Silver on the Road Read online

  It was, Marie would say, time for that to change.

  They made camp soon after that, Gabriel simply reining his gelding to a stop and sliding from the saddle without warning. He stood still for a moment, his eyes closed, then nodded once and set off, walking about ten paces before stopping again, his head tilted to the side as though he were listening for something. Izzy, uncertain, waited for direction.

  “Not much water, but enough for the night,” he said, and she edged closer to see that there was a tiny creek running at his feet where he’d stopped, barely a handspan wide and mostly hidden by the grasses. Her eyes went wide; she’d heard of water-finders before but never knew one. Like April’s plant-sense, it wasn’t a thing you could learn, only came on some folk, some medicine born in ’em.

  She’d never had a use for it, never felt jealous of it, when April coaxed up the herbs. But water-finding . . . She pushed the feeling away. Useless to envy; she wasn’t, she couldn’t.

  She was the boss’s Left Hand. She’d find her own use soon enough.

  “Get your mare settled,” Gabriel told her, “then find a flattish place without too many rocks, and settle it down for sleeping. Check for holes, too. Nothing quite like waking up and discovering you’ve got a gopher in your bedroll.”

  It was easier dismounting this time: her legs didn’t shake or tremble when she tried to move, and lifting her pack didn’t make her spine cry in agony.

  Uvnee seemed delighted to have the saddle off, leaning into Izzy while she brushed away the worst of the sweat from her hide, then meandering away to dip her muzzle into the creek alongside the mule.

  Suddenly craving cooler water, too, Izzy moved slightly upstream of them and refilled her own canteen and the tin flask Gabriel had given her earlier.

  Gabriel came around after they’d all finished with the creek, and wrapped a series of ropes around Uvnee’s left legs, leaving just enough slack between that it didn’t tangle. “Hobbles,” he said, before she could even ask. “She can walk just fine, see?” And he patted Uvnee on the haunch; the mare ignored him, placidly pulling at the grass. “Just means she can’t run off if they get spooked. I trust Steady, he’s well-named, that one, and the mule knows better than to wander off, but your girl’s still got to prove herself. And having to track down your horse in the morning might be one way to gain experience, but it’s not one I recommend.”

  Izzy studied the way Uvnee moved, making sure that the mare wasn’t bothered by the hobbles, then nodded reluctant agreement. Lacking a stall or corral, it seemed reasonable and still gave the mare room to defend herself against snakes or predators if need be.

  “There’s enough grass here, but we won’t always have good forage. Once they’re rested, give ’em some grain, too,” he said. “I’ll show you how much.”

  The grain was in one of the packs slung over the mule’s backside. It looked at her curiously as she unloaded it but, other than an eye-twitch, didn’t seem overly worried about when it would be fed. The pack was heavy but no larger than her saddlebag, and she frowned at it, wondering how it could contain enough grain for the entire trip. Maybe they would refill it when they reached the next town? But Gabriel had said . . .

  She reached a hand in and felt the soft, scratchy pellets against her skin. The bag seemed deeper inside than it did out, and she pulled her hand out again and frowned at it, as though something might have changed while it was out of her sight.

  If Gabriel wasn’t worried about running out of grain, she decided, then neither would she.

  Once she’d chosen a reasonably flat patch of ground and laid her bedroll down, Izzy gave the animals a handful of the feed each, then wandered over to see what Gabriel was doing. He had cleared a small space of grasses, baring the soil underneath, and was knelt down next to it, laying fist-sized rocks in a small circle. “Has to be a small fire tonight,” he said. “These grasses won’t burn quick, but they’ll smoke so badly, we wouldn’t get any sleep after that.” He placed a small brown object the size of his fist at the center of the circle.

  “Is that . . .” Izzy reached out to touch it, then drew her hand back, hesitating.

  “It’s all right; you can touch it now.”

  The coalstone was rough to the touch and slightly chilled. She rubbed her fingertips together, then looked at him. “How do you light it?”

  He reached his own hand out, placing his palm on the coalstone, and pressed. “Like that.”

