An Inheritance of Ashes Page 6

  James Blakely, finally, winced.

  Because that, of course, was the problem: Most of the loose talk about what Marthe and I would want—what we were capable of, and what Roadstead Farm needed—in the months after Papa’s death had come from Mayor Alonso Pitts himself. To whom Marthe had not spoken for the whole six years since he tried to cheat us of our land.

  And that had meant no Windstown harvest balls, no meals at Mrs. Pitts’s Travelers Rest, no afternoon tea visits when we bought our supplies in town—for six long, silent years.

  “You don’t want to deal with Pitts, that’s fine. Have Hallie go,” Cal put in mildly. “She saw the Twisted Thing come down. It’ll beat Jim bringing half the story and Pitts showing up here for the rest. Or worse yet, calling in a regiment and setting quarantine because we didn’t explain the thing first.”

  James shot his husband a grateful glance. “And it sends a clear message to Pitts and the Windstown Council: Bad blood or no, Roadstead Farm respects its neighbors and the law. That’ll matter to the old guard among them, Councilor Thao and Councilor Haddad.”

  “Because of course,” Marthe finished sourly, “those thieves ever respected us back. Hallie, is that something you want to do?”

  I slid down in my chair. Too late. Every eye in the room was on me, and no matter what I did, someone would be disappointed. There wasn’t love lost between me and the mayor, but when Alonso Pitts fought his epic battle against Papa’s last will, I’d only been ten years old. It was Marthe and Thom—still newly courting, together but a year—who’d fought right back; Marthe and Thom, who still felt every drop of the bad blood between us. They kept me from it, and all I remembered of that time was shadows: whispered arguments in the parlor, conferences with the Blakelys and our few allies in town through long Sunday afternoons. Nat and Tyler and I, turned out into the fields to play alone because the Mason kids and the Sumners didn’t come around anymore.

  I couldn’t tell what Marthe wanted: my sister, who’d fought tooth and nail for my right to half of this farm, knowing full well that one of us would have to buy the other out someday. Declining would just rub it in, in their minds: selfish, childish Hallie. But I couldn’t tell if saying yes would be another treachery.

  “I’ll go,” I said, hesitant.

  Marthe’s face didn’t change.

  “We need supplies from town,” I added. “We’re almost out of soap, and the butcher—”

  Marthe closed her eyes. “I’ll make a list,” she said tonelessly. Her hand circled her belly before she stood.

  “Good,” James put in just as I decided to take the whole thing back. “We’ll start with the current tomorrow. Cal or I can row you across.”

  Tyler straightened. “I’ll do it.”

  Mrs. Blakely waved him off, a nervous flutter. “Tyler, you can’t strain—”

  “I can still row, Mother.”

  Mrs. Blakely turned a slow, burning red. “Tyler,” she said, “I know you’re eighteen and think you’re invincible, but your hip is nothing to trifle—”

  “Eglantine—” Cal warned.

  “I’m not broken,” Tyler cut in coolly. “I can row Hallie to Windstown and back without making Nat drop everything to mind me.” He held the edge of the table with both hands, and his bleached eyes were as bright as sparks. I swallowed and rested my own hands on the tabletop to somehow hold it, hold him still.

  “And,” he added, “I’ve got more than enough proof that I’m not invincible.”

  The air in the room stuck like hard frost. Mrs. Blakely blinked at Tyler as if she’d been hit. I should’ve kept to Marthe’s chores, I thought bitterly. My family arguments were horrible. Apparently other people’s could be even worse.

  “Mum,” Nat said distinctly, “leave him alone. It’s town, not the other side of the ocean.”

  Mrs. Blakely huffed out a breath. Nat was Eglantine Blakely’s only daughter, and Eglantine Blakely had grown up in a house full of girls. As stubborn as she might be to her brothers-in-law, her son, and the very soil and air, she never truly denied Nat anything. She looked between her two children, one deceptively mild, one blazing, and narrowed her eyes. “If your brother goes over into the river, so help me, Nasturtium Blakely—”

  “You’ll dunk me in after him. I know,” Nat said sharply, and her mouth rose in a crooked smile. “And then you’ll have to spend the rest of your life wearing black and mourning your lost children, and it will be all my fault.”

