An Inheritance of Ashes (11 page)

“Well, you can't harbor dead things,” Ada said with a practical shrug. “Think of it as part of the war effort.”

Heron's brown face took on a sickly tinge. “How long since you last saw a nest, before yesterday?”

Ada settled thoughtfully onto her heels. “They were gone for weeks. Since August, maybe; they died out, the first time, when the soldiers came home. This little mischief arrived yesterday.”

The courteous light in Heron's eyes snuffed out. “Miss, I'll help settle the cargo,” he said, and strode back down the pier.

“What's wrong with him?” Ada asked, much too keen.

“I don't know,” I said before it caught up to me: I'd watched Heron arrive on the black-paved high road. The road that came from the old city, where the Chandlers studied its ruins. He'd been there, and he'd been running. Bearing John Balsam's knife, the relic that saved the world. The relic nobody wanted on their land.

“Tell us if you find any more of them?” I asked, stuttery and distracted.

“Of course,” Rami said, and shook my hand. I hurried down to the rowboat. It rode lower in the water with the weight of our supplies, its floor strewn with packages tangled in sacking.

“We're ready?” I asked nobody. Tyler avoided my eyes. He tucked his bad leg in and nodded.

We cast off into the river under a cold sun, slipping mockingly behind the burnt-out ruins of skyscrapers. “Row fast,” I said once we were away from the shoreline, Windstown receding into smears and dots behind us.

Heron bent over his oars, wooden, hidden.

You and I,
I resolved grimly,
are going to talk.

WE REACHED THE RIVERBANK AT TWILIGHT.

The dock loomed out of the evening, looking half abandoned after the bright glass and gardens of Windstown. I fumbled the mooring rope around the post. The world was already doused in evening gray, too dark to see our chimney smoke across the distant fields.

“Strike a light?” I asked, and took the dockside lantern off its hook. “I'll get the wheelbarrow; you unload the boat.”

“Miss,” Heron muttered. He'd been withdrawn since we'd set sail. I shoved the lantern into his hands and hurried down the dock to the orchard, away from Tyler and Heron's moods, into delicious privacy.

Roadstead Farm's paths were written in the folds of my skin; they were memorized in my tendons and bones. I picked my way up the orchard track, dodging roots and stones by memory, through sleeping apple trees that loomed like starless gulps of night. I closed my eyes and drank in the rustle of wind on branches, the smell of chilled soil in the fields.
Home,
I thought gratefully; aimed it defiantly across the river at the ponderous Pitts house.
Home
. My stomach flooded with sick tension at even the memory of Pitts glaring down his nose at us, so effortlessly ready to swat our whole lives away.

The nausea curled around a new thought:
that knife.
Heron had said it was just steel and leather, unmagical, inert.
Steel and leather he doesn't want me—or anyone—to touch
. There was something wrong between that knife and Heron, something that didn't sum to whole numbers. A secret.

I was already full into the argument with him in my head when my foot landed on something round and
wrong.

I went down with a shriek in the cold dirt path.
Twisted Thing,
I thought, blind and frightened, and scrambled backward. The night before me stayed silent. Behind me, it exploded with footsteps. “Hallie?” Tyler called, his voice muffled against nothing at all.

I listened hard for motion—the flap of wings or the stalk of feral dogs—but all I heard was the river, hushed with distance even though I knew it was just over the rise. I drew in a breath to shout back, call for Tyler, and I choked. The air was as thin as flour.

The coughs clawed at my throat, racking, grating.
But the feather came out of my hand,
I thought, and wrapped both arms around my belly. It couldn't be another Twisted Thing, or a fragment: no part of me
hurt
that much. Tyler shouted again, and then Heron.

Heron had grabbed my arms, before, and pulled me
back.

I clawed backward, coughing, over roots and hillocks: back out of the airlessness where I'd fallen. My hand closed on something cold and solid as I scrambled back down toward the beach—a round river stone, still damp from the water, trailing slimy water weed. And then another, and another.

Marthe,
I thought with a thrill of fear—and joy.
She left a note.
Marthe and I had written notes in twigs or pebbles when we were younger, when there was danger. We'd left warnings for each other when we couldn't speak aloud. She was talking to me again.

