An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

  I wrapped my mother’s shawl tightly around me and tried not to feel utterly lost.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  I bit back ruined humiliation. “Go home.”

  Tyler nodded gravely, once. “Then let’s go.”

  We gained the front hall side by side, palpably and uncomfortably apart. Mrs. Pitts held the front door for us, as courtesy demanded. She looked at the wall and did not say a word.

  “Thank you,” Tyler told her as he stepped into the sunshine.

  She hesitated, and then her chin came up. “Halfrida. Do give my greetings to your sister.”

  I clenched my jaw and just stared.

  Mrs. Pitts bowed her head a little. “He’s afraid of a panic,” she said, her voice strained. “It’s only been a month since the fear here’s settled down. There hasn’t been a sighting since September, but the Masons and Sumners still slaughtered three feral dog packs and burned a whole Bellisle orchard five weeks ago on nothing more than a rumor. I don’t know what the town would do if the gossip woke.”

  “It doesn’t need to. He’s already panicking,” I said gracelessly.

  “Yes, he is,” Mrs. Pitts replied. “Whatever you think being mayor means, he’s just a man. And no man should be forced to defend against gods.”

  For anyone else I might have felt a twinge of pity. But Alonso Pitts’s disdain was too fresh to let it through. “Thank you for the tea,” I said, civil and formal, and saw myself down their front steps, head held high, still half owner of Roadstead Farm.

  Mackenzie Green’s General Supply was as cozy as a holiday kitchen, packed floor to ceiling with grain sacks and the smell of new wool and cider. The shelves were half empty for the first time I could remember; usually they teemed with things we couldn’t afford. I stepped inside, too aware of Tyler’s silence, of the distance between us—certain that all of Main Street was whispering behind our backs.

  Mackenzie lorded over the narrow counter, a woman cut even narrower and just as precisely. Her face split into a wrinkled smile. “There’s my Hallie,” she said, and pecked me on both cheeks. “I sent your things and your hired man down to the docks. He looked like a man in need of making himself useful. Now, I heard you were up to see Pitts this morning.”

  It was true what they said about keeping a secret in Windstown: the only sure way to do it was to promptly drop dead. In the back aisle, a company of Chandlers lowered their voices, hands on their rucksacks of precious old-cities salvage. One of the older ones—Rami, his black beard half gray—shot me a look of profound sympathy.

  “We were,” I grudged. I tangled my fingers in Mami’s shawl and wished I were in my barley fields, brown-gray and endless, silent, safe. Empty of everyone’s gossipy, grasping opinions.

  “We saw a Twisted Thing on the property,” I said reluctantly, and Mackenzie quirked one black-silver brow at the Chandlers, who took the hint and dutifully filed out. Mackenzie knew everything that happened in Windstown. Telling her—confiding in her—was worth the chance she’d confide back. “We came to find out if they’ve been back here in town, too. And in one breath Pitts was sending us off the farm, bringing in generals to rip up our winter plantings, and—I have to get home.”

  “Pitts,” Mackenzie said, and sighed. “Well, he won’t be mayor forever. I’ll keep an eye out for your Twisted Things, child, and speak with Darnell Prickett. All the news comes through his doors that doesn’t come through mine.”

  “Thank you,” I said, overwhelmed. Not everyone in Windstown was Alonso Pitts. There were still people who cared for us, and who we cared for in return. “I don’t know how we can repay you—”

  Mackenzie’s lips pursed. “Down to the docks, now. Don’t lose the light.”

  I flushed. I’d offended her, and I didn’t even know how. “Thank you,” I stammered again, and we crept out into the afternoon.

  The air on the riverfront was cooling fast. Crates and dry sacks scattered over the pier, stowed inexpertly about our riverboat—which had been packed with a total unfamiliarity with how the boat took weight. “Oh, Heron,” I sighed, and looked around for him.

  He stood on the garden walk beneath a leafless peach tree, in quiet conversation with Rami Chandler while the Chandler cousins loaded their boat. I glanced over my shoulder at Tyler—already shifting packages from bow to stern to bulwarks—and drifted to join them.

  “Halfrida,” Rami said, with a tip of his broad chin.

  “Rami.” I nodded back.

