An Inheritance of Ashes (26 page)

“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 forehead 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.

“Don't you tell me,” I said, “that you're nobody.”

Heron's mouth opened, flailed, and shut. He was so young. A young, scared, lying boy.

“John Balsam,” I pronounced, and Heron, God-killer, world-saver, hid his face from me, eaten with shame.

“Yes,” he said, hoarsely. “That's my name.”

I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “Was anything you said true? The war, the towns, your mission—”

Heron's chin came up. “All of it. Every word.”

“Except the part where you killed a
god.
”

“Please let me explain.”

“How can you explain? You
said
you didn't know where he'd gone.”

Heron opened his free hand and grabbed onto thin air. “John Balsam's a cheesemaker,” he said, cracking, breaking. “He lives in Kortright and feeds the cats, and reaches jars off the highest shelf for his mother. He's learning to play his grandpa's fiddle. His best friend works the logging camps, and when he's home, we go drink and tell stories about the road, all the places I'd never been and didn't dare go, Sunil's ten thousand girlfriends—”

“You
lied.
”

“I
don't know
where that man is,” he burst out. “I have walked and hid and starved across more land than I ever thought existed, and
I do not know
where John Balsam has gone.” He hugged himself like a lost child; like he wanted to dig off his skin. “I don't know anymore what that name means.”

He is taking John Balsam's mother what is left of her son,
I realized, and put my trembling hands behind my back. “Tell me the truth,” I said unsteadily. “Tell me what
actually
happened.”

“It was true,” he said defiantly. “Every word. Except that we were the ones who slipped around Jones's barricade. Because . . . we were stupid. We got lost.”

He smiled, a hard, sad wince. “There was dust everywhere, and we just kept moving. And then in front of us was this
place,
this blotch of rain and calm. It had been so long since we'd seen rain. So I stumbled into it for a drink of water, absolutely resigned, because I knew I was going to die. My cousins were dead. My friends were dead. At least I wasn't going to die thirsty.

“Except I looked behind me and something moved: The walls of the storm, pulling in like a heart. Pulling away from me; taking away my rain. And I was just so frustrated that I
stabbed
them, I cut—

“And the whole storm,” he said, confused still, “exploded.

“It broke my nose. It threw me across the ground, back into the dust. And then the storm swirled in around me through the cut my knife had made. It bent the knife, broke my fingers. And the Wicked God Southward drained into that wound like water. And it was done. I was alive. The war was gone.”

“There was a hole between worlds in the god's heart, and you cut it open,” I breathed. A hole like the one festering on the river. My hands itched for that knife.

“I guess so,” he said, and shook his head. “I cut a hole in
something,
and the god fell through. I was too afraid to look. I
didn't want to die,
Hallie. So I held my broken fingers and ran like hell.

“It was only after,” he said, animal-stunned, “that I heard talk about John Balsam, the brave hero who slew a God. And I knew—I just knew—that the truth would break them: who I really was. I could never live up to that big a lie.

“So I ran,” he finished softly. “I took my pack, and I ran as far and as fast as I could. I deserted the Great Southern Army. I left my name, my friends, my regiment—everything. And I have
no idea
how a living man kills gods.”

I stared. “You've been running this whole time. You and your enchanted knife.”

“It's just a knife,” he said weakly. “My mother bought it when I was ten years old, from the blacksmith in Black Creek. I used to cut my name into trees with it, slice turnips for our supper.”

That hawthorn flitted across my memory, its trunk twined with glowing flowers rooted in another world. “Ask any veteran in the lakelands,” I said softly. “It's not just a knife anymore.”

His shoulders crumpled. I watched him, watched the strings and strands of the lies we told ourselves come spinnereting down. Because as long as John Balsam could say it was just a knife, he could tell himself equally that he was just a man. I could tell myself that a scrawny girl could save a fifty-acre farm. That if I did, my sister might love me again; that it would erase eight years of secret strain.

I could tell myself that if Roadstead Farm was going to, no matter what, be lost, I loved Windstown and its safety more than I loved my brother.

I reached out and took the knife that killed a god from Heron's hands.

“I am taking this,” I said coolly. Finally honest; finally resolved. “And I am going to the river to get my brother back.”

“No, wait—” Heron said, and I turned my back on him.

I balanced the knife's twist against my palms, like a shard of winter, and walked down to the hole in the world.

THE WEATHER HAD TURNED WORSE: IT WAS FREEZING COLD,
and sleeting. Icy powder sifted into the tops of my boots, and I ignored it. I had John Balsam's knife. And maybe the farm would be obliterated by the army or the Twisted Things, and maybe Marthe would never love me again, but goddammit, I would save
something
I loved.

The shore was a mess of ash and scattered jars. Thom's stones jumbled into letters, half words, noise. The hole's scorched shadow had grown to the size of a bucket, and it had eaten the Chandlers' stakes and string to dust. All the normal winter sounds—the sluggish water and the calls of wild dogs—were gone, and the whole river stank of wet violets and lye.
This is what it'll be like,
I told myself.
This is what you might loose into the world tonight.

The first twinge of doubt nibbled at my belly.

“I'm coming, Thom,” I said, and plunged John Balsam's knife into the dead space in the sky.

I felt, smelled, tasted the cut rattling through the air; felt the sky rip like rotten cloth. Purple light arced through the night as universes streamed from the tip of John Balsam's twisted knife. I felt—no, heard, smelled—a small
pop.

Magic,
I thought
.

And then everything imploded.

I flew forward along the beach and landed, rolling, bruising, in a drift of sodden snow. Sound gushed into the world, too loud, too bright: the calls of birds and a rising wind, sweetly humid and rich with life. I sat up, shivering against the chilly air, and a gust of warm wind shoved me back into the snow. That hot green wind Tyler and Heron had touched at John's Creek was still blowing: blowing, now, into
my
world through a shimmering tear in the sky the size of a barn door.
I did it,
I thought, and then heat lightning crackled through the sleeting sky.

I'd made a hole in the world, gashed bright, edges curling, and Twisted Things rained out of it like stars.

They took to the shore, stumbling, flapping, squawking their alarm calls. The rock beneath them crushed under their endless tracks; it melted and ran in the sucking, whistling storm. I wrapped my hand around John Balsam's twisted knife and whimpered as they pattered along the shoreline, past my knees, and took wing.

You've done it now,
Papa's voice, ever-present, whispered in my ear. “You're dead,” I told it, pulled painfully to my feet, and walked into that rip in the world.

I knew every step of Roadstead Farm, every blade of grass and tree hollow. But I didn't recognize the place where I drew my next breath, two steps down the riverbank. I stepped from snow, farm, river into a lush, bright valley painted in violent purple and rolling green. Rivulets of water ran from my frozen boots onto thick-thatched grass, vibrant with life. The flowers were in spring bloom, dozens of them, hundreds: white-petaled, red-stemmed, as luminescent as tiny stars.