An Inheritance of Ashes Read online

  I looked down across the soft, gray fields, to the thick green of the changeable river that cradled us in its hand. Between them the cherry trees flung their branches stark against the sunset and the goats lay in their paddock, curled around each other to sleep. You could see every speck of Hoffmann land from this spot; on a clear night, you could see all the way to the stars. You could see the half-full woodpile; you could see the broken wagon wheel, sunk in mud, and one stranger, strong and grateful just for shelter—the kind who would just move on to the next town if Roadstead Farm blew away into dust.

  If the man in front of me could help this farm work right, things might be good between Marthe and me again—even if he was two inches too tall to be Thom. And then it wouldn’t matter if Marthe didn’t understand me, because I’d never let her down again.

  “You understand we can’t pay you,” I said.

  “Room and board is all I’d ask.”

  “Right, then.” I spun on my heel and stepped into the kitchen.

  “I thought I told you to stay outside,” Marthe snapped. She was baking bread after all: the air was sweet and dusty with yeast, and the dough sounded, slap-thump, against her good block table. You didn’t tell me anything, I thought at her, smart enough, at least this time, not to say it aloud. We’d lived in the same house for sixteen years. She hadn’t had to tell me to not dare cross this doorstep until she invited me back in.

  My sister turned, and her brown hair slid out of its messy twist. Marthe was pretty, when she wasn’t coiled with anger. And Marthe had been throwing grown men off our property since before I could walk. I bit down on a river of resentment, of curdled love. “There’s a man wanting hire.”

  “Barley’s done,” she said, as if I hadn’t noticed.

  “He’s a veteran,” I added, and watched her arms stutter: slap-trip-thump.

  She untangled her fingers from the dough and peered out the kitchen window. “Not much to look at.” I winced. It was true: tall or not, he was thin to the ribs, a scarecrow with a beard like spilled ink and a nose that had definitely been broken.

  “He said,” I added reluctantly, “he’s not passed anyone in weeks.”

  Marthe’s hand grasped air; landed on the stewpot spoon. “What are you saying?”

  I bit my lip. My sister was infuriating, condescending, endlessly moody, but—there were our fights and then there was this. “I want to take him on,” I said, and waited for the storm to break.

  Her rounded cheeks paled; her mouth set into a thin, hard line. “Why?” she said finally, too controlled by far.

  “For the poultry barn.” I swallowed. “With someone else around I could fix it and start the malting, and not worry about the woodpile or cleaning the goat pen or the fields, and then I could even get to dry-docking the boat and all the chores in town—”

  The words ran out. Marthe stared at me with a compressed hurt that was worse than any rage. We’d lived in the same house for sixteen years. She could hear what I really meant: Because I’m not strong enough to keep this farm or this family alive while we pretend Thom’s coming home.

  “I thought it might be good,” I whispered, “with the baby coming.”

  Marthe’s hand drifted to her belly, dusting the old apron with flour. Unspoken words flitted across her face: linens, lifetimes, rations of small brown eggs, and it all added up to no, no, no.

  “I know we can’t pay him,” I said quickly. “He just wants a place to be overwinter. Marthe, I have to. He’s barely got boots.”

  “Charity, then?” she said, surprised: a flicker of the sister I knew—who saw me, who cared about me. Who still, sometimes, smiled.

  It’s just he said, I thought wonderingly, that I was kind. “It’d get us through the winter,” I said. “And I’d want someone to, if it was—”

  Marthe threw the wooden spoon clean across the kitchen. It clattered against the crockery shelf, smacked a blue clay mug, and rattled, dishes ringing, to the floor. The mug wobbled. I didn’t dare steady it. Marthe’s damp hair curtained down her cheek, over sheer, gutshot pain.

  I swallowed.

  Marthe stared at the spoon. Her right hand worked, and then she scrubbed it across her face as if she was very tired. “Put a pallet in the old smokehouse. At least with the stove he won’t freeze,” she said, and bowed her head over the squashed bread.

  “All right,” I whispered, through the sudden roar of my own heartbeat. I shoved shaking hands into my pockets and went back outside.

  The soldier stood at attention five feet off the porch, as wary of the line between the house’s shadow and the sun as I was of Marthe’s kitchen doorway. He didn’t even twitch: better at keeping a plain face, plain hands than I would ever be.

