An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

  “Heron was feeling enterprising this morning,” I said, and then, “No, wait. Don’t touch that.” I grabbed an end of bread off the sideboard and opened a clean Mason jar. Heron needed supper, and now was my chance.

  There wasn’t much left over after the army had been through, but I scraped stewed rabbit and winter vegetables into the jar and tucked it into my pocket. I glanced down the hall, heard the steady murmur of voices, and grabbed the lantern by the door. “Come out with me? I’ve got something to do.”

  Nat lifted her head, and her thick eyebrows with it. “Right,” she said. “Something?”

  “Adventure, Nat,” I said, and ducked outside.

  The night was edged, and glitteringly clear. Everything sparkled to a knifepoint: the stars, the frost, our puffed breath under the pale half-moon. I held the jar of stew scraps in my pocket and crunched across the hardening fields. Somewhere on Bellisle, in the distance, a light burned.

  “Where are we going?” Nat asked eagerly.

  “The hay barn,” I answered, and glanced over my shoulder. “Heron panicked when he heard about the soldiers. I couldn’t convince him they weren’t here for the knife. So he’s hiding in the hayloft, and Marthe, the soldiers—everyone—thinks he left this morning. I have to bring him something for supper.”

  Nat squinted, critical. “You know everyone always hides in haylofts.”

  “I know,” I said. “Shut up.”

  “Still.” She shot me a speculative look. “Not bad. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  I crunched ahead faster. “Thanks.”

  “Oh, c’mon. You know what I mean.”

  I puffed out a breath. That it’s Nat’s job to be sneaky, I thought. That it’s my job to be good.

  “So what’s the story there?” she asked as we rounded the pens.

  I gave her a blank look. Her eyes were troubled in the dim glow of the shielded lantern. “Stranger arrives at your door not even three weeks ago with no past, no name, and John Balsam’s knife.”

  I stiffened. “He’s got a name.”

  “It’s not Heron,” she countered. “No one saw that man and thought bird.”

  I snorted, despite myself, and Nat’s smile quirked. “What I’m asking,” she said, “is what’s going on between you two.”

  I stopped dead on the frost-hard ground. “You’re the second person to ask that tonight.”

  Nat faced me, grave. “Because I’m worried, Hal. Because you’re not acting like you.”

  The blood came up in my cheeks. “What’s me?”

  “Sensible,” Nat said pointedly. “Grown up. Smart.”

  “Boring and scared?” I snapped.

  The trees rustled in the distance, naked-limbed. Nat scowled. “I didn’t say that.”

  “I did.”

  “And you’re changing the subject.” Nat glared at me, but her heart wasn’t in it. There was a loose-leashed fear in her eyes.

  So I’m not the same me after all, I thought, wistful—and weirdly glad. Sensible and scared wasn’t all I wanted to be. “Nothing’s going on with Heron—no, Nat, I swear,” I said, and she closed her mouth. “He’s almost Marthe’s age. That’s disgusting, thanks.”

  “Doesn’t stop some people,” she muttered, and I huffed.

  “I’m grown up and sensible, right? Pretend I’ve got some sense. Besides—” I stopped abruptly. The memory of that long, warm kiss stung my lips.

  Nat and I told each other nearly everything: our family squabbles, our fears, our crushes. But I wasn’t sure I could tell her yet about that kiss.

  She crossed her arms. “There’s someone else,” she crowed.

  “No!”

  “Yes,” she pressed, and her cold cheeks bloomed into a grin. “You’re blushing.”

  “It’s cold,” I muttered, defeated. I was certainly blushing now.

  “Tell me it’s not one of the Sumner boys. I’ll hang you by your toes until your brain works again.”

  “Nat,” I pleaded, and pressed my palms to my bright face. “I don’t even know if it’s something yet. It’s too early to tell.”

  “So it’s half something.”

  “God, stop,” I begged. But I was smiling, smiling down to my toes. “Half something,” I admitted. “Maybe. Let me figure it out?”

  “All right,” she said, and huddled into her coat. “You know I just want you to be happy.”

  “I do.” I did. Suddenly I didn’t feel the cold at all. We crunched, together, through the gathering snow.

