An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

  Lieutenant Jackson crossed the beach to her implacably. “As is my duty as an officer of the Great Army, and under de Guzman’s Law, I hereby detain you for treason and harboring.”

  “What?” Nat burst out.

  “You touched all my hard work,” Ada said, absolutely amazed.

  “The penalty for failure to destroy bogeys is hanging,” Sergeant Zhang said. “There are three witnesses, all sworn officers of the Great Army.”

  “Miss, just come quietly,” said the lieutenant almost sadly.

  “Wait a minute—” I broke in, and Ada Chandler’s fist smacked into the lieutenant’s face.

  He reeled back, shocked, and then the Chandler cousins rushed in, howling with rage. Up on the hillock, Corporal Muhammad flinched, and then he and Sergeant Zhang were tumbling, war knives drawn, down into the melee of flesh and shouts and bodies.

  Nat backed up, mouth agape, and dove in, tearing at arms, trying to pull someone, anyone, out of the fight. I caught a flash of hair here, an arm there. A Twisted Thing tumbled out of the hole on the beach, hissing, and skittered away. Lieutenant Jackson had Ada in a bear hug from behind, fighting to pinion her squirming wrists. “Zhang, help me,” he hollered, and she wriggled away.

  “Do you even understand what you did?” she snarled, and dove for his knees.

  He whirled and loomed over her, fist upraised, and a white-hot ember kindled in my brain. I flew between bodies, between fists, around driftwood, until I was right between them, my feet planted and braced for a punch. “Leave her alone!” I shouted at the top of my voice. “Get off my land and leave her alone!”

  The blow never fell.

  I looked up, and Lieutenant Jackson stood over me, horrified, his hands up in surrender. Not over me: over us. Marthe was right beside me, chin out, face hard, her round belly heaving with exertion and wrath, her elbow brushing my elbow. Unconquerable.

  “Is that what you do?” she asked, monotone-quick, a too-familiar glint in her eye. “Beat up little girls? Travel around looking for someone to hit?”

  “She’s not a little girl,” he said helplessly. “She’s a traitor. Playing with bogeys almost destroyed the whole world.”

  “Touch that girl again,” Marthe said softly, “and I’ll slit your goddamned throat.”

  The lieutenant backed up one more step. “Ma’am. Miss,” he said. “This is the last time I’ll ask you to step aside.”

  I looked at Marthe. She looked at me—

  —and behind us, a crack like towers falling split the sky.

  Nat shrieked. I covered my ears and ducked along with everyone else: soldiers, Chandlers, Tyler sprawled on the riverbank. Ada ducked out from behind us and ran hard for her family. They caught her, heaving hard breaths, and walled her behind their bristling shovels and knives. Lieutenant Jackson swore, a vicious litany, and the clear sky cracked again behind us.

  “That’s enough,” our hired man said.

  Every head on the shore turned to watch Heron pick his way through the crowd: wild-haired, stick-thin, with days of new beard on his cheeks. In his hands, pointed up into the sky, was the black weapon June had trained on my heart. But this time it was loaded. This time it was armed.

  Marthe stared. At Heron and his borrowed boots, the boots that were all Uncle Matthias had left us to remember him by. The look she turned on me stung like salt sown into our fields. “What in hell—” she started in a deadly level voice.

  Heron lowered the old-city gun to the dirt. “I think it’s time we all calmed down now.”

  “Who is this?” Lieutenant Jackson snapped, and my tongue wouldn’t move. The lies were too snarled now, too tangled around each other.

  Heron drew himself up with all the curious grace that had told me, once upon a time, that he’d take my failures kindly. “I’m called Heron,” he said, and held up his sleeves. The scratched buttons on them shimmered. “Northern regiment, out of Aylmer.”

  “The northern regiment was decimated,” Sergeant Zhang said quietly.

  He nodded, infinitesimal. “And I’m the hired man you’re hunting.”

  Lieutenant Jackson’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You told us he’d left town.”

  “I asked her to send you on,” Heron said, and stepped closer. “It was my lie. And what you found in Miss Chandler’s house is being done to save another fighting man.”

