An Inheritance of Ashes (9 page)

She'd left it out there because she loved me. And she'd left it out there as the sharpest rebuke:
All your hollering about being old enough, smart enough, and you can't even remember a winter shawl.

I hugged the shawl to me and thought,
Oh, Marthe. How did we ever get so mixed up?

“Marthe's not coming?” Tyler asked. Didn't quite ask.

“She's not,” I said shortly.

He hesitated and then delicately said, “If we're bringing back heavy cargo—”

I looked at his heaving chest, at my injured hand, and nodded bitterly. “Come on. Let's go find the hired man.”

We pushed into the river half an hour later: Tyler, me, and Heron in a clean shirt, creased faintly from days or weeks spent folded in his leather pack. He'd wiped the goat muck and dust off his boots, but they were still ragged, their soles worn through at the heels.

“We aim past Bellisle,” I told him, and pointed out the low, browned island midway through the sleepy river. “Round its tip to the other shore.”

“Bellisle's the nearest town?” Heron asked, awkwardly shipping his oars.

“No, Windstown,” I said. I wrapped Mami's shawl tighter around my shoulders. “And there's nothing after it for miles.”

That soldierly shroud of attention dropped over Tyler again. “Mister Heron,” he said, every inch strain and a new, military reverence. “Mind your left oar?”

Heron's nod was terse. I was learning something of his expressions: that
Mister
made his flesh crawl like a nest of live spiders.

“I can take the oars,” I said, and Tyler shook his head.

“Your wound's still fresh. A strain might burst it right open.”

The nettled feeling Marthe was so good at giving me started to prickle. “I'll be careful.”

“Hallie—” he started, and then said almost apologetically, “spite or pride?”

I winced. “It's not like that.” He didn't reply. I closed my hand tighter, felt it twinge. It was exactly like that. My sister wasn't even here, and I was arguing with her.

I sucked in a breath. Forced it out and settled back into the rowboat's middle seat. “Pride,” I muttered.

“I'm sorry,” Tyler said, and he meant it. He dipped his oars into the water, a steady heartbeat stroke. Heron picked up the rhythm, and we glided across the current of the wide green river, out of the shallows, into the world.

I hadn't just watched the river go by since I was too small to take an oar. We slid toward Bellisle through a blanket of bright water, fringed by the browned shoreline and the sweet smell of pine trees. I perched on the middle bench and watched the shapes along the shore: wild dogs, listening prick-eared for rabbits to drag back to their dens in the empty towers of the ruined city. They looked so much like Joy, Sadie, or Kelsey—at least, until they
moved,
and you understood, truly, that they were something wild.

The shattered arc of the Windstown bridge curved over them, its steel beams and cables rusted, impassable for years. Its roadbed had cracked and shifted so badly that they'd forbidden travel on it when Papa was young. Old-city workmanship was peerless, far beyond the things we did and made now, but there was no knowing how to recreate that work—or how long it might last. The bridge ricketed up there, abandoned before its time: a giant's dusty bones.

The northern tip of Bellisle sharpened before us, and I dug my nails into my palm. “Careful,” I said. “The Beast is coming up.”

“The Beast?” Heron asked, and then we saw it.

The Twisted Thing we called the Beast rose to the left like a derelict ship, an island of old flesh and dead, rotting carrion eaters. Color rippled through the shreds of hide still left on its broken body. It shimmered like a soap-bubble rainbow, moving and hypnotic, around the red of exposed muscle and huge, splintered bones. That hide had been covered in soft feathers when it first tumbled out of the clouds, but the Windstown Council had skinned it at the end of summer. Too many fishermen and awestruck children had rowed out to pluck those shimmering plumes even after we knew the cost of a Twisted Thing's touch. Its dangerous attraction still hadn't subsided: my oarless fingers twitched to hold those colors in my palms. I put both hands securely under my legs and looked away.

“What
is
that?” Heron asked, hushed.

“It fell from the sky,” I said, and sat harder. The pain in my hand was a wonderful deterrent to those oiled, magical shreds of skin. “When the war ended. I don't think it knew how to swim.”

Heron's voice came low and awful. “It drowned?”

I shook my head. “Just fell. It thrashed there for a full day and night before Windstown sent the boats out. It was before you came home,” I added, in Tyler's direction. “Don't look at it.” His hands had stilled on the oars.

