An Inheritance of Ashes Read online

  “Your wound’s still fresh. A strain might burst it right open.”

  The nettled feeling Marthe was so good at giving me started to prickle. “I’ll be careful.”

  “Hallie—” he started, and then said almost apologetically, “spite or pride?”

  I winced. “It’s not like that.” He didn’t reply. I closed my hand tighter, felt it twinge. It was exactly like that. My sister wasn’t even here, and I was arguing with her.

  I sucked in a breath. Forced it out and settled back into the rowboat’s middle seat. “Pride,” I muttered.

  “I’m sorry,” Tyler said, and he meant it. He dipped his oars into the water, a steady heartbeat stroke. Heron picked up the rhythm, and we glided across the current of the wide green river, out of the shallows, into the world.

  I hadn’t just watched the river go by since I was too small to take an oar. We slid toward Bellisle through a blanket of bright water, fringed by the browned shoreline and the sweet smell of pine trees. I perched on the middle bench and watched the shapes along the shore: wild dogs, listening prick-eared for rabbits to drag back to their dens in the empty towers of the ruined city. They looked so much like Joy, Sadie, or Kelsey—at least, until they moved, and you understood, truly, that they were something wild.

  The shattered arc of the Windstown bridge curved over them, its steel beams and cables rusted, impassable for years. Its roadbed had cracked and shifted so badly that they’d forbidden travel on it when Papa was young. Old-city workmanship was peerless, far beyond the things we did and made now, but there was no knowing how to recreate that work—or how long it might last. The bridge ricketed up there, abandoned before its time: a giant’s dusty bones.

  The northern tip of Bellisle sharpened before us, and I dug my nails into my palm. “Careful,” I said. “The Beast is coming up.”

  “The Beast?” Heron asked, and then we saw it.

  The Twisted Thing we called the Beast rose to the left like a derelict ship, an island of old flesh and dead, rotting carrion eaters. Color rippled through the shreds of hide still left on its broken body. It shimmered like a soap-bubble rainbow, moving and hypnotic, around the red of exposed muscle and huge, splintered bones. That hide had been covered in soft feathers when it first tumbled out of the clouds, but the Windstown Council had skinned it at the end of summer. Too many fishermen and awestruck children had rowed out to pluck those shimmering plumes even after we knew the cost of a Twisted Thing’s touch. Its dangerous attraction still hadn’t subsided: my oarless fingers twitched to hold those colors in my palms. I put both hands securely under my legs and looked away.

  “What is that?” Heron asked, hushed.

  “It fell from the sky,” I said, and sat harder. The pain in my hand was a wonderful deterrent to those oiled, magical shreds of skin. “When the war ended. I don’t think it knew how to swim.”

  Heron’s voice came low and awful. “It drowned?”

  I shook my head. “Just fell. It thrashed there for a full day and night before Windstown sent the boats out. It was before you came home,” I added, in Tyler’s direction. “Don’t look at it.” His hands had stilled on the oars.

  Tyler stared at the tea-stained horns where they rose out of the river, curling like the twisted roots of trees. The near one had splintered at the tip in its fall; the burnt shreds of a white-bellied osprey’s nest twined between the jagged edges. Tyler shuddered sharply and turned away. His ruined eyes glowed luminescent in the morning sun. “That we never saw on the battlefield.”

  “It was different,” Heron murmured, “all over.”

  The oars dipped into the water and whispered river-things against the rowboat’s hull. We came close enough to touch it, for just a moment, and then the river shoved us protectively away. We glided slowly past the body of the Beast, our war memorial, past the smell of rot and dying birds calling into the breeze.

  The far shore came on us quickly once we passed the Bellisle strait. Out of the air, the hulked ghosts of gray buildings sharpened: Windstown, worn down by a century of rain. The Windstown barricade curved a protective half circle around them. Inside that wall of brick and dirt and ancient furniture lay the safe, sleepy township I’d grown up visiting, the world of small courtesies and sticky buns and salt. Outside it was no man’s land, another dead, ancient maze of ruins that grew like brambles between our lakes and the soft farmlands of the north.

  The Windstown piers were empty, all the fishing boats already gone upriver into the lake for the last of the autumn catch. Tyler and Heron shipped the oars, and I hopped onto the dock and looped the mooring rope around the piling.

