An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

  I’d spent years trying to repay her, run myself dry trying to live up to her.

  Marthe could never even touch the word failure.

  I clamped my gloves over my mouth, and the sobs escaped anyway, wrenching slaps of grief that curled me around them like a beating. “Hey, hey—” James Blakely said, and reached out. I shrugged his arms off viciously. I couldn’t be touched right now, couldn’t be held. I had to keep myself from flying apart.

  “I can’t do it,” I said, gulping, gasping. “All I do is disappoint her. I’ll never be as good, as strong, as fast, and she’ll send me away. There’s a baby coming. She’ll get tired of putting up with me, with pretending I earned my half share of Roadstead, and she’ll push me off the farm.”

  “That’s not true—”

  “Don’t say that!” I shouted. “Uncle Matthias told me the truth: she’ll only let me stay here if I’m good to her. If I’m good. He was the younger son; I’m the youngest daughter, and Papa made Uncle Matthias go. Opa made Great-aunt Millie go. Nobody wanted me to inherit anyway—nobody wanted Papa’s will. I’ve always known it was her or me, okay? So don’t tell me lies.”

  James Blakely stood back in the snowlit field, his mouth wide open. “That is bullshit,” he said darkly. “That is shit from start to finish.”

  “I saw Uncle Matthias go—”

  “Because of his stupid pride,” he snapped. “Pride’s the Hoffmann failing. Not one person who worked this dirt has ever known when to just apologize.” James shook his head. His face smoldered. “I hate them both right now, you know that? And I didn’t think, when your father died, I could’ve hated him more. I hated him when we were children. I hated him every time I had to wipe your sister’s eyes and make her go back to that house.”

  It shocked me right into breathing.

  He smiled bitterly and dug a handkerchief out of his pocket.

  I took it, crushed it small inside my fist. “I don’t need your handkerchief,” I whispered.

  He smiled awfully at me. “You’re Matthias to the bones, too. Never a second after he learned to talk that he wasn’t saying ‘I can do it myself.’ I followed him around like a lost kitten when we were kids. I wanted to be him, and now I hate him too.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I managed. Uncle Matthias had been kind to us. He was the last kindness, until Thom came, that I’d had.

  “You’re old enough,” James said almost gently. “And don’t say I don’t understand somehow. It was almost easier on me when Matthias left than when I realized he wasn’t powerful and perfect.” James Blakely smiled the crookedest smile I’d ever seen. “He left, Halfrida. He decided he could do it himself. He planted something that festered until it drove you and Marthe apart, and then he walked off down the south road, and hasn’t been back in eight years.

  “Don’t be your father,” James said softly. “But damn it all, don’t be Matthias.”

  I stood there, hugging James Blakely’s handkerchief, and felt my rib cage shatter and strew bone shards into my lungs, my heart.

  “This appears to be my fence,” James said.

  It was. The posts Thom had cut, the wire I’d strung between them stretched through the dark not a handspan away. Our farm looked dark from the outskirts: something abandoned to the winter wastes.

  “Keep the handkerchief,” James said, and started across the empty fields to his bright home and his laughing husband. His family, full of love. “You can return it in the morning. I’ll be there to talk about Thom, and our options. Together.”

  I held on to the kerchief, clinging, hating. I held on a long time. There was no mistaking it: That was a deadline. With or without me, Marthe was going to find out all the lies I’d spun her, tomorrow.

  I turned around and walked home across the snowbound fields, the back ways and brush-clogged remnants of Roadstead Farm. Walked, and just kept walking, because there was nowhere to go. There was no bright house for me anywhere; there was no end to that road.

  I turned a corner, tripped, stumbled—

  —and almost walked right into a waiting shape in the darkness.

  I jumped. “Hey—” and then its head came up, and I let out a breath. It was just Heron, crouched down by the hay barn wall, with our firewood ax in hand. Staring moodily into the bare brush field.

  He sprang up to meet me. “We need firewood. There are Twisted Things down on the beach again. Can you keep your sister away if I burn them?” he said. I held up both hands to fend him off: his secrets, his plans. How thoroughly even this stranger knew that Marthe and I weren’t family anymore. How we lived afraid, divided, and—cruel.

