An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

  “Don’t you tell me,” I said, “that you’re nobody.”

  Heron’s mouth opened, flailed, and shut. He was so young. A young, scared, lying boy.

  “John Balsam,” I pronounced, and Heron, God-killer, world-saver, hid his face from me, eaten with shame.

  “Yes,” he said, hoarsely. “That’s my name.”

  I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “Was anything you said true? The war, the towns, your mission—”

  Heron’s chin came up. “All of it. Every word.”

  “Except the part where you killed a god.”

  “Please let me explain.”

  “How can you explain? You said you didn’t know where he’d gone.”

  Heron opened his free hand and grabbed onto thin air. “John Balsam’s a cheesemaker,” he said, cracking, breaking. “He lives in Kortright and feeds the cats, and reaches jars off the highest shelf for his mother. He’s learning to play his grandpa’s fiddle. His best friend works the logging camps, and when he’s home, we go drink and tell stories about the road, all the places I’d never been and didn’t dare go, Sunil’s ten thousand girlfriends—”

  “You lied.”

  “I don’t know where that man is,” he burst out. “I have walked and hid and starved across more land than I ever thought existed, and I do not know where John Balsam has gone.” He hugged himself like a lost child; like he wanted to dig off his skin. “I don’t know anymore what that name means.”

  He is taking John Balsam’s mother what is left of her son, I realized, and put my trembling hands behind my back. “Tell me the truth,” I said unsteadily. “Tell me what actually happened.”

  “It was true,” he said defiantly. “Every word. Except that we were the ones who slipped around Jones’s barricade. Because . . . we were stupid. We got lost.”

  He smiled, a hard, sad wince. “There was dust everywhere, and we just kept moving. And then in front of us was this place, this blotch of rain and calm. It had been so long since we’d seen rain. So I stumbled into it for a drink of water, absolutely resigned, because I knew I was going to die. My cousins were dead. My friends were dead. At least I wasn’t going to die thirsty.

  “Except I looked behind me and something moved: The walls of the storm, pulling in like a heart. Pulling away from me; taking away my rain. And I was just so frustrated that I stabbed them, I cut—

  “And the whole storm,” he said, confused still, “exploded.

  “It broke my nose. It threw me across the ground, back into the dust. And then the storm swirled in around me through the cut my knife had made. It bent the knife, broke my fingers. And the Wicked God Southward drained into that wound like water. And it was done. I was alive. The war was gone.”

  “There was a hole between worlds in the god’s heart, and you cut it open,” I breathed. A hole like the one festering on the river. My hands itched for that knife.

  “I guess so,” he said, and shook his head. “I cut a hole in something, and the god fell through. I was too afraid to look. I didn’t want to die, Hallie. So I held my broken fingers and ran like hell.

  “It was only after,” he said, animal-stunned, “that I heard talk about John Balsam, the brave hero who slew a God. And I knew—I just knew—that the truth would break them: who I really was. I could never live up to that big a lie.

  “So I ran,” he finished softly. “I took my pack, and I ran as far and as fast as I could. I deserted the Great Southern Army. I left my name, my friends, my regiment—everything. And I have no idea how a living man kills gods.”

  I stared. “You’ve been running this whole time. You and your enchanted knife.”

  “It’s just a knife,” he said weakly. “My mother bought it when I was ten years old, from the blacksmith in Black Creek. I used to cut my name into trees with it, slice turnips for our supper.”

  That hawthorn flitted across my memory, its trunk twined with glowing flowers rooted in another world. “Ask any veteran in the lakelands,” I said softly. “It’s not just a knife anymore.”

  His shoulders crumpled. I watched him, watched the strings and strands of the lies we told ourselves come spinnereting down. Because as long as John Balsam could say it was just a knife, he could tell himself equally that he was just a man. I could tell myself that a scrawny girl could save a fifty-acre farm. That if I did, my sister might love me again; that it would erase eight years of secret strain.

  I could tell myself that if Roadstead Farm was going to, no matter what, be lost, I loved Windstown and its safety more than I loved my brother.

  I reached out and took the knife that killed a god from Heron’s hands.

  “I am taking this,” I said coolly. Finally honest; finally resolved. “And I am going to the river to get my brother back.”

  “No, wait—” Heron said, and I turned my back on him.

  I balanced the knife’s twist against my palms, like a shard of winter, and walked down to the hole in the world.

  twenty-one

  THE WEATHER HAD TURNED WORSE: IT WAS FREEZING COLD, and sleeting. Icy powder sifted into the tops of my boots, and I ignored it. I had John Balsam’s knife. And maybe the farm would be obliterated by the army or the Twisted Things, and maybe Marthe would never love me again, but goddammit, I would save something I loved.

