An Inheritance of Ashes (6 page)

“You'll be okay,” Tyler said, small and oddly breathless. “You're okay, Hal. I promise.” He looked even ghostlier than before. His awkward hand squeezed my own, light as dandelion.

I looked down at the fleck of brown feather on his blade. My spilt blood had charred into black, ashy flakes. The metal beneath it was pitting with rust. “That was inside me,” I said unsteadily.

Tyler nodded.

I curled into a ball. I needed to get back in control. I needed to be invisible, untouched, contained. The battered table back in the dust was too small to hide under now, and Nat's eyes were on me, Tyler's eyes. My friends. They'd given me so much, and I had nothing to repay them: no tea on the boil or hospitality to even the ledger between us. As if tea or words would keep them from reacting just like Marthe if they saw me
truly:
Needy. Messy. Frightened.
Weak.

“Hey,” Nat said. I looked up, and there were tear tracks on her face: thick ones beneath her fierce eyes. She put a hand on my shoulder, and I shuddered free. Nat's fire retreated behind her eyes. “Tyler,” she said. “Bandages.”

Tyler passed the faded bandages without a word.

I wiped my nose on my shirttail—
forget laundry, and forget propriety too
. Anything to get the disemboweled strings of my emotions back into my belly. Nat's touch came again, through the cotton fabric, and Tyler's veiled eyes stared at us and then fled past to Heron's jumbled belongings. Tyler was harder to read now, without the color in his eyes. The two darting green blotches in his left eye, the three in his right were as good as a beekeeper's mask.

“We should burn this,” he said, and shoved the wicker basket. It was blackening slowly, like the first frost over the fields.

Nat's scowl deepened. “Right.” She snugged the bandage tight where my thumb met my palm. The pressure gave me something besides my own shame to think about. I almost wept again for the gift of
normal
pain. I inspected my tender, wrapped-up hand: still red, the wound seeping, the veins of infection already gone. “So fast,” I murmured.

Tyler got painfully to one knee. His balance wavered. I bit my lip hard. “It's like that with the Twisted Things,” he said, out of breath. “Once they're gone, you heal fast.”

If you heal,
I filled in silently, and didn't let myself shiver again.

I braced myself on the red brocade stool and got up to my knees. My legs were dangerously wobbly. The muscles above my knees felt like an earthquake each. I pressed down on the stool, and rotten old-cities stuffing gave beneath my palm—around something lumpy, ungiving, and hard.

Something that was not supposed to be there.

“What's wrong?” Tyler asked.

I prodded at the stuffing. Something was hidden in the stool's ancient cushion, and I hadn't put it there. I dug two fingers into the hole, pried through the yellowed wool in layers and chunks, and brushed something as cold as the January trees.

The shock of it went up my fingers, into my palm. I jerked it out and held it up to the light: a bundle of bunched-up leather wrapped around metal a handspan long. A ridge of old iron peeked out the top and faded into a mess of what might have once been leather binding. The shreds remaining were darkened and slick with sweat, in patterns that spoke of one owner, one hand.

I unwrapped it and dropped the leather strips to the floor. It was a hilt: the iron and leather pommel of the strangest hunting knife I'd ever seen.

The hilt was twisted, nearly wrenched off the line of the scarred-up metal blade. The blade swept down from it in a spiral, a hot-forged ringlet curl. I turned it with two careful fingers. Despite the nicks and use marks, the knife's blade shone like new forging.

“You couldn't cut a thing with this.” I touched a finger to the edge. “But it's sharp.”

Nat leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “Who sharpens a knife you can't use for anything?”

“Who sharpens a knife you can't sheathe?” I said. “Unless you carry around a stool.”

“Oh, God,” Tyler said, sudden and strangled, and he slumped against the wall.

“What?” Nat whirled. “What is it?”

“It's mine,” came another voice, quietly, from the doorway, and this one I knew without seeing. Nat paled. I turned slowly to face long, lean Heron, standing silhouetted on the smokehouse step.

“Miss,” he said, perfectly without emotion, “please don't touch that thing.”