I looked up toward the chimney. In the distance, the house was dark.

Something is wrong.

I let the stone go, and it clacked against another rock, the flat kind Thom had taught me to skip as a child. River water seeped through Nat's gloves as I ran my fingers over heaps and piles of stones, disgorged wetly all around me, trying to read their jagged message.

Sparks lit the night:
the lantern.
It wobbled wildly along the beach, Heron and Tyler's footsteps slamming across the sand behind it. Heron shoved into the road, his fists clenched around a piece of driftwood. Tyler stumbled up beside him. The dockside lantern swung crazily in his hand, and its light smeared the dark trees gray, finally lighting the ground under my hands. “Hallie, what—” Tyler started, and confused horror spread across his face.

“Oh,” Heron said, small and fearstruck.

I pushed to my feet and looked down.

The path to the farmstead was choked with drowned stones. I'd been sitting sprawled between them, inside a giant stone-hewn scream. The rocks I'd touched, the rocks I'd thrown formed the curve of a message written too large:
WE'RE STUCK HERE. WE'RE DYING. HELP. PLEASE.

“Marthe,” I gasped, and ran.

The house stood lightless and lifeless on the hilltop, its windows flung open wide. “Marthe?” I called as I burst into the kitchen. No one answered. The hearth was a mess of ashy coals, the fire hours dead. Flour spilled across Marthe's woodblock table in a shocked arc. “Marthe?” I rushed up the stairs. Our bedrooms, our washroom were all empty.

I crashed out the door, down the path, and past the goat pen. The goats were stirred up, wide awake and bleating. Blood pounded in my ears. She'd shut the kitchen door. She'd done that. She had to be unharmed still, and hiding from whatever had driven her from the house. I leaned my head, desperate, into my hands.
Where would you go?
I asked, my heartbeat wild,
if you were alone and afraid?

The smokehouse,
I thought, but that was my place, the place
I
would go. And then:
the hayloft. The barn.

I took off for the barn on shaking legs. The door squealed wide under my frantic fingers and sent something scurrying for the corner, cats or voles or monstrosities in the dark. I bunched up my courage and burst inside, shouting, “Marthe?
Marthe?
”

The building held its breath, and then “Hallie?” floated down from the rafters.

I looked up and saw my sister, disheveled and ferocious in the rising moonlight, crouched in the hayloft with our pitchfork held high—and three scared marmalade cats at her ankles.

“Oh, Marthe,” I breathed, and she dropped the fork, eyes wild. She was in just her housedress. Her hands were shaking with cold. I scrabbled up the ladder and threw Mami's shawl about her, rubbed blood frantically into her arms. “Marthe, how long have you been up here? What happened?”

She lifted one arm from her straining belly and tentatively touched my cheek. “I think I saw his ghost,” Marthe said, all wonderment, and then my brave, cool sister crumpled into tears.

“Oh, no, Marthe,” I blurted, and flung my arms around her: willed my heat and nerve and stubbornness straight into her heart. “You're okay,” I begged, and chafed her cold hands. “We found your message. It's okay, I swear.”

“What message—” she started, and my stomach knotted.

“The stones in the orchard road,” I managed before the effort of pretending became too much. We looked down the hayloft ladder. Into the uncharted dark.

“A ghost?” I asked softly.

Her smile ached. “I miss him so much. But his eyes—his eyes were terrible.”

She wrapped her arms around me, and we stayed there shaking, tear tracks on our cheeks, until Heron and Tyler brought the light in.

One of Mackenzie Green's burlap sacks was full of southlands tea: the last prewar batch from the Carolinas. There was enough of it to brew strong, dark cups for all of us while Heron ran to Lakewood Farm for the Blakelys.

Marthe checked all the windows, locked the doors, and pulled the blinds. Her eyes were red and haunted. They scanned the walls restlessly, marked every shadow's fall. I set milk and honey on the table and tried to forget her shaken touch on my cheek. She'd already pulled back into her fortress of reserve. I couldn't see a hint of her behind those deliberate walls.