  “Welcome,” I said, “to Windstown.”

  eight

  THE GROUNDS BY THE WINDSTOWN DOCKS HAD BEEN parkland, once. When the world fell, our great-grandparents turned them into vegetable gardens. I led Heron and Tyler along ancient brick paths, through the familiar smell of hay and fish bone fertilizer—the same paths I remembered from being four years old, learning to touch and taste and smell that nebulous thing Marthe and Papa called town.

  There were burn scars on the white-columned buildings now. They smudged ghostlike through layers of whitewash, put the smell of old ash into the air. All of them looked ancient, faded into the brick. Some of them had wings.

  Heron’s gaze flitted nervously. “So they fell here too?”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” I said, and Windstown opened before us like a flower.

  Even stripped of its leaves in late autumn, Windstown was grand. The brick path spread into a wide concrete roadway lined with bright red and white awnings and ancient mirror glass. In the shadow of remade skyscrapers and the softly turning windmills, the shops sat snug behind hand-stenciled windows: Green’s General Supply, Thao’s Butchery and Meats, shops for hats and tools and fine wildflower paper. Old men flocked outside the café with small cups of bitter tea, gossiping over backgammon tables. Pigeons swarmed fearlessly around their bootheels and bickered for crumbs. I tilted my nose up and inhaled greedily: bakery loaves, roses, and mint. They turned the crisp air drunken.

  Tyler stopped in front of the General Supply. “Which way first?”

  I turned a full circle on the Main Street pavement: from Mackenzie Green’s warm, wood-polish window to the mayor’s distant chimney and back. “Pitts,” I said hollowly. “If I put it off, I’ll be sick. Heron, can I give you this?” I pressed Marthe’s shopping list into his hand.

  Heron’s face lapsed into that bland, armored mask. It covered his unease almost perfectly. “Miss.” He twitched his cap lower over his face. “Where do I meet you?”

  “In the general store,” I said, and squared my shoulders. “We won’t”—I hope to God—“be long.”

  Heron shouldered his way down the street, slower now, scanning for Thao’s window. I turned to Tyler. “Can we get this over with?”

  He nodded, and we set our awkward pace up the avenue.

  Tyler raised a hand here and there to men, older men, who I’d sworn the Blakelys didn’t visit: Councilor Haddad’s brother and the Kims from the Windstown mill. They stared at us with blunt curiosity, dragging their eyes from my face to my too-high hemline. I swallowed and raised a hand to my hair without thinking—and then angry blood came into my cheeks. It didn’t matter if my hair was frizzing; I wouldn’t let it matter. I set my jaw and strode faster past the Main Street shops, head held high, until the bustle of Windstown tapered into small vegetable plots, fruit trees, and fences—into the quiet, modest houses that ringed the town market, their backs stubbornly turned to the barricade.

  The Pitts house was anything and everything but modest. Its walls of red old-city brick were always scrubbed to a shine, its porch braced by white pillars and wrapped with shrubs and decorative cabbages. It wasn’t a subtle message: We are far too rich to grow our suppers in our yard. “It looks smaller,” I said softly. In my memory it was a mansion, a glowering castle that blotted out the sun.

  Tyler stuffed his hands in his po
ckets. “Well, you haven’t been past Main Street in six years.”

  I rearranged my woolen skirts; the folds were hopelessly wrinkled. Marthe had been right about the comb. The thought of her waiting at home, knowing that, felt hateful.

  “You ready?” Tyler asked.

  “No,” I said, ten years old again, and pushed past him to sound the bell.

  The door opened to an older Hmong woman, stout and steady, with gray streaks in her glossy black bob. Her dress was extravagantly fine and her shoes too soft a leather to even think of work outdoors. Mrs. Pitts, I realized. Mrs. Pitts grown six years older.

  “Good day, ma’am,” Tyler said, and “Young Mr. Blakely,” she replied. Her eyes drifted to me: to my terrible hair and down to Nat Blakely’s gloves snug about my hands. “I don’t believe I’m acquainted with your new lady friend, though.”

  Tyler startled, his color suddenly high, and went, “No, no—”

  I blinked, and he turned an even uglier red. Dodged my eyes—

  —and I got it.