  When he drew his hand away, the coalstone was a pale grey, and within seconds, tiny yellow and red flames licked over its surface.

  “Useful for when there’s no fuel to burn,” Gabriel said. “Trail tricks, not the sort of thing you needed in Flood, I suspect.”

  “No.” She cocked her head to the side, still watching the flames but thinking back. “Our blacksmith got coal in, every month; boss made sure of that. Ree said wood made the best bread, but mostly we just used cow chips.” She grimaced at the memory, having spent too many hours when younger collecting the dung for drying, and Gabriel laughed.

  “Coalstone won’t burn particularly hot, but it’s handy. Chips are better for cookfires; we can stop to gather some, if you prefer. . . .”

  “No, no, that’s quite all right,” she said hastily, embarrassed when he grinned at her.

  “And while dinner boils,” he said, arranging a triangular stand and hanging a pot over the flame, “we’ll see how well you do know how to handle a weapon.”

  The answer, Izzy quickly learned, was “not well.” Gabriel’s gun was lighter and longer in the barrel than the blunderbuss she’d learned to shoot, and only added to the aching of her arms and back until holding it steady proved impossible from the shaking of her muscles. He finally took pity on her, taking the carbine away and telling her to draw the longer blade sheathed at her saddle instead.

  A few passes with that, Gabriel’s arm wrapped in his long coat for protection, had him nodding thoughtfully. “We’ll work on it. For now, time to eat.”

  The fire might not burn as hot, but it warmed the beans and pork hock well enough. Izzy lay down on her bedroll that night with her body aching but her belly full.

  The flickering glow of the fire lingered to her left, her mentor a lightly snoring lump a few yards away, the horses quiet shadows a little beyond that. Overhead, the sky was a glittering scatter of stars, the moon full and round. An owl hooted, and insects chattered close to her ear, and suddenly it became too much, the vastness and strangeness and new experiences overwhelming her. She pulled the blanket over her head and the world went away, until suddenly Gabriel was shaking her shoulder and it was morning.

  Izzy’s first campfire breakfast was johncakes and lard, served up on thin, worn tin plates, and washed down with bitter coffee that left her teeth fuzzy and her tongue dry but her mind clear.

  “It’s horrible stuff,” Gabriel admitted, “but riders can’t be choosers. And after a while, you get used to it.”

  She doubted that but didn’t say so.

  They scraped the plates and dumped the coffee, and repacked, then she watched while Gabriel poured a double handful of dried beans into one of the refilled canteens and hooked it to the mule’s pack, snug against the animal’s side. That was how they’d had beans ready to cook the night before, she realized: soaking in water all day as they rode, then he’d poured both beans and water into the pot and added the dried hock.

  “Pork, beans, and hardtack,” Gabriel said, seeing her watching. “It’s not exciting, but it’s better than thinking you’ll be able to hunt along the way, and then starving.”

  Izzy had never hunted for anything other than prairie hen eggs, but nodded anyway. A rabbit or two added to the beans would be even better, and she was reasonable sure she’d be able to catch a coney, even if Gabriel didn’t think she could hit the broad side of a buffalo standing right next to her.

  They saddled up after
that, still heading southwest by the sun. The ground was uneven here, the dirt road no longer smooth but studded with rocks, the grasses on either side still shading from winter brown to the pale green of new growth. The occasional narrow creek cut wedges in the turf, deep and narrow, but never seemed to cross the road. Or the road never crossed them; Izzy couldn’t be sure which was true.

  Occasionally, something would rustle the grass, and once Gabriel pointed out a small grouping of wild horses in the distance, black-and-white patchwork hide and flying tails. Her eye tracked them, something leaping in her chest—different from the way the Reapers or buffalo made her feel: softer, more like comfort than fear. Buzzards circled occasionally, and blue-winged swallows swung in dizzy­ing swoops through the air around them, their faint calls the only sound other than the wind and the steady clop of hooves, and those things too brought comfort. Although she couldn’t quite say why.

