An Inheritance of Ashes (14 page)

“Thank you,” I said, sore-throated.

He inclined his head gently. Here was the man I'd come to recognize again: the one I'd taken on because he'd seen in me something to call kind. Because I thought I couldn't hurt him, no matter what I did. His mannerly walls creaked back into place: another selfless, determined soldier walking his lonely roads. But I saw it, now. I'd seen it.

He was so weary it could break your heart.

I took the shovel from him and hefted it through the scrub. He followed me silently to the path, to where untracked wilderness became a field, a farm, a road. Heron looked back over his shoulder.

“It'll be safe,” I repeated.

He picked a dead nettle out of his pantleg. “I'll at least cut the firewood here.” He forced his head forward, away from his charge—the one thing he had to make himself someone's hero after all.

“We should sleep,” I said, quieter.

“In the morning, then, miss,” he answered, soft and formal, and set off across the broken barley.

I trudged, alone, back to the silent house: past the pen where the goats slept heaped and loving and the chickens called sporadically in dreams. My boots crunched gravel. Every sound hushed and echoed, wrapping around the emptiness we'd spilled and left behind us; abandoned, like soldiers and skyscrapers, to fall to quiet ruin.

The fields lay quiet. I snuffed the lantern at the porch step.

Overhead, the broken stars burned.

THE KITCHEN DOOR HAD A NEW GOUGE ON IT WHERE
Marthe had flung it shut the morning I left for Windstown.
Just last week,
I thought.
Not even eight days ago.
Old wood peeked through years of varnish, clean-looking in the afternoon light. That fight already felt a lifetime old. Everything did, except the dull ache in my chest where Thom's love used to live.

I'd slept badly for days. I never saw him in my dreams: just his boots, creased with work and age, walking slowly away from me through the brown sand, into the storm. In the mornings, there were chores: malting and mucking out with antsy Heron, who was still perpetually looking over his shoulder to where John Balsam's knife slept.

In the afternoons we burned Twisted Things. Marthe found them in the vegetable garden, one every day or two, scattered like acorns. Steadily, screaming, in drips and bursts they came up the path between our house and the river shore. They died and died, and we burned them in the yard and marked their deaths on a makeshift map Marthe drew of the farmstead. There were Twisted Things on Roadstead Farm, and none of them went near the grave of John Balsam's knife. Heron studied the map after supper by the light of his one lantern. “This makes no damn sense,” he muttered, and it didn't. It made no sense.

It was already habit to leave the windows shut, to check our boots before we stepped into the house.

I wiped mine twice before I opened the kitchen door, and managed, “Butcher's here, Marthe,” with hearty, fake good cheer. “Hang and Cua need you to sort the goats.”

Marthe nodded, setting the lid on something rich with fresh game meat and onions. I looked down at the floor tiles and swallowed hard. The woodenness had worn off her, slow and trickling, but Marthe had not been the same since we'd found that stone message; since the night I found her in the hay barn speaking of ghosts. She moved like a foggy morning these days. She spoke like a woman underwater.

“I don't know which goats you want to keep—” I trailed off. The false smile was starting to hurt. “What should I tell them?”

Marthe wiped her hands on the dishrag. “I'm coming,” she said dully, and tried a stretched-out smile. I flinched. You could see the shattered pieces of her trailing along the floor.

“What can I do?” I asked around the glass in my throat.

She focused, for a moment, and dipped a mug in the big soup pot. “Take this out to Tyler Blakely,” she said. “I told Eglantine I'd give him lunch.”

“Right,” I said faintly. My stomach flipped with nerves.
Tyler.
He'd been grazing the Blakely sheep in our fields for a week, and no matter how small fifty acres could sometimes be, we'd managed to tidily avoid each other. The thought of breaking that distance made my stomach seize.
I hate everything,
I thought dimly, and hugged the soup mug to my shirt.

Marthe fumbled her boots on. She looked up at me, waiting, and her eyes were a heart-dead mask.

I fled.

