by Leah Bobet
“You here all afternoon?” I asked. Stupid small talk—
“Until supper,” he answered and buried his face in Marthe’s mug. Pain sparked between my ribs: there might have been a miss on that, for all the friendliness it held. He doesn’t want you, the snarl in my head pronounced. Go home.
I bit my lip, hard. “Tyler,” I managed. He lifted an eyebrow at the grass. I forced out, “Spite or pride?”
His face went awful with anger—no, with shame. And then he looked up at me, for the first time in an age, and smiled tightly. “This one’s all pride.”
That smile hit like a slap. “Ty, talk to me?”
“I’ve embarrassed myself enough,” he muttered. “Just leave me alone.”
I shoved my hands into my pockets, stomach-sick. It’s over. The boy who’d walked with me when we trailed behind Nat was just another bridge breaking; who’d—
“Remember that time you shoved a toad down the back of my shirt when I was seven?” I blurted.
He stared at me, suspicious, uncomprehending.
“I got Nat to help get you back. She stole every single pair of your skivvies out of the laundry, and we hung them on the big hawthorn at the head of the drive.”
He remembered. I could see it in the way his flat, hard mouth softened. Remembered that I was me: the lean little girl in ribbonless braids who knew where his laundry basket was.
“You just sauntered out here, cool as you please,” I said, and shook my head with broken wonderment. “Looked up at the tree, and went, ‘Guess I’m swimming in my birthday suit.’”
Tyler’s mouth quirked. “Please tell me I didn’t reach for my pants.”
I tucked my chin to hide the watery smile. “You didn’t have to. We were so grossed out we went back up the tree and got them down ourselves.”
“And threw them in the mud for me to pick up.”
“Boy underpants are gross,” I said lightly.
“Uh-huh. You two were awful little kids sometimes,” he said. But he was talking. He wasn’t turned away from me.
“I know,” I said, a little ashamed myself now. “But if you weren’t embarrassed about that”—and my voice went thin and frantic—“there is nothing on earth embarrassing enough to never speak like friends again.”
He looked up at me, and the shame was gone, leaving behind it eyes like bleak white snow. “You have no idea, Hal,” he pronounced softly.
“At least tell me why.”
“How can you not know why?” he snapped. “You said it was just talk. You don’t want me. So, fine; I’ll stay out of your way. Fair enough. But now you’re picking at this, and I don’t know what you want from me.”
I stared. A clear, staticky anger rose inside my ears. “Tyler—”
“I know everyone says you should be able to stay friends, but I can’t pretend everything’s normal, okay? You still don’t want me, and that’s—I can’t just go back to normal. I need some room. I need time where we’re not poking at it.”
He slumped against his staff, planted in the dead dirt. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to let loose like Marthe on a tear. “Tyler,” I said, slow and clear. “I didn’t say any of that.”
His head whipped up. “You did. In the mayor’s parlor, you said it was nothing but talk. If it’s all talk to you, just me being puffed-up and vain and stupid, well . . . fine. But don’t lie about it—”
“God, stop!” I burst out. He leaned back, wide-eyed. “Just stop talking and listen.”
Quiet sank into the turf between us: the mutters of sheep, a scandalized bird. Dead leaves underfoot.
“Look, I was surprised, okay? I am surprised,” I started.
Tyler looked down bitterly at his blunt fingernails. “And here I thought I was the most obvious fool in the world.”
“Listening, right?” I snapped, and he pulled a face. “You put a toad down my shirt when I was seven years old. I’ve known you forever. Nobody expects someone who saw them burping and waddling around in diapers to look at them like—something romantic.”
“Now who’s embarrassed?” he said slyly.
“What?”
“So what if you said stupid things when you were two? I was four,” he said, and his thin face firmed. “And who says that means someone can’t like you?”
“That’s not how it works,” I answered weakly. The sheep edged away from us, smelling the fight.
“Who says,” Tyler pressed softly, “how it works?”
