Red Waters Rising

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  MAP OF THE DEVIL’S WEST

  PART ONE

  A PROPER VAGABOND

  PART TWO

  WALLS AND FRONTS

  PART THREE

  DEEPER DOWN

  PART FOUR

  AGREEMENTS

  PART FIVE

  RED WATERS RISING

  PART SIX

  THE DEVIL’S HAND

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  They say

  after

  there is silence.

  They are wrong

  i hear you in everything.

  AARON L. GILMAN

  1933–2016

  PART ONE

  A PROPER VAGABOND

  ONE

  Isobel had traveled from the low plains to the high reaches of the Mother’s Knife, through storm and sun and snow, but the past few days had found her limit. “It’s winter,” she said, not for the first time. “Why is it still so warm?”

  “Welcome to the southlands,” Calico Zac said with a shrug. “You get used to it.” Both Isobel and Gabriel gave him a side-eye at that, and he laughed.

  They had met up with the native Rider a week earlier, traveling through Nanatsoho lands. He had proven a fascinating companion, especially for two Riders well and truly sick of each others’s stories, but spoke little of himself, saying only that he’d been gone from home for some time, and offering to keep them company along the Road if they were heading in the same direction.

  They had been. Although Isobel was having deep second thoughts about Gabriel’s insistence that the winter months would best be spent traveling the southern swing of the Territory, if it was all like this.

  The morning sun dappled through still-green branches overhead, the Road stretching clear and flat ahead of them, following the slight curve of the stream that Zac said would lead them to their destination. But despite the shade, the air was thick and heavy with moisture, making the simple act of breathing exhausting and leaving Isobel with the constant urge to scrape at her skin. She knew it had not in fact begun growing moss to match the sides of the trees bunched up alongside the road, but knowing that and believing it were two vastly different things.

  Gabriel made a rueful noise as he mopped the sweat from his brow before tugging his hat back down over his forehead. “He’s right, Iz. You will get used to it. Eventually. And summer’s worse.”

  Isobel glared at them both then, using the edge of her own kerchief to wipe the sweat gathering along her hairline. It didn’t help; within minutes, her face was again lightly coated, matching the wetness under her blouse and settling around her waist. Her hat hung from its cord down the back of her neck, the weight of its brown felt too much to bear, even if it meant she had to squint in the occasional spars of bright sunlight coming between the trees.

  She glanced at the men riding on either side of her. Gabriel had shed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, but Calico Zac seemed utterly unaffected, save for a faint sheen of sweat on his face. Their horses, and the mule following behind, seemed likewise unaffected, their tails swishing lazily at the insects but otherwise showing no signs of distress. She hated them, just a little, just then.

  Still, it could have been much worse without their companion to show them what leaves, rubbed on the skin, could dissuade the worst of the insects, and how to tie their bedrolls off the ground at night to catch even the faintest breeze.

  Isobel had spent the first sixteen years of her life in the high plains, where storms left the air crisp and clear, and summer heat could be avoided until night fell and things cooled again. Even in the months she’d been on the Road, they’d traveled up into the mountains, where the high summer sun might pink her skin, but never felt particularly warm. She felt as though she’d passed into another world. Maybe the one folk said the devil came from, infernally hot and filled with suffering. Damp suffering.

  “We’ll keep the southland for last,” she muttered, mocking Gabriel’s deeper voice. “ ‘Avoid the snows, you’ll see enough in your time, no need to rush it.’ You didn’t say anything about the air pretending to be water, or the insects.”

  He ducked his head just enough that she knew he was hiding a grin. “Oh, now, they’re not so bad . . .”

  “There are beetles. Everywhere.” Specifically, large back beetles in her clothing when she woke up in the morning, and a massive brown spider in the grain she’d been cooking for breakfast.

  She had not screamed, but she might have used some words that might have gotten her ears boxed, back home.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Calico Zac said again, just as a brightly colored darner swooped and fluttered in front of her, seeming to alight between Uvnee’s ears before shooting off again.

  Isobel scowled down at her hands, staring at the ragged edges of her nails, the sun-darkened skin and the dirt ingrained into the leather of Uvnee’s reins, then glanced sideways and saw that Gabriel was smiling, his gaze following the darner as well.

  It was the first time she’d seen him smile in days, she realized suddenly. That particular smile, the one that wasn’t about something funny, but a good thought, that made him happy. They’d ridden together long enough that she could tell the difference, and she wondered why—and when—that smile had become rare.

  She looked up to see more darners, diving singly and in pairs, skimming low before disappearing into the foliage. Darners were as pretty as butterflies, maybe even more so, Isobel had to admit. And didn’t bite or sting.