Sadie, her black coat smudged with dirt, was waiting outside at the porch rail. Her tail thumped cautiously against the old boards as I shut the door. “Hi, doggy,” I whispered. She was too well trained to jump, but she butted my knee worriedly; she'd taken a bit too well to her new job as Roadstead Farm's guard. I ran a calming hand down her back. “Come on. We're going to find your brother.”

She shook with delight and romped ahead of me, her nose fixed to the ground. We almost reached the highway before I saw him: Tyler Blakely, stretching his bad leg in a bitten-down barley field, surrounded by his peaceful, grazing sheep. I caught my breath, and Sadie plowed right past me, barking merrily away.

He startled and straightened awkwardly, an ugly red stain on his cheeks. Sadie plunged toward him; the sheep frayed against the pressure of her sleek black body. “Lunch,” I said hesitantly, and nudged through in her wake.

“Thanks,” he muttered. It took me a moment to translate the word. Before the war—before last week—I'd have had some witty comment about boys who mumble, or at least an elbow straight to the ribs. But I'd lost Thom. I was losing Marthe. And now Tyler's eyes were fixed away from me, his hands an arm's length away. Suddenly, nothing was the right thing to say.

“You here all afternoon?” I asked.
Stupid small talk
—

“Until supper,” he answered and buried his face in Marthe's mug. Pain sparked between my ribs: there might have been a
miss
on that, for all the friendliness it held.
He doesn't want you,
the snarl in my head pronounced.
Go home.

I bit my lip, hard. “Tyler,” I managed. He lifted an eyebrow at the grass. I forced out, “Spite or pride?”

His face went awful with anger—no, with shame. And then he looked up at me, for the first time in an age, and smiled tightly. “This one's all pride.”

That smile hit like a slap. “Ty, talk to me?”

“I've embarrassed myself enough,” he muttered. “Just leave me
alone
.”

I shoved my hands into my pockets, stomach-sick.
It's over.
The boy who'd walked with me when we trailed behind Nat was just another bridge breaking; who'd—

“Remember that time you shoved a toad down the back of my shirt when I was seven?” I blurted.

He stared at me, suspicious, uncomprehending.

“I got Nat to help get you back. She stole every single pair of your skivvies out of the laundry, and we hung them on the big hawthorn at the head of the drive.”

He remembered. I could see it in the way his flat, hard mouth softened. Remembered that I was
me:
the lean little girl in ribbonless braids who knew where his laundry basket was.

“You just sauntered out here, cool as you please,” I said, and shook my head with broken wonderment. “Looked up at the tree, and went, ‘Guess I'm swimming in my birthday suit.'”

Tyler's mouth quirked. “Please tell me I didn't reach for my pants.”

I tucked my chin to hide the watery smile. “You didn't have to. We were so grossed out we went back
up
the tree and got them down ourselves.”

“And threw them in the mud for me to pick up.”

“Boy underpants are gross,” I said lightly.

“Uh-huh. You two were awful little kids sometimes,” he said. But he was talking. He wasn't turned away from me.

“I know,” I said, a little ashamed myself now. “But if you weren't embarrassed about
that
”—and my voice went thin and frantic—“there is nothing on earth embarrassing enough to never speak like friends again.”

He looked up at me, and the shame was gone, leaving behind it eyes like bleak white snow. “You have no idea, Hal,” he pronounced softly.

“At least tell me
why.
”

“How can you not know why?” he snapped. “You said it was just talk. You don't want me. So, fine; I'll stay out of your way. Fair enough. But now you're picking at this, and I don't know what you
want
from me.”

I stared. A clear, staticky anger rose inside my ears. “Tyler—”

“I know everyone says you should be able to stay friends, but I can't pretend everything's normal, okay? You still don't want me, and that's—I can't just go back to normal. I need some
room.
I need time where we're not
poking
at it.”

He slumped against his staff, planted in the dead dirt. I didn't know whether to laugh or to let loose like Marthe on a tear. “Tyler,” I said, slow and clear. “I didn't say
any
of that.”

