An Inheritance of Ashes (15 page)

The emptiness boiled up. It ate the light. It ate the world. “Ty,” I said faintly, took a breath, and laid it recklessly bare: “I don't know how I feel about anything. I'm . . . not okay right now.”

He didn't laugh in my face. He didn't pull back, pull away. He knotted his hands around his walking stick, planted like a regimental flag, and said, “I don't know what to say.” We stared unhappily, watching the dust of two private wars blow through each other's eyes.

“This isn't fair,” I muttered, and he lifted a sharp eyebrow. “No, not you. I wish it was next summer. All I want is some time to figure everything out.”

Tyler paused like a man on a precipice. “We could, you know,” he said slowly.

“We could what?”

“Take all the time we need.”

I glared at him. “Don't you say you'll wait for me or something awful like that.”

“I'm not
waiting,
” he said, and drew up firm. “Just that we could, both of us. Take it slow. Take our time.”

Who says how it works?
rang and echoed through my head. I looked up at him—tilted head, considering eyes—and pictured it: No formal walking-out together; no talking to our families. No having him ask all the questions—would I dance, would I do more, would I permit him to court me and sneak up to the loft together—and hanging everything, forever, on my instant yes or no.

Just me and Tyler, and time to figure out what we had both become.

“Is that weird?” I asked. “Can we do that?”

“It's probably weird.” Tyler cracked a nervous smile. “But maybe that's what courting
is.
Two people spending time, and finding out how they feel about it.”

I nodded. The squirming nerves in my stomach still wouldn't settle down. “You're not going to stop being my friend if the answer's no?”

Tyler shook his head, fierce. “Never. Not on my life.”

“You were ready to throw the whole thing away ten minutes ago.”

“That was the stupid me,” he replied, eyes glinting. “He's dead now. I put a hatchet in his face.”

I watched him steadily until his broken eyes flicked to the ground. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I was scared and just assumed everything, and it was . . . really stupid. I swear I won't do that again.”

I swallowed. Reached out for his hand and tentatively took it. “I swear I won't let it stew for a whole week again,” I whispered, and he nodded:
Thanks.
His fingers were rough-callused and thin under his gloves. I squeezed them experimentally; it had a whole new meaning now.

“Hal?”

“Yeah?”

He hesitated. “Can I kiss you?”

I stopped. Was this taking our time?
You can
say no,
I reminded myself.
It doesn't have to mean never.

I thought for a fleeting second what Tyler's cold-chapped lips might taste like. He smelled warm, like soap, clean sweat, lanolin. I'd never kissed someone before.

You can say yes, and it won't mean always.

“Okay,” I said faintly, and shooed a lazy ewe out of the way. Tyler stepped close and looked down at me, serious as a church vow. I breathed in shallowly, terrified by his nearness: Tyler Blakely, tall and waiting as a guitar string.

His nose brushed mine, butted gently past, and then he placed both hands lightly on my cheeks and leaned down to my mouth.

Janelle Prickett had called her first kiss summer exploding into midnight. I didn't see it. Tyler's mouth was on mine and it was too light, too hesitant for summer. The world was not ending. The earth had not gone standstill bright, or warm, or golden.

Tyler's lips moved, weird and living, against mine; small, infinitesimal spaces meeting and parting. His fingers leafed lightly along my cheek, warm in their knit woolen gloves. I fought the sudden urge to lean against them; fought an equal urge to pull away and run. My mouth flooded with the taste of him: soup-sweet and faintly metallic with fear.

The world shrank to fingertip details, and then he broke and stepped away from me.

I leaned back. The air was doubly cold on my mouth where his lips, that soup-taste lingered on. I resisted the impulse to wipe it away—or maybe to hold it, warm and private, in my palm. The sun streaked across his face—the sheer peace on his face. The rustle and
whuff
of the flock layered our silence into something softer.

I tipped my head back and let the afternoon sun glow through my closed eyes. All the frantic voices had gone out of my head. I couldn't remember the last time everything had been so . . . calm.

