An Inheritance of Ashes Read online

  Cal Blakely looked smaller and tireder already: a month older in the past day. He went straight into the parlor and touched Tyler’s head softly. “You all right, kid?”

  Strain etched lines around Tyler’s white eyes. “Enough to keep walking.”

  “Good man,” Cal said, and patted his shoulder. There were ghosts in his eyes too; ghosts snagged everywhere. “Nat and James brought the dogs. If whatever you saw was someone prowling about trying to scare you, we’ll find them on the double.”

  “It wasn’t,” Marthe muttered, so low I barely heard.

  I peeked out the drawn curtains. I could barely see Nat and James in silhouette: two bodies, lantern-lit, in our cold barley fields.

  “Who’s at Lakewood Farm with Eglantine?” Marthe asked.

  “Eglantine is the last person anyone wants to pick a fight with,” Cal replied. “Come on. Let’s see your stone letters.”

  Heron was out front with the water bucket, drinking in great gulps straight from the brim. We marched in a ragged line toward the river dock, each one of us head down, watching the grass. The path turned, and there we were: atop the shuddering plea written in the road.

  Marthe read the stones and went pale as bleached cotton.

  “Steady,” Cal murmured. “You don’t want to stress the child.”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale, and you know it,” Marthe snapped.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Heron cut in smoothly, and inserted himself between them. “We’ve likely obliterated any footprints.”

  “Can’t be helped,” Cal said with a sigh—Cal, who tracked like a fox. “Tyler, give me light?”

  Tyler raised his lantern high, and Cal Blakely got to work.

  He paced pathways around the muddy stones, circling silently. The lamp in Tyler’s hand cast strange shadows. They made him look melancholy, bruise-eyed with age. We scoured the hard, muddy path together, down to where the sand and the river wiped every trace clean. “Anything?” I asked.

  “There’s water,” Cal said quietly, and traced an imperceptible line on the rocks, away from the pathway and away from the docks. “Water falling from river stones, I’d think. But I don’t think this was a prank or a prowler. Nothing with feet passed through here.”

  Marthe didn’t react. She’d composed herself somehow since that first sight of the stones. Her face was utterly still, her eyes shuttered again. She said, I realized with a chill, she saw a ghost. Nobody knew about the stone messages of our childhood: nobody but me, Thom, and Marthe. I couldn’t conceive of doubting Marthe: her keen eyes, her ruthless practicality, the way she always knew what to do. But there was no such thing as ghosts.

  The knife that killed a god is hidden in your smokehouse, I thought. Don’t crack too wise about no such thing. And suddenly the familiar night was full of monsters. I shuddered hard.

  Cal Blakely lifted a gentle eyebrow. “There’s nothing, Hal,” he said, and led us back to the abandoned stones.

  There was a new light there, around the corner that led to our dead, shorn fields. “We can’t find your prowler, Marthe,” James Blakely called from behind it. He and Nat came into view, the dogs slinking wary at their heels. “Flushed another Twisted Thing up the shore, though. We need to lay a fire. This doesn’t look good.”

  “If there are Twisted Things about, we should clear off,” Cal said.

  “The air’s back to normal,” Tyler murmured. “It’s fine.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You felt that too?”

  James’s eyebrows rose.

  “I couldn’t breathe. Yesterday, when we found the Twisted Thing,” I admitted, and James Blakely’s face went slack. “And again, tonight. My chest hurt. I couldn’t hear. I backed away, and it stopped.”

  “A fuzz in your ears,” Heron asked quietly, “as if everything were very far away?”

  The back of my neck prickled. The four men exchanged a long and terrible look.

  “You know what this is,” Marthe said.

  Heron nodded reluctantly. “It happened in the war, ma’am. Spots where the air was bad. Where sounds changed.”

  “It was how you knew a Twisted Thing was coming,” Tyler added. “And then you ran like hell.”

  Once, Ty’s uncles would have chastised him for bad language. Neither did. They edged close together, and Cal held James’s hand like a lifeboat.

