An Inheritance of Ashes (16 page)

The sergeant silenced him with a frown. “We won't intrude on your personal affairs, young miss. Once we've located those bogeys, we'll be on our way.”

My heart sank. He wasn't looking at me. He looked past me, to the horizon, for anything that moved.
It was never going to matter if you were charming,
I realized bitterly. We were just another chore to be done; another stop on the lonely road home from the war.

Marthe came out of the slaughterhouse with her hands clean and her knives wrapped up tight. “I'll show you the burns,” she said, short and clipped, and strode off, head down, toward the house. The soldiers trotted after: dogs at the hunt, and I couldn't tell yet if they were feral.

I clenched my fists in my pockets and caught the lingering Hang, his butchery tools bundled beneath one arm. “Please don't hold it against Marthe—”

He shook his head. “It's a family matter,” he said awkwardly. Windstown gossiped. It wasn't going to be a family matter at all. “Your sister agreed to one goat, for our services?”

“That's fine,” I muttered, relieved and disappointed and absolutely alone. “Just . . . tell Cua, please. That I'm sorry.”

He shouldered a yearling carcass and made his way up the path, scanning the haunted horizon. I waited until he was a mote in the distance and then shut the slaughterhouse door. I'd left Heron in the henhouse, mucking out straw with a rake and pail. If he hadn't dropped to his knees yet and drawn them a map to John Balsam's knife, we might get through the afternoon after all.

Heron was still in the henhouse when I made it inside, cold and out of breath. “Almost done,” he said distractedly, and picked at a tough-stuck spot. The smudges under his eyes were compost-dark; he'd probably not slept. He said he was watching for Twisted Things on the long night walks he took, but he'd yet to bring back a single body. Instead, the weeds were tramped flat on the path to our brush field and around the young hawthorn tree. I hadn't said anything. It hadn't been worth it until now.

I eased inside and shut the door slowly, breathing the warm, feathery must of hens and new-laid straw. Inside, the bright afternoon broke into dimness, shot with board-crack threads of light. “Three soldiers from the Great Army are on the other side of the house,” I said, and picked up my own rake. “Can you stay out of the back field for at least a night or two?”

I expected to embarrass him. I didn't expect him to straighten so sharply he almost put the rake through the wall. “What do they want?” he asked, then shook his head jerkily. “No, I know what they want. What did they
say?
”

I fought the urge to take his shoulders and just hold him down to earth. “It's not the knife,” I said, and Heron winced even at the word. “Oh, stop it,” I hissed, and put my rake down. “The chickens aren't listening in.”

He pressed his lips together, ducked his head. Was silent.

“They're looking for Twisted Things,” I said, less comfortably now. “Pitts set them on us. He's been after this farm for years, and if he won't have it, he's not above manipulating a whole army to prove the council should have vetoed my father's will.”

Heron quirked a humorless eyebrow. “Why?”

“What?”

“Why does this man want your farm so much?”

I opened my mouth, shut it.
I don't know,
I thought, brimming with stale rage. We only had theories: guesswork from the hairs and specks of evidence he'd left that we still picked over, scavengers, in the long winter nights. “He just hates us, and hated my father. He and Papa spent more time hating each other than most people spend eating or sleeping,” I said. “They both had to know better; they were both just so big on being
right.
Papa said black, so Pitts says white. Papa left the farm to both of us, even though I was only ten years old, so Pitts said we couldn't handle it and tried to shove in an overseer. What happened to
us
never mattered to him. It's all about their stupid fight.”

And that will was the one useful thing Papa ever did.
I didn't say it
.
Some things were personal, even when you'd cried together. Some things you just didn't speak.

Heron sighed out a long breath. “Did Pitts serve?”

I shook my head. He was too old. All the older men had stayed behind, pleading their knees or their thriving businesses.

“Then he doesn't know. He has no idea what he's called down on his little two-horse town.” Heron's eyes glittered in the henhouse gloom. “Hallie, do you know what harboring is?”

The air leaking through the split boards was suddenly very cold. “We're not harboring. It's just the knife, not—” I stopped dead, mouth open.

Heron grinned, sickly tight. “No, I am not one of Asphodel Jones's irregulars.”