When I opened them, Tyler had dropped his hands to his staff and was watching me, rapt and anxious, his eyes bright in the hazel shreds still left to them. I opened my mouth; shut it again. I didn't know what you said after a boy—
a man and a soldier
—kissed you. I didn't know what you did. I wasn't sure I felt how you were supposed to feel.

“Was that okay?” I managed, and nearly smacked my own head sideways.

Ty barked a quick laugh. He grinned at me, wild and merry. “Like I'd know anything about it.”

I snorted, and my own smile formed from nothing to meet his. “Fine, then,” I said softly.

“Well, fine,” he replied. We could go on like this for hours. We
had
gone on like this for hours, back in the days when we were small and annoying and Tyler Blakely was not somebody I had kissed.

“Fine—” Tyler started. And stopped.

I turned and saw a figure striding long across the highway, his hat low on his head against the chill-bright wintry sky. Tyler went pale around his chapped lips: the awful, helpless look he'd had when we found the stones strewn across the river path.

“It's just Thao Hang,” I said, even as the creeping wrongness spread. Our goat pen was the other way; Hang's cart was still parked in the drive. I peered closer, and the figure stopped and turned in our direction.

“It's not,” Tyler said, and picked up his knotty staff.

He limped across the field to the roadside, Joy and Sadie and the confused sheep in his wake. The figure on the road caught our motion and waved us over. There was a second man behind him, and a third. They moved to meet us: unshaven, sunburned, broad; pearly buttons at their wrists.

“Veterans,” I said softly.

“No,” Tyler said. “Soldiers.”

“What d'you mean, soldiers?” I asked with a chill.

Tyler glared down the road. “The ones who stayed after John's Creek to burn every last Twisted Thing and hang Jones's irregulars. And find John Balsam. Find John Balsam, most of all.”

My eyes widened:
the knife.
“We have to warn Heron.”

Tyler wheeled on the path, but it was too late. The three men, armed and buttoned, had caught up to us. “Good afternoon, miss,” the leader said in a rich voice. “We're looking for Roadstead Farm.”

THERE WAS NO POINT DENYING IT; NO PURCHASE IN TRYING
to lie. “That's us,” I croaked. Tyler glanced at me uneasily. “How can we help you?”

The lead man doffed his cap. “Lieutenant Jackson, from General de Guzman's regiment.” His accent was pure southlands: the round sound of rolling hills spread long into the sunset. A reassuring smile crinkled his brown face. “We were summoned here by the mayor in these parts.”

My panic frothed into wrath. “Pitts.”

“That's the man,” the lieutenant said, a little more warily now. “Don't you worry, miss; we got here on the double. Now, where did you find the bogey?”

I blinked.

“The Twisted Thing,” Tyler murmured. “We named them different in the war.”

All three looked him over, taking in his hip, his splintered eyes. The fixed cheer slid off the lieutenant's face and left something sincere, and warmer. “What regiment?”

“Lakelands, out of Toledo,” Tyler answered, and they dissolved into a circle of handshakes and half-remembered townships. I stood forgotten outside that wall of turned backs, torn between wrath and relief:
They don't know about the knife.
I bit back the urge to fly across the river and wrap my fingers around Alonso Pitts's throat. I'd said no, and he still sent them to put us under quarantine.

Years later, beyond all reason, he still wanted to push us off this farm.

I'll show you,
I thought viciously. We'd send these soldiers back to him bowled over with how well we'd done. Full of nothing but praise for how the Hoffmann girls handled Roadstead Farm.

I straightened tall, and smiled.

“I'll show you where the Twisted Things fell,” I said when the
do-you-know
s and
were-you-there
s died down. “We've had eight since: all small ones. Birds, most. One with cockroach legs that looked more like a field mouse.”

Behind Lieutenant Jackson, the youngest soldier hissed out a breath. “That's a lot, Andre,” said the third, a muscled, graying Chinese soldier who'd called himself Sergeant Zhang. “How'd they get this far out in the sticks?”

Tyler stiffened visibly beside me. I hadn't been talking to him through the last long, torturous week—but obviously Heron had.
Act natural,
I thought at him. It might as well have been written in lipstick on his forehead:
Hello, we have John Balsam's knife.

