An Inheritance of Ashes (34 page)

Ty looked down at the river, and then at me, Nat, and Heron, and lifted his head. I blinked, and then recognized it: the way a person's body held itself high when it was devoted without compromise to something greater than itself. “I'm staying,” he said quietly.

Nat glanced at him and nodded sharply. “Staying.”

Mrs. Blakely's calm evaporated. “What? Both of you?
No.
”

“Mum—” Tyler started.

“You can't. I can't lose you both—”

Nat stepped forward and folded her mother's hands in her own. “Mum,” she said softly. “I understand that if I let my brother die, you will skin me with a soup spoon and spend the rest of your life in black, and it's your worst color, and it will be all my fault.”

“That's not funny, Nasturtium Blakely,” she whispered. “Not this time.”

Nat's face fell for just a moment. “We'll take care of each other, Mum. I swear.”

Eglantine threw her arms around her daughter. She reached out, flailed, caught Tyler's shirt and pulled him in. They rocked together, heaving, in a tangled embrace full of elbows and promises. “I have already lost your father this year,” she said into that knot, and nearly choked. “You both come home. So help me God, I'll see you both on my doorstep in the morning.”

“Yes, Mum,” Tyler whispered, and squeezed his mother tight.

I looked up at Marthe: tall and proud, so undemonstrative, so contained. She reached out and ruffled my hair gently with her free hand. “Be careful, Hal,” she said softly.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “You too.”

“Eglantine,” Cal said gently.

She disentangled herself from her children with a brokenhearted look and lifted herself up onto the cart.

“Be safe,” I said softly, and Marthe took Thom's hand and they drove off Roadstead Farm, into the already-rising sun. We watched them go, Heron and Nat and Tyler and I standing in a row: four flawed bodies, all still frightened but ready. Ready for the thrum of marching feet.

I didn't want to lose this land, but if we did, Hazel would live. She would have parents to love her. She would have, in them, a home.
You cannot anymore,
I told myself,
lose everything.

I looked down at my hands, at the naked soil of Roadstead Farm. At the fences we'd defended against everyone for years and years. “They'll come, right?” I asked, like an eight-year-old child.

“They'll come,” Nat said softly.

They've hated us so long,
I thought. And then Heron pointed to the road before us and said, “Look.”

Against the sunrise, a column of Chandlers was marching on Roadstead Farm, their lamps held high and blazing, tools strapped to their backs. Ada led the ragged column and waved her hands frantically. Let out a wild war whoop.

“Look,” Tyler repeated, and nudged my shoulder toward the river.

I turned, and in the lightening morning, the water swam with sparks: small points of light like bright red fireflies, swarming in the distance, with a huge shadow behind.

“They all came,” I said, and the shapes, the shadows came clear: Mackenzie Green standing on the prow of the Windstown ferry, its pilot lantern blazing. Behind her the entire Windstown fishing fleet spread out like candles, like a funeral procession moving stately to the shore.

—and behind
them,
through the steam of a river that was boiling, burning, breaking, a pair of giant, curling horns emerged into the day. Beast Island rose out of the torch smoke, world-tall, floating at the end of three dozen ropes.

“It's time, then,” Heron said softly.

I swallowed. “It's time.” Tyler reached for my hand and caught it.

I laced my fingers through his and took Nat's hand on the other side. And then we walked, the four of us, down to the wide-rent tear on the river.

IT WAS RAINING ON THE RIVERSIDE: HOT, WET DROPS THAT
smelled of summer thickly dying into rot. They drifted into the winter wind and froze halfway to the ground.

The beach was overrun with Twisted Things: clumped on the sand, swarming around the dead posts of our dock, crawling and hissing and fighting as the stones beneath them smoked and burned. There were Twisted Things
everywhere.
And past them, over the hill and around the riverbend, came the sound of the Great Army's horns.

“You ready?” I asked everyone.

Heron looked at me, at Tyler, at Nat. At Ada Chandler, behind us, with a crowbar in her hands.

“I'm ready,” Ada said, “but they have to
listen
to me.”

“They will,” Ty soothed, and in the river behind us, the first boat touched earth.

