An Inheritance of Ashes (2 page)

It can't be,
I thought, breathless, and then he straightened—and strode up the gravel path to our door.

For a moment I forgot the argument Marthe and I had just had: every vicious thing I'd said to my sister. I leaned forward, fingers wrapped around the porch rail, and squinted at the silhouette ghosting through our fields: The fields Thom and I had planted together before the men marched off to war. The fields I'd harvested alone—and was still working alone, plowing them under for the winter, when I wasn't having pointless, nasty arguments with Marthe over nothing more than a heel of bread.

No,
I told myself.
It was about more than the stupid bread.

It was about . . . everything.

I'd known right away that asking was a mistake. Marthe had been wrestling with the autumn canning since sunrise, as behind on our winter stores as I was on the woodpile, and the second the word
bread
came out of my mouth, her face fell into put-upon fatigue. And suddenly I couldn't bear to hear her tell me for the thousandth time—like I was a slow child and not half owner of Roadstead Farm—“Hallie, I need you to try harder.”

One more chore before I could taste a bite of supper, because Thom was gone and the war had killed half our harvest. Because of the November wind outside, the woodpile that wouldn't get us past January, the snarled hole in the chicken coop that let the foxes in. Every time she said it, I could see the disappointment in her eyes:
self-centered, childish, useless Hallie. Hallie, not strong enough
.

“I'm trying, okay?” I pleaded, exhausted, hungry, cold. Marthe stared down at me, sweat-smeared and impatient; no mud on her boots and no sympathy in her eyes.
She doesn't understand,
I realized, and then it hit me:
She doesn't care.

“It's easy for you to say,” I shouted, wild with hurt. “It's not you out there, working yourself dead.”

Marthe stiffened. Put down her cheesecloth, slow. She didn't say anything; she didn't have to. She was just in the kitchen working herself dead, seven months round with Thom Clarlund's child. The doorway stood deadly quiet between us, as wide as the wound of Thom's missingness. And then my sister did something she never had in the six years since Papa's funeral: she shut the door in my face.

I stared at that door a full minute before it sank in:
You've finally gone too far.

It had been eight years since the fight that ended things between Papa and Uncle Matthias; eight years since my uncle went his lonely way. Marthe and I—at this rate we wouldn't even make it to my seventeenth birthday.

But none of that—none of it—mattered if Thom was finally home.

The wind stirred my hair, stirred the edges of that ragged silhouette in the broken barley fields.
Please,
I thought,
be Thom.
Not some man two inches too tall who walked all wrong, who didn't wave to me—

I let myself believe it for thirty delicious seconds before I let the truth in: It wasn't Thom. Just another veteran coming up the road, with a family who was waiting and wouldn't have to wait much longer. Just another stranger.

The man set down his pack five feet from the porch rail, in the soft gravel and dust. He was full-grown, but not long to it: twenty-three or four and long with muscle, his brown forearms three shades paler than Thom ever got. He huddled before me in a red-checked flannel work shirt worn threadbare, useless against the chill November breeze. My breath puffed out. It was plain what he wanted. He had a soldier's sleevebuttons, and his boots were in ribbons.

“We've nothing to spare,” I muttered, too distracted to say it louder. He wasn't Thom, Marthe was still furious, and I was still in trouble. I stared into the dirt at his feet:
Please, please go away.
“You might try the Masons down the road.”

He neglected to pick up his pack immediately, turn around, and never be seen again.

Instead, he took off his cap. There was a shock of black hair under it, pulled back in a cattleman's tail. “Thank you,” he said, quiet for such a big-shouldered man, “but I'm actually hoping to hire on.”

I blinked. The barley was in. Anyone could see that.

“I'm quick with my fingers,” he kept on. He had an accent more suited to the wild country northward than our lakeland farmsteads and ruins. “And I don't eat much.”

My hands tightened on the rail. “You're come from the war.”

The man tucked his chin with a passable country respect.

“You by any chance pass a man on the road, shorter than you by a few inches?” I worked to keep my voice casual. “Twenty-seven, dark skin, brown eyes, name of Thomas Clarlund?”