  “Oh,” I said, surprised. “No, that’s not it at all. I’m not. I mean—” I started, and there was no good place to go. Tyler had practically curled up with embarrassment. Mrs. Pitts’s polite puzzlement was turning to alarm. And I—

  I’d never even thought how I might feel about that. And Tyler, from the stricken look on his face . . . had.

  I shut my mouth, absolutely stunned. Tyler hadn’t been acting so mercurial, so odd, because of the war alone. He wanted to court me. Tyler, who I’d known since I could barely walk.

  He recovered well before I did. “You know—” he said, slightly strangled, “Miss Halfrida Hoffmann.”

  Mrs. Pitts’s dark eyes widened, and not a little bit. “Little Halfrida,” she said, my name an old, lost language on her lips. “Well. I haven’t laid eyes on you since you were a child.”

  “Six years,” I agreed uncomfortably. Tyler shifted, and it set off thunderstorms in my head. He didn’t want to look at me. All the strength I’d summoned to face down this doorstep was already wilting away.

  Get it together, I scolded myself, and I dug my nails into my gloved palm until the pain brought focus back. “We’d like,” I said in my best high, strong voice, “a meeting with the mayor.”

  Mrs. Pitts glanced over her shoulder, into the depths of her shrunken house. “I—well,” she said, entirely taken aback. “I’ll see if he’s available. Please come in.”

  Mrs. Pitts flung the double doors wide, striping shadows on the floors, and showed us into the one house both Marthe and I had sworn never to set foot in again.

  Mayor Pitts took his appointments in his personal parlor, a bright, wide-windowed room that looked out on the back garden. There were vegetable beds out there, battened down for the winter. Whoever gardened for the Pitts household had tried to hide them with roses. The dead brambles reached up across the windowsill.

  Tyler shifted on the edge of the stuffed couch, his bad leg sprawled corpselike down to the carpet. He still wouldn’t look at me, and what I could see of his face was blotchy, half hidden behind his collar.

  “It was just talk,” I said, desperate. “Windstown would sink into the river without gossip.”

  My voice vanished into the green plush couches, the high bookshelves, the antique old-cities carpet. Tyler buried his face in Alonso Pitts’s expensive teacup and didn’t say a word.

  “Tyler?” I asked, smaller.

  There was no time to reply. A narrow chestnut door opened at the other side of the parlor, and there he was: Alonso Pitts, in full waistcoat and chain of office.

  Mayor Pitts took us in, one and then the other, and nodded with fine, fatherly benevolence. The seething anger started, comforting, in my belly: Alonso Pitts, always presumptuous. So kindly and firmly smiling while he ripped out your guts.

  He looked older. The years didn’t wear on people the same way, but Pitts had taken the last six pretty personally. His hair had thinned in a stain that spread from his crown, and he looked smaller, less fiery, less like the voice of hell. There were stitches on his plum waistcoat where the seams had been let out, and vague gray circles under his eyes. “Miss Hoffmann,” the mayor said, and leaned against the fireplace mantel. “Young Mr. Blakely.”

  “Private Blakely,” Tyler corrected, and I abruptly understood why he’d worn his soldier’s buttons.

  “Private,” the mayor amended. “I won’t say I expected to see either of you.”

  No kidding, I thought, and the whole thing seeped up again: Papa’s funeral, rainy and cold. The mud of our burying ground caked on the last pair of new boots I’d owned, while I clung to Marthe’s strong fingers. The look on her face when she returned from the Windstown land office, drenched with rain, hat twisted in her hands, and told me Papa’s will would not be proved.

  I put my hands behind my back to stop their sudden shaking. “This isn’t about—” the argument, our family, your awful, high-handed meddling. “We’ve sighted a Twisted Thing on Roadstead Farm.”

  Pitts’s elbow slipped off the mantel. “Twisted Things? When?” The ease fell from him like a stolen suit. I glanced at Tyler. He stood very straight and still, arms at ease behind his back as if to hold himself in place.

  “It fell against my window yesterday at dawn,” I said. I heard that frantic, weak scrabbling again and shivered. “A bird with spider eyes and webbed talons. We burned it. But we haven’t seen one since the end of the war. We just wanted to know if you’ve had any here, or if it was the only one.”

  The mayor drew himself up, six feet of retired muscle and ease. “Of course we haven’t had Twisted Things in town,” he said, much too fast. “We won the war. It’s over.”

