An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

  Heron’s mouth opened and then hung. Harsh, I thought, with a dark satisfaction. This wasn’t even Heron’s farm. He wasn’t even the one with the most to lose.

  “If anyone knows how to fix this,” Tyler offered, tentative, “it might be Ada Chandler.”

  Nat’s eyebrows skyrocketed.

  “She’s studying Twisted Things,” he said, speculative, “just like the Chandlers study the ruins. Ada probably knows more about Twisted Things by now than anyone. If anyone in fifty miles knows about their world and how to close up that hole, it’ll be her.”

  “Even if she doesn’t,” Nat said—Nat, who’d never really even liked Ada Chandler—“you’re right, she’ll go find out. She never wants to do anything except pin bugs to boards or pick through old-cities houses for salvage. Ada hates not knowing things.”

  “All right,” I said, curling my fists around my shirt hem just to feel like I had hold of something. “We get Ada. We tell her everything. And we hope to God she can use it to figure out how to close that hole and lock the Twisted Things on the other side.”

  Heron looked anxiously at the shovel barring the door. “You said you’d keep my secret.”

  I stood and faced him full. “There are Twisted Things pouring onto my riverbank, soldiers touching every inch of my farm, and my sister thinks you betrayed us and skipped town northward. Telling Ada Chandler about that knife is the last thing likely to get you killed right now.”

  Heron bowed his head. I could see it running through him: I should have never left home.

  “Well, you did, and now we’ve got to deal with it,” I said softly, and the gaze he turned up at me was hooded with regret.

  “I’ll go to the Chandlers, then,” Tyler said. “Now. We can’t afford to wait.”

  Heron’s eyes shut, exhausted. “Where do I stay?” Now I knew what he was picturing when he closed his eyes: a cheesemaker’s shop in a small town in the woods, where everyone spoke with his short and lilting grace.

  “Not the hayloft,” Nat put in, and I gave her a filthy look.

  I looked around at old desks and cradles, the shattered settee. “Here,” I said. “They’ve already been through the place, and everything here’s broken. Nobody really looks for anything in here.”

  Heron examined the endlessly branching trails I’d made when I was a child. “I’ll find a spot,” he said softly, and wove into the ruins.

  Nat cautiously unbarred the door, and we followed her like ducklings into the cloudy morning. The bar scraped back into place the moment the door shut.

  “What do I tell Mum?” Nat asked.

  Tyler huffed a cloudy breath. “Don’t. I’ll deal with it myself.”

  Nat’s baleful stare turned wounded for just a moment. “I’ll find the lieutenant, then,” she said, and stomped toward the fenceline.

  “She’s mad at us,” I said when she was far enough away. “I didn’t think she’d be mad.”

  I rubbed my bad hand fretfully. Ty snorted, and folded it into his; tucked them both into his warmly lined pocket. “Nat’s had a bad summer.”

  Carrying Lakewood Farm. Tyler’s leg. Her uncles. Her father. None of us had had a good summer at all.

  “You okay?” Tyler asked. No, I thought. Yes. No. I shook my head, once. I was not okay.

  Tyler drew back, confused. “What’d I do wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and took a shuddering breath. “Nothing. You did everything right.” I let myself lean into him for one more moment and then stood, cold, on my own two feet. “You have to go get the Chandlers. And I have to gather the eggs. I told Marthe I’d do them over an hour ago.”

  “Right,” Tyler said wistfully, and pecked me on the cheek. It was strange how quickly a thing became normal. Bonfires of dead birds and lizards, your brother’s absence, the texture of lips upon your cheek.

  “Be careful,” I said, uncomfortably like Marthe, and he chuckled.

  “Wear a warm scarf and hat, and do up your jacket.”

  I socked him in the shoulder.

  “Right,” he replied, and quirked a grin. “Be back soon.”

  I watched him limp to the highway, a shuffling dot of warmth, before I ducked into the poultry barn to gather the day’s eggs. Marthe had moved on to making sausage when I got in, and the look she shot me should have withered my bones: Shiftless, lazy, irresponsible, childish Hallie.

  “Eggs,” I said, and set them on the counter.

