An Inheritance of Ashes Read online

  Heron nodded. He had no idea how to read the words beneath Marthe’s words. Roadstead Farm was fifty acres, half of it unfarmed wilderness.

  The Twisted Thing could be anywhere.

  I dropped the rake into the dirt. “I’ll get my coat.”

  “You won’t,” Marthe corrected, and eyed Heron, standing haphazardly at attention with a rake two feet too short for him. “Lakewood Farm’s half a mile up the old road: the white-painted house with blue trim. Just tell James or Eglantine Blakely what’s happened. That we need to cover ground.”

  I swallowed. She was angry at me for losing track of it. She had to be, if she wouldn’t even let me make good.

  Heron set his rake against the redbrick wall. “I’ll be as quick as I can, ma’am.”

  He took off at an easy, swinging walk, one that didn’t get quicker as he met the path toward the old highway. Marthe watched him go with grave, sober eyes. “That man’s been walking a long time.”

  She sounded tired. She sounded . . . infinitely sad. I stared, bewildered, and she pointed at the road with her softening chin. Heron was not much more than a detail upon it, another pine made tiny by distance, waving in the breeze. “Look at that: he’ll go only so fast as a walk.”

  “I’d have run,” I said, resentful.

  “Exactly,” Marthe said softly. “You don’t set your pace that steady if you think you’ll ever get to stop walking.”

  She’s telling me something, I realized. Something important about her and me and winter, and everything that wasn’t what time Heron would arrive at Lakewood Farm. Marthe waited, expectant, and my mouth emptied of every profound word. I had no idea what she meant. I had no idea what she wanted from me.

  Why can’t we just talk, like we used to? I thought, and turned away too fast to hide the sudden tears in my eyes: to the farm buildings and the orchard beyond them. Once, we’d talked all the time: in gestures, in whispers, in messages written in river stones and hidden by the apple orchard when Papa’s rages made it too dangerous to speak. Away from her, the sky was cloudless and cold, perfect weather for turning a field among the last of the red autumn leaves.

  I’d imagined a thousand ways I might lose Roadstead Farm. But they always ended with the road south, a backpack, and a home I could never again have. None of my doomed futures had held a missing Twisted Thing and seas of endless, spreading gray dust.

  I fumbled the rake into my hands, fumbled for words. “Marthe, what do I do?”

  Her expectation dissolved into pure exhaustion. “There’s chores,” she said sharply, and rounded the corner without another word.

  I stared after her, mouth open. If I chased her, there’d be a fight: Clueless, self-centered, childish, useless Hallie. If I demanded she just explain what she’d meant, in plain language, we’d go at it all morning, and—

  There were chores.

  I picked up the water buckets from the kitchen porch. The sun was well into the sky, and the malt was two weeks late. Maybe if I filled the cistern, hauling water ’til my hands ached, I could forget how to think until the Blakelys arrived to save us.

  three

  CHORES.

  I flung the bucket into the well and hauled it up with blistering fingers. I’d forgotten one thing about forgetting how to think: how hard that is to do when you are alone inside your head. I fought the urge to jump every time the grass trembled; every birdcall raised shivers on the back of my neck. And my head kept circling on all the things I should have said, devastating comebacks and perfect replies to Marthe’s disappointed face that came so easily now that she wasn’t here.

  Chores, I thought viciously. Of course, Marthe.

  The ache in my left hand beat a cranky pulse as I hauled the bucket to the malthouse. The cistern beside it glowed dully in the sunlight. It was built of scavenged tin and Papa’s erratic ingenuity, connected with ancient piping from before the old cities fell. Papa had been tall, and it had never been his way to think too hard about others: I had to hoist the bucket shoulder-high to pour. My hand twinged under its weight, the burn stretching wide. I gritted my teeth and braced the bucket higher.

  Pain hissed through my nerves like a riled snake.

  It only touched me for a second, I thought, and gingerly poked my throbbing hand. It was redder than the worst sunburn I’d ever had, violent red, tender under my fingers. Holding a Twisted Thing was suicide: they’d rusted the metal teeth off our rakes. But one touch wasn’t supposed to lame you. Lots of people had been touched.

  “Come on,” I muttered blackly, and shook my wrist. I had to work. Marthe was already angry at me. I lifted the bucket, and my hand tingled, ached—and quit.