  Heron glanced at me, surprised.

  “My given name’s perfectly all right. We’re neighbors here,” Rami explained, and reached into a pocket for an awkward, cloth-wrapped bundle. “I heard mention of the Twisted Thing on your property up at Green’s. We thought you should know: we’ve had a sighting too.”

  He unwrapped the cloth—his spare keffiyeh, creased and clean—and produced a thick glass jar with something floating inside. I shaded the jar with one hand. Inside was the corpse of a lizard, no larger than my palm, curled in some viscous fluid.

  I swallowed past a throat gone dry. The lizard’s limbs bent in a way I couldn’t understand: backwards, like a horse’s hocks, but three times, a zigzag of joints. Its ruff was green and scaly, touched with purpling dots. And its ears, floating limp and free, were the red-tufted points of a fox.

  It wasn’t a fluke. There were still Twisted Things in the lakelands. I couldn’t even begin to figure out what that meant.

  “Be careful,” Rami warned as I took the jar. “It’s still throwing heat.” The glass warmed my hands like a fresh mug of soup, even through Nat’s fine blue gloves.

  “When did you find this?” I asked.

  “Two days ago. Ada found the nest,” Rami said, and waved her over from the knot of busy Chandlers. I startled. I hadn’t seen Ada Chandler in years, since the days when we still paid calls in Windstown and our neighbors’ hospitality was good. She’d grown from a narrow, quiet kid into a woman taller than me, her dark arms hard with muscle and her black hair close cut in tight, dense curls.

  “Ada,” I said awkwardly. She anatomized me with a look; cataloged my own changes in seconds. The practical nod that was her verdict was Ada to the core: identify, recognize, and dismiss everything that didn’t interest her.

  “You’ve got a Twisted Thing, then?” she said, and leaned in with an intensity I remembered all too well.

  “Yeah,” I blurted. Not being sure what to do with Ada Chandler was a familiar, comforting feeling. “Yesterday. Just one.”

  Ada nodded, sharp as a rice merchant. “That fits. The nest we found yesterday was a new one—none of the specimens we caught this summer lived past two weeks. Their burns killed them off, and they disintegrated after, but this little guy’s still nice and fresh.”

  “Caught?” I said, scandalized. “You kept them?”

  Ada’s bright eyes narrowed. “Of course we kept them. There’s no way to fight something you don’t understand.”

  A horrid image flashed across my mind’s eye: twisted birds and lizards, centipedes as long as my arm, twined and floating in jars like Marthe’s canned carrots. I pushed the jar back at Ada. The lizard bumped against the glass, and Ada took it like I’d cradle a sick goat.

  “You’re taking an awful risk,” I said softly. There were punishments for harboring now, ever since Asphodel Jones, the Wicked God’s general and living prophet, and his irregulars scattered into the hills above John’s Creek. The Great Army found those who harbored Jones’s men or failed to rid their lands of Twisted Things, and hanging was just the favorite death. There were dim rumors of others, less kind and uglier still. Stories had reached even our lonely farm of the swift blade of a regimental trial.

  “Well, you can’t harbor dead things,” Ada said with a practical shrug. “Think of it as part of the war effort.”

  Heron’s brown face took on a sickly tinge. “How long since you last saw a nest, before yesterday?”

  Ada settled thoughtfully onto her he
els. “They were gone for weeks. Since August, maybe; they died out, the first time, when the soldiers came home. This little mischief arrived yesterday.”

  The courteous light in Heron’s eyes snuffed out. “Miss, I’ll help settle the cargo,” he said, and strode back down the pier.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Ada asked, much too keen.

  “I don’t know,” I said before it caught up to me: I’d watched Heron arrive on the black-paved high road. The road that came from the old city, where the Chandlers studied its ruins. He’d been there, and he’d been running. Bearing John Balsam’s knife, the relic that saved the world. The relic nobody wanted on their land.

  “Tell us if you find any more of them?” I asked, stuttery and distracted.

  “Of course,” Rami said, and shook my hand. I hurried down to the rowboat. It rode lower in the water with the weight of our supplies, its floor strewn with packages tangled in sacking.