His head whipped up. “You did. In the mayor's parlor, you said it was nothing but talk. If it's all talk to you, just me being puffed-up and vain and
stupid,
well . . .
fine.
But don't
lie
about it—”

“God,
stop!
” I burst out. He leaned back, wide-eyed. “Just stop talking and
listen.
”

Quiet sank into the turf between us: the mutters of sheep, a scandalized bird. Dead leaves underfoot.

“Look, I was surprised, okay? I
am
surprised,” I started.

Tyler looked down bitterly at his blunt fingernails. “And here I thought I was the most obvious fool in the world.”

“Listening, right?” I snapped, and he pulled a face. “You put a toad down my shirt when I was seven years old. I've known you
forever.
Nobody expects someone who saw them burping and waddling around in diapers to look at them like—something
romantic.
”

“Now who's embarrassed?” he said slyly.

“What?”

“So what if you said stupid things when you were two? I was
four,
” he said, and his thin face firmed. “And who says that means someone can't like you?”

“That's not how it works,” I answered weakly. The sheep edged away from us, smelling the fight.

“Who says,” Tyler pressed softly, “how it
works?
”

The static in my ears dropped clean out. “Everybody,” I said. The adults in Windstown, in every approving smile or shake of a disappointed head. Nat's suitors, stiffly formal, coming down the path in their best boots and most terrified faces. Janelle Prickett, when she gave us the gossip about who'd dared show a little too much of themselves to whom, and was turned away.

And . . . none of them were here. Nobody was here except Tyler and me, and the sheep, and the dogs, and the trees.

“You like
me,
” I said distinctly. “Even though I put your skivvies up the hawthorn tree.”

I saw his Adam's apple bob. “I like you. No
even though.
”

“Oh,” I said stupidly. The mown barley rustled around us, under the sound of nervous sheep. Joy finally intervened on their behalf: she leaned against my legs and pushed to drive Tyler and me apart. “Your dog wants us to stop fighting,” I managed.

Tyler looked down at Joy. She shot him a dirty look and let out a herder's bark. “So she does,” he murmured.

I gave up and let her push me into the milling flock. The gentle heat of their bodies licked my poor, frozen knees. I hadn't even noticed the cold.

Tyler closed the distance between us with a sheepherder's careful grace, and the air changed into something breath-caught and bright. My friend wasn't leaving me. He cared about me. He was
still here.

“I didn't want you to be embarrassed,” I said finally. “You looked so miserable, and I was so nervous about Pitts, and . . . sometimes I still say stupid things.”

“You didn't want me to be—” Tyler started. His mouth worked and landed gracelessly on, “Oh. Shit.”

I laughed. I couldn't help it; we were just too ridiculous.

He stared at me a moment and then let out a rueful chuckle. “My life has a terrible sense of humor, you know? I was proud of that speech.” His cheeks were still ugly crimson. “I practiced it all week long to my bedroom ceiling.”

“Did it have any good suggestions?”

“It said to definitely go with the wounded dignity. Very manly, super-tragic. I'm never asking it for anything again.”

“The ceiling
or
Mrs. Pitts,” I said dryly.

“God,” Tyler said feelingly. “The Pittses. They ruin
everything
.”

I laughed unexpectedly, bright as a bell. Tyler shot me a sudden warm look and pressed on: “You want to go swimming, they'll drain the river.”

“You make a batch of ice cream, they
turn up the sun.
”

He glanced at me sidelong, with that mischievous face. I grinned back, and the sunshine in him faltered.

“So,” I asked, “what do we do?”

I'd heard a lot about Nat's ill-fated courtship with Vijay Chaudhry, and nobody had forgotten the spring where Will Sumner just wouldn't leave either of us alone, but I didn't know what courting looked like when it worked. When both people already knew and liked each other; when they were friends.

“That depends on—well. How you feel about it,” he said. His broken eyes looked down at me, flicked away, crept back. Filled with nerves and—hope.

“I don't know,” I said, breathless. “No, really, I don't. It's been just me here all summer. We barely sleep, and Marthe won't
talk;
she's gone somewhere in the back of her head where I can't get her. And all I've been telling myself is that I just have to make it until Thom gets home, but—”