An Inheritance of Ashes (10 page)

“Private Blakely,” Tyler corrected, and I abruptly understood why he'd worn his soldier's buttons.

“Private,” the mayor amended. “I won't say I expected to see either of you.”

No kidding,
I thought, and the whole thing seeped up again: Papa's funeral, rainy and cold. The mud of our burying ground caked on the last pair of new boots I'd owned, while I clung to Marthe's strong fingers. The look on her face when she returned from the Windstown land office, drenched with rain, hat twisted in her hands, and told me Papa's will would not be proved.

I put my hands behind my back to stop their sudden shaking. “This isn't about—”
the argument, our family, your awful, high-handed meddling
. “We've sighted a Twisted Thing on Roadstead Farm.”

Pitts's elbow slipped off the mantel. “Twisted Things? When?” The ease fell from him like a stolen suit. I glanced at Tyler. He stood very straight and still, arms at ease behind his back as if to hold himself in place.

“It fell against my window yesterday at dawn,” I said. I heard that frantic, weak scrabbling again and shivered. “A bird with spider eyes and webbed talons. We burned it. But we haven't seen one since the end of the war. We just wanted to know if you've had any here, or if it was the only one.”

The mayor drew himself up, six feet of retired muscle and ease. “Of course we haven't had Twisted Things in town,” he said, much too fast. “We won the war. It's over.”

He cocked an eyebrow and stared: a blatant dare to argue. I drew back. The man I remembered, Mayor Hellfire himself, simmered in his eyes.
I said something wrong,
I realized, too late.
I messed up, and now we're going to get it.

Pitts's gaze traveled from Tyler's leg to my bandaged hand, and burned them both in the cauldron of his head. “We'll quarantine your fields ourselves until General de Guzman can be found. The militiamen will escort you back to pack your valuables. And Miss Hoffmann”—he pinched the bridge of his nose as if terribly weary—“I'll find you and your sister somewhere to stay.”

“Excuse me?” I started. All I'd asked was if they'd sighted Twisted Things, and suddenly Pitts was snatching all our choices right out of our hands.

Pitts raised an eyebrow, as if I'd interrupted. “A place to stay. I'm sure Darnell Prickett has a room or two free.”

“You want us to leave the farm,” I said slowly, shaping the words to make them real. And then they were real: a bag in hand, no land beneath your feet, the dubious charity of others. “How can you be picking fights about the will
now?
”

“Don't be foolish,” Pitts snapped. “This isn't about the will. The Great Army always puts infected land under quarantine. The war in the south killed hundreds of men.” His eyes flicked, uncomfortable, to Tyler's hitched hip.

“You
just said
the war was over!” I sputtered. “There's been one Twisted Thing. How can you say this isn't about the will when you go straight to—quarantine, eviction, tramping our fields into mud, when we're just trying to find out what's wrong?”

His face went hard, utterly cold. Alonso Pitts and my papa had one thing in common: the word they most hated to hear was
no
.

“This is how it started in the southlands,” Pitts said louder. “The Twisted Things showed up, one here, one there. Nothing to worry about; perfectly safe to stay at home. And then it wasn't.” He faced us full on, pale with rage. “And nobody'll ever come from John's Creek again.”

The sheer wrath keeping me on my feet faltered. John's Creek and its foothills, three hundred acres of green land, were dead now, and so was everyone who'd loved them. “This isn't John's Creek,” I said. “Hundreds of men saw the Wicked God die. Our home
is
safe. And it's
ours.
”

Pitts's eyes slitted. “Young lady, I have a whole town to think of: the barricades, the harvests, if our sewers will last. It is irresponsible to stay on that farm, and downright childish to ask for help and then quibble over everything this town offers you.”

My fists curled. “We weren't asking for your help.”

Pitts looked down at me, and his mouth twisted with sad disdain.

The rage in my belly exploded.

“We'd
never
ask for your help,” I snapped. “You've been trying to take my inheritance since the day Papa died. I only even
came
here because James Blakely said telling you was neighborly, and we couldn't
not
warn you. We're not—” I grasped, drowning, for words. “We're not
monsters.
”

Pitts stared for a long moment and then leaned back, all sad understanding. “I know you probably hate me,” he said, “but I stand by it. It wasn't responsible to leave a young woman and a child out there on that much acreage, alone.”

