An Inheritance of Ashes (35 page)

Heron looked at the army. And then he looked at me.

“No,” I whispered.

But he knew I didn't mean it.

He swallowed hard and straightened his back. Devoted. Uncompromising. Brave.

“Lay down your armaments,” he said, his voice reeded with fear, but then louder, stronger. “It's over. At ease. Put them down.”

The general squinted at him from before that wall of men. “Who says?”

Heron squared his shoulders. Lifted his chin. He was thin to the ribs, but his jaw was squared, his eyes tired; his face soot-smudged—but looking at our braver, brighter tomorrows.

“John Balsam,” he said, and the night went wild.

THE DAMAGE, IN THE END, WAS BREATHTAKING.

The orchard trees would have to be replanted, the far barley field swept of ash and fertilized anew. The riverbank was a melted ruin: hard stone, run together until it sat slick in the winter light. The brush was dying in the back field, around the guts of what was once a hawthorn tree. And the smokehouse—

There was no smokehouse anymore.

In the far field was a tangled ruin of old brick, its roof fallen in, its beams scorched black. It lay like the eldest of the old-city ruins, jumbled in its own old furniture and a dead pile of long deer horns—and, tangled with it, the crushed body of Asphodel Jones. I swallowed hard at the ruin the falling walls had made of his skull. He would never face his justice. He would never be tried.

I stacked the horns into a pile and set them, like a cairn, atop his body to keep the scavengers away. They cast weird, slanted shadows across the fields as the sun crested over the horizon.

The boats had departed through the morning, one by one, fluttering across the river to emptied Windstown. The soldiers were gone, likewise, from what they were already calling the Battle of Windstown-on-the-River. They'd taken Heron with them: John Balsam, God-slayer. Hero of two desperate wars.

They left me with the orchard, and the ruined fences, and my barley field. I walked the land—my land, my one and only home—and claimed it, step by step. “Home,” I whispered to the fences, the shattered trees. Safe, now. Free.

I counted up the damage, alone and lonely.

It was Tyler who brought Marthe and Thom back down the highway, on the creaking cart weighed down with everything we could lift and still loved. He coaxed the tired ponies up our drive midafternoon, soot and fatigue smudged under his eyes.

“Oh,” Marthe said as her eyes roamed the casualties. Thom ran his bandaged fingers through her hair. It was desolation.

“I'm taking the boards off the windows,” I said. “The chickens made it. So did the goats, and the barn cats.”

Marthe looked at the hammer in my belt, the dirt on my hands, and stepped down from the cart. She reached into Hazel's swaddle and handed me back my darkwood box. The contents hadn't been disturbed: every little relic was tucked safely in place. The paper with Papa's signature fit crisp as a glove.

“Thank you,” I said quietly, and wrapped my weary arms around her.

She held me for a long, long time.

It took less than an hour to unpack. Marthe was upstairs, nursing Hazel in the dim room that was once our papa's. She'd had James move Mama's old rocking chair over: plumped up with a parlor cushion, it looked like a nursery sprouting cautiously in the weeds.

I lingered in the doorway. I didn't feel right, yet, just walking through the privacies of husband and child that had sprung up to surround her, to pull us even farther apart.

I waited 'til she saw me to speak. “How's Miss Hazel?”

“Terrible,” Marthe said, and brushed the child's thin curls. “She's always fussing. She never sleeps. If I knew I was going to be someone's Milk Lady for the next year, I'd have sent her right back in.”

There was no edge to it. Marthe was tired; I could see the fatigue hanging on her like bracken vines. But she cradled Hazel close, feather-gentle, in her arms.

“Marthe—” I started, and shuffled my feet in place.

“You didn't tell me,” she said softly, “who Heron was.”

My skin froze. Thom had told her.
Of course
Thom had told her. They were married, they loved each other, and they never, ever lied.

“Marthe, I—”

She shook her head. “Don't even tell me that you didn't know.” She looked up from where the baby nursed, busily, in the shadows. “I've known you since the day you were born. You knew.”

