An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

  Nat dusted her hands on her dress and hefted the hammer. “Where next?” She was still angry at me. Her voice stayed flat even as she shifted my fingers around nails and boards.

  “The poultry barn. I’ll catch up,” I said with not a little trepidation, and headed for the smokehouse. Everything else was ready. We had to deal with Asphodel Jones.

  Heron was out front, facing a split log set tall against a willow tree. In his hands was the old-city gun. “James Blakely rode out just now to meet the regiment,” he said. “He’ll brief General de Guzman. Maybe it’ll buy some time.”

  I shuddered at the thought. This is what we’d come to: buying time. “What’re you doing?”

  “Practicing.” Heron’s hands moved on the mechanism. Inside it, something clicked, and its bottom popped out: a scuffed, black rectangle stinking of oil and sawdust. He checked the rectangle carefully in the lantern light and pushed it back into the handle. “I traded into the Chandlers’ grounds for the rest of the bullets while you were in town. We don’t know what this might come to.”

  I stared. This collection of tubes and boxes was more than a hundred years old and insanely precious. We didn’t own enough to barter for something like that. “How?”

  Heron’s face, in the sooty light, was as resigned as an execution. “The man who was asking was John Balsam.”

  “Oh,” I said without meaning to, quick and heartbroken. I could see it unfolding like the seasons: gossip flaring down the roadways, through the townships, across the lakelands until it reached some county magistrate, and then—

  There would be delegations. Endless city dances and fetes. Thousands of feet pouring after him wherever he landed to rest, all looking for advice, all with questions.

  Questions for the man who killed a god.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly, my heart like windows breaking in the storm.

  Heron shook his head once. “No. Don’t be. It was too important.”

  He lined up his arms again, braced himself, and Crack! spoke the tube as the log split clean in two. I blinked and knew immediately why Ada hadn’t wanted June touching this one relic. The weapon in Heron’s hands was vicious, formidable. It frightened me with its metal stink.

  The man holding it was putting up a brave front, but I knew his moods by now. He looked absolutely lost.

  “The poster,” I said. “It didn’t look like you.”

  Heron blinked wildly. His hands were rough-knuckled on the old-cities gun. “I know. It was a fantasy. It was a story they told themselves.”

  It looked more like him than he thought. A version of him who’d never feared, never cried. I shook my head. “It didn’t look like you, but I recognized you. I recognize you now.”

  “I’m not a hero,” he said, his voice tinged with desperation.

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said simply. “It’s because I have good reasons to recognize your face.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, and then set down the gun and clasped me in a rough hug; breathed in deep and held on for dear life. “You’re a good kid,” he said thickly, and I heard what he wasn’t saying: You are a good friend.

  “Thanks,” I whispered. “You too.”

  He held me for a handful of seconds and then stepped back, resolute. Head higher, now, against the night sky. He picked up the old-cities weapon like it was tainted, like I had held John Balsam’s world-splitting knife.

  “Can I—” I asked, and he pulled the weapon away.

  “Hallie,” he said gently. “Some things aren’t for honest people’s hands.”

  John Balsam was the man who had cut the heart out of a god. I didn’t try to tell him that he was still, always, honest. “The regiment’s here. We have to deal with Jones now,” I said, and he shuddered.

  “I can’t,” he said, strained. “Don’t ask me to tell a man tonight’s the night he dies.”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” he asked, incredulous.

  “You were right before,” I said. “It’s my farm, and I have to deal with my own consequences.” I walked up the steps and paused. “Heron, when do you get to go home?”

  He turned away, fast. For a moment, before he’d hid it, his face was as empty as the sky. “I said nobody was waiting for me.”

  “No,” I countered. “You said no one was waiting for you to make things normal again. You’ve got a mother. She’s got to wonder where you are.”

  “Sharp girl,” Heron said, and his lips twisted. He set down the weapon and looked at me bleakly. “I don’t know. When the legend of John Balsam quiets down. When the army goes home. Never. I don’t know.”

