An Inheritance of Ashes (3 page)

We didn't know what it meant, then. Those three weeks, we held our breaths.

“I didn't see it,” my new hired man said softly, and closed his hand around his satchel strap. “I turned my face away.”

I opened my mouth. Shut it. I hadn't expected a real answer, and now I didn't know
what
to say. Not one lakelands man who went to battle with the Wicked God Southward would speak a word about how he fell, but they all saw it. You could tell it from their eyes: newly guarded, and dark as pits. They all
saw.

The stranger's own eyes had abruptly lost their kindness. They shuttered, chilly as river ice. They made me feel young, and ignorant, and small.

“I'll show you where you're bunking,” I said, unsettled, and wrapped my fingers in the dusty flannel of my shirtsleeve. There was more to a farm than a kindly face, and you still didn't shake with hired men.

HE CHOPPED WOOD FOR A WEEK. HE SAID
PLEASE,
AND
thank you,
and fixed our rotting fences.

No one shouted for seven days, but I never stopped expecting it: when thunder kicked me awake on the eighth day, it almost felt like coming home.

My bedroom window clattered in its frame, loud enough to scruff me out of sleep. Half awake, I caught my breath and held it; closed my eyes tighter and listened for the inevitable nightmare steps. If I pretended to sleep, maybe it would be all right: maybe his furious muttered swears, his heavy boots would pass my closed door by—

I swallowed hard. I was sixteen, not six, and my father was dead.

A bird called, harsh and frightened, and I dared open my eyes. Dawn light pried through my thick-paned window. The sky above it was as blue and fine as my faded bedroom walls. The thunder rattled weaker, wet leaves on glass. My heart wouldn't stop its frightened stutter. “He's
dead,
” I muttered sternly, padded across the green rag rug and opened the window.

The yard stretched before me, brown and empty; the air smelled of woodsmoke and frost. I shoved my head into the chilly dawn outside, and the bare branches of trees, the barns, the gray river unscrolled sleepily into the sky. From below, from the leaf-clogged gutters, something let out a whimpered
cheep.
I reached down—

—and a small shape exploded in a fury of wings.

I shrieked.

It staggered and shrieked right back at me, a harsh, uncertain caw. Battered brown wings struggled for purchase on the sill; tiny claws scrabbled closer. I grabbed the window handles and jerked them down between us. The thin cry muffled as wood and glass slammed down—and then it rose to a scream. A dark smear fluttered between the thick panes and the white sill:
the wing.
It was nothing more than a stunned bird, and I'd just crushed its wing.

“Oh,” I breathed, and brushed river stones and hair clips messily off the sill. Bile stung my throat:
You've killed it. It can't even fight back.
I shoved the window upward fast, hands clutched under the bottom frame.

The wing slapped my hand so hard that
everything
stopped.

“Ow!”
I cradled the hand close to my chest. Furious, ragged squawks trailed me back into the bedroom. “Sorry,” I whispered over and over, an exhausted litany of
sorry
that beat in time with my throbbing hand. The wing had left a red spot, as red as a bug-bite burn. I brushed it with idle fingernails.

They caught on something, hard.

The thinnest edge of a cobweb was growing out of my left hand. It seared my window frame brown where it stuck, and the line it burned led straight to the bird's desperate talons. I'd been too rattled, too guilty to see it: those eight black sparrow-nails were sticky-coated with web.

It wasn't a bird. It was a Twisted Thing—one of the Wicked God Southward's pet monsters.

“Not possible,” I whispered to myself, and Papa's mocking ghost sneered
not possible
back. We were supposed to have seen the last of them. John Balsam, by magic, skill, or cunning, had killed the Wicked God and the world had ripped itself shut again; we'd burned the dead Twisted Things that had fallen from the sky. We'd grieved our tomatoes, our chicken hutches, our fields, and watched the real birds migrate south with the weather, into the newly gap-toothed constellations. The Twisted Things were supposed to be over, just like the Wicked God who made them. Just like the war.

The burn on my hand throbbed, red as a stove coal and condescending as Papa could ever be:
Well, explain this, then
. I scrubbed it hard on the paisley curtain. Outside, a wisp of sour black smoke rose from the Twisted Thing's acid feathers.
It'll burn down the house,
I thought, sharp as snow, and slammed the window down on its body—three terrible bangs.