The stranger pressed his lips together, a hair's-width, no farther. “I'm afraid I've not passed any travelers in some weeks.”

A tiny shudder moved through me, from the rib cage down. I shut my eyes against it: against the empty road and the ruin I'd made of the farm Thom, Marthe, and I had built up together.

“We don't take on help past harvest,” I said hollowly. His starved face emptied like a water bucket. All I could see inside it was some black-haired mother or sister pacing behind wood walls, weeks north, her door left unlatched past midnight in case he arrived before dawn. “Look, I can spare some apples. I'll give you apples if you just go home.” Frustration beat hollow fists against my temples.
Thom, if you've hired on somewhere—
“Your people don't know if you're alive or dead. You can't
do
that to them.”

His smile twisted like a scar. “Don't worry,” he said crisply. “No one's waiting for me to turn life normal again.”

I flinched. That wasn't why I wanted Thom home. That wasn't it at all.

Something in his eyes flinched back. That anti-smile faltered. “I'm sorry,” he said, humbler. “You're being kind and I was just snide.”

I blinked. “Kind?” I'd done everything but run him off.

He lifted his chin and regarded me: a girl too sunburned to be pretty and too small to throw him bodily off the kitchen porch. “You looked at
this
”—and he gestured down, from that soft north country accent to tattered shirtsleeves and the reek of sweat—“and saw a man someone might wait for.”

I'd done everything
but
run him off. I hadn't run him off. And for that—

No one had ever called me
kind
before.

“So if it's too late for harvest,” he finished, oblivious to my surprise, “I'll help however I can.”

I bit back the automatic response:
I can do this,
the ugly chorus of every fight Marthe and I ever had, with the ghosts of Papa and Uncle Matthias hovering over our shoulders.
I can run this farm. I can earn my keep if you just give me a little more
time
.
I
had
to, so Thom had somewhere to come home to. So Marthe and I could laugh again, could build pillow forts under the table like we did when I was young. So we could raise her almost-child together in our own house—a house where everybody knew the younger Hoffmann sister was still half owner of Roadstead Farm.

I looked down across the soft, gray fields, to the thick green of the changeable river that cradled us in its hand. Between them the cherry trees flung their branches stark against the sunset and the goats lay in their paddock, curled around each other to sleep. You could see every speck of Hoffmann land from this spot; on a clear night, you could see all the way to the stars. You could see the half-full woodpile; you could see the broken wagon wheel, sunk in mud, and one stranger, strong and grateful just for shelter—the kind who would just move on to the next town if Roadstead Farm blew away into dust.

If the man in front of me could help this farm work right, things might be good between Marthe and me again—even if he was two inches too tall to be Thom. And then it wouldn't matter if Marthe didn't understand me, because I'd never let her down again.

“You understand we can't pay you,” I said.

“Room and board is all I'd ask.”

“Right, then.” I spun on my heel and stepped into the kitchen.

“I thought I told you to stay outside,” Marthe snapped. She was baking bread after all: the air was sweet and dusty with yeast, and the dough sounded,
slap-thump,
against her good block table.
You didn't tell me anything,
I thought at her, smart enough, at least this time, not to say it aloud. We'd lived in the same house for sixteen years. She hadn't had to
tell
me to not dare cross this doorstep until she invited me back in.

My sister turned, and her brown hair slid out of its messy twist. Marthe was pretty, when she wasn't coiled with anger. And Marthe had been throwing grown men off our property since before I could walk. I bit down on a river of resentment, of curdled love. “There's a man wanting hire.”

“Barley's done,” she said, as if I hadn't noticed.

“He's a veteran,” I added, and watched her arms stutter:
slap
-
trip-thump
.

She untangled her fingers from the dough and peered out the kitchen window. “Not much to look at.” I winced. It was true: tall or not, he was thin to the ribs, a scarecrow with a beard like spilled ink and a nose that had definitely been broken.