  “You ran because sometimes it got into a man,” Heron explained. “And they’d cough. You heard them through the night: fit, healthy farmers choking like their air had turned to water. It’s why the war went so hard,” he said, despite Cal’s glare. “We held our breath every time we charged.”

  “We didn’t fight at John’s Creek so we could scare half-grown girls with it,” Cal said lightly. The edge on his voice would’ve cut brick.

  Heron loosened his shoulders fractionally and stared holes into Cal’s eyes. “We didn’t fight to lie about it either.”

  “C’mon now,” James said quietly, and squeezed his husband’s hand. “We fought so this wouldn’t swallow up our homes. Which means we use everything we know, right now.”

  “Of course I married an optimist,” Cal said, disgusted, and tromped up the path to the river.

  Nat watched him go, the lantern flashing her pupils wide. “So it’s the Wicked God.”

  James exhaled in the rumpled dark. “Some Twisted Things left over from the Wicked God, maybe—the shreds the Great Army’s still hunting. The Wicked God is dead.”

  “What Twisted Thing learns how to spell?” Nat said dryly.

  “I don’t know,” James said, and ran both hands through his hair. “Nasturtium, I am only human.”

  Silence pooled through the trees. Joy whined impatiently and snuffled Nat’s hand.

  “We have to clear this away,” Heron said into the awkward hush. “Your flour and salt are still on the dock, ma’am.”

  Marthe stared at the stone letters for a long moment. “Fine,” she said too lightly, and I reluctantly lifted the first stone. It felt wrong, like unmarking a grave. We obliterated the wet bones of that call for help and trailed back to the house in silence.

  Marthe stopped at the porch steps, her arms still crossed above her stomach. “We’ll be fine now, thank you,” she said hollowly.

  James gave her a long look. “We’re not done yet. We have a Twisted Thing to burn.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Christ, Marthe,” he said, ragged-edged, “stop being your father.”

  I flinched.

  Marthe went pale. “That was low, Jim.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and held out his weary hands. “But we’re neighbors, and—”

  “—we have to look out for each other,” Marthe finished, her teeth still gritted. That was the second-longest argument in the world, repeated over and over with the Blakely adults from the time our Papa died. “Then look out for us instead of calling me that.” The fire in her voice was weirdly soothing: this was the sister I knew, who took no nonsense, anywhere.

  James nodded gravely, and I wondered if he’d done it on purpose—to kick her out of that awful, broken calm. “We’ll loan you Sadie for a guard dog,” he said, and Tyler blinked with surprise. “She’s going into heat, and we can’t feed puppies this year.”

  “We can’t take your dog,” I said, truly flabbergasted. The Blakelys’ sheepdogs were family. To send one away, even in a lean year, was—staggering.

  Cal glanced at his husband from the corner of his eye. “Actually, I’ve a better idea. Give us winter grazing rights in your barley fields. It’d be a good thing, this year, to not take the flock all the way to River Rouge.”

  It didn’t take a breath for James to catch on. “That’s a thought. It’ll put more eyes on the land and save everyone trouble.” His smile stayed fixed easy on Marthe, but that’s not where Cal was watching. Cal was watching Tyler.

  Wicked, I thought. The Blakelys would have cheap winter grazing and the chance to keep an eye on us without ruffling our pride. An
d Tyler’s wounded leg, around which so much revolved, would be inexorably kept safe, close to home. God, what a plot, I thought, infuriated and relieved.

  “Fine, James. Do whatever you want,” Marthe snapped. She turned on her heel, stripped of all manners, and went into the house.

  “Well, that went well,” Cal muttered dryly, and I scowled.

  “I’m right here.”

  Cal’s face stayed impassive; it was Tyler who flushed. “Yes,” Cal said laconically. “You are.”

  I got behind him and started walking him, as stubborn as a sheepdog, toward their cart. “Not too happy with me, are you?” Cal said mildly as he backed down the path before me; as James, Nat, and Tyler rounded the turn.

  “Nope,” Nat said before I could. Cal cast her a startled glance.

  “I’ll get over it,” I said through gritted teeth. “Just . . . get lost. Go home.”

  Tyler fell back next to me as his uncles readied the cart. My stomach seized, and I forced myself to meet his eye.

