by Leah Bobet
She’d told me that she’d always be there. I just hadn’t known how to hear it.
I felt it break inside me: the hairline cracks in a fear I’d carried in my gut years too long. All my balled-up ease and kindness broke through the cracks and hatched: kept away so long by the certainty that if I dared love too hard, I’d just lose.
“Marthe,” I said, as tiny and high and small as I’d sounded as a child. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said those things, I’m sorry I was so terrible to you—”
Marthe’s strong face, her bright and sharp and proud face crumpled. She pushed up and wrapped her arms tight around me, crushing the air from my lungs. Letting me, finally, breathe. “I’m sorry too.”
“What’re you sorry for?” I burst.
“You were always such a serious kid,” she said softly, and wiped her eyes. “I always knew I was failing you somehow.”
“Never,” I choked, and held her face close to mine. “Never in my life.”
“Yes, I did,” she whispered, and hugged me, fierce. “Because I never told you we aren’t Papa and Uncle Matthias.”
We cried until the last tears shook themselves free, shook onto the dress our mama had worn, the floor our papa had paced, and the million little ways we’d made all those things ours after all.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” Marthe said when we parted, scrubbing salt from her reddened eyes. “We have to work at this, okay? We’ll screw up. We’ll backslide. We have to talk to each other, and be patient.”
“I promise,” I pushed out.
“No,” she stopped me. “Shh. It was a bad year.”
I nodded.
“A bad year,” she echoed for me. “Let’s never do it again.”
Later, I came downstairs wiping my eyes, lightheaded with the sniffling.
Tyler, busy at the dishes, laid a hand on my cheek. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, and gave him a watery smile. For the first time in a long time, I was finally okay.
Tyler stayed through the afternoon to relight the fire in the stove, patch the chicken coop, pry off the boards we’d used to shut the windows. We worked together in silence, hands brushing hands, snow in our hair, soothed by each other’s breath pluming through the sky.
Everyone always went to the hayloft to hide. But for now, there was nowhere else, so I lay with Tyler in the dwindling straw inside the old hay barn. An orange cat glared at us nervously and settled into the soft afternoon light. We should bring them inside, I reminded myself. So they didn’t go hunting until the last Twisted Things had fallen to ash.
Heron found us by the time the sun was westering to evening, when we’d had more than enough time to just lie there, hands and breaths entwined. “You’re back,” I said, and sat up. Tyler rose behind me, tinged with embarrassment.
“There’s straw in your hair,” Heron said, bemused.
“I live on a farm,” I retorted. “Where’s the army?”
Heron sat on a bale, the teasing still in his eyes. “Going home,” he said. “Or at least most of them. General de Guzman declared the amnesty this morning, now that they’ve found me, and most of the regiment packed up for the highway. It’s been a long time away for a lot of people.”
The taste of inevitability flooded my mouth. “And you?”
Heron looked at the scattered hay bales. “I said I’d fix your wagon wheel,” he said tentatively.
I smiled, and then I couldn’t stop smiling, bright as sun on snow. “Right,” I said, and then he beamed back.
I’d never seen him smile before. It was warm as Sunday morning.
We uncovered Asphodel Jones’s body the next morning, from under its cairn of secrets and bone. Tyler opened its eyes with his dirt-smudged fingers, but there was nothing in them.
“What’re you looking for?” I asked softly as the breakfast crowd picked their way from the house down to the smokehouse’s dusty ruins: James Blakely and Callum; Nat and Eglantine; Marthe, Hazel, and Thom. Heron paced a rut into the ground behind us, looking out over the burnt-down orchard toward Bellisle. To where the bulk of Beast Island no longer blocked the sky.
Tyler shook his head. “There was a picture in Jones’s eyes before, when he was in your father’s room. It blotted out the walls, it was so bright.”
I swallowed. “What did you see?”
Tyler rubbed his eyes. “Stars,” he said. His hand moved in the shattered dust and bored swift dots, jagged and certain, into the cracked earth of my great-grandparents’ farm. “Steady stars, on the darkness.”