  There was no noise from the hay barn, not even a whisper. I lifted the latch, and we slipped in through a finger’s-width of space. The scent of sweet, faded summer green drifted into my nose, little more than dust now, and more memory than smell. I unshielded the lantern carefully, and it threw shadows across the bales and rafters, a swaying fiddle reel of light.

  “Heron?” I whispered, and caught sight of him by accident: the curve of a man’s head and shoulder against the hayloft wall. “You can come out now. They’re in the house.”

  Heron’s voice floated from the high loft. “You’re alone?”

  “Nat’s here,” I said, and the silence stretched.

  She snorted, and climbed the ladder to the loft. “Oh, come on. We can’t all be army spies.”

  “We brought supper,” I added, and climbed up after her.

  Heron huddled, wrapped in three shirts and a tattered horse blanket, rock-still among the lean bales of hay. I lifted the lantern—and forgot how I could have cast him, even fleetingly, as one of Jones’s irregulars. His legs were knit into a cradle, and in the center lay an orange cat, its tail limp on the floor.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered. Heron stared at us hollowly, and wordlessly turned the cat over. The fur around his mouth was a strange, colorless shade: a splash of transparent wire in the mottled orange and black. His nose was bleached white, an acid splash in his bristling fur.

  “Gussy?” I whispered, my palm hovering over his back. Our cats were all Gus—a joke of Marthe’s that she’d never got around to explaining. It wasn’t like they answered. They hated company, hated to be touched. You could pet them for a minute and then they’d be off into the haystacks, hissing. “What happened to him?”

  “Oh, damn,” Nat said quietly, and pulled my hand away.

  The cat’s eyes were gone. The sockets swelled with thin pink flesh, scar-torn and sickly. I could smell them, still burning, acrid against the sweet, soft dust.

  “I found him this way,” Heron said tonelessly. There were tears running, silent, down his windburned cheeks. “He could still see, a little bit, before sunset. He died before dark. I couldn’t just get the hammer and—” He shook his head. A whole universe of inability rushed into that silence. Heron’s hand moved soothingly across the cat’s back, as if it couldn’t stop.

  “Cat, what did you do?” I whispered, as if I didn’t already know. Most of our Twisted Things had been found in the garden, but there had still been that first one: that smear of burning wings cairn-buried at the riverside. One curious cat, prowling for morning prey, had lifted it there for breakfast, and its poison touch ate him slowly from the places they’d touched.

  “Twisted Thing,” Nat said grimly, and shook her head. “I’ll go light the fire.”

  “No—” Heron snapped, a child’s outrage.

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s poisoned by a Twisted Thing. He’s dead, Heron.”

  “There’s got to be something—” His voice trickled out.

  “You’re not a farm kid, are you?” Nat asked gently.

  Heron held Gus tighter and shook his head. “My mother and I make cheese. In a little woods town three hours outside Black Creek.” The long muscles of his back shook once, twice, with hiccupping sobs.

  “You’re a cheesemaker,” I said quietly.

  He nodded, every mile and inch of highway written across his face. “I never should have left home.”

  “You have to let him go now,” I said, and hated myse
lf for it. Heron lifted the cat from his lap as if his heart was breaking.

  I took the cat’s stiff body and stroked it mindlessly. Orange fur clumped on my blue gloves and floated into the hay bales. Heron’s eyes were red and freely crying, his breath hitched. I took his hand and squeezed it; felt Nat pat my back and almost choked.

  “I can’t tell Marthe about this. Not now,” I said. “She fed these cats from the bottle.”

  “We burn it out back, then,” Nat said grimly, and pulled me to my feet.

  Heron swung his legs over the hayloft ladder like a man long bedridden. I wrapped Gussy gently in the tattered blanket. “Take the lamp?” I asked Nat, and clambered down the ladder.

  “If Marthe asks, where were we?” Nat asked from above.

  “The smokehouse. No—looking for Twisted Things. I don’t know,” I said, and huffed out a breath. I am already tired of secrets, I thought, and opened the barn door.

  On the other side of it, shadowed against the night sky, someone yelped.

  fourteen

  HERON SWORE. I JUMPED BACK, THE CAT’S CORPSE IN MY arms. The shadow took a step forward. “Hallie?”

  Tyler’s voice.