  “I can’t,” I said, too high, and he stopped, surprise and offense battling on his face. “I just can’t anymore,” I choked, and pushed past him, clutching James Blakely’s kerchief. Into my empty, ghost-ridden house.

  nineteen

  I TOSSED ALL NIGHT.

  I practiced conversations that never ended in forgiveness, argued in my head, thought about running away forever as James Blakely’s Don’t be Matthias turned cartwheels in my gut. Couldn’t sleep; couldn’t dream for all the ghosts in the walls. When dawn crawled hand over hand through my cracked window, I still didn’t have the words to explain any of this to Marthe: that I’d wanted to give her something the size of all she’d given me; to be her hero.

  How that had somehow been eaten up in lies.

  Marthe rapped three times on my door, harsh enough to rock it in the frame. “Breakfast, Hal,” she said, unknowing, utterly unprepared. The sun spilled over the horizon filthy bright and cruel, cruel, cruel filled my ears. I could already see the look on her face when I loosed all the terrible secrets I’d kept. It wrenched my guts. I can’t do it, I thought despairingly. I can’t.

  My bedroom door still locked from the inside. Marthe had installed the lock for me the week after Papa died, and told me I could use it, that I shouldn’t be afraid. I locked it and curled up under the quilt to wait for the world to end.

  The knock came twice more, and then: “Hal, please. Damn it, why do you never just talk?” My door handle jiggled. I froze beneath the blankets and begged every god there was to just let me stop existing. Marthe’d said six years ago that nothing would tear this family apart, and nothing could. Nothing had, except ourselves.

  I’d been a fool to think I could fix us by somehow saving Roadstead Farm.

  The door’s rattle fell silent. From the faraway place where I curled up, waiting for the blow to land, I heard her sniffle. And then her steps moved slow down the stairs. The kitchen door opened. The kitchen door shut.

  You couldn’t even tell her yourself, I thought bitterly: my final failure. James would tell Marthe how I’d lied to her, betrayed her, and she’d finally turn me out of the house. I would fill my half-packed bag, hidden in the smokehouse all these years, and wander like Heron, walk the lonely roads. After so many years of waiting, it was almost a relief.

  All summer long, all fall and winter, the world I knew had fallen away under my feet, piece by piece. I wasn’t Marthe’s treasured sister anymore, wasn’t a maker of malt and keeper of goats, half owner of Roadstead Farm. If I couldn’t still be the girl Uncle Matthias stood up for, comforted, loved—I didn’t know who I was anymore.

  I didn’t know what to hold on to, to keep from being utterly lost.

  James’s knock rang on our kitchen door slow minutes later, shaking the house on its ancient foundations. The murmur of voices drifted up through the floorboards: James’s baritone rumble, Marthe’s words curt and soft. Tears snuck like traitors into the corners of my mouth.

  Then the voices drowned in footsteps, too quick and muddled to be Marthe. A tentative knock: “Hallie? Are you okay?”

  Tyler’s fear rent my heart in two all over again. I opened my mouth and closed it, scrambled for a word to slide under the door to him. The walls of Roadstead Farm were tumbling down inside me—the walls of love and family, the only ones that ever mattered—and there was nothing. My mouth w
as dust.

  “Hal—” he started, and stopped again. “You don’t have to come out. Just please, talk to us.”

  “You are scaring my brother,” Nat said through the door.

  I got up and let them in.

  They both registered it at the same time: my messy hair, my sweaty nightdress, the blank pain vulturing on my shoulders. Tyler’s hazel-shard eyes widened. “Well,” Nat said, “you look like hell.”

  Tyler shot her a filthy look. He’d never quite understood Nat the way I did.

  “You’re supposed to be stuck in the house,” I said dully.

  Ty’s mouth skewed, all out of tune. “Whatever you said to Uncle James last night, he came back in a fury. He sent the soldiers to the Masons’ place and then gave us both hell for not telling him about Thom.”

  I looked away. Everybody knew now: everyone. “I didn’t say a word about Heron,” I mumbled. “And I didn’t say a word about your eyes.”

  “I said more than a word about my eyes,” Ty said bitterly, and put his hands on my hunched shoulders. “Hallie, what did he say to you?”