Mackenzie Green stepped out of it, her hands wrapped around a thick truncheon. “Good God,” she muttered, pale beneath her tan. She looked over her shoulder, uncertain for what might have been the first time since she'd landed in Windstown to take over the general store.

The murmur didn't stop with her. It rippled through the fleet of bumping boats, into Beast Island's veil of steam. Behind her, boat after boat docked: the Thaos, the Masons, the Sumners and Pricketts, the Pitts family and the Haddads, in their too-fine working gear. All the people we knew in the wide world. All the people who had come for us.

The men who'd been at John's Creek with Thom and Tyler clamped their mouths uniformly shut.
This is the war,
I realized. I'd grown so used to this destruction on my doorstep.
This is what they saw at John's Creek
.

“Is it too late?” Mackenzie asked, and I couldn't tell if she was hoping or fearing it was true. The boats bobbed on the shore like lanterns, drifting in on a false midsummer tide.

“No,” I said in a small voice, and then summoned up something louder, something I could believe. “No. It is
not
too late for us.”

“Let's go, then,” Ada said mildly, and the Thaos leaped out of their wooden boat.

The Chandlers rushed in, took sturdy ropes from Windstown hands, and passed around thick leather gloves. “Don't touch its skin,” Rami Chandler repeated. “Don't breathe its scent. If you're hurt, fall back.” He paused before Councilor Haddad, looked him full in the face, and shook his head. “Dad. Don't touch its skin.”

“Rami,” Councilor Haddad said thinly, and turned away.

The ropes drew taut, ten bodies to each line. I drew in a breath.

“Heave!”
Thao Hang shouted, and every grown man and woman in Windstown and the Chandler village pulled Beast Island ashore.

Birds scattered from their dead nests, and the ropes creaked, strained, pulled the skinned hulk of Beast Island through the currents. It caught in the shallows and dragged, its long paws bent and breaking against the disturbed rocks, and the hefting crew scattered to the back to push, their hands encased in the Chandlers' thick leather gloves. The Pricketts flung blankets, tablecloths, curtains over the beast's wet-furred, stinking haunch and pushed through that smoking shield. I ran to the back and threw in among them, put my shoulder to the blankets on the wet corpse. Smelled their wool begin to burn.

The Twisted Things scattered across the beach, burning and agitated, ducking in and out of the violet light of the open portal. A lizard flicked up its red ears at us and hissed. Councilor Kim faltered. “What
is
that?”

Tyler pulled his shearing knife and brandished it low. “Keep pushing!” he called. “We'll clear a path!”

I shifted my weight against Beast Island's hind leg. “But there are so many of them—”

He smiled at me, his sweet, whimsical smile. “This is what I trained for. Keep pushing, Hal.
Don't stop.
”

He limped toward the snarls of Twisted Things, and he moved like a killer.

Tyler's heavy knife connected with a spinner bird and ripped. Bones cracked and feathers flew as it let out an outraged squawk. Nat howled a war cry on his heels and dashed in, her pitchfork high, swinging and swiping anything that moved out of our path. Johan Prickett gave me a frantic glance, and then he was off behind her, silent, eyes narrowed, as focused as a fox.

I traded a frightened glance with Heron. “Keep pushing,” he said.
Don't you give up.
I nodded fractionally, and he strode, head high, into the carnage with his twisted knife in hand.

I wasn't a fighter. I wasn't a hero, clearing the path ahead of us with blood and fire as the sun rose high. But I knew how to push, and I pushed, shoulder to shoulder, the endless weight before us. It moved an inch; two inches. We pushed: Mackenzie, with Darnell and Janelle and Mrs. Pitts. “Heave!” Hang called again, and we groaned and shoved, and the body skittered another two inches up the scree. One moment at a time, we pushed Beast Island across the beach I'd played on since I was a child. The fumes rose from the blankets, from the body, and I choked. It would never be done. We would never make it.

Tyler slashed fruitlessly at a hissing lizard-fox, and Nat shook her pitchfork at something that looked mostly like wax melting. “Left!” Tyler called out, and Ada Chandler grabbed the lead line. “A little more! Okay, good!”

I leaned in, breath to breath, and pushed with everything I had. The body inched forward, one step, two steps, three.