  “Ty,” I breathed, and sat down hard on a hay bale. Tyler scrambled into the barn and leaned hard against the wall.

  “What are you doing here?” Nat hissed, pale in the lamplight. “Mum said you need to rest.”

  The glare he shot her was fierce. “Right. And what are you doing?”

  “Look,” I said, between them, and held up Gus’s body, shrunken and stinking, the orange gone to white.

  “Oh,” Tyler managed, the fight punched right out of him. He hesitated, and then wrapped a clumsy arm around my shoulders. I stiffened: You didn’t just touch like that in front of people. Not before your family knew you were courting, and approved.

  Good thing we’re not courting, then, I thought fleetingly. My heart felt bruised and my head spun with nerves, and if Heron or Nat could offer me comfort without it meaning things, well—

  It was pointless, the kiss and our promise to do things our way, if we couldn’t even hold each other up.

  I leaned into Tyler’s strange-familiar warmth, wiped my eyes on his flannel shirt. His arm tightened around my back: awkward, new. Defiant.

  Nat looked at me, looked at her big brother, and her mouth shaped a perfect, astonished O.

  “What are you doing?” Tyler asked again, closer to my ear.

  “Heron’s hiding,” I said thickly. “We’re going out to burn Gus’s body.”

  “I’m sorry,” Heron said awkwardly. “But those soldiers will ask about a dead barn cat. They’ll want to search in here. Every inch.”

  I swallowed the scent of Tyler’s shirt. “They’re going to search it anyway. They’re staying the night to look around for Twisted Things tomorrow.”

  Heron turned the color of dirty tea.

  “Look,” Nat said, off balance, unsure where to look between a hired man playing fugitive and her best friend in her brother’s arms. “That’s easy. I can get them out of here long enough for Heron to move.”

  Tyler’s chin shifted on my shoulder. “What are you plotting now?”

  Her lip curled. “I will go back to your kitchen,” she said loftily, over Tyler’s head, “and offer them the bunkhouse at Lakewood Farm.”

  Tyler eased back. “That could really work.”

  “Of course it’ll work,” Nat said bitingly. “They looked at Uncle James like he was John Balsam himself.” She put down the lamp and fixed Heron with a sharp eye. “Is tonight enough to get your things and get yourself to ground?”

  He nodded, his face ravaged.

  “Good,” she said, absolutely in control once again. She might be leaner, and taller, and half strange with absence, but she was still the same Nasturtium Blakely who’d run all our games as a child, forever frustrated that we were catching her imaginary trout wrong. “I’ll take them over the high road. Don’t go anywhere ’til we’re gone. And you,” Nat added, and pointed a finger at her brother.

  “Me,” Ty agreed coolly.

  “Don’t let Uncle James see you out of bed or he’ll stripe your hide,” she said, and stomped out into the frost.

  “No, he won’t,” Tyler added, unnecessarily, once she was gone.

  Heron sank, exhausted, to the barn floor. I detached myself from Tyler’s arms. “Will you be all right in here a little longer?”

  Heron nodded curtly. “I’ll get my things from your smokehouse. I stuffed them down in back.” He seemed to have run out of feelings to feel.

  I swallowed a clawing worry. “Eat. Here,” I said, and pressed the scraps jar into his hands. We waited for Nat’s steps to fade before I hefted Gus’s body, and then we walked, Tyler and I, to the back fields to burn our dead.

  We lit Gus’s pyre on the other side of the hawthorn tree, between John Balsam’s knife and the river. It took too long to build the fire: the ground was frozen now, the wood wet, and my gloved hands kept slipping on the striker. Tyler held the lamp high, and I blew endlessly on the curling tinder to grow our meager sparks. We didn’t speak.

  Tyler set the cat’s limp body into the flames when they caught, solid and bright. I stared off across the river, at the choppy winter waves. I was starting to hate this field. When this was all over, I would level every weed inside it and drown it in river water.

  “The gloves too. They touched the body,” Tyler said, and I peeled off Nat’s fine blue gloves regretfully.

  “She’ll be so upset.”

  He found my good hand and squeezed it. “She won’t. They’re just things.”

  They curled like crackling paper in the low orange flames. A wild dog called, lonely, up the river, and its cry sank into the snap of dying logs.