  “At ten minutes per hen?” she said acidly. My child’s fears wriggled, but I ignored them. I am doing something important, I realized for the first time. She doesn’t even know it, but for once, I’m taking the weight off her. For once, I’m taking care of Marthe.

  “Eggs,” I repeated, and slipped outside. The fresh, cold air prickled my face and stung my eyes. There was a fire to lay, down by the river. I put my mitts on and brought the wood down, ready to burn.

  sixteen

  IT WAS A TENSE AND SILENT AFTERNOON. I TAPPED A DOUBLE dozen shingles onto the poultry barn, filled the lye barrel with ash and snowmelt so we could finally make soap, burned twenty-seven Twisted Things to dust down by the river dock, and Tyler still didn’t return. I worked like a proper farm girl, from light ’til dusk, and it still didn’t block the quiet out of my ears.

  A way of life becomes normal so quickly. I’d forgotten how lonely the farm was without Tyler here; without Heron just around the corner, whistling low. Fifty acres was a lot of land, much too much for just two people to live on. Much too desolate and cold.

  Supper was even tenser. Marthe was angry—real anger, for the first time since the soldiers arrived—and her rage splashed out across the kitchen, into the air. The goat sausage drying on the rafters had a squeezed and vicious look, and she pushed pickled beets across her plate in short, sharp shoves. I kept quiet, kept from calling her rage my way, snuck glances at the windowpanes and listened for Tyler’s step. Marthe gave up on the beets and shoved her plate away. I glanced at it, awkward. There was nothing to say.

  I took my empty plate to the basin, dropped it in. “I’m going to check for Twisted Things,” I said, and lifted my coat off the hook.

  Her eyes veiled with suspicion: hard, mean, and hurt. “I swear,” I added, small. “Just to the poultry barn and the river. No secrets.”

  “You still haven’t told me why Heron left,” she said. I swallowed, but she just waited: a fisherman’s sort of patience, the kind with a hook pushed through your lip.

  “Please don’t make me make things up,” I blurted desperately.

  “Nobody makes you,” my sister said, flat and even. “You tell people the truth or you don’t.”

  I bit my lip. Marthe winced behind her long bangs and put a hand on her belly.

  “You okay?” I asked immediately.

  “It’s just the baby kicking,” she said, and lifted a baleful brow. “You can’t change the subject like that.”

  My stomach knotted. “Do you need me to get something, or—”

  She stared at me skeptically. “I’m pregnant, Hallie. Not dead.”

  You either tell the truth or you don’t, I thought, and sucked in a breath. I didn’t even know where I’d begin anymore; I couldn’t begin. I could see only one way out of Marthe’s carefully laid trap, and it was the worst thing I’d ever done, ever.

  I looked straight at Marthe’s belly and—deliberately—flinched.

  Her eyes opened wider—all the way. “Hallie, talk to me.”

  “What Cal Blakely said,” I said, and took care to make my voice stumble. Her eyebrows rose. “About the baby. About upsetting it, and—”

  Marthe darkened like a storm cloud. “That is an absolute stupid fairy tale,” she said. “Uroma was pregnant with Opa while the old cities were falling, and she spent all day building the house and all night chasing bandits off our land. It takes more to lose a baby than this.”

  I let out a breath. The steely grit was gone from Marthe’s eyes. “Is that why you won’t tell me anything anym
ore?” she said, quieter.

  It worked. I looked down at the table and shrugged. She’d take it as a yes.

  I am horrible.

  “The baby’s fine,” she said, just handing me the comfort I’d worked so hard to steal. “Here.” And she placed my hand on her belly.

  My fingers spread over her stomach: two thin layers of fabric between them and her tight, stretching skin. I sat there awkwardly; this was almost unbearably close for us. We never hugged or touched the way the Pricketts or Chaudhrys did, light and laughing, like it meant nothing at all. I started to pull away, and then I felt it.

  So small I could have imagined it: an insistent little push. Something touching me through skin and Marthe’s cotton dress. I jumped, and Marthe’s mouth twitched with the ghost of a smile.

  “Your niece. Or nephew.” Her bleak eyes met mine, and hidden in them was a flush, a rush of pride.

  I beamed back, not lying now; unexpectedly euphoric. “It’s a real baby.”