  I turned the door handle. “Don’t wait too long.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Home doesn’t wait for you, sometimes,” I said, and went into the smokehouse to treat with Asphodel Jones.

  It was dim inside the smokehouse: old soot and ruin draped over the quiet I’d always known. Heron’s things were gone now; the space he’d made for himself looked desperately alone. Amazing how fast you can get used to things, I thought, and scuffed into what was once my solitary lair. It moved so quickly sometimes: the way worlds ended, and changed.

  Jones was stretched out in his dirty sheet, sleeping. I had a little time.

  I tiptoed onto one of my trails, into the heaps of broken things. I kept a lot of things in the smokehouse, but the title to the farm was farther in, around the stack of tangled fishing nets Uncle Matthias had left behind, inside a broken butter churn webbed with dust. In the smallest, darkest corner there was—the most safe.

  I reached into the churn with a hand almost twice as big as when I’d first chosen it for a hideaway. The wooden box was still there.

  There was no knowing who the box had belonged to; I’d found it here seven years ago, a dark wood thing with half the inlay knocked out. I eased it out from the break in the churn and checked the contents by reflex: Uncle Matthias’s spare comb. Two stolen rose petals from the night Thom Clarlund asked Marthe to marry him. The felted doll Mrs. Blakely had made me as a child, kept at my bedside ’til I’d grown too old.

  And under them, the copy of Papa’s will and land title, folded up together small in the lining. The papers that gave me the right to half of Roadstead Farm.

  I brushed them with my index finger. Safe. It’s still safe. I swallowed hard, closed the box up again, and picked my way out of the junk maze. Jones slept restless on the floor, his cheeks sallow and patched with dreams.

  “Jones,” I said softly, and he sat up, tangled in the blankets that were likely his deathbed.

  “Thom’s sister, Halfrida,” he said with a faint nod.

  “They’re coming,” I said. “The regiment. We saw them over the hills an hour ago.”

  Jones flashed his quiet, bitter grin. “Time to hand me over like a sacrificial animal,” he said. “I hope it’s enough blood to make them spare your houses. I sincerely do.”

  It was strange: baiting from Jones was almost nothing next to the baiting that was Alonso Pitts. It was so quiet and mild. All the fires in Asphodel Jones’s halls had long been quenched. “I know you only do that because you’re lonely,” I said.

  He shrank a little in his skin. He was an old man, I realized; Papa’s age, when he died. “You do remind me of my daughter,” he said. “She never lets me get away with that either. That’s why I built that birdhouse.” And just like with Marthe sometimes, I could tell that he meant so much more than I understood, but I couldn’t follow him through the cramped byways of his own head.

  The words came to me quietly—from the box in my hands, from knowing what was most important in the world. “Does she know what happened to you?”

  Jones shook his head. “I’m sure some of the tale’s got back to the hill country by now.”

  No, I translated. She hasn’t a clue.

  The words came unbidden to my lips: You should go home to your family. I swallowed them. This time, that wasn�
�t going to work. Asphodel Jones had murdered in cold blood, and there was no way back for him: only military justice and a trial that would end in a long rope.

  “We’ll come for you when the regiment’s here,” I said quietly. “But I’m going to take down your last will.”

  Jones caught his breath. “What are you playing at?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and sat on the brocade stool. “If we survive this, if the hole closes up like you promised, tell me where you want your ashes and belongings to go. We’ll get them there.”

  Jones pushed himself upright, a tight look on his face. “Why are you doing this?”

  I looked down at my box. “I don’t hurt people,” I said, like a promise: a promise to myself about who Hallie Hoffmann was even to the people she didn’t love, didn’t need help from, didn’t have to impress. To someone whose life she held in her very hand.

  I couldn’t read Asphodel Jones’s expressions: he’d been here too short a time. I’d been too busy juggling catastrophes to know him. “I don’t have anything,” he said, “not anymore. But what I have I want to go to my little girl, and I want her to know the truth. About where I was. About why I didn’t come home. I want her to know I love her the most.”

  “That’s all?” I asked quietly.