  “Do you want its ashes?” Tyler asked. I stifled a bitter laugh: what a mockery that would be. A cat’s ashes in that venerated place on our mantel while Thom stayed unburied, missing, gone.

  “No,” I said, and kicked the cold dirt. Another loss on Roadstead Farm, half-funeraled, done in secret. Another piece of mourning we couldn’t finish and move on from.

  When the fire cindered, we walked single file through the broken brush to where our fields started, to where everything still tenuously made sense. “Walk with me a bit farther?” I asked Tyler after a moment. Our house was a dark cloud atop the hill, and I couldn’t face it yet with the feel of that orange fur on my hands.

  “It’ll be more of a meander,” he said dryly.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Yeah. Okay,” he said, and we changed course: down the frosty field road, toward the orchard and the cold riverbank. He took my arm after a moment, and it wasn’t to hold me upright or to ask me to keep him from falling.

  “This is still weird,” I said into the silent fields.

  “Yeah. Um—” Tyler started. “Thank you for saying that. It’s weird.”

  I couldn’t tell why it felt less okay when it was him who said it.

  “Bad weird?” he asked as we approached the glittering orchard trees. The apple branches loomed, frosted into false stars.

  “Not bad weird,” I said, and slid my hand down his arm. Took his hand.

  His lips pressed to mine, gentler now, steam-warm against the night. I pulled back, drew breath, and bumped into his frozen nose. “Right,” he said. “No, your other right,” and I laughed, a nervous giggle that bloomed into an all-out grin.

  Tyler looked down at me, his frost-pinched face weirdly fond. “I missed your laugh.”

  I wiped my eyes with gloveless fingers. “I do too,” I said when I could breathe again. “I just . . . I’ve had about a hundred feelings since I woke up this morning, Ty. It’s too much. It’s exhausting.”

  His shard-bright eyes shuttered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you should do it for me, or—” He ran a hand through his hair. “God, I’m bad at this.”

  “I’m an expert,” I proclaimed brightly. He stared at me for a second, and the
n deliberately poked one finger into my gut.

  I laughed again, helpless, ticklish gasps, and his face went less grim. “I like when you’re happy too,” I said, and wrapped my cold hand around his finger. “Just . . . take it slow. Give me time. I need—I need to breathe.”

  “Right,” he said softly, and turned his caught hand to take mine. “C’mon. I’ll walk you home.”

  We set off up the frozen path, slow enough that I could think about that hand in mine and what it meant. Ice popped sharply beneath our boots. We gained the orchard path, and Ty’s arms moved like shadows flecked with dim starlight. His bad leg lagged through the hardened dirt: crunch, crunch—clink.

  “What the hell—” he started softly, and stepped back. “Not again.”

  Right, he swears now, I reminded myself, and tugged my hand free to unshield the lantern.

  A river stone. Five river stones. And then a whole pathway of them, icy wet, small, and graying. They’d come back in the night: a long howl written dot by dot across the frozen mud.

  “Oh—” I said, and my stomach dropped. I knew the way those stones clustered together. The same hard corners and tight curves had told me for two silent years, two terrified years of living with Papa after Uncle Matthias was gone: STAY CLEAR TONIGHT. LEFT YOUR SUPPER IN THE HAY BARN. BE STRONG. I LOVE YOU MOST. “Marthe wrote this. She’s writing back,” I said, and in the lamplight, Tyler went still.

  “TELL ME HOW TO HELP,” Tyler read, barely above a whisper. “I DON’T KNOW HOW TO FIND YOU. LOVE,” and his voice stumbled. “I NEED YOU SO MUCH I CAN’T EVEN BREATHE.”

  “Marthe said she saw a ghost the night the first message appeared,” I said, and the words burned my throat to the tongue-roots. “She saw Thom. She thinks it’s Thom asking for help.”

  The last line glimmered at the lantern’s edge: I NEVER SHOULD HAVE LET YOU LEAVE HOME.

  I reached for Tyler’s hand, and it fell limp between my fingers. The stars glowed, gap-toothed, and between them I also burned with unruly embarrassment, with fear. Marthe had to be hallucinating: wishing for magic, wishing for a miracle so hard she’d fabricated one whole. She had to. I’d worked so hard to stop waiting. I’d just finally learned to let Thom Clarlund go.