  “You’re to have a pallet in the smokehouse,” I forced out. In a soot-stained junkyard we’d meant to clean out for six years. “My sister will give you spare linens.” My hands were still trembling. I’d won the argument, but Marthe’s grief, Marthe’s frustration—

  This didn’t feel like winning.

  “It’s her farm?”

  “Ours.” Papa’s snarl peaked, banked, and faded. “Our father willed it to the both of us.”

  If he was surprised, he feigned well enough; he nodded and shouldered his brown leather pack. “Thank you, miss.”

  “It’s Hallie,” I said. “My sister’s Marthe. From Roadstead Farm, in the lakelands.”

  “Heron,” he offered, and tilted his head with something finer, deeper than lakeland manners.

  “Heron, from the war,” I said bitterly.

  His lips pressed shut for a moment. “From the war,” he agreed.

  “So,” I asked, “did you see it?”

  No reason to say what it was. The war was won when John Balsam, a man simple and small, lifted his dagger and cut out the Wicked God Southward’s dark heart. Tyler Blakely had carried the tale home three weeks past midsummer, limping on a leg once hale and thick, his eyes blasted pale with the sight of it. We’d already realized a change, though, here on the river: Birds not known on the riverbanks since Opa’s generation washed up dead and open-mouthed each sunrise. The stars rumbled nightly, too low and regular for thunder. Greta Chaudhry’s hives failed, and Berkhardt Mason’s orchards. By the time the Twisted Things staggered, wounded, through our fields, we couldn’t tell if the war was won or lost. Half our crops had burned at the touch of their acrid wings: a whole winter’s provisions gone up in noise and smoke. We shoveled their bodies into bonfires by night and prayed, among the cinders, for news.

  We didn’t know what it meant, then. Those three weeks, we held our breaths.

  “I didn’t see it,” my new hired man said softly, and closed his hand around his satchel strap. “I turned my face away.”

  I opened my mouth. Shut it. I hadn’t expected a real answer, and now I didn’t know what to say. Not one lakelands man who went to battle with the Wicked God Southward would speak a word about how he fell, but they all saw it. You could tell it from their eyes: newly guarded, and dark as pits. They all saw.

  The stranger’s own eyes had abruptly lost their kindness. They shuttered, chilly as river ice. They made me feel young, and ignorant, and small.

  “I’ll show you where you’re bunking,” I said, unsettled, and wrapped my fingers in the dusty flannel of my shirtsleeve. There was more to a farm than a kindly face, and you still didn’t shake with hired men.

  two

  HE CHOPPED WOOD FOR A WEEK. HE SAID PLEASE, AND thank you, and fixed our rotting fences.

  No one shouted for seven days, but I never stopped expecting it: when thunder kicked me awake on the eighth day, it almost felt like coming home.

  My bedroom window clattered in its frame, loud enough to scruff me out of sleep. Half awake, I caught my breath and held it; closed my eyes tighter and listened for the inevitable nightmare steps. If I pretended to sleep, maybe it would be all right: maybe his furious muttered swears, his heavy boots would pass my closed door by—

  I
swallowed hard. I was sixteen, not six, and my father was dead.

  A bird called, harsh and frightened, and I dared open my eyes. Dawn light pried through my thick-paned window. The sky above it was as blue and fine as my faded bedroom walls. The thunder rattled weaker, wet leaves on glass. My heart wouldn’t stop its frightened stutter. “He’s dead,” I muttered sternly, padded across the green rag rug and opened the window.

  The yard stretched before me, brown and empty; the air smelled of woodsmoke and frost. I shoved my head into the chilly dawn outside, and the bare branches of trees, the barns, the gray river unscrolled sleepily into the sky. From below, from the leaf-clogged gutters, something let out a whimpered cheep. I reached down—

  —and a small shape exploded in a fury of wings.

  I shrieked.

  It staggered and shrieked right back at me, a harsh, uncertain caw. Battered brown wings struggled for purchase on the sill; tiny claws scrabbled closer. I grabbed the window handles and jerked them down between us. The thin cry muffled as wood and glass slammed down—and then it rose to a scream. A dark smear fluttered between the thick panes and the white sill: the wing. It was nothing more than a stunned bird, and I’d just crushed its wing.