  The truth, I thought distantly, and shuddered: that Uncle Matthias had abandoned us. That Marthe and I were just as afraid of each other as we’d been of Papa. That it was too late: We were ruined for loving people. We were ruined for being loved.

  There were things you didn’t speak aloud in this world: the twist of love-hate that still burned some nights when I thought of our Papa, because he was still our Papa, who bruised our hearts and bodies but made damned sure we kept our land. The fear that his ghost might sneak into Marthe’s hands someday and speak out of her throat and eyes. I’d never even thought he would slip, instead, into mine.

  There were no words to tell Tyler—kind, innocent, loved Tyler—about that fear, that taint. How much I would give to destroy it. And how much, deep down, I hoped he never would truly understand.

  Tyler’s eyebrows knitted painfully together. “Can we tell Marthe you’re all right?”

  Somewhere below, Marthe’s voice rose in outrage. I caught a breath, and my face crumpled.

  “She’s not all right,” Nat said shortly, and Marthe came scrambling up the stairs.

  “Marthe, no—” James said behind her, but it was too late. She burst into my room, hair wild, arms wrapped tight around the child still stubbornly inside. I cringed under my bedquilt, my tongue tasting metal, my spine aching under the memory of Papa’s belt, Papa’s fists.

  I looked up.

  And I’d been wrong about it all along: I couldn’t see Papa in her eyes. I saw myself: eight years old, shell-shocked, outraged at the world, screaming at the person she loved most: Liar! You promised!

  Marthe looked down at me cowering in my nightclothes, tears choking her eyes. “You little monster,” she said coolly, and then her voice split into a sob.

  “Come on, Marthe,” James said, thick with disappointment, and led her away from my door.

  The sun had crested in the sky when I lifted my head out of the pillow. I’d slept. Somehow I’d slept, exhausted from the culmination of eight years of fear.

  Nat was in the chair at my bedside, spinning yarn. Her spindle whirled up, down, up again automatically: chores. All the daily, tiny bits of maintenance that kept a farm, a family, alive.

  “You stayed,” I said through a dry throat.

  Nat’s mouth firmed, and she lowered her spinning. “Awake now?”

  I hesitated, and her mouth quirked thinly. “She’s not here, Hal.”

  I nodded. The house was silent. I could hear the emptiness in the walls: no one singing, no clank of jars or baking smell coming through the old vents. I hadn’t understood how much Marthe was this house, this farm, until she was suddenly gone.

  The emptiness spread through my belly again—you’re just like Papa, and you drove her away—and I clamped it brutally down.

  “Where is she?” I managed.

  “At the river with Uncle James, Tyler, and half of Ada’s cousins. Ada showed up three hours ago with a pile of strange-looking machines.” Nat wound up her spinning and tucked it in the basket by the chair. “We can go down if you want.”

  “No—” I said quickly. The thought of Marthe’s hurt eyes, her wary step, made my stomach turn.

  “Hallie,” Nat said, utterly bereft of sarcasm, “I think you should get down to the river now.”

  “You’re disappointed in me.”

  Nat stood and lifted my blanket off me. “I’m a little pissed off at all of you. I’ll get over it eventually. We’ve got work to do. C’mon.”

  I worked myself out of the sheets. “Are—we still friends?” I asked weakly.

  Nat tossed me a scornful glance. “Of course, you jackass. That’s not how friendship works. This is why I get scared about you and my brother, you know. I don’t know why you think messing up means lying about it or beating yourself with guilt or—just walking away. You messed up; fix it. You want forgiveness, get downstairs and start making some amends.”

  I swallowed. I felt beaten and bitten, cut utterly to the quick. But Nat was still here. She wasn’t leaving. She loved me still.

  That was something to stand on. A tiny piece of land, solid under my feet.

  “I’ll get up,” I whispered, and went into the bathroom to wash.

  Nat had not exaggerated: the riverbank swarmed with Chandlers. Through the break in the orchard trees the beach swam with bodies in homespun, scratched goggles on their faces and metal tools in their hands. Wooden stakes and string marked out a hard fence around the hole in the air.

