An Inheritance of Ashes (30 page)

“Oh, it will. But before the army arrives?” Jones said pragmatically, and I swallowed a sudden rage.

“I have chores,” I said to Heron, and stomped out onto the steps.

Tyler was leaning against the wall by the smokehouse door, a long rake in his hand. “How long were you listening?” I asked, and he just shrugged. His face looked absolutely ancient, and his mouth was clamped shut. Heron stepped out the door behind me, shoulders bent, and saw those eyes. And stopped.

“Private Blakely,” he said.

“Heron,” Ty replied. “Who are you?”

I saw it in his eyes: the lie.
I'm nobody.
Heron stepped down into the snow and closed the door behind him. “John Balsam,” he said simply, and bowed his head. “Hired on as a farmhand to have a warm roof for the winter.”

“But John Balsam's a hero,” Tyler blurted.

Heron flinched.

It didn't stop Tyler. “John Balsam was strong, bright, courageous. He ran up to the whirlwind when everyone else ran away, and he leaped—” Tyler reached out one hand, grasping. “He leaped. He
tried.
”

“I'm sorry,” Heron said wearily, and slumped against the doorjamb. “I'm sorry. I'm just . . . not.”

Tyler's face crumbled like a child's, and I swallowed. “Ty—”

“Let me by,” he said hurriedly. “Just—leave me alone.” He propped himself up on his rake and shoved past us down the path, into the farmyard, toward the house.

Heron's face sagged into his cupped hands. “I've disappointed him.”

“I'm sorry,” I said helplessly.

“No,” Heron answered. “We all disappoint eventually.” He stumped slowly back up the smokehouse stairs. “I have to change his bandages. I don't want to. I want to leave them. I want to watch him suffer and die.”

His gray eyes flickered, not rage, but resignation: the deep pit I felt inside when I admitted to Nat the wrong I'd done.

“That's why I have to change them,” he finished. “Apparently there are lines I draw too.”

“That's not wrong—” I stumbled. As if I knew what was right and what was wrong.

“I should have never left home,” he said again, and shook his head. And went back inside, back to Asphodel Jones.

Thom was napping fitfully when I brought lunch up. Tyler trailed me, desolate still, his arms piled with clean linens. James set down his carding in the bedside chair. “Can I leave you with the kids for a bit, Thom? I need to see what Cal and Eglantine are doing about the sheep.”

Thom waved a bandaged hand wearily, and James stood. “I'll leave you to it, then,” he said to me and Tyler, and left us together for the first time since we'd left the God's violet world.

I set down Thom's soup with a curious trepidation. There was so much we had to say: a whole summer lost between us that we could never get back.
Why didn't you come home in time?
bubbled up, desperate, and I quashed it. He was here now. And we had more important things to ask.

“Thom,” I said, and handed him the soup spoon, “why did you bring that man here?”

Thom's lips parted—and stopped. “What are you doing with him?”

“Keeping him in the smokehouse,” I said. “Learning everything he knows about the other world so we can block that hole on the river before the whole lakelands goes down. And we need everything
you
know too: about the war, about the God. Everything.”

Thom chuckled bitterly. “I only learned one thing on that walk north: it wasn't even a god.”

“What?”
Tyler burst out.

Thom smiled, and it wasn't the smile I remembered from summer afternoons when I was twelve or thirteen. It was a vicious Cheshire grin, flecked with pain. “That's the terrible irony of the thing. There are thousands of Wicked Gods in the plains there: hundreds and thousands of those
things
in the grass, whirling like calving tornadoes. They decorate themselves with leaves and flower petals so they're not just pockets of wind.

“It was never a god,” he pronounced softly. “It was a wild horse, or a bull cow: some brainless thing that fell through that hole when Jones and his acolytes opened it, got stuck halfway through, and screamed itself raw in the dark.”

Tyler's hand clenched around his shirt cuff, around that shining button he'd earned at John's Creek. “But it destroyed John's Creek,” he said, barely audible. “Burned it to desert in mere months.”