  She nodded, and edged back enough to let my hand drift off her belly. My palm still felt warm, the ghost of stubborn life whispering across it. I closed my fingers on that feeling to keep it from wisping away. She’d just given me something: a gift. Something special I should have earned, not taken by stealth to deflect her.

  The worst part about learning to lie was the way you lied to yourself. How the lies seeped into, and tainted, everything true.

  “I made you some lye,” I said. I had nothing else to offer. I wanted so desperately to have something to offer her.

  Marthe swallowed. “Thank you,” she said, strained again, and took her own plate to the basin. “Just to the river.”

  I slipped out the door, coat in hand, and shrugged it on halfway down the slick porch steps. I would have something to offer if Ada could give us answers: safety for our farm; proof that I could be the one who took the weight, faced down the terrors; proof, once and for all, how much I loved my sister. I dutifully checked the sleeping hens and then skirted the path down to the orchard, to where Marthe’s stones lay. To where we might already have an answer written out.

  My heart hammered behind my ribs as I struck a spark, flared tinder. Please, I thought. Please answer us. I lit the lamp and held it high.

  The ground was disturbed where Marthe had written her message, the rocks rolled painfully into new letters and words. I caught my breath, hard, and squinted at their curves. YOU HAVE TO OPEN—they said in the same long, shaky hand that had cried silently out for help.

  The crunch of footsteps echoed softly against the shore: a thick boot’s tread, slow and deliberate. Setting pace for a road that would never, ever stop.

  “Heron?” I whispered, terrified, as alone in the dark as I’d ever been in my father’s house, unprotected by the thin wooden walls. “Tyler?”

  There was fear in my mouth. I could taste its bloody tang. My legs cramped from the desire to run to the smokehouse, lock its door. The ghostly pacing faded down toward the river, and I narrowed my eyes. How dared I tell myself a lie that big—that all my inability to even find a way to put this mountain of made-up stories right was somehow bravely facing down monsters for Marthe. “Look at you,” I whispered, hissed through my clenched teeth. “Look.”

  I lifted my lamp. If I couldn’t tell the truth, I would damned well face something down.

  I strode, back tall, down the path to the river shore.

  I wasn’t surprised to see nothing there: the lonely strand, the moon-stained waves. The creak and shatter of melted sand sounded against the current and a curious absence of birdcalls. I set my jaw and lifted the lantern high.

  There was a bootprint in the round, glassed patch of sand, burned deep as a cattle brand.

  “Who’s there?” I said, and it came out in a squeak. Glass broke with a soft pop at the shoreline. Ash scattered into the still air. The new print formed right before my eyes, under the weight of nothing. The steps of ghosts: the steps of something leaking through from another world.

  I shivered—and shook it off. Tyler had sat up all night to try to see its face. I couldn’t run now. I couldn’t.

  I stalked behind it, step by step, to the freezing shallows.

  Loose bubbles flecked the river chop: trout below, or buried crabs. The flame of my lantern danced in the dark water, distorted, a swirled reflection. If I squinted, I could almost see another figure beside me, folded weirdly at the torso, its coat pure dark.

  My skin prickled. I backed up. “He can’t touch me. He’s in another world,” I whispered—I prayed, throat icy dry. “He can’t touch me.”

  The reflection wavered, then blurred into a new shape on the running river: tall, long, stretched full upright. It edged closer, turning into arms and shoulders and the whites of human eyes. I shuddered in the stagnant air and leaned forward, over the river. Into the ghost’s clearing face.

  “He can’t touch me,” I whispered, heartbroken. And suddenly I couldn’t breathe for the grief, the need, the hope.

  Thom Clarlund’s hand reached toward me—and through me. Thom Clarlund’s face, distorted by war and waves and the walls between worlds, peered at me through the current and burst into tears.

  I reached the smokehouse sobbing, choking with grief. “Heron?” I hiccupped, half blind, my face smeared. “Heron, please—”

  Heron rose from a warren halfway through the maze of junk, one hand on his belt, his hair a black cloud. “Hallie? What’s wrong?”