The thick bottom pane of my window misted and cracked. The brown wing flopped uselessly against the frame, and there was silence.

I unclenched my teeth and peeked through the clouded pane.

The Twisted Thing lay crumpled against the sill, its tiny chest wreathed in smoke. It was impossible to mistake for anything real now: Its hooked black beak threw sparks against the old glass; its body stank of ash and dead violets. Four eyes stared sightless back at me, spider-round and white, nestled in feathers that wilted at the very touch of air.
It's dying,
I realized, with a pang of shame.
It'll be dead soon.

I grabbed the wooden comb off my dressing table. You had to burn Twisted Things: they rotted the stones off their own graves overnight. I cracked the window wide and nudged it gingerly with the comb, but there was no reaction left in the Twisted Thing—just a pause in the beat of its downy chest and a weak
caw
. A plea.

“Sorry,” I whispered, one last time, and shoved it to the brown grass below.

The dawn breeze ruffled the feathers on its body and coaxed goose bumps from my bare arms. The sweat on my nightgown had chilled into ice.

The burnt-out imprint of the Twisted Thing's body smoked on the sill before me: a craned, tortured neck, sketched in ancient wood and brick. A pair of violent, outstretched wings.

Kitchen. Get a coal,
I thought, quick and shaky, and reached blindly for my trousers.

Marthe was already dressed when I clattered down the stairs, my hands scraped raw with scrubbing. She'd been milking; our thick glass milk bottles stood on the kitchen counter, stained weirdly by the rising light. The sunlight wrapped her so privately, so
normally
that I almost expected her to turn, smile
good morning,
and slop extra cream into my tea like she would when I was small. The kitchen doorway stood, impassable: a portal back to the years when she was my protector, my best friend, my world. I couldn't bear to move. The slightest rustle could destroy that spell.

Marthe didn't say good morning. She didn't even turn her head.

Time snapped back into place. I was sixteen years old, not six, and my sister was nothing, anymore, but angry. “Marthe,” I started, and crossed that unmagical threshold.

She looked up with red-blotched eyes, and my stomach did a flip. She'd been crying onto the counter, head turned to keep the tears out of the milk pail. “Marthe, can I—” I started, softer.

She cut me off with a jerk of her rounded chin. “That's your breakfast and the hired man's. Take it out to the fields when you go.”

No,
I translated.
Whatever it is, you can't.

I closed my hands tight. The left one itched and burned. “I need a hot coal,” I said, smaller now, and Marthe raised one thick eyebrow. “There was a bird. Not a real one, a Twisted Thing.” The runnel of milk from pail to bottle slowed. “It's dead.”

Marthe set the pail down. “Just the one?”

“I only saw one.” My voice quivered at the memory of the window slamming, slamming in my hands. “It landed on my windowsill.”

Marthe finally met my eye with a cool, clear determination: her version of panic. “We'll check the barns,” she said, wiping milk and sweat off her hands. “Rake the garden. Sweep the dock.” I sucked in a breath. I could almost hear the crack of dying seeds; taste rot and burnt feathers from the midsummer fires.

Marthe's hands stilled on her towel. “You've got it?” Asked like that protective sister of old would have:
Do you want me to handle it?

I bit down on the urge to hug her and sob 'til I couldn't breathe. “I can do it myself,” I managed. I was a youngest child, and part owner of Roadstead Farm. Not handling it was an indulgence I could no longer afford.

The gentleness in Marthe's face went stiff. “I'll lay a fire in the yard,” she said, and turned back to the milk.

I grabbed our meager breakfast and fled.

The tea was weak but still warm: one mug for me and one for quiet, unobtrusive Heron. Their heat blanketed my fingers as I rushed out into the morning, into a plume of my own exhaled breath. Roadstead Farm by dawnlight was all soft blues and grays, the crisp smell of autumn soil and the foggy calls of geese southbound on the river. The mugs steamed as I hurried, head down, across the farmyard, scanning for gray-bleached soil; for places where the rakes would bring up ruin-seeds and bone.