  Marthe’s eyes went furiously wide. “He knew. You told him, and you didn’t tell your own sister—”

  “Growing Twisted Things?” the lieutenant said acidly.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ada snapped from well behind her kin. “Can you grow a dead bird? I’m studying them.”

  Corporal Muhammad looked at his superior officers, counted the restless crowd before him, and his jaw worked in sudden terror.

  “Tell them what you found, Ada,” I said, suddenly inspired. “Tell them how the Twisted Things die.”

  “They burn,” she pronounced with a cold, intense satisfaction. “Every second after they show up here, ’til they die, they are burning. I’ve seen it under my glass: the air eating away their skin. That’s why you burn if you touch them: from their heat. They’re boiling inside, all the time.”

  I winced. Tyler reached blindly, took my hand.

  “The smaller ones, the birds and lizard-foxes, last maybe two weeks. They’re stronger when they grow large. The Beast out in the river might be there for years, boiling the Bellisle current, with the air eating its bones down to nubs.”

  Corporal Muhammad stared down at the spider-cracked jar in the snow. The thick liquid inside oozed. “You’re keeping the air off their bodies.”

  Ada nodded, like one might to a particularly precocious child. “They don’t break down so fast in the jelly. It gives me time to figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?” Sergeant Zhang asked.

  She rounded on him. “What they are. Where they come from. What your whole war was actually about. And this week, how to get Thom Clarlund home in time to meet his child.”

  A shining lizard tumbled from midair into the stained snow, and James quietly crushed its skull.

  Lieutenant Jackson’s hand looped around his knife. “You’re all in on this.”

  “Wherever those things are coming from, my brother’s stuck there with them,” I retorted. “There’s a baby coming. I will move hell to bring him home.”

  “You’re going to,” the lieutenant said. “You’re going to move it right here, and destroy the whole world.”

  “Use your eyes, man,” Heron pressed. “There are Twisted Things coming through absolutely nothing. Hanging anyone who looks at it will not make our problems go away.”

  The silence crackled through the open air. Behind me, someone, nervous, giggled. “Oh, for the love of—” Ada spat, and ducked between the press of bodies. Snatched the jar from the snow.

  “Stop!” Lieutenant Jackson shouted, too late. Ada twisted the jar open with a hiss and poured her lizard-fox on the ground.

  The slime slid off its bumpy skin and sank into the thick snow. Corporal Muhammad jumped away from it, his pupils dark in his wide eyes, knife drawn and nowhere to use it. The liquid spread, glistening, and the lizard began to smoke. “Lieutenant,” the corporal said as the body ignited, crackled.

  The flame almost took his eyebrows off. It shot up like liquid light.

  “Can you hang that?” Ada shouted from behind the fumes. “Look at it! Can you pretend we made that just to spite you?”

  Another gout of flame burst out of the lizard’s corpse. Its delicate, soft-eared skull caved in and disintegrated to ash.

  “I’ve seen enough,” Sergeant Zhang said quietly, and sheathed his knife. “It’s time to bring in the authorities.”

  My eyes widened. “Pitts? You’re going to let that—that slime take our land?”

  He looked down his nose at me with mingled pity and disgust. “I don’t care about your mayor. This is clearly a quarantine zone. And if you won’t cooperate to isolate and bur
n whatever’s wrong with this land, I’m calling in the regiment.”

  Heron sucked in a breath.

  Zhang turned his back and walked over the hill, and Nat burst into tears.

  twenty

  “IT WAS AN IDIOT RISK,” MARTHE SAID, AND SLAMMED THE MUG onto the kitchen table. I huddled under the blanket wrapped around my shoulders and said nothing. The smell of salt-meat broth rose queasy to my nose. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be hungry again.

  “Ma’am,” Heron said from the kitchen corner. “I was the one who asked Miss Halfrida to keep me hidden. She was doing me a kindness. It was my fault.”

  Marthe rounded on him. “Your fault.” Her voice cut. “You take our hospitality and then lie, hide, interfere with my sister—” She shook her head. “Actions have consequences. There is a regiment coming to burn our home to ashes. Sorry is not enough.”

  This time James didn’t stop her with a soft word, a light hand. He stood behind her, his arms crossed, his face as hard as stone.