I shoved my hands in my skirt's deep pockets and crumpled their fabric 'til it tore.

“They aren't alone,” Tyler cut in, in that hard voice that reminded me of his father, “and don't you ever say that again.” He turned, sideways, stumbling, and held open the door of the mayor's parlor. “C'mon, Hal. Let's go.”

I glanced between Alonso Pitts's hard, pitying face and the door Tyler had flung open. And then I walked through it, and slammed that expensive door hard enough to shake the frame.

Tyler paced a circle in the hallway, stiff with rage. “I'm sorry,” he said, and looked me in the eye for the first time since we'd set foot in the Pitts household. “I wish I could—
ugh.
”

“I—no.” I pressed my hands to my cheeks. My face was still hot: wrath and fear and shame, all mixed up. “I should have known. I should have remembered why we don't talk to him. Of course he'd find a way to make a simple question into a trap.”

Tyler glanced at the door worriedly and shifted farther down the hall. I followed him—and stopped, not sure anymore how close was too close. Discomfort bloomed between us. He edged one step farther along, and my heart wilted. Windstown was crammed with people all the time. There was no private space to ask Tyler if he was all right—
no,
if
we're
all right
—until we were back across the river.

I wrapped my mother's shawl tightly around me and tried not to feel utterly lost.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

I bit back ruined humiliation. “Go home.”

Tyler nodded gravely, once. “Then let's go.”

We gained the front hall side by side, palpably and uncomfortably apart. Mrs. Pitts held the front door for us, as courtesy demanded. She looked at the wall and did not say a word.

“Thank you,” Tyler told her as he stepped into the sunshine.

She hesitated, and then her chin came up. “Halfrida. Do give my greetings to your sister.”

I clenched my jaw and just stared.

Mrs. Pitts bowed her head a little. “He's afraid of a panic,” she said, her voice strained. “It's only been a month since the fear here's settled down. There hasn't been a sighting since September, but the Masons and Sumners still slaughtered three feral dog packs and burned a whole Bellisle orchard five weeks ago on nothing more than a rumor. I don't know what the town would do if the gossip woke.”

“It doesn't need to.
He's
already panicking,” I said gracelessly.

“Yes, he is,” Mrs. Pitts replied. “Whatever you think being mayor means, he's just a man. And no man should be forced to defend against gods.”

For anyone else I might have felt a twinge of pity. But Alonso Pitts's disdain was too fresh to let it through. “Thank you for the tea,” I said, civil and formal, and saw myself down their front steps, head held high, still half owner of Roadstead Farm.

Mackenzie Green's General Supply was as cozy as a holiday kitchen, packed floor to ceiling with grain sacks and the smell of new wool and cider. The shelves were half empty for the first time I could remember; usually they teemed with things we couldn't afford. I stepped inside, too aware of Tyler's silence, of the distance between us—certain that all of Main Street was whispering behind our backs.

Mackenzie lorded over the narrow counter, a woman cut even narrower and just as precisely. Her face split into a wrinkled smile. “There's my Hallie,” she said, and pecked me on both cheeks. “I sent your things and your hired man down to the docks. He looked like a man in need of making himself useful. Now, I heard you were up to see Pitts this morning.”

It was true what they said about keeping a secret in Windstown: the only sure way to do it was to promptly drop dead. In the back aisle, a company of Chandlers lowered their voices, hands on their rucksacks of precious old-cities salvage. One of the older ones—Rami, his black beard half gray—shot me a look of profound sympathy.

“We were,” I grudged. I tangled my fingers in Mami's shawl and wished I were in my barley fields, brown-gray and endless, silent, safe. Empty of everyone's gossipy, grasping
opinions.

“We saw a Twisted Thing on the property,” I said reluctantly, and Mackenzie quirked one black-silver brow at the Chandlers, who took the hint and dutifully filed out. Mackenzie knew everything that happened in Windstown. Telling her—confiding in her—was worth the chance she'd confide back. “We came to find out if they've been back here in town, too. And in one breath Pitts was sending us off the farm, bringing in generals to rip up our winter plantings, and—I have to get home.”

