dared stand in its path. Isobel’s knees buckled, cold sweat coating her skin, but the Tree withstood, and the bones withstood, and slowly, slowly, the wind died down, sulky and sullen. The sigil in her palm flared, cold itch and a burning light, and the figures within the binding went to their knees, then onto their sides, inert, harmless, asleep.
Isobel felt the false crossroads crumble, the original warding dissolve, both the marshal’s and her own, leaving only the new-shaped binding wrapped around two figures, sodden and silent on the grass. Only then did her gaze fall on the objects tied to their belts.
She knew she should stand up, back away, say something to someone, but she couldn’t remember what or who, or how to move at all. Her fingers were clenched tight, her knuckles gone white, but she couldn’t bring herself to undo them until hands covered hers, warmer and familiar, easing the fingers apart, smoothing them straight, thumbs pressing into her palms until something gave, and she collapsed against Gabriel’s chest, his voice a soothing rumble of nonsense, his breath warm against her hair.
He was speaking a language she didn’t know, and she could not tell the words, but they soothed and calmed anyway, until she pushed away, his hands no longer touching her but close, close by in case they were needed.
She took a breath, then another one when that didn’t hurt.
“Get them off them,” she told Gabriel. “Get them off.”
He looked at her, puzzled, and when she gestured weakly with one hand at the bodies, looked again, more closely. Then he was moving, bending by the bodies, cautious, removing the scraps of buffalo hide from their belts, returning to Isobel’s side with them held gently in his hands.
She touched one of the scraps with the edge of her thumb. Her eyes and throat burned as though she’d been standing too close to a blacksmith’s fire. “Burn them and bury them,” she told Gabriel. “Please.”
“I will,” he promised. “Isobel, I will.”
She nodded, witnessing his vow, and he sat back a little, giving her room to breathe.
“Are they—?” The marshal, standing off to the side, the two men grouped behind her. The long-haired one was scowling, looking down at the ground, then off at the trees, at the horses, at anything that wasn’t on two legs, while his companion merely . . . stood there, his hands clasped behind his back. He put more weight on his right side than his left, she noted.
“Alive,” Isobel told the marshal. “They’re . . .” They weren’t asleep, not exactly, but Isobel didn’t have words for what she had done. “They will remain still,” she said. “But that won’t hold for long.” She was already feeling the tug of power that, even sleeping, the magicians contained, pushing against her, looking for a crack to push through. Like holding your breath underwater, trying to resist the stream’s current, only the other way around, air trying to find its way into her lungs.
A few days’ walk, the marshal had said. It would have to be enough. It would have to hold.