  The angry flush drained out of Mrs. Blakely’s cheeks. “I’m glad we understand each other,” she said hoarsely, and a matching smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow, then,” Tyler said. His eyes still snarled like foxes.

  “Thank you,” I said tentatively. The world felt more like thin river ice than ever.

  James folded his napkin and set it on the table. “Marthe, we should head home. We left the sheep penned up.” As if they’d been waiting for permission, two generations of Blakelys raced to pull on their boots.

  Marthe inclined her head to James. “Thanks,” she said, rough and genuine. “Again.”

  “Of course,” he said quietly, and kissed her on the cheek. And added even lower: “Chin up, kid.”

  “I’m trying,” I thought I heard her whisper, but under the clatter of kitchen chairs and fall coats, there was no way to be sure.

  Courtesy dictated that you walked a visitor to the roadway, or at least to their waiting cart. I pulled on my boots and kept pace with the Blakelys as they straggled out past the gardens. The blue cart was waiting at the edge of our nearest field, guarded by the now-napping dogs. James Blakely boosted his sister-in-law onto its worn leather seat and pointed the horses to the highway, back to the soft clover of Lakewood Farm.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Tyler said, still quiet and frostbitten. I nodded. I didn’t know where to look. The injured leg stood out like a bruise; the cool anger on his face was worse. Everywhere, like fingerprints, the marks of the world outside the lakelands stood out on his skin—a constant reminder of how much he’d walked through to come home. How much he’d returned a stranger.

  He glanced over my shoulder, and a memory dredged loose. “Back on the beach,” I said, trying to be casual, “what was that you saw?”

  Tyler blinked, his injured dignity forgotten. He looked at me sidelong, wary. “The bird.”

  He’s lying, I thought, shocked, and shook my head. “No, before that. The bird was on the ground. You looked up.”

  He looked down at his hands, then back up at me, his face a small torment. I swallowed. Tyler was afraid.

  He opened his mouth, and I realized: He’s going to lie to me again. I suddenly could not bear to hear him lie.

  “It must have been a deer,” I said, too loud. The terror on his face froze and stuck. “They’ve been straying in all summer. I’ll have to check the fences.”

  “Right,” he said in a strangled voice. His shoulders slowly came down. “Right.”

  And then: “Tyler!” Callum called, and Tyler hopped up onto the cart like a marionette. One crackle of the reins and they were gone, rushing down the pathway past our empty fields, shrinking into a small hard knot against the sky.

  I stared at the dust cloud they left me, and then at the slanted sunlight as it settled. He’d seen something for certain, something too terrifying to tell me about. Or thought he had, out of his broken eyes.

  A throat cleared soft behind me, and I jumped.

  Heron stood a full ten paces back, his hands up cautiously. “The cistern’s full, miss,” he said. And then, apologetic: “I said I’d find you when it was done.”

  I rubbed my eyes with my unbandaged hand. “Right,” I said, and pushed down the urge to scour the riverbank. The goat pen, I recited. Firewood, and a start on the malt. Whatever Tyler was hiding, ferreting it out wouldn’t feed us through the long winter.

  What did that was chores.

  “Come on,” I said, and shook myself, an
d sighed. “I’ll get you a shovel.”

  seven

  I WOKE INTO THE GRAY DAWN LIGHT TO DRESS FOR WAR.

  My town dress had sat unused since springtime, buried in work clothes and mothballs. It was already an inch too short. I ignored the shamefully high hem and fished under my bed for Marthe’s old town boots. Nat was a girl in a family of men, and her mother bought her new boots for the Windstown dances, but Marthe and I made do with creased hand-me-downs, the kind that made men like Alonso Pitts sniff with aggrieved charity. Let it go, I told myself, and swiped at the musty old boots. Everyone already knew Roadstead Farm was poor. We told them with every stitch.

  My denimless legs felt light and strange as I clattered into the kitchen; my hair trailed down my back like spiderwebs. One summer contained in braids and buttons, and I’d already forgotten how town clothes felt. In town clothes, I could almost remember visits to Prickett’s, holidays, the quiet pace of life before Thom marched south. I swallowed and pushed all that aside. I was sixteen; I lived here and now.