The static in my ears dropped clean out. “Everybody,” I said. The adults in Windstown, in every approving smile or shake of a disappointed head. Nat’s suitors, stiffly formal, coming down the path in their best boots and most terrified faces. Janelle Prickett, when she gave us the gossip about who’d dared show a little too much of themselves to whom, and was turned away.
And . . . none of them were here. Nobody was here except Tyler and me, and the sheep, and the dogs, and the trees.
“You like me,” I said distinctly. “Even though I put your skivvies up the hawthorn tree.”
I saw his Adam’s apple bob. “I like you. No even though.”
“Oh,” I said stupidly. The mown barley rustled around us, under the sound of nervous sheep. Joy finally intervened on their behalf: she leaned against my legs and pushed to drive Tyler and me apart. “Your dog wants us to stop fighting,” I managed.
Tyler looked down at Joy. She shot him a dirty look and let out a herder’s bark. “So she does,” he murmured.
I gave up and let her push me into the milling flock. The gentle heat of their bodies licked my poor, frozen knees. I hadn’t even noticed the cold.
Tyler closed the distance between us with a sheepherder’s careful grace, and the air changed into something breath-caught and bright. My friend wasn’t leaving me. He cared about me. He was still here.
“I didn’t want you to be embarrassed,” I said finally. “You looked so miserable, and I was so nervous about Pitts, and . . . sometimes I still say stupid things.”
“You didn’t want me to be—” Tyler started. His mouth worked and landed gracelessly on, “Oh. Shit.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it; we were just too ridiculous.
He stared at me a moment and then let out a rueful chuckle. “My life has a terrible sense of humor, you know? I was proud of that speech.” His cheeks were still ugly crimson. “I practiced it all week long to my bedroom ceiling.”
“Did it have any good suggestions?”
“It said to definitely go with the wounded dignity. Very manly, super-tragic. I’m never asking it for anything again.”
“The ceiling or Mrs. Pitts,” I said dryly.
“God,” Tyler said feelingly. “The Pittses. They ruin everything.”
I laughed unexpectedly, bright as a bell. Tyler shot me a sudden warm look and pressed on: “You want to go swimming, they’ll drain the river.”
“You make a batch of ice cream, they turn up the sun.”
He glanced at me sidelong, with that mischievous face. I grinned back, and the sunshine in him faltered.
“So,” I asked, “what do we do?”
I’d heard a lot about Nat’s ill-fated courtship with Vijay Chaudhry, and nobody had forgotten the spring where Will Sumner just wouldn’t leave either of us alone, but I didn’t know what courting looked like when it worked. When both people already knew and liked each other; when they were friends.
“That depends on—well. How you feel about it,” he said. His broken eyes looked down at me, flicked away, crept back. Filled with nerves and—hope.
“I don’t know,” I said, breathless. “No, really, I don’t. It’s been just me here all summer. We barely sleep, and Marthe won’t talk; she’s gone somewhere in the back of her head where I can’t get her. And all I’ve been telling myself is that I just have to make it until Thom gets home, but—”
The emptiness boiled up. It ate the light. It ate the world. “Ty,” I said faintly, took a breath, and laid it recklessly bar
e: “I don’t know how I feel about anything. I’m . . . not okay right now.”
He didn’t laugh in my face. He didn’t pull back, pull away. He knotted his hands around his walking stick, planted like a regimental flag, and said, “I don’t know what to say.” We stared unhappily, watching the dust of two private wars blow through each other’s eyes.
“This isn’t fair,” I muttered, and he lifted a sharp eyebrow. “No, not you. I wish it was next summer. All I want is some time to figure everything out.”
Tyler paused like a man on a precipice. “We could, you know,” he said slowly.
“We could what?”
“Take all the time we need.”
I glared at him. “Don’t you say you’ll wait for me or something awful like that.”
“I’m not waiting,” he said, and drew up firm. “Just that we could, both of us. Take it slow. Take our time.”
Who says how it works? rang and echoed through my head. I looked up at him—tilted head, considering eyes—and pictured it: No formal walking-out together; no talking to our families. No having him ask all the questions—would I dance, would I do more, would I permit him to court me and sneak up to the loft together—and hanging everything, forever, on my instant yes or no.