  All my rage—at Marthe, at that stupid Twisted Thing, at Thom’s absence and my useless hand—crawled up my throat and boiled. “Damn!” I reared back and kicked the tin bucket clear off the steps.

  Suddenly there was water everywhere—on the steps, on my shirt—and metal ringing like a bell. The bucket hit the dead grass with a thud and rolled smugly into the dirt. There’s that Hoffmann temper, Papa’s voice rumbled approvingly, and I shuddered. “Damn.”

  Distant, a chorus of raised voices answered back.

  I’m the only one who gets to shout around here, I thought sourly, but I knew those quick, squabbling voices. The anxious pecking in my chest blurred into blinding hope: the Blakelys. Nat was here.

  I clattered down the malthouse steps and raced around the corner, and there they were: Nat’s whole family tumbling off their wagon, work shirts and sheep-stink and clean hair and limbs. Her uncle Callum unloaded rakes and their shepherd’s crook, and two of the Blakely sheepdogs, Joy and Kelsey, circled the wheels, jumping and snuffling the leaf-sharp air. We’d sent for the Blakelys, and we’d got them: everyone except the sheep.

  “Oh, my poor Hallie. We got here as soon as we could,” Mrs. Blakely said, and came off the wagon in a flurry of skirts.

  I dropped an awkward curtsy in my stained work pants. “Mrs. Blakely,” I said. “James. Callum.”

  Heron perched atop the wagon like a river buoy that’d tangled with too big a thunderstorm, his long elbows and knees crammed together between the tools and James Blakely’s broad back. He straightened haphazardly—“Miss Hallie?”—and in the blur of motion, someone stopped.

  Nat, her hands full of housedress and her hair flecked with straw.

  Nat I couldn’t curtsy to; she wrapped her arms around me tight enough to push the air out of my lungs. We’d stuck closer before this summer. She’d been trapped with the sheep on Lakewood Farm just as surely as I was tied to Roadstead, and the end of the war hadn’t changed that. Her two uncles had come back aged five years in a summer, her brother Tyler wounded for life. But her father hadn’t come back at all. There was a vial of ashes on the Blakely mantel now: the John’s Creek ash the regiment gave for every broken body they’d been unable to bring home. The family had held a service, and made a stone. And I hadn’t seen Nat since.

  She looked different: same careless red hair, same brown-greenish eyes always watching much too sharply for anyone’s own good, but she was—not skinny, but lean now, lean down to her shoes.

  She sized me up in the same way, half baffled at the change in me, at the seams between strange and familiar. What do I look like now? I thought suddenly, but then she laughed a little, and the shake and shudder in my chest eased. It’s Nat, I thought joyfully. She’s still my Nat.

  I looked up when she loosed my arms, and fidgeting beside the cart, not just lean but outright gaunt, was Tyler Blakely.

  “Ty,” I said, and Nat’s older brother took my hand and squeezed it. He was tanned and hair-combed, and nearly swimming in his best shirt: clean linen, all the fresh starch in the world not enough to keep it from slopping above his belt. His buttons were different—not wood, but cool-sheened smoothnesses rough-cut about the edges and ridged like fallen trees. His army buttons, engraved with John Balsam’s sigil: the crest the Great Army had, once their hero vanished, made in his na
me. Nat might have been the same as she ever was, deep down, but Tyler Blakely was back from the war.

  “It’s good to see you,” I managed through all the awkwardness in the world. We hadn’t spoken since the funeral, since Marthe and I swept too quickly past the chair his injured leg confined him to, his head down, bristling leave me alone. I squeezed his hand. It had never before felt so tenuous in mine.

  “It’s good to see you too,” he said, and his gaze stuttered and dropped, enough to hide his white eyes—and the shreds of hazel left to them. Tyler had looked upon the Wicked God dying, and five green-ringed blotches, as irregular as ink spots, were all that were left of his normal eyes. The rest was white to the pupil, white as the Twisted Thing’s spider gaze.

  I tried to pull up a smile for him and failed in the glare of that twisted hip, those broken eyes. His fingers slid cool against my palm and pulled away. Tyler, looking for the familiar in me, just like Nat—just like we all were, rattled and odd.