“Pitts,” Mackenzie said, and sighed. “Well, he won't be mayor forever. I'll keep an eye out for your Twisted Things, child, and speak with Darnell Prickett. All the news comes through his doors that doesn't come through mine.”

“Thank you,” I said, overwhelmed. Not everyone in Windstown was Alonso Pitts. There were still people who cared for us, and who we cared for in return. “I don't know how we can repay you—”

Mackenzie's lips pursed. “Down to the docks, now. Don't lose the light.”

I flushed. I'd offended her, and I didn't even know how. “Thank you,” I stammered again, and we crept out into the afternoon.

The air on the riverfront was cooling fast. Crates and dry sacks scattered over the pier, stowed inexpertly about our riverboat—which had been packed with a total unfamiliarity with how the boat took weight. “Oh, Heron,” I sighed, and looked around for him.

He stood on the garden walk beneath a leafless peach tree, in quiet conversation with Rami Chandler while the Chandler cousins loaded their boat. I glanced over my shoulder at Tyler—already shifting packages from bow to stern to bulwarks—and drifted to join them.

“Halfrida,” Rami said, with a tip of his broad chin.

“Rami.” I nodded back.

Heron glanced at me, surprised.

“My given name's perfectly all right. We're neighbors here,” Rami explained, and reached into a pocket for an awkward, cloth-wrapped bundle. “I heard mention of the Twisted Thing on your property up at Green's. We thought you should know: we've had a sighting too.”

He unwrapped the cloth—his spare keffiyeh, creased and clean—and produced a thick glass jar with
something
floating inside. I shaded the jar with one hand. Inside was the corpse of a lizard, no larger than my palm, curled in some viscous fluid.

I swallowed past a throat gone dry. The lizard's limbs bent in a way I couldn't understand: backwards, like a horse's hocks, but three times, a zigzag of joints. Its ruff was green and scaly, touched with purpling dots. And its ears, floating limp and free, were the red-tufted points of a fox.

It wasn't a fluke. There were still Twisted Things in the lakelands. I couldn't even begin to figure out what that meant.

“Be careful,” Rami warned as I took the jar. “It's still throwing heat.” The glass warmed my hands like a fresh mug of soup, even through Nat's fine blue gloves.

“When did you find this?” I asked.

“Two days ago. Ada found the nest,” Rami said, and waved her over from the knot of busy Chandlers. I startled. I hadn't seen Ada Chandler in years, since the days when we still paid calls in Windstown and our neighbors' hospitality was good. She'd grown from a narrow, quiet kid into a woman taller than me, her dark arms hard with muscle and her black hair close cut in tight, dense curls.

“Ada,” I said awkwardly. She anatomized me with a look; cataloged my own changes in seconds. The practical nod that was her verdict was Ada to the core: identify, recognize, and dismiss everything that didn't interest her.

“You've got a Twisted Thing, then?” she said, and leaned in with an intensity I remembered all too well.

“Yeah,” I blurted. Not being sure what to do with Ada Chandler was a familiar, comforting feeling. “Yesterday. Just one.”

Ada nodded, sharp as a rice merchant. “That fits. The nest we found yesterday was a new one—none of the specimens we caught this summer lived past two weeks. Their burns killed them off, and they disintegrated after, but this little guy's still nice and fresh.”

“Caught?” I said, scandalized. “You kept them?”

Ada's bright eyes narrowed. “Of course we kept them. There's no way to fight something you don't
understand.
”

A horrid image flashed across my mind's eye: twisted birds and lizards, centipedes as long as my arm, twined and floating in jars like Marthe's canned carrots. I pushed the jar back at Ada. The lizard bumped against the glass, and Ada took it like I'd cradle a sick goat.

“You're taking an awful risk,” I said softly. There were punishments for harboring now, ever since Asphodel Jones, the Wicked God's general and living prophet, and his irregulars scattered into the hills above John's Creek. The Great Army found those who harbored Jones's men or failed to rid their lands of Twisted Things, and hanging was just the favorite death. There were dim rumors of others, less kind and uglier still. Stories had reached even our lonely farm of the swift blade of a regimental trial.