My throat prickled, and my cheeks: hot and ashamed. “We weren't looking to go through your things—”

“That's not the issue,” he said, and took two long strides inside. The smell of bonfires followed him: sweat and the stink of feathers crisped to ash.

A ripple of slow tension ran up Tyler Blakely's back. “That isn't yours.”

“Ty—” Nat started, high and scandalized. The tingle in my finger where I'd touched the knife's edge grew itchily stronger.

Heron smiled: a sick, sad thing. “I'm sorry,” he said. “It is.”

“You got it somewhere,” Tyler snapped. He looked ready to burst into tears.

The hilt dangled between my fingers like the tail end of a snake. “Tell me what it is I'm holding.”

Silence pooled across the floor like snowmelt. Neither of them looked at me. Tyler's fingers brushed once, twice, over John Balsam's sigil on his shirt.

“That,” Tyler finally said, “is the knife that cut the heart out of the Wicked God Southward.”

THE KNIFE HIT THE FLOOR LIKE A BELL BREAKING.

I backed away fast. Three paces away was too close to a broken piece of magic, a vanished man's dead weapon—something that stopped a war nobody, before or after it, even
understood
.
That killed a god,
I thought, my mouth dry.
It killed a god, and I
touched
it.

The knife wobbled to a stop, and Nat leaned in, her mouth open.

“Don't—” Tyler started.

Heron snorted. “It's just a knife.”

I laughed so tightly I choked. “Just a knife?” John Balsam had vanished: slain the Wicked God Southward with his own common hands and disappeared without a trace. Every general and veteran who'd renamed his homestead Balsam Farm this autumn—and there were thousands of them—would descend on our sleepy little farm for this knife, and there'd be no convincing them the Godslayer wasn't hid in our garbage too.

“It's not
just a knife,
” Tyler spat. “I was there. I saw the Wicked God die.”

Heron turned sharply. He took in Tyler's bad leg, his God-struck eyes. “It's just a knife,” he repeated softly, and leaned back on his split bootheels. “Steel and leather; no more and no less.”

“How do you know?”

“Because all the time I've carried it”—and Heron's eyes sagged shut with the weight of it—“all the way from the battlefield at the burnt-out town of John's Creek, it's never done
one damn thing
that was magic.”

A bird called somewhere outside, in the bright and endless distance. Tyler stared for a long moment at Heron, at the miles of grief written on his face. “You know where he's gone, don't you?”

Heron's hands closed softly around thin air. “No,” he said, and Tyler sagged in on himself. “I don't.”

Heron studied the three of us: me with my good hand grasping my bandaged one; Nat, gravestone-still and sharp as a blade; Tyler, a ruined, caving building of a boy. My hired man stepped around Tyler with a woodcarver's delicacy and picked up the twisted knife.

I caught my breath, expecting thunder, mayhem . . . something. Heron flipped the shredded leather grip gently into his hand. Outside, the birdcall faded, and wind rustled the trees.

Nothing happened. It was just a knife.

Heron's mouth crimped with a disgusted affection. And then he shook his head, picked up the leather wrapping, and looped it carefully about the curves and whorls of the knife that killed a god.

I scrubbed my good hand across my eyes. “How is this here? How is that knife on my farm?”

Heron wrapped the shining blade; checked his knots twice. “It was given to me,” he said quietly. “I'm carrying it north.”

“You've had it the whole time?” Tyler exclaimed. “Why didn't you tell anyone? The Great Army's tearing apart the countryside for even a
hint
of John Balsam. That knife's the most important thing in the
world.
”

Heron's studied blankness slammed up like a fence. I caught my breath: I'd lived too long with Marthe's anger, silent and cold, to believe his stillness was sincere. “I'm taking it north,” he said, his eyes viciously bright. “Back to his people, where it belongs. Not to sit in a shrine to bilk pilgrims, or go to the highest bidder, or help some general set himself up as mayor-for-life in some backwater town.
Home.
”

Tyler flinched. I swallowed and tasted burnt wicker and feathers. The family of John Balsam would have no regimental memorial. No one would have brought them a vial of ashes from John's Creek. Just like Marthe and me, they had nothing.