Just me and Tyler, and time to figure out what we had both become.
“Is that weird?” I asked. “Can we do that?”
“It’s probably weird.” Tyler cracked a nervous smile. “But maybe that’s what courting is. Two people spending time, and finding out how they feel about it.”
I nodded. The squirming nerves in my stomach still wouldn’t settle down. “You’re not going to stop being my friend if the answer’s no?”
Tyler shook his head, fierce. “Never. Not on my life.”
“You were ready to throw the whole thing away ten minutes ago.”
“That was the stupid me,” he replied, eyes glinting. “He’s dead now. I put a hatchet in his face.”
I watched him steadily until his broken eyes flicked to the ground. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was scared and just assumed everything, and it was . . . really stupid. I swear I won’t do that again.”
I swallowed. Reached out for his hand and tentatively took it. “I swear I won’t let it stew for a whole week again,” I whispered, and he nodded: Thanks. His fingers were rough-callused and thin under his gloves. I squeezed them experimentally; it had a whole new meaning now.
“Hal?”
“Yeah?”
He hesitated. “Can I kiss you?”
I stopped. Was this taking our time? You can say no, I reminded myself. It doesn’t have to mean never.
I thought for a fleeting second what Tyler’s cold-chapped lips might taste like. He smelled warm, like soap, clean sweat, lanolin. I’d never kissed someone before.
You can say yes, and it won’t mean always.
“Okay,” I said faintly, and shooed a lazy ewe out of the way. Tyler stepped close and looked down at me, serious as a church vow. I breathed in shallowly, terrified by his nearness: Tyler Blakely, tall and waiting as a guitar string.
His nose brushed mine, butted gently past, and then he placed both hands lightly on my cheeks and leaned down to my mouth.
Janelle Prickett had called her first kiss summer exploding into midnight. I didn’t see it. Tyler’s mouth was on mine and it was too light, too hesitant for summer. The world was not ending. The earth had not gone standstill bright, or warm, or golden.
Tyler’s lips moved, weird and living, against mine; small, infinitesimal spaces meeting and parting. His fingers leafed lightly along my cheek, warm in their knit woolen gloves. I fought the sudden urge to lean against them; fought an equal urge to pull away and run. My mouth flooded with the taste of him: soup-sweet and faintly metallic with fear.
The world shrank to fingertip details, and then he broke and stepped away from me.
I leaned back. The air was doubly cold on my mouth where his lips, that soup-taste lingered on. I resisted the impulse to wipe it away—or maybe to hold it, warm and private, in my palm. The sun streaked across his face—the sheer peace on his face. The rustle and whuff of the flock layered our silence into something softer.
I tipped my head back and let the afternoon sun glow through my closed eyes. All the frantic voices had gone out of my head. I couldn’t remember the last time everything had been so . . . calm.
When I opened them, Tyler had dropped his hands to his staff and was watching me, rapt and anxious, his eyes bright in the hazel shreds still left to them. I opened my mouth; shut it again. I didn’t know what you said after a boy—a man and a soldier—kissed you. I didn’t know what you did. I wasn’t sure I felt how you were supposed to feel.
“Was that okay?” I managed, and nearly smacked my own head sideways.
Ty barked a quick laugh. He grinned at me, wild and merry. “Like I’d know anything about it.”
I snorted, and my own smile formed from nothing to meet his. “Fine, then,” I said softly.
“Well, fine,” he replied. We could go on like this for hours. We had gone on like this for hours, back in the days when we were small and annoying and Tyler Blakely was not somebody I had kissed.
“Fine—” Tyler started. And stopped.
I turned and saw a figure striding long across the highway, his hat low on his head against the chill-bright wintry sky. Tyler went pale around his chapped lips: the awful, helpless look he’d had when we found the stones strewn across the river path.
“It’s just Thao Hang,” I said, even as the creeping wrongness spread. Our goat pen was the other way; Hang’s cart was still parked in the drive. I peered closer, and the figure stopped and turned in our direction.
“It’s not,” Tyler said, and picked up his knotty staff.