“That's exactly what an irregular would say,” I muttered.

“I told you,” he went on softly. “I'm nobody. But that won't be enough for them if they find that knife. They want John Balsam.” He paced an endless circle, round and round like a trapped fox. “They want their hero, and if I don't deliver him they'll tear me apart.”

“They don't know,” I pressed. “I won't tell them. Ty and Nat won't tell them a thing.”

“I can't risk it.” Heron's deep voice went thin. He peered out the crack where the door mismatched its frame. “I'll be off the land by sundown. Just say I went north. Went home.”

My stomach squeezed into a ball of ice. “Heron, what are you doing? They're only staying for a day.”

“That's how it starts out, yes,” he said wildly. He wasn't seeing me; he was seeing something endless, beyond the slatted walls.

“God,” I burst out. “The knife's cursed, isn't it? It's cursed to make you obsessive and insane. You'll freeze out there. You don't even have a coat.”

“I
can't stay,
” he pleaded. He focused on me, and his fear spilled, sharp. I could have named its every plane and corner. I swallowed. For an instant I felt the clawing fear that I'd lived with, forced down every time Papa's shouting stopped and his heavy tread came clumping up the stairs. It wasn't the knife sending Heron out to the winter countryside to starve or freeze or falter.

None of that mattered when you needed to
get away.

I don't hurt people,
I told myself.
I keep them safe. That is who I am.
Remembered Marthe's voice, soft and grim:
Go upstairs. Shut the door. I'll deal with it, baby.

“We'll hide you,” I said desperately, forcing my voice to come out calm. “Somewhere away from the smokehouse; somewhere they won't think to look. In the hayloft, or—no. Everyone always hides in the hayloft.”

He grabbed for it like a drowning man. “The hayloft. Fine. Above the barn.”

“I'll deal with it,” I promised. “I'll get you when they're gone.”

Heron nodded. And then he was already out the door, running across our wintering fields. Running faster than I thought Heron would ever move, like someone who had something, after all, to fear or love.

I shut the henhouse door and went the other way: to our house, with its bird-burn, its old brick, its stale fear; its pall of fierce, complicated sadness that no one else understood. You could feel that sadness sometimes, a wall of words and crooked habits that kept Marthe and me both from being truly understood by our neighbors. Kept us from the open smiles and handshakes of the rest of the world.

Marthe was still with the soldiers, in the yard by the fire where we burned the Twisted dead. They came to a stiff attention before me. “Your sister says you've a hired man,” Lieutenant Jackson said.

I thought of my father's crockery broken on the kitchen floor, my father's rages, my father's fist. Of Marthe's hands stroking my hair, deflecting his anger away from me. And said with my most plain and innocent face, “He's left for his homeland. He's gone.”

THE SOLDIERS WENT OVER OUR FARM LIKE LAND BUYERS.
They searched every corner, every cranny of the fields, and took notes in their leather-bound book. It left them worse-tempered than they'd started: you could see the rumble on Sergeant Zhang's face, the chagrin in Corporal Muhammad's step. Lieutenant Jackson kept an eye on the old-city road as they lined up outside our porch and said, “We'd be obliged for a bite of supper.”

“We'll repay you in good coin,” the corporal added, with a guilty glance at me.

“Fine,” Marthe said, hard and tired, but not awful. I shoved my hands into my pockets, and we led the soldiers inside.

Marthe's game stew had burned at the edges. She ladled it out, rich with onions and sweet thyme, in portions stingy enough for five. “That's excellent, ma'am,” Lieutenant Jackson said politely. “Can I ask what it is?”

“Rabbit,” Marthe replied. “That hired man caught it fresh this morning.” I looked down and bit my lip. There it was, that edge of betrayal in Marthe's voice—for another person who'd, without warning, left us and disappeared.
I'm going to have so much explaining to do,
I thought miserably. And so much of it wrapped up in things I never spoke aloud.

Lieutenant Jackson quirked an eyebrow at Corporal Muhammad, who waved it off. “It's fine. Rabbit's halal.”

Sergeant Zhang was sharper. “Your hired man left just this morning?”