  “Hallie, I—”

  That ugly red color was back in his face. “What?” I asked, and bit my lip.

  He took the measure of me, and looked down. Shook his head.

  He didn’t look at me again. Not once as they mounted the cart and drove, jingling, into the violent night.

  ten

  MARTHE WAS LATE TO BED. SHE BALANCED THE ACCOUNT books, fussed in the root cellar, and swept the kitchen twice before finally coming upstairs. I held my breath for ten minutes after her door shut, and fought the temptation to knock on it. To break my sworn word, curl up in her quilt, and tell her every last scrap of the humiliation Pitts had served me; describe Heron’s torn-up face when he looked upon that knife. To ask my big sister, who always knew, what to do.

  “You’re not six anymore,” I whispered, the old refrain. And without Thom here to mend our squabbles, without the threat of Papa cleaving us together, united, Marthe wasn’t Marthe anymore: she wouldn’t dry my tears, tell a bad joke, and reassure me that everything would be all right. She’d look down at me, as cold-eyed as Alonso Pitts, and send me out into the fields again; send Heron onto the winter roads. Send anything that was a problem as far away as possible.

  The world changed. Families changed. I’d known that since I was eight years old. What hurt was how I still couldn’t stop myself from wanting those impossible things: the quiet touch, on nightmare mornings, of her hand on my hair.

  I swallowed, and forced my head up high. “You are half owner of Roadstead Farm, Hallie Hoffmann. Take care of it.” How we always had: alone.

  I slipped out of my bedroom and closed the door behind me; tiptoed past Marthe’s shut door into the night. My breath plumed: a real frost was coming on. I snagged our icy shovel from the barn and carried it with me to the smokehouse. There was a light in there, one lone, smoky lantern fighting the unwelcoming moon. I tapped on the door, quick and quiet, and Heron opened it warily.

  He’d not yet prepared for bed. He was still in his shirtsleeves, face wet and stubble dripping, his socks more darns than wool. He took me in with an ugly trepidation. “Miss Hallie,” he started.

  I didn’t want to hear how that sentence ended. I thrust the shovel between our bodies like a wall. “Did the Twisted Things follow you here? Is that why nobody from John’s Creek to the river wanted you on their land?”

  The fear that had ridden his shoulders all the way from the Windstown docks flared, and then he tucked his head. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “There were incidents on the road back from John’s Creek. But that was the war. Things . . . happened.”

  “Things?”

  Heron’s smile came thin as lantern smoke. “The last town I stayed in proper was Caryville. We were there a week before a cloud came from the south and every bit of wood in the township scorched to cinders. They didn’t have a tree or doorway left. The whole town stank of lye and burnt houses.” He paused. “I was traveling with a quarter regiment, and the town hung half those men off the water tower—it was old-cities metal and it was still there. Their town was gone. They needed someone to blame.”

  I stared, my eyes full of rope and Thom’s good boots dangling, and tried to find my voice.

  “Things happened,” he said, and met my eye, almost pleading. “So much of it had nothing to do with me.”

  “But some of it did,” I finished. Some of it did.

  Heron winced, but his face was unguarded again. “Are you sending me away?”

  I recoiled, incredulous. “No.”

  His eyebrows rose—and then narrowed into an appraising stare. “Why in hell not?”

  “Because it’s winter,” I stammered, and his frank gaze didn’t falter. “You’ll freeze if I turn you out.”

  “So?” he pressed brutally. “I’m a stranger. Your sister’s pregnant. I can’t say for certain those Twisted Things aren’t flocking to John Balsam’s knife, and I’ve already left a handful of towns to the tender mercies of regimental justice. I might just wreck your little farm.”

  “I don’t hurt people!” I burst out—and covered my mouth with both hands. “I don’t do that. Not to someone who’s bringing a veteran’s family his things. Not to someone who’s trying to help save my farm.”

  “You don’t do that in the lakelands,” Heron said. Weighed me in his gaze, like a bar of soap in Uncle Matthias’s considering palm.

  My red cheeks ached against the midnight cold. “I don’t do that,” I said harshly. “We don’t do that on Roadstead Farm.”