  “That’s all,” he said.

  You don’t deserve to say that after you walked away, I thought, and pulled it back in. My papa had a gravestone. He had been thrown a proper funeral in the family plot, where we’d served a cold lunch and told only good stories about him all afternoon. He had died a painless death in his bed, overnight, blurred with medicine.

  If Thom had not come back to us through the endless roads of the Wicked God’s world, we wouldn’t even have had a body to bury in the soil he’d worked so hard to replenish. Nowhere to visit his memory for the family he’d worked so hard to mend. No vial of ash to end the questions about where, when, how to rest; to let us learn to lock the door again at night and stop listening for a knock that would never come.

  Deserve had nothing to do with it. And Asphodel Jones had a daughter, who was waiting, who would not have a vial of ash to put on her mantel so she could grieve.

  “All right,” I said through a thick throat. “Give me her name and her township.”

  Jones’s eyes widened. He hadn’t truly believed it. Neither had I until the words left my mouth. “Chandi. Her name’s Chandika. We lived two days out of Monticello, on a mountain, mostly alone. She’s likely with her mother’s people now.”

  I nodded. “South, then.”

  “South,” he said.

  I got to my feet and hugged the wooden box to my chest. “We’re going to seal the hole in a few hours,” I said. “We’ll come for you. I’ll keep my word.”

  “I know,” said the Wicked God’s prophet, and I left him, lonely, in the dark.

  Dawn grayed on a farm packed up and boarded up to abandon.

  We did the final packing in the cold and spicy air, listening to the branches rustle against each other. It was, if you didn’t look at the river, almost peaceful: our last chance to see the place between the river and the road.

  We all kept quiet. We took that chance, and remembered every sound.

  The Blakelys’ cart stood ready in the drive, with Marthe’s packages perched in the back: the grimmest crop we’d ever shipped off Roadstead Farm. Eglantine and Marthe handed Thom up the cart steps, careful of his bandages and his still-peeling burns. “We’ll lie you right back down,” Eglantine said. “Two steps, Thom. I know you can.”

  Thom gritted his teeth. He walked across the shadowlands, I thought about saying, and just left it alone.

  I edged over to the cart once Marthe and Hazel Mae were settled, and folded the darkwood box into Marthe’s hands. “Take this?” My own hands trembled. “Take it and keep it safe for me?”

  Marthe’s eyebrows drew together. “This was Mama’s. What’s inside it?”

  I swallowed, and faced my sister full. “The deed to half of Roadstead Farm.”

  Marthe looked down at me over the wrapped bundle of Hazel, lashed gently to her chest, and tears sprang to her eyes. She knows, I thought in terror and relief. She knows what I’m entrusting to her. “I’ll give it to you,” she said, fierce and low, and tucked the box inside her daughter’s blanket. “I will give this right back to you when we get home.”

  I nodded: left wishing, as always, for the right words to give her, the kind of words that were a gift. My hands shook. I couldn’t speak.

  Eglantine positioned herself by the step. “All right, Tyler,” she said delicately. “We’ll put you up next.”

  Ty looked down at the river, and then at me, Nat, and Heron, and lifted his head. I blinked, and then recognized it: the way a person’s body held itself high when it was devoted without compromise to something greater than itself. “I’m staying,” he said quietly.

  Nat glanced at him and nodded sharply. “Staying.”

  Mrs. Blakely’s calm evaporated. “What? Both of you? No.”

  “Mum—” Tyler started.

  “You can’t. I can’t lose you both—”

  Nat stepped forward and folded her mother’s hands in her own. “Mum,” she said softly. “I understand that if I let my brother die, you will skin me with a soup spoon and spend the rest of your life in black, and it’s your worst color, and it will be all my fault.”

  “That’s not funny, Nasturtium Blakely,” she whispered. “Not this time.”

  Nat’s face fell for just a moment. “We’ll take care of each other, Mum. I swear.”