“Town,” she said, a dare to break the spell of normality she'd thrown together: tea brewing and the smell of sweet candle wax in the air. “How did it go?”

I bowed my head and handed back the accounts book. “That's a good price on salt,” Marthe said after a moment.

“Heron did that. I was talking to Pitts,” I said low, and Tyler excused himself to the parlor. I wasn't the only one who could feel Marthe's temperamental weather.

“And what did
he
have to say?” Marthe asked bitterly.

My jaw clenched into a snarl. “Pitts wants to pack us off to Prickett's and quarantine the whole farm. And I told him where to shove his militia, his grudge, and his presumption.”

Marthe's grim face flickered, and she scrubbed a hand across her eyes. “Good girl.”

I flushed, and looked away. “He said there aren't Twisted Things in Windstown. But the Chandlers found one. It was all—” I shook my head. I couldn't inflict that pickled, floating corpse on Marthe.

My sister's face went still. “We'll just have to handle it, then.”

“How?” I said, small, into the ghost-filled night.

Her jaw set, stone hard. “By ourselves, Hal,” she said. “The same way we always have,” and then the kitchen door opened and the Blakelys poured in.

Cal Blakely looked smaller and tireder already: a month older in the past day. He went straight into the parlor and touched Tyler's head softly. “You all right, kid?”

Strain etched lines around Tyler's white eyes. “Enough to keep walking.”

“Good man,” Cal said, and patted his shoulder. There were ghosts in his eyes too; ghosts snagged everywhere. “Nat and James brought the dogs. If whatever you saw was someone prowling about trying to scare you, we'll find them on the double.”

“It wasn't,” Marthe muttered, so low I barely heard.

I peeked out the drawn curtains. I could barely see Nat and James in silhouette: two bodies, lantern-lit, in our cold barley fields.

“Who's at Lakewood Farm with Eglantine?” Marthe asked.

“Eglantine is the last person anyone wants to pick a fight with,” Cal replied. “Come on. Let's see your stone letters.”

Heron was out front with the water bucket, drinking in great gulps straight from the brim. We marched in a ragged line toward the river dock, each one of us head down, watching the grass. The path turned, and there we were: atop the shuddering plea written in the road.

Marthe read the stones and went pale as bleached cotton.

“Steady,” Cal murmured. “You don't want to stress the child.”

“That's an old wives' tale, and you know it,” Marthe snapped.

“I'm sorry, sir,” Heron cut in smoothly, and inserted himself between them. “We've likely obliterated any footprints.”

“Can't be helped,” Cal said with a sigh—Cal, who tracked like a fox. “Tyler, give me light?”

Tyler raised his lantern high, and Cal Blakely got to work.

He paced pathways around the muddy stones, circling silently. The lamp in Tyler's hand cast strange shadows. They made him look melancholy, bruise-eyed with age. We scoured the hard, muddy path together, down to where the sand and the river wiped every trace clean. “Anything?” I asked.

“There's water,” Cal said quietly, and traced an imperceptible line on the rocks, away from the pathway and away from the docks. “Water falling from river stones, I'd think. But I don't think this was a prank or a prowler. Nothing with feet passed through here.”

Marthe didn't react. She'd composed herself somehow since that first sight of the stones. Her face was utterly still, her eyes shuttered again.
She said,
I realized with a chill,
she saw a ghost.
Nobody knew about the stone messages of our childhood: nobody but me, Thom, and Marthe. I couldn't conceive of doubting Marthe: her keen eyes, her ruthless practicality, the way she always knew what to do. But there was no such thing as ghosts.

The knife that killed a god is hidden in your smokehouse,
I thought.
Don't crack too wise about no such thing.
And suddenly the familiar night was full of monsters. I shuddered hard.

Cal Blakely lifted a gentle eyebrow. “There's nothing, Hal,” he said, and led us back to the abandoned stones.

There was a new light there, around the corner that led to our dead, shorn fields. “We can't find your prowler, Marthe,” James Blakely called from behind it. He and Nat came into view, the dogs slinking wary at their heels. “Flushed another Twisted Thing up the shore, though. We need to lay a fire. This doesn't look good.”