  I was at him in an instant, my hands tangled in his shirtsleeves. “It’s Thom,” I sobbed, heaving tears like I hadn’t since I was tiny. “Marthe’s ghost. I saw him. I saw Thom in the river.”

  Heron’s hands found my shaking shoulders, grasped them almost too tight. “Hallie,” he said. “What do you mean—slow down.”

  The story came out in pieces, shattered like the moonlight, like my splintered nerves. I gasped it into Heron’s sleeve by lamplight, leaned up against the table I’d hid beneath on the night my uncle left.

  “We have to get him out of there.” The tears would not stop coming. They stung where their cold trails had chapped my face raw. “Heron, I will do anything.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. His brow furrowed, hard. “Don’t say that.”

  “I would—”

  “Don’t say that,” he said sharply, and crouched on the flagstone floor. “We’ll get him out. I promise you. We’ll bring your brother home.”

  I picked a cobweb out of his ponytail. He winced, and I dropped my hand. We leaned together: cold, exhausted. Breathing.

  “We have to tell Nat and Tyler, and Ada,” I said abruptly, and leaned back. “This changes—this changes everything.” I cast about in my coat’s fifteen pockets for a pair of warm gloves. Heron’s hand patted my back: regular, warm, human comfort. So new that I couldn’t find words to explain that there was such a thing as the one human whose comfort I wanted.

  I need Tyler, I realized. I need the way he listens.

  I need to be held.

  “I told Marthe I’d only go down to the river,” I said hastily. “You have to help me think up something to say, something to tell her—”

  “You’re going to find them at this hour?”

  “I need him,” I said with an urgency that shook my bones.

  “How suspicious,” he asked quietly, “do you want your sister to be?”

  “I—” My thoughts caught. I’d sworn to her I wouldn’t go past the river. If she came looking in the smokehouse and found Heron here, there’d be no explaining what we’d done. “I’ll think of something,” I stammered, balancing the delicate scales of our need against Marthe’s increasing, chilly rage.

  “You will stay here,” Heron said firmly, and I blinked with sheer surprise. It felt like years since landowner and hired man had fit our secretive allegiance, but he had never given me an order before. He’d never once thrown at me that he was older, or a veteran soldier; that he’d seen more of the world than one tiny lakelands farm.

  “Hall
ie,” he said. “Miss. You hired me to save this farm. And your farm will die if you and your sister completely break apart.”

  I caught my breath. How had he seen? How, I realized, could he not see? “But if I don’t, we might not get Thom back—”

  “So you’ll save your brother,” he answered. “And then the trust between all of you will be so far gone, you’ll starve or break by midwinter.”

  For the first time ever, I hated those gray eyes. They saw me truly. They saw too damned much.

  I swallowed humiliated fury. “What, then? I should just stay home and leave him there?”

  Heron pulled on his too-thin flannel shirt. “Your sharp little friend told me to get over myself,” he said quietly. “I found a pair of old boots in one of those boxes. I’m going to put them on and tell Tyler and Nasturtium what’s happened here. And then I’m going to treat with your Chandlers myself, like I should have from the beginning.”

  A perverse pain rose up in my throat—Uncle Matthias’s winter boots.

  “What are you asking me to do?” I whispered.

  Heron looked down at me, down his broken, twisted nose. “Go home,” he said, “to your family. You can’t do this to them.”

  I swallowed. Hard.

  “Keep the boots if they fit,” I forced out, and he whuffed a grateful breath. “You’ll need them in the spring.”

  He nodded sharply and pulled on the boots. “Anyone out there?”

  I opened the smokehouse door and looked into a sudden dazzle of snowlight. “No,” I said. And then, through a thick throat, “Go.”

  He eased out the door, cautious, and up the gravel path. I turned my foot sideways and wiped his bootmarks from the new snow, left alone between white ground and gray sky. My own boots made a solitary path back to the kitchen porch.

  “I’m back,” I called to Marthe as I banged through the door, hands blue with cold and worry. Eyes red from endless tears.

  “Good,” she said, laying bread dough for an overnight rise. Simply, kindly: Good. I edged up the stairs, peeled my work clothes off, and eased into a clean nightdress. The mark of the burnt Twisted Thing stained my windowsill. I stared past it into the snow, into the fine space between two worlds.