They needed something to touch and hold, so that they could finally grieve.

Heron hefted the leather wrapping and turned his stiff dignity onto me. “Miss, I'll understand if you'd rather not have this on your land.”

“Other people didn't,” I guessed, and his eyes fell.

“I left the town of Jasper through a window, by night, ahead of a full western regiment. Three farms by Ball Creek were overrun entirely by Great Army soldiers after rumor got out of my passing.” Heron winced, but his voice stayed low and steady. “No, I won't flatter myself:
its
passing.”

Nat scowled. “That's bull. The army mustered up to
protect
our land.”

“Never underestimate,” Tyler put in softly, “what men do when they're desperate.”

Heron looked him over again, this time quietly appraising. “Or what they'll do when they're that thirsty for hope. I learned fast to pretend I was just another veteran, but I've never stopped for shelter for more than a few nights since.”

The rest went unspoken:
Not until now.
Not until the coming winter forced him to ground.

I shook my head. This was too big for me. This was bigger than my whole world: our crooked fields and the riverbend that held off the hills and forests north. I turned to Nat in mute appeal, and she crossed her arms. “We can't tell anyone about this,” she said.

I nodded. Not Mrs. Blakely, not James or Callum. Not Marthe, and I bit my lip against how dangerous it was to keep things from Marthe. To her, even more than to me, this farm was everything. She'd fought Windstown to a standstill to keep it, strained both our bodies to the breaking point, broken with every friend who questioned whether we could run Roadstead Farm alone. If she knew John Balsam's knife was here—and the whole Great Army keening for it like kittens orphaned at birth—she wouldn't hesitate: she'd throw Heron off the farm by sunset to starve in the coming snow, and if she did, I would fail. We'd already fixed the fences; the woodpile was stacked full. One week, and Heron was already giving Roadstead Farm a chance. He was giving me a chance to keep this family alive.

I snuck a glance at my half-full pack. It sat ready against the stonework, as it had for eight long years, a waiting spider in a web of dust.
Not yet,
the still, small voice in my head wailed. I hadn't failed
yet.

Heron stood before me, stiff and unshaken, his peculiar grace bleeding into the very air. It wasn't just northern manners, it was his sense of
calling:
the way a person held themself high when they were devoted, without compromise, to something greater than themself. He hadn't failed yet either. He
couldn't fail.

And abruptly, I wanted him to bring that funeral knife home.

“Leave it in the stool,” I said quickly, before I could take it back. “Nobody comes here; nobody but me. Leave it there and don't move it 'til springtime.”

Heron's dignity broke. “You're serious. You'll hide me. Hide
this
.”

I straightened my spine and felt that sense of calling through it, so proud and rich. So brave. “We won't breathe a word of it.”

“We swear,” Nat added, and I tossed her a grateful glance. Her cheeks glowed hot with determination. “We are not
like that
to folks in the lakelands.”

Tyler stared at us for a long moment, right across the space where Heron cradled the twisted knife. His lips parted, and his face was so full of warmth and indecision that it threatened to flood. “I swear,” he repeated after a moment. “I give you my word.”

Heron's shoulders sagged. When he lifted his head, the hunted cast was gone from his eyes. “Thank you,” he said, his voice ragged and a little wry. “All of you. I won't forget it. And you won't regret it, I swear.”

A hollow promise from a man with three patched shirts and a cooking pot to his name. But it filled the room with such bright and enduring force that my bones knew it was true.

Heron checked the knots on his makeshift sheath and set the knife down on the stool. Its hinges creaked under the slight weight: an altar or an opened grave. Heron blinked and looked between us awkwardly, once again a man not much older than I was: far from home and friendless in a pair of broken boots. I wet my lips against the silence. The memory of John Balsam's knife in my hands made
time to milk the goats
feel trivial.

“What's in the basket?” he asked hesitantly.

Nat's expression hardened. “Something that needs to burn.” She scooped it up, abrupt as weather, and slipped past me out the door.

Tyler took one step after her and then turned back, shamefaced. “Sir,” he said, and took a deep breath. “I'm sorry.”