“We've had the dogs out,” he managed, too high and
much
too fast. “They're good with tracking. But Twisted Things don't leave scent trails the same way.”

You would never know that Tyler Blakely and his sister were related, sometimes. He couldn't have faked his way into a root cellar if his name was Potato.

“I'll show you. Right this way,” I said quickly, and their masks came up again: polite and determined not to scare the children.
I will show you and Mayor Presumption,
I thought as we turned down the gravel path to the outbuildings and left Tyler snarled in his sheep.
I'll show you how to fight a war.

Marthe and Thao Hang were in our tiny slaughterhouse, butchering the luckless among this summer's goats. Hang's sister Cua worked out back, at the slaughter: stunning the animals and then bleeding them out, all her attention on the knife. The youngest soldier, Corporal Muhammad—short and dark-browed like Rami Chandler—covered his nose, a little sick.

“Marthe,” I said with the tight cheer she used for unwelcome company. “There are soldiers from the Great Southern Army visiting.”

Marthe came to the door. “Soldiers?” she echoed blankly.

“Mayor Pitts,” I said deliberately, “sent them to look for Twisted Things.”

Cua's hand hesitated on the knife.

Now there might be a panic in Windstown,
I thought with fleeting guilt. Mackenzie I could trust to keep discretion, but Cua and Hang had friends, and those friends had friends, and the gossip would spiral around town by sunset.
Pitts sent for the army,
I told myself fiercely.
He started it
.

“I see,” Marthe said, and from whatever depths she'd been lost in for days, she finally surfaced: suspicion first, and the Hoffmann temper quick on its heels. She wiped her salt-pruned hands and stepped over the threshold. “You're aware that Alonso Pitts isn't mayor on this farm? His word stops at the river. He can't send anyone here for anything.”

“Ma'am, we wouldn't presume,” Lieutenant Jackson said. “We didn't come here just for Mr. Pitts. We've been tracking bogey reports, reports of—”

“Twisted Things,” I supplied.

“—Twisted Things, moving northward for months now. General de Guzman sent us to locate their source.”

“But the Wicked God is dead,” Hang said warily from the doorway, and Marthe gave him a look that could scorch paint.

“Forgive me,” she said, razor-edged. “Thao Hang and Thao Cua, from the butchery in Windstown. They don't speak for this farm either.”

Cua set her knife down on the butchery block. Hang drew a patient breath and shook his head.
Oh, great,
I thought, exhausted.
Another ally lost across the river.

“The Wicked God is dead,” Lieutenant Jackson said firmly, and met Hang's eye. “And we won't rest until all His bogeys and His army of traitors are gone too.”

Hang nodded slowly. He didn't look reassured. “We won't keep you, then,” he said, and gave his knives a swift wipe. Cua took the last carcass into the slaughterhouse and set off down the pathway to her cart, watching her boots before every step.
Looking,
I realized,
for Twisted Things.

I started after her—and stopped. God knew what Marthe might see: me siding with a Windstown tradeswoman over her. God knew how a fight over loyalty would end right now, in front of three Great Army soldiers I'd hoped to send away utterly charmed. “Marthe,” I pleaded, “can you show the lieutenant where the Twisted Things fell? That's all. Just that, and then they'll go.”

The silence lengthened. Marthe blinked, focused on me, then on the empty slaughterhouse yard. The rage drained slowly out of her eyes and left a scum of appalled shame. “I'll just clean up,” she muttered, and shut the door behind her.

I could feel the soldiers' eyes. Feel them like I was in the wide streets of Windstown, except that this was my family, my life, my homestead being judged, and not just my stupid hair.

“She's not always like this,” I said, low. The normal, easy smile was getting harder and harder to wear. Sergeant Zhang and Lieutenant Jackson exchanged an embarrassed glance. I bit back the urge to scream, to call them every horrible thing I knew for daring to think my sister was irrational and mean.

“My brother-in-law didn't come back from John's Creek,” I said, breaking the stem off every word. “Their child's coming soon.”

Lieutenant Jackson looked at the closed door, at me, at the grass dying cold between us. “Don't worry,” Corporal Muhammad said awkwardly. “You're not—we've seen a lot.”