  “We’re ready?” I asked nobody. Tyler avoided my eyes. He tucked his bad leg in and nodded.

  We cast off into the river under a cold sun, slipping mockingly behind the burnt-out ruins of skyscrapers. “Row fast,” I said once we were away from the shoreline, Windstown receding into smears and dots behind us.

  Heron bent over his oars, wooden, hidden.

  You and I, I resolved grimly, are going to talk.

  nine

  WE REACHED THE RIVERBANK AT TWILIGHT.

  The dock loomed out of the evening, looking half abandoned after the bright glass and gardens of Windstown. I fumbled the mooring rope around the post. The world was already doused in evening gray, too dark to see our chimney smoke across the distant fields.

  “Strike a light?” I asked, and took the dockside lantern off its hook. “I’ll get the wheelbarrow; you unload the boat.”

  “Miss,” Heron muttered. He’d been withdrawn since we’d set sail. I shoved the lantern into his hands and hurried down the dock to the orchard, away from Tyler and Heron’s moods, into delicious privacy.

  Roadstead Farm’s paths were written in the folds of my skin; they were memorized in my tendons and bones. I picked my way up the orchard track, dodging roots and stones by memory, through sleeping apple trees that loomed like starless gulps of night. I closed my eyes and drank in the rustle of wind on branches, the smell of chilled soil in the fields. Home, I thought gratefully; aimed it defiantly across the river at the ponderous Pitts house. Home. My stomach flooded with sick tension at even the memory of Pitts glaring down his nose at us, so effortlessly ready to swat our whole lives away.

  The nausea curled around a new thought: that knife. Heron had said it was just steel and leather, unmagical, inert. Steel and leather he doesn’t want me—or anyone—to touch. There was something wrong between that knife and Heron, something that didn’t sum to whole numbers. A secret.

  I was already full into the argument with him in my head when my foot landed on something round and wrong.

  I went down with a shriek in the cold dirt path. Twisted Thing, I thought, blind and frightened, and scrambled backward. The night before me stayed silent. Behind me, it exploded with footsteps. “Hallie?” Tyler called, his voice muffled against nothing at all.

  I listened hard for motion—the flap of wings or the stalk of feral dogs—but all I heard was the river, hushed with distance even though I knew it was just over the rise. I drew in a breath to shout back, call for Tyler, and I choked. The air was as thin as flour.

  The coughs clawed at my throat, racking, grating. But the feather came out of my hand, I thought, and wrapped both arms around my belly. It couldn’t be another Twisted Thing, or a fragment: no part of me hurt that much. Tyler shouted again, and then Heron.

  Heron had grabbed my arms, before, and pulled me back.

  I clawed backward, coughing, over roots and hillocks: back out of the airlessness where I’d fallen. My hand closed on something cold and solid as I scrambled back down toward the beach—a round river stone, still damp from the water, trailing slimy water weed. And then another, and another.

  Marthe, I thought with a thrill of fear—and joy. She left a note. Marthe and I had written notes in twigs or pebbles when we were younger, when there was danger. We’d left warnings for each other when we couldn’t speak aloud. She was talking to me again.

  I looked up toward the chimney. In the distance, the house was dark.

  Something is wrong.

  I let the stone go, and it clacked against another rock, the flat kind Thom had taught me to skip as a child. River water seeped through Nat’s gloves as I ran my fingers over heaps and piles of stones, disgorged wetly all around me, trying to read their jagged message.

  Sparks lit the night: the lantern. It wobbled wildly along the beach, Heron and Tyler’s footsteps slamming across the sand behind it. Heron shoved into the road, his fists clenched around a piece of driftwood. Tyler stumbled up beside him. The dockside lantern swung crazily in his hand, and its light smeared the dark trees gray, finally lighting the ground under my hands. “Hallie, what—” Tyler started, and confused horror spread across his face.

  “Oh,” Heron said, small and fearstruck.

  I pushed to my feet and looked down.

  The path to the farmstead was choked with drowned stones. I’d been sitting sprawled between them, inside a giant stone-hewn scream. The rocks I’d touched, the rocks I’d thrown formed the curve of a message written too large: WE’RE STUCK HERE. WE’RE DYING. HELP. PLEASE.