  We had chores.

  Marthe was at the kitchen table, awash in a storm of paper. Before her, the farm’s thick accounts book gleamed with fresh ink between snowdrifts of debt slips: goods due to us, goods we owed, all from the last trip into Windstown in the spring. I pulled in my skirt to avoid sending the papers flying, and looked around for breakfast.

  “Sideboard,” Marthe said, and there it was, wedged against a half-used jar of pickles. “Wait,” she added, and beckoned me into the sunlight. “Your hair.”

  I did a little turn, crammed between the sideboard and the table. Marthe frowned and adjusted my part with two fingers. “We’ll have to find a hat. You look like a nest the crows fled.”

  The nerves in my belly hardened into ice. “There are plenty of combs in Windstown.”

  Marthe visibly fought the urge to smooth down a rebellious curl. “Not for us, there aren’t. Mackenzie Green still owes us for two sacks of last year’s flour, but that’s all the credit we have. I’ve written it all down.” She handed me a scribbled list. “Do what you can with her.”

  I scanned my sister’s crabbed handwriting: Tea, salt, honey, nails; talk to Thao Pa about the goats. Alonso Pitts’s name wasn’t there. The blank space where it should have been ate the morning light.

  “And—here.” Marthe dug out our smaller town book: full of years of little contracts for cheese and salt and rice, negotiated while Prickett’s oldest, Janelle, hauled me on pirate adventures under the taproom tables. I cradled the book in my hands and felt suddenly, overwhelmingly too young.

  “What do I tell Alonso Pitts?” I asked softly.

  Marthe pushed her chair back and stalked to the oven. “As little as possible. Focus on getting enough salt.”

  “Thanks,” I said bitingly, and put down the accounts book to rub my aching hand.

  Marthe stopped, and her shoulders winched tighter. “Let me see?”

  I held out my wounded hand, curled up and chapped in its white bandages. Marthe’s warm fingers unwrapped the cloth, and the cold air hit, as sharp as river water. I swallowed, remembering the oozing blood and pus, and looked down.

  The Twisted Thing’s mark had shrunk overnight from a vicious, messy wound to angry red skin, puffed up in the middle. Marthe pressed a callused finger to the swelling, and I hissed. “You cleaned it?” she asked, and I nodded.

  Her face fluttered, a sickly wince. “Be careful with that,” she said shortly. “Don’t push.”

  “Right,” I drawled. “Thanks a lot. I thought I’d go lift weights, but you’ve told me.”

  Her eyes hardened. Her hand went to her rounded belly. “Hallie, good God, don’t prickle at me today.”

  “I’m prickling?” I said before my head caught up with my tongue. “You didn’t even say good morning. The first thing you did say was how awful I look, and the second was how I won’t remember our supplies and I’ll probably break off my own hand while I’m at it.”

  Marthe threw up her hands. “Just because I don’t want that man sneering at you because you haven’t cut your hair this summer—”

  “I am sixteen years old,” I hissed. “I can figure out combing myself.”

  Pain built in my hand—no, both my hands. They were curled into fists.

  Marthe stared at them, her eyes hooded, and then she slammed the account book shut. “Don’t forget the nails,” she snapped, and flung the kitchen door shut behind her.

  Tyler found me ankle-deep in the malthouse, ruining my hair gloriously with work and the autumn damp. “Hallie?” he said from the doorway.

  “Don’t come in with those boots on,” I snarled.

  He froze mid-step, caught between surprise and naked hurt. The guilt was instant. “I’m sorry,” I said lower. With everyone else those two little words came so easy—everyone but my own flesh and blood. “Marthe thinks I can’t do anything right, and we bickered again, before I’d even had breakfast, and it just makes me so—agh.”

  Tyler shoved his hands in his pockets. “Yeah,” he muttered. “I understand that.”

  Mrs. Blakely’s furious stillness flickered across my memory: the way she’d so casually decided what Tyler could and couldn’t do. “I’m sorry,” I said again, quieter.

  He looked away and nodded. “Ready to go?”

  I caught the hint: I don’t want to talk about it. “I’m ready, yeah,” I said, and pinched some brightness into my voice. “Unless whoever drove you wants a cup of tea.”