“He's got a family to go home to,” I blurted, spotlighted in Zhang's dark eyes. “There's no crossing the river once it freezes. Winter's here.” I wasn't good at insinuating, like Marthe or Nat. The
go home to your families
sailed right over their heads.

“So, not a local man,” Sergeant Zhang said, hot on my heels. “What regiment?”

“Aylmer, I think.”

Lieutenant Jackson leaned closer. “There's no regiment called Aylmer.”

I fought the urge to flinch. “He had the buttons. He said he joined up in Aylmer. I don't know what regiment that means.”

All three of them exchanged a grim look, ripe with need. Lieutenant Jackson took a spoonful of stew. “You've a strange pattern here, the way the bogeys landed. We're hoping we can keep investigating tomorrow.”

I swallowed. It sounded like a change of subject. Sergeant Zhang and Corporal Muhammad's too-bland faces told me it was not. The Great Army's soldiers had heard something they didn't like.

Marthe looked between us and shrugged. “As long as you aren't in our way.”

“I assure you, ma'am—” the lieutenant started, and it all faded into noise and every vivid tale I'd heard of regimental justice: hangings, confiscations, farms burned to the roots.
One day is how it starts,
Heron had said, so darkly certain—and trapped in that hayloft now for another day. He'd need supper. He'd need a blanket so he didn't freeze.

“Hallie,” Marthe said, with an edge that said it was the second or third time.
“Halfrida.”

I startled. “Hmm?”

Marthe cocked an eyebrow at me. The table was dead silent. “I said, will you help me with the tea downstairs?”

I pushed out my chair. I'd entirely lost track of the conversation. “Yes, Marthe,” I said nervously, and followed her down to the cold cellar.

The cellar was dim. The outlines of pickle jars, beets, and flour sacks sprawled across the shelves our Opa had bolted, half a century ago, to the walls. Marthe hefted a jar of amber honey, placed it in my hands, and picked up a hand-sewn sack of tea. “Hal,” she said quietly, “what are you doing?”

My skin chilled. “Holding the honey?”

“That's not what I mean.” There was threat in my sister's voice: plain, unsheathed. “What went on between you and Heron?”

Oh.
I hugged the honey to my shirt, my brain gone snow-blank. I'd never been a bad sister. It wasn't my temperament, and even after Papa's will came to light, I couldn't afford that kind of rebellion.

“I can't tell you,” I blurted, and that fire I hated so much blossomed in her eyes. Both her eyebrows rose and hung in a half-moon across her brow.

“What do you mean you can't tell me?”

I swallowed a childish urge to run for the smokehouse. “It's someone else's secret,” I managed. “I gave him my word that I wouldn't tell anyone.”

Marthe stepped back and studied me afresh. “Hallie,” she said, her voice edged with precision. “Are you in trouble?”

I looked down at my socks. Then back at Marthe's eyes, hot with the kind of fury that could bide its time for years.
She's mad at
him,
not me,
I realized abruptly.
She thinks he did something, and she's ready to wring his neck.

“No,” I said, shocked. “Nothing like that, no
trouble.
No.”

Something in her loosened, something still human and soft
.
“Your word or not,” she said grimly, and took me by the shoulders as if I was very small, “if you're in trouble, you tell me. Promise me you will.”

I nodded wordlessly, and she released me almost unwillingly. Marthe glanced over her shoulder, then trod heavily up the stairs. I stood there breathing hard for a moment before I followed her.

The kitchen was fuller when I climbed the last step: Nat Blakely stood on our doormat, wiping her boots, with her uncle James right behind her. “Marthe, Hallie,” he greeted us, as straight-backed as a funeral, every inch of him a scarred and narrow efficiency. “Tyler mentioned that a detachment from the army was here. I thought I'd come and compare notes.”

There was a rebuke in his eyes. Marthe lifted a weary eyebrow to meet it.

“You mean the young man with the sheep,” Lieutenant Jackson said tactfully.
The young man with the limp.

“My late brother's son,” James said, and a tight look passed over his face. How Mr. Blakely died didn't even need to be said. “Sergeant Blakely, Lakelands Regiment. I'm the ranking officer in these parts.”