  “And how are you, Miss Halfrida?” James Blakely said mildly. His smile, courteous as ever, pulled at the half-healed, dotted wounds that covered him cheek to shoulder. The shallowest cuts had already scarred, a sick pink that pulled his cheek into strange angles. Those wounds stared every problem I had down into the gutter. He didn’t need to hear me whine about my stupid bucket.

  “Fine,” I said faintly. His husband, Callum, shook his head once, resigned.

  Color bloomed around the smooth pink scars. “Well, we’re ready to beat the bushes,” James pressed on. “Show us where you saw it?”

  Marthe had heard the Blakelys’ racket. She was waiting on the kitchen porch, wrapped in her thick wool jacket. Warmth spilled out of the kitchen window behind her: not just the oven running hot, but a kettle on the stove set to boil.

  “Chores?” I hissed into her ear.

  “We can’t ask someone’s help and give them nothing in return,” she whispered crisply, and her face opened up into warmth and worry as Eglantine Blakely rushed up the steps.

  “Marthe,” Mrs. Blakely said, and kidnapped both her hands. Mrs. Blakely had made a practice of being totally overbearing since the moment our mother was buried, and she felt that practice made perfect. “Brave girl. Don’t you worry; we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  “You’re very kind,” Marthe said, and Mrs. Blakely pooh-poohed it, and I scowled behind my hair at both of them. Of course Marthe was warm gratitude and manners now that company was here. Of course that cutting voice was kept only for me.

  I turned away to where Cal Blakely squatted beside the burn mark. “No tracks around this, hey? Just the one mark in the dirt.”

  Nat frowned. “It didn’t struggle.”

  “Or walk. Or fly.” Cal’s long finger hovered over the seared soil and the normal, rich brown that outlined it. “Either it was lifted or it just disappeared.”

  James’s frown pulled his scars into whole different constellations. “Right. We pair off and comb out, from here to the fencelines. Marthe, you’re with me. Cal, Eglantine, take the field road.”

  Mrs. Blakely cast a quick, involuntary glance at Tyler. No: at Tyler’s bad leg. “James, I should—”

  “Good. We’ll go down to the river,” Nat cut in, shuffling behind Tyler so it was clear who we meant. Tyler’s shoulders went rigid. Their mother’s eyes narrowed as she took Callum’s arm—and the look he sent Nat, over Eglantine’s head, absolutely brimmed with complicity. Not my regular Nat after all, then, I thought with a shard of despair. There had never been this many secret alliances in the Blakely house, or such an edge to their bickering.

  “Hallie, you’ll come with us?” Tyler asked tightly.

  “Yeah,” I said without thinking, and looked up—right at Heron. He trailed the search party, dust on his tattered boots, behind even the nervous, whining dogs. He watched the small crowd of Blakelys as if they were a reflection from another world. He called me kind, I remembered guiltily, and we just shut him out.

  “Heron too,” I said firmly, so they’d all hear it. “It’ll go faster with four.”

  Heron blinked, and fled instantly into that sheeting, blank expression.

  Tyler’s face fell, fractionally. “Fine,” he said, and limped hurriedly down the path with Nat striding at his heels. Mrs. Blakely stared at her children’s backs, all her fussing and mothering snuffed out. The hole it left behind filled slowly with a desolate pain.

  “We’ll find it,” I stuttered, and rushed off after them.

  Heron was behind me, though I could hardly tell. He carried the distance between us, five feet back and steady, like the borders of a whole universe. This is what the open roads do to you, I told myself, and thought of Uncle Matthias and the half-packed bag I kept in the smokehouse. Even when I was ten years old and grieving, I’d never been that alone.

  Nat’s garden rake scraped the roots and dirt clods; Tyler’s bad leg dragged an uneven counterpoint beside her. No one spoke as we slipped around the goat pen, eyes scanning the soil, and gained the orchard trees. The branches hung still and naked above us and fallen fruit oozed under our boots, over the crannies where Marthe and I used to write. Ahead, the ever-present rustle of the river rose and rumbled louder.

  Tyler squinted through the dust and the orchard trees—and his white-stained eyes narrowed. He leaned forward, just as focused as Joy hunting rabbits, and unease shuddered through my belly. Tyler was looking at something.

  The thing was, there was nothing there.

  “What is it?” I asked, a fat pebble thrown into that silence. He startled, but didn’t turn.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said, and hobbled faster toward the river.