“He said,” I added reluctantly, “he's not passed anyone in weeks.”

Marthe's hand grasped air; landed on the stewpot spoon. “What are you saying?”

I bit my lip. My sister was infuriating, condescending, endlessly moody, but—there were our fights and then there was
this
. “I want to take him on,” I said, and waited for the storm to break.

Her rounded cheeks paled; her mouth set into a thin, hard line. “Why?” she said finally, too controlled by far.

“For the poultry barn.” I swallowed. “With someone else around I could fix it
and
start the malting, and not worry about the woodpile or cleaning the goat pen or the fields, and then I could even
get
to dry-docking the boat and all the chores in town—”

The words ran out. Marthe stared at me with a compressed hurt that was worse than any rage. We'd lived in the same house for sixteen years. She could hear what I really meant:
Because I'm not strong enough to keep this farm
or
this family alive while we pretend Thom's coming home.

“I thought it might be good,” I whispered, “with the baby coming.”

Marthe's hand drifted to her belly, dusting the old apron with flour. Unspoken words flitted across her face: linens, lifetimes, rations of small brown eggs, and it all added up to
no, no, no
.

“I know we can't pay him,” I said quickly. “He just wants a place to be overwinter. Marthe, I have to. He's barely got boots.”

“Charity, then?” she said, surprised: a flicker of the sister I knew—who saw me, who cared about me. Who still, sometimes, smiled.

It's just he said,
I thought wonderingly,
that I was kind
. “It'd get us through the winter,” I said. “And I'd want someone to, if it was—”

Marthe threw the wooden spoon clean across the kitchen. It clattered against the crockery shelf, smacked a blue clay mug, and rattled, dishes ringing, to the floor. The mug wobbled. I didn't dare steady it. Marthe's damp hair curtained down her cheek, over sheer, gutshot pain.

I swallowed.

Marthe stared at the spoon. Her right hand worked, and then she scrubbed it across her face as if she was very tired. “Put a pallet in the old smokehouse. At least with the stove he won't freeze,” she said, and bowed her head over the squashed bread.

“All right,” I whispered, through the sudden roar of my own heartbeat. I shoved shaking hands into my pockets and went back outside.

The soldier stood at attention five feet off the porch, as wary of the line between the house's shadow and the sun as I was of Marthe's kitchen doorway. He didn't even twitch: better at keeping a plain face, plain hands than I would ever be.

“You're to have a pallet in the smokehouse,” I forced out. In a soot-stained junkyard we'd meant to clean out for six years. “My sister will give you spare linens.” My hands were still trembling. I'd won the argument, but Marthe's grief, Marthe's
frustration
—

This didn't feel like winning.

“It's her farm?”

“Ours.” Papa's snarl peaked, banked, and faded. “Our father willed it to the both of us.”

If he was surprised, he feigned well enough; he nodded and shouldered his brown leather pack. “Thank you, miss.”

“It's Hallie,” I said. “My sister's Marthe. From Roadstead Farm, in the lakelands.”

“Heron,” he offered, and tilted his head with something finer, deeper than lakeland manners.

“Heron, from the war,” I said bitterly.

His lips pressed shut for a moment. “From the war,” he agreed.

“So,” I asked, “did you see it?”

No reason to say what
it
was. The war was won when John Balsam, a man simple and small, lifted his dagger and cut out the Wicked God Southward's dark heart. Tyler Blakely had carried the tale home three weeks past midsummer, limping on a leg once hale and thick, his eyes blasted pale with the sight of it. We'd already realized a change, though, here on the river: Birds not known on the riverbanks since Opa's generation washed up dead and open-mouthed each sunrise. The stars rumbled nightly, too low and regular for thunder. Greta Chaudhry's hives failed, and Berkhardt Mason's orchards. By the time the Twisted Things staggered, wounded, through our fields, we couldn't tell if the war was won or lost. Half our crops had burned at the touch of their acrid wings: a whole winter's provisions gone up in noise and smoke. We shoveled their bodies into bonfires by night and prayed, among the cinders, for news.