“That’s the plow constellation,” Heron said. He traced the lines between it with his blunt-nailed finger. “It’s a summer constellation. I saw that every night at John’s Creek when I looked up.”
Tyler traced it over and over, meditative. “He said something that night. I couldn’t make it out. I didn’t know the word. I think it was a name.”
“Chandi?” I guessed softly, and Tyler startled. Jones’s daughter.
“What do we do?” Cal asked.
I looked across the newly tumbled, crumbling stones of the smokehouse my Opa had built out of lakelands stone and river mud; across the ruined barley fields and the gray corpse of the hawthorn tree. Thom and I had planned to resurrect that smokehouse. We were going to be the talk of the lakelands. We were going to set Roadstead Farm up for life, so neither Marthe nor I had to worry about how a few struggling acres of land and four barley fields could possibly support two whole families, hers and mine. And no one would have to leave. We’d all have a home, forever, between the apple trees and the high road. That future seemed so long ago: long ago and far away.
“I’m sure the army will want him,” James said. “They like that sort of thing.”
I shook my head and dragged my eyes along the careless, sleeping bend of his broken body. I took his last will and testament, I thought, because Papa’s last will changed our lives; because if Thom hadn’t come home, we would have had no vial of ash to grieve over, to let him go—
“Asphodel Jones has a daughter,” I said.
Thom looked up at me. Mild Thom’s eyes were steady, and burning with a held-breath hope.
“Somewhere down south there’s a girl waiting,” I said, quick and low, and then stronger, stronger: “Still leaving the door unlocked every night and a light by the window, because they never found a body, and who knows, he might come back. And the hope’s the worst.” I swallowed. “The hope means you never stop crying. You just . . . it never stops.”
“I’m sorry,” Thom whispered.
“You came home,” Marthe said lightly, and pressed his bandaged hand to her heart.
“What’re you saying, Hal?” James Blakely asked, and his green eyes were piercing.
“Soldiers bring a vial of ashes,” I said softly, and placed Jones’s corpse-cold hand over his crushed rib cage. “For the families. So we can live life again. We should take him home. We should bring that girl his ashes.”
“He’s a murderer,” Marthe said.
I looked up at her. “But that girl isn’t,” I said, just like Marthe wasn’t Papa. Just like I wasn’t Uncle Matthias, after all, but just Hallie. Maker of malt, herder of goats, half owner of Roadstead Farm.
Tyler followed me up the path, through the corpses of our orchard trees, into the December brightness that lasted so fleetingly. “Hal, I have to tell you something.”
I stopped. “This isn’t about your ceiling.”
“The ceiling and I broke up,” he agreed, and swallowed. “I can’t help mop up the Twisted Things. I can’t see anymore.”
My heart seized, terrified. “What do you mean you can’t—”
“Not like that,” he said, and lifted his head.
His eyes were wide and frightened. Light hazel, ringed delicately with green where the sunshine lit them up. There was nothing in them now, nothing and everything.
Tyler Blakely’s eyes. Not the same as before he marched the south roads and back, but close enough. The war
m eyes I remembered, bright with mischief, bright with loving.
“Tyler—” I started, and my throat caught. “When?”
“This morning,” he said. “I saw the Beast block out the light of that sun, and that was the last. I can’t help anymore. It’s gone.”
“I do not care about help,” I said fiercely, and turned over my scar-pocked hand. “The wounds of the Twisted Things do heal,” I marveled. “It takes a while, but they heal.”
He nodded, wordless, and fell into my arms.
“Hallie,” he said, relieved, weeping from his healed, human eyes. “It’s over. I’m home.”
SPRING
thirty-one
WE BURNED ASPHODEL JONES LIKE A BIRD, LIKE A DEER, in a pyre down by the water.
It was a sunny, cold day, but no snow stuck on the land the God’s world had scorched into smooth rock. Our pyre stayed clear and dry, and when it was done, we gathered the ashes into an elegant green glass bottle, the color of caught sunshine at the bottom of the lake.