  He cocked an eyebrow and stared: a blatant dare to argue. I drew back. The man I remembered, Mayor Hellfire himself, simmered in his eyes. I said something wrong, I realized, too late. I messed up, and now we’re going to get it.

  Pitts’s gaze traveled from Tyler’s leg to my bandaged hand, and burned them both in the cauldron of his head. “We’ll quarantine your fields ourselves until General de Guzman can be found. The militiamen will escort you back to pack your valuables. And Miss Hoffmann”—he pinched the bridge of his nose as if terribly weary—“I’ll find you and your sister somewhere to stay.”

  “Excuse me?” I started. All I’d asked was if they’d sighted Twisted Things, and suddenly Pitts was snatching all our choices right out of our hands.

  Pitts raised an eyebrow, as if I’d interrupted. “A place to stay. I’m sure Darnell Prickett has a room or two free.”

  “You want us to leave the farm,” I said slowly, shaping the words to make them real. And then they were real: a bag in hand, no land beneath your feet, the dubious charity of others. “How can you be picking fights about the will now?”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Pitts snapped. “This isn’t about the will. The Great Army always puts infected land under quarantine. The war in the south killed hundreds of men.” His eyes flicked, uncomfortable, to Tyler’s hitched hip.

  “You just said the war was over!” I sputtered. “There’s been one Twisted Thing. How can you say this isn’t about the will when you go straight to—quarantine, eviction, tramping our fields into mud, when we’re just trying to find out what’s wrong?”

  His face went hard, utterly cold. Alonso Pitts and my papa had one thing in common: the word they most hated to hear was no.

  “This is how it started in the southlands,” Pitts said louder. “The Twisted Things showed up, one here, one there. Nothing to worry about; perfectly safe to stay at home. And then it wasn’t.” He faced us full on, pale with rage. “And nobody’ll ever come from John’s Creek again.”

  The sheer wrath keeping me on my feet faltered. John’s Creek and its foothills, three hundred acres of green land, were dead now, and so was everyone who’d loved them. “This isn’t John’s Creek,” I said. “Hundreds of men saw the Wicked God die. Our home is safe. And it’s ours.”

  Pitts
’s eyes slitted. “Young lady, I have a whole town to think of: the barricades, the harvests, if our sewers will last. It is irresponsible to stay on that farm, and downright childish to ask for help and then quibble over everything this town offers you.”

  My fists curled. “We weren’t asking for your help.”

  Pitts looked down at me, and his mouth twisted with sad disdain.

  The rage in my belly exploded.

  “We’d never ask for your help,” I snapped. “You’ve been trying to take my inheritance since the day Papa died. I only even came here because James Blakely said telling you was neighborly, and we couldn’t not warn you. We’re not—” I grasped, drowning, for words. “We’re not monsters.”

  Pitts stared for a long moment and then leaned back, all sad understanding. “I know you probably hate me,” he said, “but I stand by it. It wasn’t responsible to leave a young woman and a child out there on that much acreage, alone.”

  I shoved my hands in my skirt’s deep pockets and crumpled their fabric ’til it tore.

  “They aren’t alone,” Tyler cut in, in that hard voice that reminded me of his father, “and don’t you ever say that again.” He turned, sideways, stumbling, and held open the door of the mayor’s parlor. “C’mon, Hal. Let’s go.”

  I glanced between Alonso Pitts’s hard, pitying face and the door Tyler had flung open. And then I walked through it, and slammed that expensive door hard enough to shake the frame.

  Tyler paced a circle in the hallway, stiff with rage. “I’m sorry,” he said, and looked me in the eye for the first time since we’d set foot in the Pitts household. “I wish I could—ugh.”

  “I—no.” I pressed my hands to my cheeks. My face was still hot: wrath and fear and shame, all mixed up. “I should have known. I should have remembered why we don’t talk to him. Of course he’d find a way to make a simple question into a trap.”

  Tyler glanced at the door worriedly and shifted farther down the hall. I followed him—and stopped, not sure anymore how close was too close. Discomfort bloomed between us. He edged one step farther along, and my heart wilted. Windstown was crammed with people all the time. There was no private space to ask Tyler if he was all right—no, if we’re all right—until we were back across the river.