Tyler stared at the tea-stained horns where they rose out of the river, curling like the twisted roots of trees. The near one had splintered at the tip in its fall; the burnt shreds of a white-bellied osprey's nest twined between the jagged edges. Tyler shuddered sharply and turned away. His ruined eyes glowed luminescent in the morning sun. “
That
we never saw on the battlefield.”

“It was different,” Heron murmured, “all over.”

The oars dipped into the water and whispered river-things against the rowboat's hull. We came close enough to touch it, for just a moment, and then the river shoved us protectively away. We glided slowly past the body of the Beast, our war memorial, past the smell of rot and dying birds calling into the breeze.

The far shore came on us quickly once we passed the Bellisle strait. Out of the air, the hulked ghosts of gray buildings sharpened: Windstown, worn down by a century of rain. The Windstown barricade curved a protective half circle around them. Inside that wall of brick and dirt and ancient furniture lay the safe, sleepy township I'd grown up visiting, the world of small courtesies and sticky buns and salt. Outside it was no man's land, another dead, ancient maze of ruins that grew like brambles between our lakes and the soft farmlands of the north.

The Windstown piers were empty, all the fishing boats already gone upriver into the lake for the last of the autumn catch. Tyler and Heron shipped the oars, and I hopped onto the dock and looped the mooring rope around the piling.

“Welcome,” I said, “to Windstown.”

THE GROUNDS BY THE WINDSTOWN DOCKS HAD BEEN
parkland, once. When the world fell, our great-grandparents turned them into vegetable gardens. I led Heron and Tyler along ancient brick paths, through the familiar smell of hay and fish bone fertilizer—the same paths I remembered from being four years old, learning to touch and taste and smell that nebulous thing Marthe and Papa called
town
.

There were burn scars on the white-columned buildings now. They smudged ghostlike through layers of whitewash, put the smell of old ash into the air. All of them looked ancient, faded into the brick. Some of them had wings.

Heron's gaze flitted nervously. “So they fell here too?”

“I guess we'll find out,” I said, and Windstown opened before us like a flower.

Even stripped of its leaves in late autumn, Windstown was grand. The brick path spread into a wide concrete roadway lined with bright red and white awnings and ancient mirror glass. In the shadow of remade skyscrapers and the softly turning windmills, the shops sat snug behind hand-stenciled windows: Green's General Supply, Thao's Butchery and Meats, shops for hats and tools and fine wildflower paper. Old men flocked outside the café with small cups of bitter tea, gossiping over backgammon tables. Pigeons swarmed fearlessly around their bootheels and bickered for crumbs. I tilted my nose up and inhaled greedily: bakery loaves, roses, and mint. They turned the crisp air drunken.

Tyler stopped in front of the General Supply. “Which way first?”

I turned a full circle on the Main Street pavement: from Mackenzie Green's warm, wood-polish window to the mayor's distant chimney and back. “Pitts,” I said hollowly. “If I put it off, I'll be sick. Heron, can I give you this?” I pressed Marthe's shopping list into his hand.

Heron's face lapsed into that bland, armored mask. It covered his unease almost perfectly. “Miss.” He twitched his cap lower over his face. “Where do I meet you?”

“In the general store,” I said, and squared my shoulders. “We won't”—
I hope to God—“
be long.”

Heron shouldered his way down the street, slower now, scanning for Thao's window. I turned to Tyler. “Can we get this over with?”

He nodded, and we set our awkward pace up the avenue.

Tyler raised a hand here and there to men, older men, who I'd sworn the Blakelys didn't visit: Councilor Haddad's brother and the Kims from the Windstown mill. They stared at us with blunt curiosity, dragging their eyes from my face to my too-high hemline. I swallowed and raised a hand to my hair without thinking—and then angry blood came into my cheeks. It didn't matter if my hair was frizzing; I wouldn't
let
it matter. I set my jaw and strode faster past the Main Street shops, head held high, until the bustle of Windstown tapered into small vegetable plots, fruit trees, and fences—into the quiet, modest houses that ringed the town market, their backs stubbornly turned to the barricade.