  “All right,” she admitted, letting the reins go slack on Uvnee’s neck long enough to cross her arms and direct a glare at Zac. “Maybe there’s something to be said for this part of the Territory, too. Still doesn’t make up for finding a widder in my boot this morning.”

  The two men glanced at her, but didn’t respond, and she shifted in her saddle, terribly aware of the weight of her skirts and the close fit of her boots. She’d rolled down her stockings the day before, choosing one discomfort over another, but the heat still prickled on her skin, damp and uncomfortable. Uvnee snorted, and she eased on the reins, aware she was holding too tight and the mare was becoming uneasy. “Sorry, girl,” she said. “I’m just . . .”

  “The word you’re looking for,” Gabriel said, “is ‘cranky.’ ”

  She couldn’t deny it. Nor could she avoid the reason for it, far more than the too-damp air or the increase in biting insects.

  They weren’t only heading south. They were heading toward a place called Red Stick. A city.

  Isobel had never been in a city before. She couldn’t quite imagine it, no matter how many times she’d asked Gabriel, and now Zac, to describe it to her. That many pe
ople, all in one place . . .

  With all that had been happening in the past few months they were on the Road, all the things they’d dealt with, it was sometimes easy to forget that she was riding for a reason. This was her mentorship ride: She was the Devil’s Left Hand, the physical form of his judgment and protection, and the people of the Territory needed to know her—and she them. She did not have the freedom to say where she might go or where she might stay; she went where she was needed, same as any of the devil’s tools.

  And the southernmost corner of the Territory was important. The Mother’s Knife held the silver mines and kept the Spaniards from invading in force from the west, but they were inhospitable, even for the native tribes; few people lived there year round. The plains were kinder, but the largest town they’d visited had held no more than a few thousand souls, and more often they saw farm-groupings, two or three families gathering together for protection and company without quite forming a town.

  The southern edge of the Territory was different.

  Isobel unhooked her canteen, taking a mouthful of the warm, flat water, and thought glumly of frost-covered fields and the snap of snow in the air. Not that she wanted particularly to be caught in a blizzard or even wake up covered in overnight snow—a thing that had happened once, which was once too often for her—but those options seemed more pleasurable than this.

  She took another mouthful of water, forcing it down her throat. The mule, who had been following behind at a sluggishly resigned pace ever since the native and his dun pony had joined them, came up alongside and nipped at her sleeve.

  “You want some water, boy?” she asked, and squirted a little onto its muzzle. Long ears flicked at her, and he pushed his muzzle against her arm before moving off, his dusty sides rippling with a shudder. She would have to give him extra attention when they made camp, she decided; he was as sulky as a small child.

  “Zac. Tell me more about your people,” Gabriel said. “You said your tribe was small?”

  “Small, and likely gone by now,” the other man admitted, the saddle under him creaking as he shifted, and Isobel thought that he was uncomfortable with the question. “We did not have enough to offer other tribes to join with us, and so my cousins made families elsewhere.”

  “And you took to the Road.”

  “And I took to the Road,” he agreed. “And now I return.”

  Neither Gabriel nor Isobel pressed further. A man’s—or woman’s—past was their own.

  Before they could change the subject, the horses walked around a thick clump of thick-trunked trees whose branches spread out like something with far too many arms, and the sparse trail they had been on was crossed by a much wider road, ruts in the packed-down dirt indicating that wagons had passed along here often enough to leave wear.

  Isobel exhaled, pressing down through her heels, letting her awareness sink slowly into the deep, rich soil beneath her, the way Gabriel had taught her. Something pulsed in response, the feel of it as strong and familiar as Uvnee’s hoofbeats.

  “Not so much a greenie anymore,” Gabriel said, watching her with an odd smile. “Stretching for the Road like a proper vagabond.”

  The Road: not a single road but the interconnected trails and paths, the ever-running medicine that ran the length and width of the Territory, looping and turning on itself, power constant and free—save where it bottled up at a crossroads. A Rider could never be lost, so long as they could feel the Road beneath them.

  But with the Road came crossroads.

  Calico Zac reached into his pocket, as though searching for something, but Gabriel put a hand out to halt him. “No need,” he said, and nodded at Isobel.

  A wise Rider always checked the way with silver. Crossroads caught power, and even a sparsely traveled one such as this could hold danger. Silver warned, and cleared. It wasn’t foolproof, but if you were not a fool, it was safe enough.

  But Gabriel called her the devil’s own silver for a reason.

  She dropped from the saddle, feeling the ache in her hips and knees as she did so, the weight of her skirt almost surprising, after so many hours in the saddle. The moment her boots touched dirt, the feeling of the Road ahead of them intensified, and she let herself reach out, not deep but along the surface, half-braced for the tingle of something pooling within the crossroads.