The tips of those shattered horns vanished into the shimmering forest, then its head, its torso, its rotted tail.

A drop of rain, soft and sweet with fullest summer, trickled down its length and splashed to the ground. And then the purple light, the light of unfurled leaves, flickered and went out.

Silence pooled over the beach. Not the silence of the quiet place, the place I'd walked through to find our Thom: the silence of a constellation, stars in concert, hand in hand.

“Feel for drafts!” Ada called, and the Chandlers surged forward, plugging the chinks and crannies around it with the bodies of dead spinner birds. The tiny licks of heat faltered one by one. The acid summer of that other world, fading away.

We felt the wind go, together. We tilted our heads up into the sky and watched the bright morning sun reemerge from the smoke that had stained our sky.

A birdcall broke the silence, clear and sharp, and we shook ourselves, together, like we'd spent years underwater. Mackenzie grinned, and then Janelle Prickett, and then the sound of a whole town breathing filled the morning until it burst.

Someone was hugging me. Jerome Chandler, or Thao Cua, or any one of my neighbors who were heaving with tears, with sweat, with shouting as the portal burned itself out. Mrs. Pitts let out a whoop, and then the Sanchez girls picked it up, and we stood there cheering, screaming, dancing in the dead sand under the sunrise sky.

Because we'd done it. We'd all done it.

We'd saved Windstown, and the lakelands, and Roadstead Farm.

Tyler wrapped his arms around my waist and kissed me, full and long, in view of the whole of Windstown society. And there it was, that steal of breath, that flutter Janelle Prickett had described so gleefully. I pulled back and looked full into his face, grinning, crying.

“We did it,” I whispered.

“Told you so,” he answered.

And then he looked up, and I felt a hesitant tap on my shoulder. “Ah,” Nat said behind me, quiet, insistent. “Hal. Ty.”

I turned and heard it, felt it: dozens of marching feet, shaking the ground beneath us. I'd almost forgot. The army was coming. The army was here.

The party quieted to hiccups and whispers. “Weapons at the ready, please,” Jerome said, and I stared at him.

“You can't be serious.”

Darnell Prickett took out his truncheon. Mackenzie Green pulled her filleting knife.

The first of the soldiers of the army that had saved the world came, two-step, down our orchard path.

The Great Southern Army was a wall of sound. They carried horns and drums and standards, wore their polished buttons like regimental badges. The dawn flickered into cacophony as they gained the beach and spread, semicircle, around the tail of Beast Island and the desolated shore.

I realized I still didn't know how big a regiment was. They just kept
coming:
rows of thin soldiers, endless as barley, marching forever through the sand.
How many people died at John's Creek?
I thought as they stood at attention.
How many, if there are so very many left?

We watched them come, all of us damp and stinking and small: the ham-handed people of a river town who had just happened to thwart the second coming of a god.

A slight woman came to the fore: brown-skinned, crisp-collared, lines spidering her face. “Who's in charge here, then?” she said in a deceptively mild voice.

“That's General de Guzman,” someone breathed, and it set off a new chorus of murmurs. I blinked. General de Guzman was a woman, small, sharp-eyed, and wrinkled—and she was
old.
Older than my papa had lived to, older than my Opa or Oma. She appraised all of us like a general-store keeper: hard-faced with hard living, weights and measures in her eyes.

Alonso Pitts stepped forward. “I'm the mayor,” he said, and snuck a look at me. He swallowed. “But it's her farm.”

I sucked in a deep, sweet breath of smoky air. There'd be hundreds of witnesses to tell Marthe about this. But it was nothing to being here. It was nothing to hearing it said.

“It's my farm,” I repeated, and put some steel in my spine.

She looked me over, and looked at the tail of Beast Island, slumped in a forever sleep where my dock and rowboat used to be. “Explain this,” she said. Not unkindly, but not kind.

I cleared my throat, and that's when I felt it.

A full regiment of soldiers leaning in from behind their marching order, memorizing every detail of my tattered coat, my bleeding hands. Firelight glinted in their eyes, and something else. Hunger.

Hope.

I am not a hero,
I thought suddenly, piercingly.