My eyes widened. “It wasn't the wrath of a god,” I realized. “Ada
told
us; we just didn't get it then. The god was just so big, and when our air touches them—”

“—they burn,” Tyler finished, horrified. “It's a Twisted Thing. It was nothing but a trapped animal all along.”

“That's all I know,” Thom said simply, and stared down into the bowl of cloudy broth. “All I knew for certain about that world was what Jones saw fit to share with me, and he stopped talking once he realized he'd been the prophet of a false idol.”

I swallowed. Here it was, the question, the real one. “Why did you bring him onto our farm?”

Thom bowed his head. “It was a coincidence. We were both going north, so we held conversation on the road sometimes. When we chanced upon each other, we shared a camp. Who he was stopped mattering after a certain point.”

“It matters, Thom: he turned against the whole
world,
” Tyler breathed.

“It's not that simple,” Thom said, and for the first time, he met our eyes. His usually warm brown eyes were burning. “We were two farming men. We were trapped, and dying. We were kind to each other. There is no such thing as an enemy the day you find yourself dying alone.”

Tyler's mouth closed so fast I heard his jaw click shut.

Alone,
I realized: dying alone in the loneliest place in the world. I'd withstood mere minutes in that green and silent world, locked in with my doubts, my fears, my
self.
Jones and Thom had been there for months on end.
Jones agreed to our deal,
I realized,
because Heron threatened to put him
back.

There was a deferential tap on the door. I turned, and Heron scuffed his worn blue socks on the threshold. “Hallie, I sent for Ada Chandler. She's ready downstairs when you are.”

Tyler was suddenly absorbed in gathering up the soiled, bloody sheets. Heron watched him set them in the washbasket with a new anxiety. Tyler was proud of the war, proud of his part in it. But he'd wanted to
be
John Balsam, and that was a different kind of love: one that could turn right into resentment.

“Right,” I said, and Thom pushed himself up to his elbows.

“And what are you doing on my farm?” he asked coolly.

“Chopping wood. Fixing fences. Right now, guarding Asphodel Jones,” Heron answered. “He's a sad man, that one. He'll say anything so I don't leave, even to the horrible bastard who killed his God.”

“But if he knows it wasn't a god . . . ” I trailed off.

Heron's eyebrows rose.

“He doesn't want to know anything about his god,” Thom said quietly. “It would mean he staked it all on something and was wrong, and some people just don't deal well with the thought that they tried and failed.”

I turned away. I didn't want any of them to see me flinch.

“You know, Thomas, you could have stopped him,” Heron went on. “He's pitiful. But he still killed all those soldiers. He doesn't feel a speck of remorse.”

Thom's humorless grin surfaced and then drowned. “I should have cut his throat in the dark, like an irregular?”

Heron shrugged.

Thom shook his head. “Maybe if I was a hero.”

“Nobody's a hero here,” Heron said softly.

Thom ran a finger over the long train of his bandages, wrapped like soft leather over a twist-forged knife. “I'm just a barley farmer. I wanted to go home and see my daughter born.” He swallowed. “I didn't want to be left alone.”

Heron looked down at my Thom with contempt—and pity. “Well, none of us do,” he said evenly, and stumped back down the stairs.

I FOUND HERON IN THE KITCHEN, FILLING THE KETTLE FOR TEA.
Ada Chandler tapped her toes impatiently on the floorboards, raccoon-eyed with exhaustion and inexplicably cheerful. “There you are,” she said, and sprang to her feet as I rounded the corner. “That intelligence about the hole at John's Creek is
perfect.
Everything makes sense now. Okay, not everything. But it's
good.
It might just work.”

“What might work?” I asked.

“Jerome's measurements were right,” she said, all enthusiasm. She was a totally different person on the trail of a mystery: all the restless grumpiness fell away. “The Twisted Things' bodies will block the portal without decaying, like the stones did on the riverbank, if we can brick it up with them—just like that wall of leaves Heron mentioned in John's Creek. And I figured out
why.
The matter they're made of is just slightly chemically different from what
we
are, and from our air. We're alkaline to them. It all makes
sense
now.”

I stared. She huffed impatiently.