  The landscape itself remained unchanging, endless sway of grass and occasional rock crops, but Izzy remembered her vow to pay attention, to read everything she could, and practiced on what she had. By the afternoon of the third day after leaving Flood, Izzy felt she had an understanding of her mare, the way Uvnee would spook at the too-close swoop of a swallow but not even blink when a colony of sod dogs scolded them for riding too near their burrow, and of the mule, who didn’t care about anything except solid footing and his next meal, and was happiest when jowl to shoulder with one of the horses.

  Gabriel was a harder read, though even the boss would admit that it was difficult to learn a man by the set of his shoulders and a hat pulled down low over his brow. She’d already known he had a pleasing charm, and a gentle kindness inside. But she knew more now. When he dropped one shoulder, he was about to show her something, or test her. When he shifted to his left, he’d go quiet for a while and didn’t want to be disturbed. And as he went to the evening chores with quiet competence, and showed her how to load and unload his carbine with quiet, calm instruction, she got the feeling that he was a deep man, the charmer she’d met in the saloon only the surface paint.

  He was born to the Territory—she knew that from what he’d said—and had left for a while to study in the United States and then come back. He’d been on the road a while, didn’t seem to have a sweetheart or any place he called home particularly, and he was patient as a rock when it came to teaching.

  And sometimes she’d wake midway through the night, and he’d be sitting there, his back against his pack, not doing anything but staring out into the darkness. She never spoke, even though she knew he knew she was awake. Whatever coiled in him, violence or sorrow, he didn’t care to share it, and she’d respect that.

  The morning of the sixth day since they’d left Flood, the first he’d allowed Izzy to set the coalstone and make johncakes she didn’t burn too badly, the landscape changed again. Izzy noticed less green and more brown, the grasses growing shorter, low brush hugging the flat, featureless ground in sparse patches over bare rock. She couldn’t imagine anything growing here, anyone living here, and said so.

  “No?” Gabriel said, clearly amused. She frowned at him, shifting her weight in the saddle from one buttock to the other almost automatically, then let her gaze rest on the horizon, the way he’d taught her, and slowly dragged her eyes back, not looking for anything in particular until a movement or odd shape caught her attention. There was the occasional jagged spar of stone rising out of the grass, higher than a man was tall and strangely ominous in their solitude. The grass swayed in places despite the lack of breeze to move them: invisible birds or small animals creeping along, hiding from predators, she supposed. So, there was that much life here, and the flash of something moving further distant, a jack or grouse maybe, but nothing that would make him say—oh.

  “Someone was there,” she said, pointing at something in the distance. The barely visible framework was old, a rounded skeleton bleached and broken down by the wind, but obviously manmade. “A hunting camp?”

  “Maybe a month ago,” Gabriel said. “Niukonska, probably. There’s not enough water to support a long-term camp here; they were just passing through, maybe hunting or observing some ceremony.”

  But people did live here. She took the rebuke silently, her jaw clenching slightly. She’d known better, she had. The native tribes, los nativos do país, Ree called them; they farmed, some of them, and hunted, and didn’t settle in towns the way whites did but went where they would and didn’t pay much attention to Law or the devil unless they chose to.

  Suddenly, the empty land around them seemed less empty, and Izzy wasn’t sure if that were a good thing or not.

  They rode closer, past the bleached, bent sticks that had once stretched a hide between their ribs, and she saw two small charred circles where fires had been built, but nothing else left behind.

  Gabriel broke the silence again. “Your boss teach you anything about the tribal alliances?”

  “A little.” She considered how very little that had been. “He had me study a map once. Listed all the tribes, as far as we knew ’em, and who they traded with, who they were warring with. Boss said it had to be updated all the time because they’d move, change who they were friendly with, who they weren’t. It’s not like Spain, where they have one border and keep to it.”

  “Nations are different creatures,” Gabriel said. “They think about land different. They think about war different, too. That’s a thing your boss has been able to keep from the Territory so far.”