He limped across the field to the roadside, Joy and Sadie and the confused sheep in his wake. The figure on the road caught our motion and waved us over. There was a second man behind him, and a third. They moved to meet us: unshaven, sunburned, broad; pearly buttons at their wrists.
“Veterans,” I said softly.
“No,” Tyler said. “Soldiers.”
“What d’you mean, soldiers?” I asked with a chill.
Tyler glared down the road. “The ones who stayed after John’s Creek to burn every last Twisted Thing and hang Jones’s irregulars. And find John Balsam. Find John Balsam, most of all.”
My eyes widened: the knife. “We have to warn Heron.”
Tyler wheeled on the path, but it was too late. The three men, armed and buttoned, had caught up to us. “Good afternoon, miss,” the leader said in a rich voice. “We’re looking for Roadstead Farm.”
twelve
THERE WAS NO POINT DENYING IT; NO PURCHASE IN TRYING to lie. “That’s us,” I croaked. Tyler glanced at me uneasily. “How can we help you?”
The lead man doffed his cap. “Lieutenant Jackson, from General de Guzman’s regiment.” His accent was pure southlands: the round sound of rolling hills spread long into the sunset. A reassuring smile crinkled his brown face. “We were summoned here by the mayor in these parts.”
My panic frothed into wrath. “Pitts.”
“That’s the man,” the lieutenant said, a little more warily now. “Don’t you worry, miss; we got here on the double. Now, where did you find the bogey?”
I blinked.
“The Twisted Thing,” Tyler murmured. “We named them different in the war.”
All three looked him over, taking in his hip, his splintered eyes. The fixed cheer slid off the lieutenant’s face and left something sincere, and warmer. “What regiment?”
“Lakelands, out of Toledo,” Tyler answered, and they dissolved into a circle of handshakes and half-remembered townships. I stood forgotten outside that wall of turned backs, torn between wrath and relief: They don’t know about the knife. I bit back the urge to fly across the river and wrap my fingers around Alonso Pitts’s throat. I’d said no, and he still sent them to put us under quaran
tine.
Years later, beyond all reason, he still wanted to push us off this farm.
I’ll show you, I thought viciously. We’d send these soldiers back to him bowled over with how well we’d done. Full of nothing but praise for how the Hoffmann girls handled Roadstead Farm.
I straightened tall, and smiled.
“I’ll show you where the Twisted Things fell,” I said when the do-you-knows and were-you-theres died down. “We’ve had eight since: all small ones. Birds, most. One with cockroach legs that looked more like a field mouse.”
Behind Lieutenant Jackson, the youngest soldier hissed out a breath. “That’s a lot, Andre,” said the third, a muscled, graying Chinese soldier who’d called himself Sergeant Zhang. “How’d they get this far out in the sticks?”
Tyler stiffened visibly beside me. I hadn’t been talking to him through the last long, torturous week—but obviously Heron had. Act natural, I thought at him. It might as well have been written in lipstick on his forehead: Hello, we have John Balsam’s knife.
“We’ve had the dogs out,” he managed, too high and much too fast. “They’re good with tracking. But Twisted Things don’t leave scent trails the same way.”
You would never know that Tyler Blakely and his sister were related, sometimes. He couldn’t have faked his way into a root cellar if his name was Potato.
“I’ll show you. Right this way,” I said quickly, and their masks came up again: polite and determined not to scare the children. I will show you and Mayor Presumption, I thought as we turned down the gravel path to the outbuildings and left Tyler snarled in his sheep. I’ll show you how to fight a war.
Marthe and Thao Hang were in our tiny slaughterhouse, butchering the luckless among this summer’s goats. Hang’s sister Cua worked out back, at the slaughter: stunning the animals and then bleeding them out, all her attention on the knife. The youngest soldier, Corporal Muhammad—short and dark-browed like Rami Chandler—covered his nose, a little sick.
“Marthe,” I said with the tight cheer she used for unwelcome company. “There are soldiers from the Great Southern Army visiting.”
Marthe came to the door. “Soldiers?” she echoed blankly.