Tyler came down the stairs with the full washbasket pressed against his chest. “Tyler,” Ada said. “Did you catch that?”

“Don't start again,” he said, and she relaxed. “I won't follow it.”

“The point is, we're alkaline to them, like—baking soda or lye. For the Twisted Things, being here is like walking through a world of lye fumes,” she explained. “Breathing lye. Eating lye. Running through it. Your brother could walk in their world and come out a bit burnt, because the acid levels there—they're like vinegar on a cut. But for the Twisted Things, this place is deadly. That's why they burn here, inside and out.”

“Oh,” I said, eyes wide. “That's horrible.”

“Isn't it?” Ada said, and grinned. “But that's the key. We've had a Twisted Thing in that portal, on a string, for hours now. And it's not breaking down at all. It's blocked the portal, just like we need.”

Tyler's head came up. “We could plug it. Stuff it full of Twisted Things, and then it'll close. Just like Jones said.”

“Exactly,” Ada crowed. “All we need is a mortar to bind them together. A mortar that's chemically acidic enough that it won't burn up on the other side. And then we build a wall, and this is over. It's
brilliant
.”

It,
I thought, admiringly,
is mad.
Mad enough that it could just work.

“Problem is, we burned them all,” Tyler said from the corner. “Getting enough Twisted Things to fill that hole will take weeks. And they don't stay in one
piece
for weeks.”

“So stop burning them,” Ada said impatiently. “I'll be ready with my jars. It's either that or we go through that portal and bring down something huge, and I'm no big-game hunter.”

Heron and I exchanged a tense look. “There's no time to just save them up,” I said. “The regiment's still coming.”

Ada scowled. “Then hold them off somehow. Keep them off my site.”

“Hold off an entire regiment?” Tyler said from the corner.

“Your uncle's a full sergeant,” Ada shot back, and slid her boots on. “Figure it out. We're too close to back out now.” She waved, an imperious flip of her hand, and strode out the door.

Heron looked down at his hands and shook his head. “It
was
just a knife,” he murmured to himself. It fell flat into the silence festering across the room. “Say it,” he said finally.

Tyler set the washbasket down. “The poster didn't look like you,” he said, defeated.

Heron smirked. “Of course it didn't. They drew a God-killer. They drew a hero.”

Tyler's eyes went bright with humiliation. I fought the urge to throw Heron out of my kitchen and just hold Ty 'til it stopped, to joke about chickens and the bedroom ceiling for the rest of the afternoon. “Stop it,” I said, and flung a handful of carrots on the table to chop for supper. “I will
not
watch you two trade potshots until Ada invents her evil glue.”

“We can't hold off a regiment,” Heron said, sobered now. “Miss Chandler's confidence is inspiring, but they'll come here torches blazing. Like it or not, we
are
harboring Jones now. That's a hanging offense.”

“Jones,” Tyler said, and pulled a knife from the block for the carrots. “Do you think they'll believe us? That we're going to turn him over to the generals?”

“After how Lieutenant Jackson reacted, I don't know,” I said. The problem of Asphodel Jones just kept getting more complicated. I lifted the lid of our soap pot and loosed a stink of crushed mint, lye, and flowers: more of Marthe's normalcy, left on the stove to simmer. The regiment was coming, and we were harborers, but Hazel Mae needed soap. “Do you think when we hand him over they'll give him a trial? Use the law?”

“No,” Heron said with the discomfited expression he got whenever Jones came up. “You saw him. He's not the Asphodel Jones they want. They want a raving madman, spitting sand and death and slitting throats by the dozen. He's”—he stopped, with an awful look at both of us—“selfish. Broken. Pitiful.”

“That's the second time you've said that,” Tyler muttered.

“He is. He's been baiting me,” Heron said uncomfortably, and dropped his hands into his lap. “He picks fights because otherwise I don't talk, and the silence drives him mad. And the rest of the afternoon all he's talked about is his daughter: how much he loves her. Every brilliant thing she does—because he knows he won't see her again. I marched into the Great Dust to slaughter Asphodel Jones. I never imagined he would be so
sad.
”