  Heron looked down at me, indecipherable, all fathoms. “All right,” he said softly. “What’s the shovel for?”

  “I know you said it’s not magic,” I said, and set the shovel down. “But before the ground freezes, we’re burying that knife. Away from us.”

  “I’ll get my boots,” he said, and disappeared into the smokehouse.

  He came out with the knife shoved in his belt loop, swaddled in its leather wrappings; his face wholly unconcerned about what godlike powers it might stain on his skin. So small, I thought. Such a nothing of a thing. “Where do we put it?” he asked, tense.

  “As far as we can get,” I said, and we set off across the fields.

  Roadstead Farm was large, larger than we could manage even when Thom had worked the land beside me. Whole acres were left to weeds and wilderness, to a vague well, someday. We followed those overgrown paths from the river, past our burying ground and the rough stones inside it: the graves of our parents, our grandparents, a smattering of great-aunts and -uncles who’d died young, or lived long lives without leaving. We’ll have to make Thom a stone, I realized, and fought the lump in my throat. Marthe and I needed somewhere to visit. Her child would, when it was born.

  The path wandered through scrub trees and dead dandelions and trickled out in an ocean of brush. “Here,” I said, and hefted the lantern. “It’s empty. No one ever comes.”

  Heron stopped where the path turned to weeds. “Whose land is this?”

  “Ours,” I said, and pushed a waist-tall sapling aside. “There are three generations of Hoffmanns back up the road who couldn’t find the time to clear it.”

  I held the young tree aside for Heron. He ducked past it, and we waded into the scrub together, around broken bricks and the soft humps of rabbit burrows. Heron picked at the ground with the shovel, indecisive, and then sank it between the roots of a hawthorn. “Here,” he said. “So I can find it in the spring.”

  I nodded. He dug, and I held the light.

  The shadows twirled drunkenly around the tree trunk. My arms were tired. My everything was tired. I pretended that darkness was a burn mark, spreading slowly across the hawthorn like a Twisted Thing’s footprints. I lowered the lamp and—there, it was gone. Like the town of Caryville. Like Coal Mountain. John’s Creek.

  “Tell me about it?” I asked Heron.

  He didn’t bother pretending not to know what I meant: John Balsam. John’s Creek. The war against the Wicked God Southward. “That’s a personal
thing you’re asking.”

  “Personal between every grown man between here and the southlands.”

  “I mean it,” he said sharply. “You do not want to know.”

  I dropped the lantern to my side. “I just told you I did. God, you’re just like Cal Blakely after all. If I’m harboring you, at least tell me what against.”

  Heron stiffened. “I thought the price for that was a winter’s honest labor.”

  He’d forgot, for the first time, to call me miss.

  “It’s not a price,” I pressed on. “You and Cal and James and Tyler, you all act like you can protect us from ever knowing there was a war, or Twisted Things.” I gestured wide, at the burn marks in the brush he couldn’t see. “I’m trying to help you. Don’t insult me by pretending I shouldn’t know what that might cost.”

  I yanked the light up—and stopped cold. That wooden look on his face wasn’t anger. It was a dam, and behind it was grief.

  My voice caught and unraveled. “Tell me about it,” I begged, and he turned away, half in shadow. I leaned forward, farther into his space than a young woman should to any man but her suitor. “I want to know what he knew,” I said, crisp and low. “I want to know what he saw and felt, and what it was like when—”

  Heron looked up, looked at me, and his changeable gray eyes were suddenly, rawly young, as wide as Tyler Blakely’s and wholly uncertain. “A man a few inches shorter than me, dark skin, brown eyes.”

  Angry tears scratched at the back of my nose. “Marthe’s husband. He’s my brother,” and then my voice truly failed.

  Heron shifted his weight, one leg to the other, through the thousand small choices that lay around us like snares. “How long since you stopped waiting for him?” he asked, and my heart froze.

  “Just last week. Just when you came.” I shook my head and clamped my jaw tight. My eyes weren’t damp. They weren’t.

  That awful look, that studying look on Heron’s face only deepened. “Miss,” he said, differently deferent, “don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s only been a week and a half.”