I swallowed and nodded mutely. I could hair-split, argue, pick at her, but we both knew the truth.

Her eyes stayed steady on me, filled with a dizzying amount of pain. “Why, Hal?” she asked simply.

I swallowed, and sank down in my socks. All I could see was James Blakely's wild face in the fields on the night before everything broke, asking me why I couldn't trust my family enough to let them in.

“I couldn't,” I started, and it broke down right past my lips. How could I encompass years of that slow slide into fear, guilt, grief?
I couldn't.
“I am terrible at secrets,” I said. “I am terrible at lies. I hate everything about this stupid year.” I trailed off. “You don't understand—”

“
God,
Hallie,” Marthe snapped. “I don't know what you want anymore—”

With a wail, the baby arched in her arms. Marthe stopped abruptly and cradled her, and then set Hazel deliberately down in the cradle and buttoned her dress back up to the neck.

“I don't know what you want from me,” she said again, but lower. “You used to be so
brave,
so loving, no matter what happened. And now you've grown into this . . . stranger, and I can't do anything right.”

“You used to be proud of me,” I said, low and small.

Marthe's chin whipped upward. Her eyes blazed hot, hard, furious. She reached out for my face, and I pulled away; she reached out again and caught it between her two hands. “Listen to me,” she said, looking me full in the eyes. “I am
so
proud of you. I have
always
been proud of you, and I will never stop. Do you hear me?”

For a moment, I was nothing but a body, stiff with shock. A body in a strange, new world, where I could
succeed
.

“But you're
not,
” I whispered. “All I do for you is do things wrong. All we do is fight. And I've worked so hard to live up to you, to make you proud, but I'm
so tired,
Marthe. I'm not good enough, and the fields almost went to seed and the beer's late, and four of the chickens died right in the coop, and I couldn't do anything right. I just wanted you to love me again. I just wanted you to never, ever make me leave—”

Somehow I was crying. There were hot tears streaming, blinding, down my cheeks, and salt in the corners of my heaving mouth. Marthe sat with my shaking face in her hands, open-mouthed. “Oh, God, Hallie,” she said softly, but it was entirely different now. “Hallie, baby, you're only sixteen.”

I looked up, betrayed, but her smile was gentle.

“There's over fifty acres here. You're sixteen years old. No one on earth could ever keep that much farm with two pairs of hands. I never expected you to—God. I never stopped loving you. I'll
always
love you. You're the only family I have.”

“But you have Thom, you have Hazel now—”

My sister scowled. “Hallie,” she said, “do you remember the night Papa broke the casserole?”

I flinched. I did. I did.

I'd been just eight, and my big sister eighteen, and we were newly alone with Papa's rules, Papa's rages, all the ways those rules changed day by day and the rages flew high when you inevitably broke them. Marthe'd done something so trivial—left her winter coat across the old chair, or forgot to scrub a dish—and Papa's temper exploded, again. He'd picked up Mama's old casserole dish and flung it, sailing past us, against the wall.

I'd looked up at my big sister and her stern, furious face. And saw it, for just a moment,
afraid.

“You took your hands off your little ears,” she said softly. “You stood right between us and
dared
him, eye to eye, to lay a hand on you instead.” There was a glint in her eye. Fear, years old, for her safety and mine.

Remembered fear, and real pride.

I saw it before me, sudden as a shudder: He'd stared down at me, my big, raging papa with his heavy meat hands and his heavy red face, and something shrank inside him. Something faded. And he'd turned around and stomped his slow way to bed.

I'd looked at Marthe. And she'd looked at me. And then I threw the most furious tantrum of my life before or after.

That someone had
dared
to make my sister afraid.

“There's no one else in the world who remembers that,” she said, and dropped her hands, finally, to the old wood of Mama's rocking chair. They were thin hands, I noticed, for maybe the first time. Thin hands, work-scarred. Strong. “Everyone else in the world, I have to explain that to. What it means to us. What we are. But you and me, we just know it. We know it without words.