Three months later, when the first melt came, John Balsam packed a bag.
He was stronger now: three months of good home cooking and a warm place to sleep off the endless road had filled him out. And he had boots, good ones from Windstown, and a coat to keep the weather off his back. Gifts, from those who’d fought beside us the day we pulled Beast Island up to shore.
I watched him pack his scuffed leather satchel in the parlor that had become his room through the winter; watched him weigh the things that had sustained him on the dead and lonely road north and tuck them lovingly inside. “Need more space,” he muttered, and dumped them out again. There was extra cargo this time, for the journey south: the last effects and promises of the Wicked God’s prophet, Asphodel Jones.
There were few enough of them: the container with his ashes, and his ragged hat. His torn coat, laundered and dried carefully. The gold wedding ring we’d found on his finger, loosened by hunger, tarnished sooty black.
And atop them, in a ringing heap, four glinting, shimmering disks: half of Thom’s army buttons.
“Do you want these back?” I’d asked Thom. He never wore his. They were hidden in a box in his dresser drawer, behind old socks and ratted undershirts. He walked our ravaged fields with plain flannel and cotton over his burn-scarred skin, closed with buttons the Windstown woodcarvers made.
Thom stopped amid the rows of plowed land, under the birdsong, and studied the buttons in my hand. “Let him keep them,” he said, and cast another handful of seeds onto the rich earth.
“Are you sure? He wasn’t a veteran.”
“That’s not the point,” Thom said, and dropped more barley seeds into the ground. On his back, swathed and swaddled, Hazel Mae burbled a nonsense word and sang.
I told my niece the story again that night, after Marthe had fed her and she squirmed restlessly, fighting if we tried to put her down. “Hazel Mae Clarlund,” I sang into her little ear. “This is the story of the storm between worlds, in the week when you were born.”
Our last afternoon I spent with Nat, side by side, walking along the river.
Everyone always went to the hay barn, but right now the hay barn was off-limits: Gus the Third had birthed her kittens, and she stood hissing between us and the mewling litter every time we came in for a forkful. Hazel stared at them whenever she got close, her hands grasping and her eyes big.
“You could come with, you know,” I said to Nat, and kicked a rock upstream. “It’s horribly improper for a young lady to travel alone with a farm hand.”
“Hah,” Nat snorted, and kicked another rock to meet mine. “Thank you. But no.” She looked straight at me with a sharpness that wasn’t furious or frightened, but sober.
“No?” I asked, surprised. Nat Blakely, who was always shoving us toward another adventure. Nat, who broke the rules.
“No,” she said, firmer. “Remember? I told you that you always had one foot out the door. You were packed for years. But I’ve got what I want: good work, and nice weather, and Mum’s teaching me the business. Ty’s got no head for it. I’ve got acres to learn if I’m going to be running a whole sheep farm.”
“But—”
“It’s my home, Hal,” she said, and her smile was rueful.
“It’s mine too,” I promised her. “I’ll come back soon.”
She nodded, already more distant from me than when we’d started. “I know,” she said, and wrapped an arm about my shoulder. We kept on through the greening riverbanks.
I had packed, the night before, in a new pack, strongly made—not the decrepit one I’d kept packed for years and then lost when the smokehouse tumbled down: four changes of clothes, for all weather, all roads; soap, and a bedroll, and a striker for fires; a bottle for water and a pan to heat it up. And between them, wedged carefully, a darkwood box with two rose petals and a child’s doll, and the deed to half of Roadstead Farm.
Because I was leaving on the long road south, but unlike Uncle Matthias, I was coming back.
Heron met us at the poultry barn, Tyler in tow, busy with the last-minute chores we’d promised before setting out into the world. “How’s it looking?” I asked, and Heron shook his head.
“Not even close to done,” he said irritably. “Before this winter I’d have laughed to think a farm was this much work.”