  “Oh,” I breathed, and brushed river stones and hair clips messily off the sill. Bile stung my throat: You’ve killed it. It can’t even fight back. I shoved the window upward fast, hands clutched under the bottom frame.

  The wing slapped my hand so hard that everything stopped.

  “Ow!” I cradled the hand close to my chest. Furious, ragged squawks trailed me back into the bedroom. “Sorry,” I whispered over and over, an exhausted litany of sorry that beat in time with my throbbing hand. The wing had left a red spot, as red as a bug-bite burn. I brushed it with idle fingernails.

  They caught on something, hard.

  The thinnest edge of a cobweb was growing out of my left hand. It seared my window frame brown where it stuck, and the line it burned led straight to the bird’s desperate talons. I’d been too rattled, too guilty to see it: those eight black sparrow-nails were sticky-coated with web.

  It wasn’t a bird. It was a Twisted Thing—one of the Wicked God Southward’s pet monsters.

  “Not possible,” I whispered to myself, and Papa’s mocking ghost sneered not possible back. We were supposed to have seen the last of them. John Balsam, by magic, skill, or cunning, had killed the Wicked God and the world had ripped itself shut again; we’d burned the dead Twisted Things that had fallen from the sky. We’d grieved our tomatoes, our chicken hutches, our fields, and watched the real birds migrate south with the weather, into the newly gap-toothed constellations. The Twisted Things were supposed to be over, just like the Wicked God who made them. Just like the war.

  The burn on my hand throbbed, red as a stove coal and condescending as Papa could ever be: Well, explain this, then. I scrubbed it hard on the paisley curtain. Outside, a wisp of sour black smoke rose from the Twisted Thing’s acid feathers. It’ll burn down the house, I thought, sharp as snow, and slammed the window down on its body—three terrible bangs.

  The thick bottom pane of my window misted and cracked. The brown wing flopped uselessly against the frame, and there was silence.

  I unclenched my teeth and peeked through the clouded pane.

  The Twisted Thing lay crumpled against the sill, its tiny chest wreathed in smoke. It was impossible to mistake for anything real now: Its hooked black beak threw sparks against the old glass; its body stank of ash and dead violets. Four eyes stared sightless back at me, spider-round and white, nestled in feathers that wilted at the very touch of air. It’s dying, I realized, with a pang of shame. It’ll be dead soon.

  I grabbed the wooden comb off my dressing table. You had to burn Twisted Things: they rotted the stones off their own graves overnight. I cracked the window wide and nudged it gingerly with the comb, but there was no reaction left in the Twisted Thing—just a pause in the beat of its downy chest and a weak caw. A plea.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, one last time, and shoved it to the brown grass below.

  The dawn breeze ruffled the feathers on its body and coaxed goose bumps from my bare arms. The sweat on my nightgown had chilled into ice.

  The burnt-out imprint of the Twisted Thing’s body smoked on the sill before me: a craned, tortured neck, sketched in ancient wood and brick. A pair of violent, outstretched wings.

  Kitchen. Get a coal, I thought, quick and shaky, and reached blindly for my trousers.

  Marthe was already dressed when I clattered down the stairs, my hands scraped raw with scrubbing. She’d been milking; our thick glass milk bottles stood on the kitchen counter, stained weirdly by the rising light. The sunlight wrapped her so privately, so normally that I almost expected her to turn, smile good morning, and slop extra cream into my tea like she would when I was small. The kitchen doorway stood, impassable: a portal back to the years when she was my protector, my best friend, my world. I couldn’t bear to move. The slightest rustle could destroy that spell.

  Marthe didn’t say good morning. She didn’t even turn her head.

  Time snapped back into place. I was sixteen years old, not six, and my sister was nothing, anymore, but angry. “Marthe,” I started, and crossed that unmagical threshold.

  She looked up with red-blotched eyes, and my stomach did a flip. She’d been crying onto the counter, head turned to keep the tears out of the milk pail. “Marthe, can I—” I started, softer.

  She cut me off with a jerk of her rounded chin. “That’s your breakfast and the hired man’s. Take it out to the fields when you go.”