  The hole was scorched black into the riverside now, a jagged tear just as agonized as the mark of those first broken wings. Twisted Things seeped from the wound, hissing and screaming. James Blakely stood, his sleeves rolled up, at the perimeter and bludgeoned them into the dirt. Beside him, wearing fat gloves that bled dark brown smoke, Jerome Chandler scooped body after body into jars.

  Tyler leaned against a scrubby tree beside them, squinting into the gap. “Lower,” he said, and James repositioned his shovel. A thin spinner bird tumbled through a moment later, and the shovel fell with a crunch.

  “Ty,” Nat said, her voice pitched to carry. He caught our eyes and picked his way across the strand.

  “Hallie, you’re—” he started. He was fidgeting again, his fingers playing on his shirt hem as if he dreaded the answer. “Not okay?”

  I felt Nat’s eyes on me, on us, like a vise. I grimaced and looked away. “Not okay.”

  His hand crept into mine. “You well enough to keep walking?”

  “You said that before. To your uncle.”

  Tyler looked away. “You didn’t have to be okay to make it back from John’s Creek. Nobody was okay. But you had to be well enough to get one more day closer to home.”

  I looked down the strand, forced myself to look until I found the familiar check of Marthe’s work shirt, our mother’s shawl draped over her shoulders. She sat to the side, on a driftwood log, her fingers tracing a haphazard line of river stones. I could not see the shape of those private words.

  She looked up at me, her eyes burning with a cold, heartbroke light. I swallowed: I’m so sorry. It wouldn’t come loose. My sister stared at me, incandescent with betrayal, and deliberately turned away.

  I took a shaking breath. Can you go another day like this? Maybe. Eight years’ fear had finally come to pass, and I was still walking and talking, and I could probably walk and talk another hour. I could bear it a bit longer, and that was what mattered now.

  “Well enough, yeah,” I said softly. Tyler smiled in shards and kissed my forehead.

  James Blakely lifted an eyebrow at us over Ty’s head. Hot blood rose in my cheeks, and then: So what, I thought with a new, peculiar lightness. All I had to do was last another hour, and we’d already done everything backwards anyway. Tyler’s lips were dry on my brow. It soothed me, the way everything about him had slowly become calming: his quiet hands and dry jokes and everlastingly ridiculous grin. />
  I leaned my head on his shoulder, suddenly profoundly grateful it was there.

  “I’m glad you came home,” I said quietly.

  He looked down at me, startled: a too-young man who’d suddenly found a shaft of sunlight in his hand. “I’m glad, too,” he said, and buried his cold nose in my hair.

  “Hey there,” Ada said with a softer edge than she normally wielded. “Either of you kittens expecting anyone else?”

  Nat’s mouth opened halfway. “No,” she said, and Ada pointed to the horizon.

  There were silhouettes on the hillocks downriver, outlined against the sky. Grown men in formation, moving this way.

  “Ada,” Jerome said nervously, and she snapped to life.

  “Pack up everything,” she ordered. “Stow the instruments. I don’t care where. Go.”

  “But I’m getting something,” Jerome started, and pushed a fat lizard corpse into the air around the burn. “Look. It blocks the portal wind. And it doesn’t rot.”

  Ada rolled two jars into the underbrush. “Great. We’ll take that back to the lab. Now put it away.”

  The Chandlers flurried into motion. Sealed jars and tools and devices disappeared into burlap sacks. Jerome kicked dirty snow over the burn on the shore. “Too late,” Nat muttered, and clutched my hand.

  Marching over the rise, weapons drawn, were Lieutenant Jackson and his men.

  All three surveyed us with flat, grim eyes. “Sergeant, not you too,” the lieutenant said. James Blakely opened his mouth—for once, at a loss for words.

  Nat yanked up a puzzled smile. “Lieutenant, good to see you. We’re just doing some dredging—”

  He cut her off with one scornful glance. “Miss, don’t bother. We’ve spoken to your neighbors in Windstown. And we’ve seen your filthy hoard.”

  Sergeant Zhang pulled a dirty glass jar out from his coat. Ada startled. He rolled it down the hill, and it shuddered to a stop in the thick snow at her feet. When she looked up, her eyes burned. “You touched my lab.”