  “It’s clean,” she said, pushing down the faint feeling of disappointment. “A marshal must have been by recently to clear it out.” That was what marshals did; they kept the Road clear and safe, as well as sorting any rumblings of trouble or mischance off the roads.

  “Or a magician,” Gabriel said. “Can you tell?”

  She shook her head. “It’s just clean. No trace of anything left.”

  Clean but not empty, not the way the northern hills had been, where magicians had done such damage. She tried not to think of those places; she had left them warded, but it would take the devil himself riding out to put them to rights, she thought, if even he could.

  “Then back up in the saddle,” Gabriel said, “and let’s move on. Zac, how much farther until we reach the limits of your peoples’ lands?”

  “Not far, I think.” He shrugged when they both looked at him. “It’s been many years. Landmarks change. Look for marked posts. That will tell us who claims an area.”

  “Individual tribes, not the confederation of tribes as a whole?” Gabriel sounded fascinated, so Isobel tried to pay attention.

  “The confederation is, how you say it, política? Politics. Boundaries are personal.”

  “That’s not . . .ow can that be? Borders are inherently political . . .” Gabriel shook his head, kneeing his gelding closer to argue with Zac. Isobel left them to it, letting them lead the way as she traced the Road forward and back, as far as she could reach before the feeling faded into dusty nothingness.

  The Mudwater should run just a few days southwest of them, she thought, remembering the map Gabriel had laid out the last night they’d slept under a roof, tracing the path they’d come and the route they’d take. The Mudwater, where the Boss had first stood, so long ago, and told conquistadors, ‘Go no farther.’ Although, knowing the boss, Isobel thought he’d used rougher words than that. . . .

  To the east of the river lay the United States. Farther south, she knew, Spain claimed both the spread hand of the delta itself and the waterways beyond, demanding a high price for any who tried to sail them. And both nations eyed the Territory like it was their birthright, sticking fingers to test the boss’s resolve.

  She had slapped several of those fingers back herself but never once seen the Mudwater itself. Gabriel had taken them north, and then west, not south or east. Not until now.

  Not until she was ready, she supposed. And still, he told her nothing of what to expect.

  Gabriel was her mentor, her teacher, as well as a friend. But she’d learned that he had too much in common with the boss in that they both seemed to think that teaching her to swim meant tossing her into the creek so she could figure out how not to drown.

  But Zac was with them now. He was neither teacher nor guardian but a fellow Rider. He might give her a different answer.

  “You grew up here,” she said, into a moment when neither of them were speaking. “Tell me about Red Stick.”

  She had difficulty reading natives as easily as settlers; they had different expressions, different tells, the boss called them, and a few days’ riding together was not enough to learn his particulars, but it seemed almost as though he hesitated before giving a sideways shrug.

  “I’m not sure what much more I can speak to. As I said—”

  “It’s been a long time since you were home, I know. So, what was it like then?”

  “Busy. It was always busy. Boats using the Mudwater stop there to sell and buy, then go back up- or cross-river, back and forth. There are always strangers coming and going.”

  “That means if something’s happening, Red Stick knows it first,” Gabriel added, and Zac made a hand
gesture of agreement. “Gossip is one of the things bought and sold.”

  Isobel rested her hand on Uvnee’s neck, feeling the rough warmth of the mare’s coat, the coarse, scratchy hairs of her mane passing over the tops of her fingers. Traveling by boat sounded terrifying; she’d never seen anything larger than a trapper’s dugout, never even stepped in one of those. The Americans claimed the river as theirs. The boss just laughed and said they could try to hold it, for all the good it would do them. The Mudwater was its own.

  “Who do they trade with cross-river?” They had seen a few farmholdings as they traveled but nothing that might interest traders, she thought.

  “There’s an American fortification just on the other side, and of course there’s Liberdad.”

  Isobel nodded, feeling something tighten in her gut. Those were two very good reasons for her to become familiar with this area: any place where American military gathered could become a problem at any time, and Liberdad could be the spark that lit that trouble.

  Back home, Iktan told stories about Liberdad, although she didn’t believe he had ever been there. Beholden to no one, the city rested between a bend in the Mudwater and a massive lake that was fed by the sea itself, and was home to pirates, freebooters, and whatever navy paid them enough for berthing—Spanish, American, even the English and French. And once through their gates, the entire Mudwater—and the Territory’s less-defended border—could be laid open.

  The boss stepped carefully around Liberdad, and they paid him the same respect. She had never questioned the stability of that—until now.

  The thought was uncomfortable. Too many of her thoughts were uncomfortable these days. She pushed it down with the others and reached back to pull her hat up, settling it firmly on her head as though to protect her from further distractions. “But what is it like?”