  “Marthe,” I gasped, and ran.

  The house stood lightless and lifeless on the hilltop, its windows flung open wide. “Marthe?” I called as I burst into the kitchen. No one answered. The hearth was a mess of ashy coals, the fire hours dead. Flour spilled across Marthe’s woodblock table in a shocked arc. “Marthe?” I rushed up the stairs. Our bedrooms, our washroom were all empty.

  I crashed out the door, down the path, and past the goat pen. The goats were stirred up, wide awake and bleating. Blood pounded in my ears. She’d shut the kitchen door. She’d done that. She had to be unharmed still, and hiding from whatever had driven her from the house. I leaned my head, desperate, into my hands. Where would you go? I asked, my heartbeat wild, if you were alone and afraid?

  The smokehouse, I thought, but that was my place, the place I would go. And then: the hayloft. The barn.

  I took off for the barn on shaking legs. The door squealed wide under my frantic fingers and sent something scurrying for the corner, cats or voles or monstrosities in the dark. I bunched up my courage and burst inside, shouting, “Marthe? Marthe?”

  The building held its breath, and then “Hallie?” floated down from the rafters.

  I looked up and saw my sister, disheveled and ferocious in the rising moonlight, crouched in the hayloft with our pitchfork held high—and three scared marmalade cats at her ankles.

  “Oh, Marthe,” I breathed, and she dropped the fork, eyes wild. She was in just her housedress. Her hands were shaking with cold. I scrabbled up the ladder and threw Mami’s shawl about her, rubbed blood frantically into her arms. “Marthe, how long have you been up here? What happened?”

  She lifted one arm from her straining belly and tentatively touched my cheek. “I think I saw his ghost,” Marthe said, all wonderment, and then my brave, cool sister crumpled into tears.

  “Oh, no, Marthe,” I blurted, and flung my arms around her: willed my heat and nerve and stubbornness straight into her heart. “You’re okay,” I begged, and chafed her cold hands. “We found your message. It’s okay, I swear.”

  “What message—” she started, and my stomach knotted.

  “The stones in the orchard road,” I managed before the effort of pretending became too much. We looked down the hayloft ladder. Into the uncharted dark.

  “A ghost?” I asked softly.

  Her smile ached. “I miss him so much. But his eyes—his eyes were terrible.”

  She wrapped her arms around me, and we stayed there shaking, tear tracks on our cheeks, until
Heron and Tyler brought the light in.

  One of Mackenzie Green’s burlap sacks was full of southlands tea: the last prewar batch from the Carolinas. There was enough of it to brew strong, dark cups for all of us while Heron ran to Lakewood Farm for the Blakelys.

  Marthe checked all the windows, locked the doors, and pulled the blinds. Her eyes were red and haunted. They scanned the walls restlessly, marked every shadow’s fall. I set milk and honey on the table and tried to forget her shaken touch on my cheek. She’d already pulled back into her fortress of reserve. I couldn’t see a hint of her behind those deliberate walls.

  “Town,” she said, a dare to break the spell of normality she’d thrown together: tea brewing and the smell of sweet candle wax in the air. “How did it go?”

  I bowed my head and handed back the accounts book. “That’s a good price on salt,” Marthe said after a moment.

  “Heron did that. I was talking to Pitts,” I said low, and Tyler excused himself to the parlor. I wasn’t the only one who could feel Marthe’s temperamental weather.

  “And what did he have to say?” Marthe asked bitterly.

  My jaw clenched into a snarl. “Pitts wants to pack us off to Prickett’s and quarantine the whole farm. And I told him where to shove his militia, his grudge, and his presumption.”

  Marthe’s grim face flickered, and she scrubbed a hand across her eyes. “Good girl.”

  I flushed, and looked away. “He said there aren’t Twisted Things in Windstown. But the Chandlers found one. It was all—” I shook my head. I couldn’t inflict that pickled, floating corpse on Marthe.

  My sister’s face went still. “We’ll just have to handle it, then.”

  “How?” I said, small, into the ghost-filled night.

  Her jaw set, stone hard. “By ourselves, Hal,” she said. “The same way we always have,” and then the kitchen door opened and the Blakelys poured in.