  His mouth quirked. “Nobody did. I walked.”

  I blinked, and instantly wished I hadn’t: his wariness set like frost. “Oh,” I managed—say something, anything!—“was that spite or pride?”

  Tyler startled—and let out a brilliant laugh. He leaned gasping against the malthouse door, and when he looked back up, the Tyler I remembered was in his shattered eyes: so fond and quiet and patient that it took three days to recover when he climbed through your window and put a toad in your bed.

  “Well,” he said, wiping his eyes, “I’d have to give that a yes.”

  I sagged with relief. “I hear it’s good to have more than one reason for things.”

  His grin widened. “How ’bout you? Spite or pride?”

  I pulled a sweaty strand of hair off my forehead. I felt like a mess, and what with Tyler wearing his good shirt again, freshly pressed and laundered with the buttons glimmering in the sunlight, I was starting to regret that. “Yes,” I concluded. “My sister used to treat me like a person, and this hurts my pride, and now I am feeling very spiteful.”

  “So we’re agreed,” he said lightly, and held the door for me. “We’ll fly to town on the smoke billowing from our ears.”

  “Better than rowing,” I added. I sloshed out of the wet malt, wiped a stray grain off my ankle, and slithered into my boots.

  “That reminds me,” Tyler said, jumpy all over again. “Nat sent these.”

  He pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket. They were a fitted blue fabric—Nat’s favorite color—as deep and smooth as the sky in springtime. Much too fine for hauling cheeses and crates of salt. I squinted. “Not even Marthe makes me cover my hands in town.”

  “No,” he said, reddening. “It’s for your hand. I mean, of course they’re for your hands,” he rushed on, “but to keep dirt off the bandage.”

  “Oh,” I said, embarrassed. “Thanks. I mean, tell Nat thanks.” I smiled, but he didn’t see it. He was gone again, a stranger again, tucked behind silent walls.

  I clicked my mouth shut, arms around myself. That flash of the old Tyler, the one who was my friend, made his pull away even lonelier. “We should get going,” I said. “Or we’ll lose the light on the way home.”

  “Right,” Tyler said distantly, and he levered down the malthouse steps.

  We reached the house red-cheeked and tingling with cold, Tyler puffing out his chest to hide just how hard he was breathing. Marthe was nowhere to be seen, but draped across the porch rail was a clump of rust-red fabr
ic. Mami’s winter shawl, I registered. I’d been ready to rush off in nothing but a housedress. “Thanks,” I said softly, and spread the shawl about my shoulders. It was soft: thick homespun worn smooth by years and hands, and it no longer smelled like my mother. The wind at my elbows was immediately less cold.

  She’d left it out there because she loved me. And she’d left it out there as the sharpest rebuke: All your hollering about being old enough, smart enough, and you can’t even remember a winter shawl.

  I hugged the shawl to me and thought, Oh, Marthe. How did we ever get so mixed up?

  “Marthe’s not coming?” Tyler asked. Didn’t quite ask.

  “She’s not,” I said shortly.

  He hesitated and then delicately said, “If we’re bringing back heavy cargo—”

  I looked at his heaving chest, at my injured hand, and nodded bitterly. “Come on. Let’s go find the hired man.”

  We pushed into the river half an hour later: Tyler, me, and Heron in a clean shirt, creased faintly from days or weeks spent folded in his leather pack. He’d wiped the goat muck and dust off his boots, but they were still ragged, their soles worn through at the heels.

  “We aim past Bellisle,” I told him, and pointed out the low, browned island midway through the sleepy river. “Round its tip to the other shore.”

  “Bellisle’s the nearest town?” Heron asked, awkwardly shipping his oars.

  “No, Windstown,” I said. I wrapped Mami’s shawl tighter around my shoulders. “And there’s nothing after it for miles.”

  That soldierly shroud of attention dropped over Tyler again. “Mister Heron,” he said, every inch strain and a new, military reverence. “Mind your left oar?”

  Heron’s nod was terse. I was learning something of his expressions: that Mister made his flesh crawl like a nest of live spiders.

  “I can take the oars,” I said, and Tyler shook his head.