  “We didn’t want trouble,” I said faintly. “We just wanted to bring Thom home.”

  “Well,” Marthe’s voice quivered, “he’s not coming home to me now—”

  “Marthe,” James interjected.

  “You tell me how to solve what John’s Creek couldn’t before that army shows up. He’s gone, James,” she said bitterly. “My husband is dying. He’s going to die.”

  Her hair hung loose and limp over angry cheeks. She wouldn’t look at me. James would: over her shoulder his scarred face, ever kind, was an effigy of disappointment.

  “Northman, I want you off my farm,” Marthe said. “Gather your things up. Get on that highway. Never set foot here again.”

  Heron slumped into himself.

  “Marthe, please—” I started.

  “And you,” she said, rounding on me, and I shrank back. “Get up to your room. And don’t you dare come out.”

  I looked back at Heron, desperately. His eyes were hooded, his unshaven chin tucked low. We’ve failed, I thought. We’re doomed.

  “Hallie,” Marthe snarled, “go.”

  My window was the best in the house our great-grandparents had built a century ago on a hilltop in the wreck of the fallen world. It opened out over the river and the fields, over the blanket of snow glittering on the orchard trees. I knotted the paisley curtains in my fist. I couldn’t bear to watch Heron pace out to the smokehouse to pack his single bag.

  I couldn’t bear not to watch when they finally made him go.

  Lamplight licked the mark the Twisted Thing’s scorched wings had left, forever, on my windowsill. I deliberately looked away, into the clear, cool sky. The gap-toothed stars stared back at me, suddenly impermanent. They’d be different somewhere else, on someone else’s land, after the army had been and gone again. When everything I knew had crumbled into ash.

  Stop being Uncle Matthias, my brain snarled. It had taken on an edge, unbidden, in just a day: Abandoner. Quitter. Giver-up. My soul ached. Even thinking about my uncle and how my love for him might spoil sent me dizzyingly close to that morning’s despair. “You have Nat,” I whispered, like a protection, like a prayer. “You have Tyler. They love you.” It kept back the dark.

  Don’t bring Uncle Matthias into it, I corrected. Just stop giving up. Somehow.

  Heron emerged from the smokehouse, pack in hand, silhouetted in the light of James Blakely’s lamp. He was small against the horizon: a bent man with a bent back, treading slowly into the night. James herded him up the path at a crisp pace. Heron looked back, and James shooed him on: Soldier, march.

  I watched until I couldn’t, my hand on the windowpane. Just a silhouette framed inside it, one lonely lamp burning.

  Marthe’s evening sounds filtered through the vent in my floorboards: the clank of plates, the sigh of cloth, the click of the kitchen door’s heavy brass lock. She came up the stairs, heavy tread and slow shuffle, and paused in front of my bedroom door.

  “Put out that light, Hallie,” she said. “Go to bed. You have chores.”

  We didn’t have to discuss it. We knew where to meet.

  I found Heron at the join where our path met the main road, freezing in his shirtsleeves, utterly undone. He looked up at me as if he’d doubted, deep inside, that he’d ever see a friendly soul again. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, too relieved for me to believe he meant it.

  “You can go to the Chandlers,” I told him quickly. “They’ll take you in. We’ll get Thom back. We have to.”

  He looked down at me, haunted, and shook his head once. “It’s done, kid. The army’s coming. I’m—” He stopped. “I’m so damned sorry.”

  “We can’t just give up,” I argued, and he shook his head again. His tattered boots were pointed northward, up the river road, to the lake. They’d taken back Uncle Matthias’s warm winter pair and left him to the snow and ice with only shreds. Stop giving up! I wailed inside, eight years old again, at two different men, one years and miles away. “If you’re just giving up, why’d you even wait?”

  “The knife. I couldn’t get it. I didn’t have a chance,” he said, and paced a crazed line along the road. He looked up at me, desperate, and I knew what he wanted me to do.

  “So they can raze our land for nothing,” I said heavily.

  “So you can wash your hands of me and everything I’ve brought on your heads,” he snapped.

  I let out a bitter laugh. “Heron, it’s far too late for that.”