  “Ty, slow down,” Nat said—Nat, who never got nervous, scrambling right on his heels but not one step farther. She doesn’t want to get ahead of him, I realized. It’ll remind him he can’t run anymore. She looked back at me, her lower lip bit hard between her teeth, and I shrugged helplessly. Heron paced sentry behind us, blank as new-laid snow.

  “Come on,” Tyler snapped, and we hurried through the last dregs of orchard shade, down the steep, stony hill that led to the river.

  The path faded into shoreline: a breath of weedy water, the crunch of shoreline stones, and our lonely dock, stretched out into the gray river ahead. At the end of it, our two-seater rowboat huddled empty in the current, nuzzling the ancient concrete piles: our only way to Windstown or Bellisle now, what with our wagon’s back wheel broken for good. “Well, the boat’s still here,” I said into the strained silence.

  Nobody answered. They were watching Tyler pace.

  Bent awkward at the waist, he followed a looping, invisible trail, his shepherd’s crook planted between the stones for balance. “Ty, what’re you looking at?” I asked carefully. I wasn’t seeing much: rocks, sand, weeds. The debris of coming winter on the shore.

  There was no answer. Tyler Blakely stared past me, down to the river, one hand on his short shearing knife—and his eyes went wide.

  Nat flung her hands into the air. “Tyler, for God’s sake, cut the drama out. What?”

  “There,” he said darkly, and pointed far down the beach. “There’s the bastard.”

  He curses now, I thought, inappropriately, before the next thought overtook it.

  I was wrong: Tyler Blakely could still run.

  Shuffling and lopsided, he dashed down the beach, slipping on slick stones, his waist twisting to keep him upright. “God!” Nat shouted, and sprinted after him, her arms flailing against the blue sky. I took off after them, my long rake ready across my chest. The rocks bumped and bruised as I drove myself along the riverbank, a sick lump hardening in my belly.

  Tyler stuttered to a stop just before the river curved, his unearthly eyes flaring. He sagged and lowered his knife.

  I dropped the rake to my knees and bent double after it. My lungs burned. The ache in my hand burned. Nat pattered to a stop ahead of me, her face blotched red with fury. “I’m trying to keep Mum off your back, okay? Do yo
u have to act so insane—”

  Tyler wasn’t listening. He paced a circle around the featureless rocks, his knife held low and mean. His chest heaved just as hard as mine—mine, which couldn’t hold a breath. I coughed, and black spots swam in the corners of my eyes. What on earth, I thought in fragments. I’d run that fast and more. I’d run longer without breaking a sweat. The choke under my ribs hardened, grew tight. I coughed helplessly, and the tightness ripped, and tore—

  And then there were hands at my elbows, pulling me back mere inches across some invisible border where my lungs became whole again: Heron’s hands. The unfamiliar sourness of his sweat clogged my nostrils. “Miss Hallie, you all right?”

  “Out of breath,” I said, and leaned elbows-to-knees forward, my field rake loose in both hands. The line of it swam before my eyes. “The Twisted Thing’s there, isn’t it?”

  The crease between Heron’s eyebrows deepened. “It is.”

  The tearing feeling was fading. I coughed into my pant legs again and straightened. “Let me see?”

  The tumble of brown wings hid beneath a cairn of what had once been rocks. The touch of the Twisted Thing had worn the rocks, in hours, to gravel. Its feathers peeked up now, unearthed again, from the dirt of a troubled grave.

  I brushed the crumbled rocks aside and the body of the malformed sparrow emerged, broken-winged, web-tangled. Its good wing and breast were bloodily marked by a small, delicate, familiar mouth. My hands curled into useless fists. “Stupid cats.”

  “Of course,” Nat said sourly, and kicked the sand.

  Heron’s black brows rose. “What do you mean, cats?”

  “We have a family of them in the barn. Marthe’s pets,” I said, and shook my head. “And that is one of them being too damned lazy to mouse and just picking up a Twisted Thing for its supper.” Lucky for them there was no way to know which one was responsible. I’d have flung it into the river and let it swim its way out.

  Heron eased around us and crouched over the Twisted Thing. “I’ll dispose of this,” he said, and tipped Tyler one of those nods that passed between grown men. “Good eye, there.”