  Eglantine threw her arms around her daughter. She reached out, flailed, caught Tyler’s shirt and pulled him in. They rocked together, heaving, in a tangled embrace full of elbows and promises. “I have already lost your father this year,” she said into that knot, and nearly choked. “You both come home. So help me God, I’ll see you both on my doorstep in the morning.”

  “Yes, Mum,” Tyler whispered, and squeezed his mother tight.

  I looked up at Marthe: tall and proud, so undemonstrative, so contained. She reached out and ruffled my hair gently with her free hand. “Be careful, Hal,” she said softly.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “You too.”

  “Eglantine,” Cal said gently.

  She disentangled herself from her children with a brokenhearted look and lifted herself up onto the cart.

  “Be safe,” I said softly, and Marthe took Thom’s hand and they drove off Roadstead Farm, into the already-rising sun. We watched them go, Heron and Nat and Tyler and I standing in a row: four flawed bodies, all still frightened but ready. Ready for the thrum of marching feet.

  I didn’t want to lose this land, but if we did, Hazel would live. She would have parents to love her. She would have, in them, a home. You cannot anymore, I told myself, lose everything.

  I looked down at my hands, at the naked soil of Roadstead Farm. At the fences we’d defended against everyone for years and years. “They’ll come, right?” I asked, like an eight-year-old child.

  “They’ll come,” Nat said softly.

  They’ve hated us so long, I thought. And then Heron pointed to the road before us and said, “Look.”

  Against the sunrise, a column of Chandlers was marching on Roadstead Farm, their lamps held high and blazing, tools strapped to their backs. Ada led the ragged column and waved her hands frantically. Let out a wild war whoop.

  “Look,” Tyler repeated, and nudged my shoulder toward the river.

  I turned, and in the lightening morning, the water swam with sparks: small points of light like bright red fireflies, swarming in the distance, with a huge shadow behind.

  “They all came,” I said, and the shapes, the shadows came clear: Mackenzie Green standing on the prow of the Windstown ferry, its pilot lantern blazing. Behind her the entire Windstown fishing fleet spread out like candles, like a funeral procession moving stately to the shore.

  —and behind them, through the steam of a river
that was boiling, burning, breaking, a pair of giant, curling horns emerged into the day. Beast Island rose out of the torch smoke, world-tall, floating at the end of three dozen ropes.

  “It’s time, then,” Heron said softly.

  I swallowed. “It’s time.” Tyler reached for my hand and caught it.

  I laced my fingers through his and took Nat’s hand on the other side. And then we walked, the four of us, down to the wide-rent tear on the river.

  twenty-nine

  IT WAS RAINING ON THE RIVERSIDE: HOT, WET DROPS THAT smelled of summer thickly dying into rot. They drifted into the winter wind and froze halfway to the ground.

  The beach was overrun with Twisted Things: clumped on the sand, swarming around the dead posts of our dock, crawling and hissing and fighting as the stones beneath them smoked and burned. There were Twisted Things everywhere. And past them, over the hill and around the riverbend, came the sound of the Great Army’s horns.

  “You ready?” I asked everyone.

  Heron looked at me, at Tyler, at Nat. At Ada Chandler, behind us, with a crowbar in her hands.

  “I’m ready,” Ada said, “but they have to listen to me.”

  “They will,” Ty soothed, and in the river behind us, the first boat touched earth.

  Mackenzie Green stepped out of it, her hands wrapped around a thick truncheon. “Good God,” she muttered, pale beneath her tan. She looked over her shoulder, uncertain for what might have been the first time since she’d landed in Windstown to take over the general store.

  The murmur didn’t stop with her. It rippled through the fleet of bumping boats, into Beast Island’s veil of steam. Behind her, boat after boat docked: the Thaos, the Masons, the Sumners and Pricketts, the Pitts family and the Haddads, in their too-fine working gear. All the people we knew in the wide world. All the people who had come for us.

  The men who’d been at John’s Creek with Thom and Tyler clamped their mouths uniformly shut. This is the war, I realized. I’d grown so used to this destruction on my doorstep. This is what they saw at John’s Creek.