  He was sad . . . no, he was angry when he said that, and she knew suddenly that he’d been in a war maybe, or been close to one, close enough for it to hurt. But he was too young to be part of the Americans’ rebellion, wasn’t he? Some folk aged differently, but he didn’t seem that old.

  And it was none of her need-knowing. Stop poking, she told herself, hearing Marie’s tone in her thoughts. You read what you need to know and you leave the rest alone. That’s only polite.

  Izzy shifted in her saddle, taking a sip of water from her canteen and letting it slide down her throat. The road had widened enough there that they could ride abreast, the mule still plodding along behind as though it didn’t matter where or what, so long as it didn’t have to lift its head. Izzy felt sympathy; the sore tenderness of those first few days had faded into an ache every bone in her body felt, from heels to elbows, and sweat had run and dried and run again under her clothing. She would have taken off her hat to let the breeze touch her scalp, except there was no breeze to be found. How was it so warm, so early in the season?

  “Doesn’t it rain here?” The sky was such a pale blue, it was nearly white, the only clouds high and loose-formed, like a breath would make them disappear, and even the air smelled dry and dusty.

  “Not so much as where you’re from, or up in the mountains proper, but it does.” He looked around, and she saw that expression on his face, a quiet sort of concentration, like he was listening to something she couldn’t hear. “Rains are late this year; when it comes, everything will bloom all at once. It’s . . . impressive.”

  Izzy tried to imagine the ground around her suddenly turning green, maybe with flowers, the occasional cottonwood’s bare twisted branches hidden under green leaves. And then she thought about the mountains, the long ridge called Mother’s Knife, where the Territory ended. Across those distant peaks was Nueva España, where her parents had maybe come from, and maybe where they’d gone back to. She tried to imagine it, tried to imagine mountains, and on the other side, towns and cities filled with people who’d come from somewhere even farther away, and failed utterly.

  Her distraction was broken by an itch at the back of her neck, as though something crawled across the fine hairs under her braid, but when she reached back to brush it away, there was nothing there. Maybe a spider’d hidden in her collar, she thought, and shuddered, brushing the back of her neck again for good measure.

  “Will we go up into the Knife?�
�� she asked.

  “No.” He hesitated. “We’ll get closer, though. Despite your boss picking the route, there are some folk I need to see. There are a few settlements over the ridge, good places to touch ground and talk to people.”

  The sudden urge to talk to people, utter strangers, caught Izzy by surprise. She wasn’t normally much for talking, but she supposed a week with only one person—and three beasts—for company could make even the most sullen man a chatterbox.

  And meeting people, learning who was out in the Territory, learning their needs, was what she’d been sent here to learn, to do, like Marie did for the folk who came to Flood. At least . . . she thought it was.

  She shifted in her saddle again, rising in the stirrups to stretch her legs slightly, then extending her arms one at a time to work the ache from her back. Uvnee twitched one ear but otherwise ignored her rider’s behavior, having decided it did not indicate a threat about to eat them both.

  She let Uvnee fall behind slightly as they wound their way past a series of those tall, jagged rocks, slowing to look more closely at the way the rock was layered and cracked like sugar candy. She could have reached out and touched one as they passed, but instead kept her fingers wrapped around the leather of the reins, her free hand resting on the fabric of her skirt. She looked away from the ridge of rock, focusing instead on the now-familiar set of Gabriel’s shoulders in front of her, his dun coat nearly matching the dust Steady’s hooves were kicking up. Her boots were coated in the same dust, her hat no longer brightly new, if not as battered as Gabriel’s own, her dark braid stiff with sweat no matter how many times she brushed it each night.

  She remembered that last night in Flood and wondered, if she looked in a mirror now, who would she see?

  The back of her neck itched again, but she ignored it. There was no insect, no cloth fluttering there; it was only nerves, and she would not let nerves control her. She would go where she was sent, and speak to the people she met, and learn their names, their problems. Be the boss’s eyes and ears and his voice, just the way he’d told her to be. She could do that. She’d been frightened the day she first served drinks, too, and that had turned out to be easy . . .