Inside a week, Heron had made the smokehouse barely recognizable. He'd scrubbed a circle of flagstones clean and laid out his stranger's things as tidy as a barracks inspection. I counted a cookpot, plate, and canteen; a stack of half-mended clothing that looked three sizes too big. His straw pallet was made neater than I ever kept my bed, its corners sharp and tight. He'd made more progress with the place in one week than Thom and I had in two summers.

He wanted to,
my head countered dryly. I gulped down a yearning to
fix
the smokehouse: to put back the junk and curled cobwebs and settle safe under my table, among the knickknacks and dust.

“Good morning, miss,” Heron said, and blocked my view with his own long bulk. “More carpentry today?”

“Morning,” I answered, and shoved his breakfast at him. “We've got to eat quick. There's a Twisted Thing dead in the garden.”

His face blinked into wary blankness—everything except for those sharp gray eyes. “A Twisted Thing?”

“The Wicked God's creatures.” I squinted up at him. “You said you were in the war.”

Heron's hands tightened around the mug until his brown knuckles pulled smooth. “We called them something different there,” he said, and looked away. His fingers didn't lie right about our good Windstown pottery. They'd been broken too, in jagged, twisting lines.

Fingers broken,
I realized with a shiver,
more than once.

I tore my eyes away from that jigsaw hand. “Hurry up. It'll scorch the soil dead,” I said, and took off down the smokehouse steps.

The burn mark lay right beneath my bedroom window, a small, seared shape in the deep brown soil of Marthe's vegetable plot. I traced its outline with my metal rake: a pair of outstretched wings rucked and hilled where we'd grown the snap peas.

It was hard to ignore the bit where the outline was empty.

“It was right here,” I argued to nobody, and hugged the long rake handle.

Heron's rake parted the browning grass stalks like hair. “You're sure it was dead, miss?”

“It's dead,” I snapped back; glared it into being true. “It had a broken wing. It couldn't halfway breathe.”

Heron shaded his eyes and scanned the sun-drenched grass. “Well, it can't be far,” he started, and then my morning went from bad to worse.

Marthe came around the corner, her arms speckled with sawdust, and asked, “So, do you have it?”

“We'll send for the Blakelys,” Marthe said. “It can't have got off the property with a broken wing.” Her hand rubbed slow circles across her belly, soothing herself or the child squirming inside. What she did when she was nervous, now. I'd somehow liked it better when she'd just bit her fingernails.

Heron nodded. He had no idea how to read the words beneath Marthe's words. Roadstead Farm was fifty acres, half of it unfarmed wilderness.

The Twisted Thing could be anywhere.

I dropped the rake into the dirt. “I'll get my coat.”

“
You
won't,” Marthe corrected, and eyed Heron, standing haphazardly at attention with a rake two feet too short for him. “Lakewood Farm's half a mile up the old road: the white-painted house with blue trim. Just tell James or Eglantine Blakely what's happened. That we need to cover ground.”

I swallowed. She was angry at me for losing track of it. She had to be, if she wouldn't even let me make good.

Heron set his rake against the redbrick wall. “I'll be as quick as I can, ma'am.”

He took off at an easy, swinging walk, one that didn't get quicker as he met the path toward the old highway. Marthe watched him go with grave, sober eyes. “That man's been walking a long time.”

She sounded tired. She sounded . . . infinitely sad. I stared, bewildered, and she pointed at the road with her softening chin. Heron was not much more than a detail upon it, another pine made tiny by distance, waving in the breeze. “Look at that: he'll go only so fast as a walk.”

“I'd have run,” I said, resentful.

“Exactly,” Marthe said softly. “You don't set your pace that steady if you think you'll ever get to stop walking.”

She's telling me something,
I realized. Something important about her and me and winter, and everything that
wasn't
what time Heron would arrive at Lakewood Farm. Marthe waited, expectant, and my mouth emptied of every profound word. I had no idea what she meant. I had no idea what she wanted from me.

Why can't we just
talk,
like we used to?
I thought, and turned away too fast to hide the sudden tears in my eyes: to the farm buildings and the orchard beyond them. Once, we'd talked all the time: in gestures, in whispers, in messages written in river stones and hidden by the apple orchard when Papa's rages made it too dangerous to speak. Away from her, the sky was cloudless and cold, perfect weather for turning a field among the last of the red autumn leaves.