  No, I translated. Whatever it is, you can’t.

  I closed my hands tight. The left one itched and burned. “I need a hot coal,” I said, smaller now, and Marthe raised one thick eyebrow. “There was a bird. Not a real one, a Twisted Thing.” The runnel of milk from pail to bottle slowed. “It’s dead.”

  Marthe set the pail down. “Just the one?”

  “I only saw one.” My voice quivered at the memory of the window slamming, slamming in my hands. “It landed on my windowsill.”

  Marthe finally met my eye with a cool, clear determination: her version of panic. “We’ll check the barns,” she said, wiping milk and sweat off her hands. “Rake the garden. Sweep the dock.” I sucked in a breath. I could almost hear the crack of dying seeds; taste rot and burnt feathers from the midsummer fires.

  Marthe’s hands stilled on her towel. “You’ve got it?” Asked like that protective sister of old would have: Do you want me to handle it?

  I bit down on the urge to hug her and sob ’til I couldn’t breathe. “I can do it myself,” I managed. I was a youngest child, and part owner of Roadstead Farm. Not handling it was an indulgence I could no longer afford.

  The gentleness in Marthe’s face went stiff. “I’ll lay a fire in the yard,” she said, and turned back to the milk.

  I grabbed our meager breakfast and fled.

  The tea was weak but still warm: one mug for me and one for quiet, unobtrusive Heron. Their heat blanketed my fingers as I rushed out into the morning, into a plume of my own exhaled breath. Roadstead Farm by dawnlight was all soft blues and grays, the crisp smell of autumn soil and the foggy calls of geese southbound on the river. The mugs steamed as I hurried, head down, across the farmyard, scanning for gray-bleached soil; for places where the rakes would bring up ruin-seeds and bone.

  Inside a week, Heron had made the smokehouse barely recognizable. He’d scrubbed a circle of flagstones clean and laid out his stranger’s things as tidy as a barracks inspection. I counted a cookpot, plate, and canteen; a stack of half-mended clothing that looked three sizes too big. His straw pallet was made neater than I ever kept my bed, its corners sharp and tight. He’d made more progress with the place in one week than Thom and I had in two summers.

  He wanted to, my head countered dryly. I gulped down a yearning to fix the smokehouse: to put back the junk and curled cobwebs and settle safe under my table, a
mong the knickknacks and dust.

  “Good morning, miss,” Heron said, and blocked my view with his own long bulk. “More carpentry today?”

  “Morning,” I answered, and shoved his breakfast at him. “We’ve got to eat quick. There’s a Twisted Thing dead in the garden.”

  His face blinked into wary blankness—everything except for those sharp gray eyes. “A Twisted Thing?”

  “The Wicked God’s creatures.” I squinted up at him. “You said you were in the war.”

  Heron’s hands tightened around the mug until his brown knuckles pulled smooth. “We called them something different there,” he said, and looked away. His fingers didn’t lie right about our good Windstown pottery. They’d been broken too, in jagged, twisting lines.

  Fingers broken, I realized with a shiver, more than once.

  I tore my eyes away from that jigsaw hand. “Hurry up. It’ll scorch the soil dead,” I said, and took off down the smokehouse steps.

  The burn mark lay right beneath my bedroom window, a small, seared shape in the deep brown soil of Marthe’s vegetable plot. I traced its outline with my metal rake: a pair of outstretched wings rucked and hilled where we’d grown the snap peas.

  It was hard to ignore the bit where the outline was empty.

  “It was right here,” I argued to nobody, and hugged the long rake handle.

  Heron’s rake parted the browning grass stalks like hair. “You’re sure it was dead, miss?”

  “It’s dead,” I snapped back; glared it into being true. “It had a broken wing. It couldn’t halfway breathe.”

  Heron shaded his eyes and scanned the sun-drenched grass. “Well, it can’t be far,” he started, and then my morning went from bad to worse.

  Marthe came around the corner, her arms speckled with sawdust, and asked, “So, do you have it?”

  “We’ll send for the Blakelys,” Marthe said. “It can’t have got off the property with a broken wing.” Her hand rubbed slow circles across her belly, soothing herself or the child squirming inside. What she did when she was nervous, now. I’d somehow liked it better when she’d just bit her fingernails.