“And I know you understand what that means to me,” she said awkwardly. “Because you
ran.
You went into that portal and found Thom, as fast as you could, even though it cost something. You didn't wait. You're still not someone who thinks they'll never get to stop walking.”

And I finally got it, the thing she'd been trying to tell me all along. The difference between Heron or our uncle Matthias—walking away from disaster after mishap, slow enough to save their strength for the endless road—and what we were.

People who had to turn around and fight. People who
tried,
because we had something to lose. A home.

I choked down another, richer sob.
She
was
telling me,
I realized. She'd been telling me for months: Marthe and I were each other's home. And so was Roadstead Farm, malting and eggs every morning and the cozy routine of chores going on into forever.

She'd told me that she'd always be there. I just hadn't known how to hear it.

I felt it break inside me: the hairline cracks in a fear I'd carried in my gut years too long. All my balled-up ease and kindness broke through the cracks and hatched: kept away so long by the certainty that if I dared love too hard, I'd just lose.

“Marthe,” I said, as tiny and high and small as I'd sounded as a child. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I said those things, I'm sorry I was so terrible to you—”

Marthe's strong face, her bright and sharp and proud face crumpled. She pushed up and wrapped her arms tight around me, crushing the air from my lungs. Letting me, finally, breathe. “I'm sorry too.”

“What're
you
sorry for?” I burst.

“You were always such a serious kid,” she said softly, and wiped her eyes. “I always knew I was failing you somehow.”

“Never,” I choked, and held her face close to mine. “Never in my life.”

“Yes, I did,” she whispered, and hugged me, fierce. “Because I never told you we aren't Papa and Uncle Matthias.”

We cried until the last tears shook themselves free, shook onto the dress our mama had worn, the floor our papa had paced, and the million little ways we'd made all those things ours after all.

“This isn't going to be easy,” Marthe said when we parted, scrubbing salt from her reddened eyes. “We have to work at this, okay? We'll screw up. We'll backslide. We have to talk to each other, and be patient.”

“I promise,” I pushed out.

“No,” she stopped me. “Shh. It was a bad year.”

I nodded.

“A bad year,” she echoed for me. “Let's never do it again.”

Later, I came downstairs wiping my eyes, lightheaded with the sniffling.

Tyler, busy at the dishes, laid a hand on my cheek. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, and gave him a watery smile. For the first time in a long time, I was finally okay.

Tyler stayed through the afternoon to relight the fire in the stove, patch the chicken coop, pry off the boards we'd used to shut the windows. We worked together in silence, hands brushing hands, snow in our hair, soothed by each other's breath pluming through the sky.

Everyone always went to the hayloft to hide. But for now, there was nowhere else, so I lay with Tyler in the dwindling straw inside the old hay barn. An orange cat glared at us nervously and settled into the soft afternoon light.
We should bring them inside,
I reminded myself. So they didn't go hunting until the last Twisted Things had fallen to ash.

Heron found us by the time the sun was westering to evening, when we'd had more than enough time to just lie there, hands and breaths entwined. “You're back,” I said, and sat up. Tyler rose behind me, tinged with embarrassment.

“There's straw in your hair,” Heron said, bemused.

“I live on a farm,” I retorted. “Where's the army?”

Heron sat on a bale, the teasing still in his eyes. “Going home,” he said. “Or at least most of them. General de Guzman declared the amnesty this morning, now that they've found me, and most of the regiment packed up for the highway. It's been a long time away for a lot of people.”

The taste of inevitability flooded my mouth. “And you?”

Heron looked at the scattered hay bales. “I said I'd fix your wagon wheel,” he said tentatively.

I smiled, and then I couldn't stop smiling, bright as sun on snow. “Right,” I said, and then he beamed back.

I'd never seen him smile before. It was warm as Sunday morning.

We uncovered Asphodel Jones's body the next morning, from under its cairn of secrets and bone. Tyler opened its eyes with his dirt-smudged fingers, but there was nothing in them.