I snorted. It was only half funny. “Townie. So what do we do?”
He gazed out across the greening fields, to the ruin of the changeable river and the edge of the Beast’s tail rising above the orchard trees. We’d planted the trees new, from cuttings: their skinny trunks stretched up, smiling, into the thin, bright sun. Heron and Thom and I, together, holding the shovels and steadying the soil. “Bring in help,” Heron said, and shrugged. “I can write you a reference for a hired man.”
I snickered, and Ty’s hammer swung, missed, and re-aimed. I swallowed. Tyler and I had deliberately not talked about my leaving. It was the very worst part, and we’d counted every second together. We’d dodged it for so long.
“We’ll come back as quick as we can,” I said, and Ty looked away.
Heron looked at him. Looked at me, and sighed. “Look, Private. I was eighteen once too. If you don’t want to leave her, just open your mouth and come with.”
I flushed. “I’m right here,” I said, and Heron shot me a sly glance.
Ty looked up, red-faced, shame-shouldered, but still tall with his own pride. “I can’t. I can’t walk that fast,” he admitted.
Heron studied him and then shrugged. “You in any hurry, Hallie?”
Hope surged beneath my ribs. “Nope,” I said.
Tyler’s smile opened like a bloom, like the sun. Looked at me. Yes? his eyes asked.
I could say no, I remembered, like I remembered every time. No did not mean never. I had to say yes only if I meant it, only if it was true.
I met his eyes. Nodded slowly.
Yes.
“Excuse me,” he said, and put down the hammer. “I have to go speak to my mother about a trip.”
James and Cal Blakely came late in the afternoon to give us their farewells, and they came with rucksacks packed.
“You’re not coming too?” I asked with a spike of dismay.
Cal shook his head. “South again? Not likely.”
James nudged him with a gentle elbow. “We’ve been meaning for years to take a load of wool with the caravans. Spread our market a little. I thought we’d go north,” he said, ever so lightly. “The Sanchez cousins are very curious about handling a flock of sheep, and I hear Black Creek and Kortright are real beauties this time of spring.”
Heron’s mouth opened, but for once, he had no words. His gray eyes, so reserved, filled with tears. He took James’s hand and closed his around it gravely. “Tell her that John Balsam is alive,” he said, thick with emotion. “Tell her he’s coming home soon. That I love her.”
“I will,” James said, and cupped his own hand over Heron’s. “You’ve our word on it.”
The afternoon waned into a soft, fitful night, sprinkled with showers and the call of young geese winging across the river. Marthe sat at the table with me, our teacups halfway empty, silent amid the scattered dishes and the warm lantern light.
“It is going to be very strange,” she said, “without you here.”
The whole thing still wasn’t quite real: the pack in my bedroom corner, the clothes laid out for our morning start, the way I’d drifted out of planting, cooking, chores. It still felt like tomorrow would be a normal day: breakfast around the table with Marthe and Heron and Thom; feed to scatter for the chickens; soft earth to turn, the still-healing earth, while we sang Hazel nursery songs.
“It was all I wanted,” I said, and Marthe’s head came up.
“What’s that?”
I shook my head. A half-remembered thing. Another life. “All I wanted,” I said, “was to help bring Hazel up together. The four of us, in our own house, like it was supposed to be all along. Pillow forts and the alphabet and taking turns at supper, and now—”
There was a world out there. A world full of homesteads, and cities, and strangers who might give us a meal, a night’s shelter, a kindness; who might point us the way to Monticello Town. There were new routines waiting, routines of miles instead of chores, and for the first time, sneaking about the edges, I was wanting. Wanting—now that I dared to, now that I had a way to come back—to explore.
Marthe shook her head softly; the smile on her face was wry. “That’s the thing about life,” she said. “You start off thinking you’re doing a small thing: standing up in the face of an argument, or giving three dances to the apple farmer’s son from Essex because it’ll keep Jeremy Sumner’s paws off your backside, and besides, you’ll never see him again, right?”