The Pitts house was anything and everything but modest. Its walls of red old-city brick were always scrubbed to a shine, its porch braced by white pillars and wrapped with shrubs and decorative cabbages. It wasn't a subtle message:
We are far too rich to grow our suppers in our yard.
“It looks smaller,” I said softly. In my memory it was a mansion, a glowering castle that blotted out the sun.

Tyler stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Well, you haven't been past Main Street in six years.”

I rearranged my woolen skirts; the folds were hopelessly wrinkled. Marthe had been right about the comb. The thought of her waiting at home,
knowing
that, felt hateful.

“You ready?” Tyler asked.

“No,” I said, ten years old again, and pushed past him to sound the bell.

The door opened to an older Hmong woman, stout and steady, with gray streaks in her glossy black bob. Her dress was extravagantly fine and her shoes too soft a leather to even think of work outdoors.
Mrs. Pitts,
I realized. Mrs. Pitts grown six years older.

“Good day, ma'am,” Tyler said, and “Young Mr. Blakely,” she replied. Her eyes drifted to me: to my terrible hair and down to Nat Blakely's gloves snug about my hands. “I don't believe I'm acquainted with your new lady friend, though.”

Tyler startled, his color suddenly high, and went, “No, no—”

I blinked, and he turned an even uglier red. Dodged my eyes—

—and I
got
it.

“Oh,” I said, surprised. “No, that's not it at all. I'm not. I mean—” I started, and there was no good place to go. Tyler had practically curled up with embarrassment. Mrs. Pitts's polite puzzlement was turning to alarm. And I—

I'd never even
thought
how I might feel about that. And Tyler, from the stricken look on his face . . . had.

I shut my mouth, absolutely stunned. Tyler hadn't been acting so mercurial, so
odd,
because of the war alone. He wanted to court me. Tyler, who I'd known since I could barely walk.

He recovered well before I did. “You know—” he said, slightly strangled, “Miss Halfrida Hoffmann.”

Mrs. Pitts's dark eyes widened, and not a little bit. “Little Halfrida,” she said, my name an old, lost language on her lips. “Well. I haven't laid eyes on you since you were a child.”

“Six years,” I agreed uncomfortably. Tyler shifted, and it set off thunderstorms in my head. He didn't want to look at me. All the strength I'd summoned to face down this doorstep was already wilting away.

Get it together,
I scolded myself, and I dug my nails into my gloved palm until the pain brought focus back. “We'd like,” I said in my best high, strong voice, “a meeting with the mayor.”

Mrs. Pitts glanced over her shoulder, into the depths of her shrunken house. “I—well,” she said, entirely taken aback. “I'll see if he's available. Please come in.”

Mrs. Pitts flung the double doors wide, striping shadows on the floors, and showed us into the one house both Marthe and I had sworn never to set foot in again.

Mayor Pitts took his appointments in his personal parlor, a bright, wide-windowed room that looked out on the back garden. There were vegetable beds out there, battened down for the winter. Whoever gardened for the Pitts household had tried to hide them with roses. The dead brambles reached up across the windowsill.

Tyler shifted on the edge of the stuffed couch, his bad leg sprawled corpselike down to the carpet. He still wouldn't look at me, and what I could see of his face was blotchy, half hidden behind his collar.

“It was just talk,” I said, desperate. “Windstown would sink into the river without gossip.”

My voice vanished into the green plush couches, the high bookshelves, the antique old-cities carpet. Tyler buried his face in Alonso Pitts's expensive teacup and didn't say a word.

“Tyler?” I asked, smaller.

There was no time to reply. A narrow chestnut door opened at the other side of the parlor, and there he was: Alonso Pitts, in full waistcoat and chain of office.

Mayor Pitts took us in, one and then the other, and nodded with fine, fatherly benevolence. The seething anger started, comforting, in my belly: Alonso Pitts, always presumptuous. So kindly and firmly smiling while he ripped out your guts.

He looked older. The years didn't wear on people the same way, but Pitts had taken the last six pretty personally. His hair had thinned in a stain that spread from his crown, and he looked smaller, less fiery, less like the voice of hell. There were stitches on his plum waistcoat where the seams had been let out, and vague gray circles under his eyes. “Miss Hoffmann,” the mayor said, and leaned against the fireplace mantel. “Young Mr. Blakely.”