  He looked up at me, his mouth open, and I turned away to the empty snowfields. There had been so much, when he’d shown up, that I hadn’t understood. I’d been a fool to think I could take on, could put my trust in a stranger, and that when it all went wrong, he’d stay a stranger and just disappear with no hurt or blame. I’d been a fool to think we couldn’t break each other’s hearts.

  “I’ll get your stupid knife,” I said, and pulled my gloves from my pockets.

  “You don’t have to—” he started, but I knew he didn’t mean it.

  “Shut up,” I said softly, and went to get the shovel.

  The hawthorn in the back field was dying.

  White stains roped around the sides of the tree, and where they spread, the wood buckled and fissured deep. There were strange flowers growing through those cracks: moon-bright, delicate white, their striped petals warm and glowing. They’d brought the tree into leaf out of season: a full head of brilliant green glittered on the branches, each leaf half uncurled when it had frozen solid. It was an incandescent nightmare, awful and beautiful, begging to be touched. Fishing for a brush of my hand just as Beast Island had lured fishers and shopkeeps to their doom.

  I put my hands behind my back. Magic, I thought bitterly. It’s not just a knife; it’s magic.

  And then I swallowed adrenaline, because it’d been in front of us all along: the one secret we’d actually managed to keep.

  We had the knife that killed a god. Its edge, strange and magic, could cut worlds.

  My heart flared desperately. I set the shovel between the roots and pushed.

  The hawthorn trunk cracked as the iron went in at its roots. Its whitened bark shone with stress; wood creaked like a tortured scream. “Come on,” I muttered, and wrenched the blade. That white bark bubbled angrily, like fine soap.

  “Just—give it—up!” I hissed, and drove the shovel as hard as I could.

  The ragged hawthorn tree shattered.

  Branches flew through the night, landing hard in the snow, and the once-solid trunk rocked and split. Its two halves peeled, rotten, to the ground, and out of it came a miasma stench: the stink of blood and burnt land, of salt and shit and dead birds’ bodies tangled in vines from another world. The ghost of the Wicked God’s dark war rose and whispered through the night sky, traveled like rumors into the thick soil of my fields.

  Two leaves, as bright as summer, smashed to splinters on the ground. Flared green, and were finally still.

  I brushed dust and sweat off my f
orehead and hesitantly poked my ruined shovel into the roots. Like a splinter, like a spray of diseased feather, John Balsam’s knife stood out of the gray dirt.

  I caught the leather-bound hilt and twisted it. It came sharply free: the knife that cut the heart from the Wicked God Southward, clutched in my frozen hand. The soft wrapping caught in the dead hawthorn roots, and I let it fall to the dirt. Naked, the knife gleamed dead and dark in my palm, edges undulled by its time underground. They were still liable to take your finger off, if your finger could somehow navigate the twists and cliffs it had become.

  This knife cut the heart from a god, I thought, and ran toward the crossroads.

  It was hard to hold. The wound in the hilt had seen to that: a parody of clutched fingers, matched to one man’s hand. John Balsam’s hand, I thought wildly, pelting through the snow. I’m holding it just where he did.

  And then I skidded to a halt in the snowy weeds. Remembered Heron’s curled fingers around our good Windstown crockery, every one of them broken and reset in crooked lines.

  His sad eyes. His evasions. I’m nobody, he’d said, and tried not to meet my eye.

  Torn leather pricked my fingers on the twisted, grooved hilt. There was only one hand in the world like this, one hand that fit the swirls of a dying god’s rages. And it had carried this knife all along, all the way to John’s Creek—and back.

  You sneak, I thought, awed. You liar, and I ran again, knife in hand, to the man waiting at the crossroads.

  He hadn’t waited quietly where our path met the high road: he’d paced a damp circle on the asphalt to mirror the moon. His head flicked up at my footsteps. “You found it?”

  I could see the face on that Missing poster in him now: wasted by hunger, too young, too sad; never that heroic after all. Lurking under the face of my friend, the man who had comforted and understood me: dark hair, light brows, cheekbones high and clear, square-jawed.

  I marched up to him, nose to nose, and put the dagger in his right hand; closed his jagged fingers around it. They fit like destiny: the curled blade and his scars.