  The shore was a mess of ash and scattered jars. Thom’s stones jumbled into letters, half words, noise. The hole’s scorched shadow had grown to the size of a bucket, and it had eaten the Chandlers’ stakes and string to dust. All the normal winter sounds—the sluggish water and the calls of wild dogs—were gone, and the whole river stank of wet violets and lye. This is what it’ll be like, I told myself. This is what you might loose into the world tonight.

  The first twinge of doubt nibbled at my belly.

  “I’m coming, Thom,” I said, and plunged John Balsam’s knife into the dead space in the sky.

  I felt, smelled, tasted the cut rattling through the air; felt the sky rip like rotten cloth. Purple light arced through the night as universes streamed from the tip of John Balsam’s twisted knife. I felt—no, heard, smelled—a small pop.

  Magic, I thought.

  And then everything imploded.

  I flew forward along the beach and landed, rolling, bruising, in a drift of sodden snow. Sound gushed into the world, too loud, too bright: the calls of birds and a rising wind, sweetly humid and rich with life. I sat up, shivering against the chilly air, and a gust of warm wind shoved me back into the snow. That hot green wind Tyler and Heron had touched at John’s Creek was still blowing: blowing, now, into my world through a shimmering tear in the sky the size of a barn door. I did it, I thought, and then heat lightning crackled through the sleeting sky.

  I’d made a hole in the world, gashed bright, edges curling, and Twisted Things rained out of it like stars.

  They took to the shore, stumbling, flapping, squawking their alarm calls. The rock beneath them crushed under their endless tracks; it melted and ran in the sucking, whistling storm. I wrapped my hand around John Balsam’s twisted knife and whimpered as they pattered along the shoreline, past my knees, and took wing.

  You’ve done it now, Papa’s voice, ever-present, whispered in my ear. “You’re dead,” I told it, pulled painfully to my feet, and walked into that rip in the world.

  I knew every step of Roadstead Farm, every blade of grass and tree hollow. But I didn’t recognize the place where I drew my next breath, two steps down the riverbank. I stepped from snow, farm, river into a lush, bright valley painted in violent purple and rolling green. Rivulets of water ran from my frozen boots onto thick-thatched grass, vibrant with life. The flowers were in spring bloom, dozens of them, hundreds: white-petaled, red-stemmed, as luminescent as tiny stars.

  I turned a circle, disoriented, in the sweet, humid air. Home shimmered behind me, a half dozen or a thousand steps away. Its warm lights and familiar corners felt farther away than the stars.

  “Thom?” I called, and coughe
d lightly, then harder. Tyler and Heron had called it the sign of Twisted Things coming—that thin air that made it hard to hear, hard to breathe. It was more: it was the air of another world, a world where it was warm, and quiet, and always raining. Where exhausted soldiers might have found, for a few moments on the battlefield, some peace.

  Nothing stirred in the grass or in the forest that stretched out before me, patched and thriving, its blooms wafting sour and sweet. “Thom?” I called again, and a lizard scuttled, terrified, away. I was alone in the Wicked God’s strange paradise: entirely alone.

  I pushed forward, the knife heavy in my hand, searching for flattened grass or footprints. The wind retreated. Nothing felt real anymore except the ground springing beneath my feet and the silence that muffled my hurrying steps.

  I’d thought I understood aloneness, tending a farm that didn’t speak to its neighbors with a sister who didn’t, sometimes, speak at all. But wherever this was, this untouched land, it was the loneliest place in the world. Here I could understand how Heron had lost John Balsam for good. Here I could face what it meant to feel my world crumbling: I am losing Halfrida Hoffmann.

  I was so damned far from who I wanted to be: someone who wasn’t aching with anger all the time. Who smiled, who looked at her neighbors with trust and not fear. Someone who loved her sister and knew how to do right. Nothing I’d done, said, been since Thom left home had truly felt like me. Except kissing Tyler Blakely and taking on a hired man because he had reminded me what it was to be kind.

  I stumbled on the hummocked green, on the infinitesimal and unbridgeable ground between me and the clean sheets of home. I owed Heron, I realized, more than I could repay. He’d reached across all the polite distance I kept between myself and other people: the ones I loved, the ones I hated. He had called me kind. I owed Tyler and Nat, who had insisted that I open my closed bedroom door, who had lifted me up, who had stayed. In our desperation, we’d offered each other comfort, sheltered each other. Everyone in my universe was farther away than the stars tonight, but Heron and me, and Nat, and Tyler: we held fast like a constellation. We made each other less alone.

  I had to stop lying to myself. I had to stop it for good. Because if I was brave—if I was honest, when I stepped out of this silent world onto the shores of the river I was born next to, into whatever destruction I’d just created—I wouldn’t have to be alone at all.

  I blew out the last of my dead air and said, “Keep on walking.” Heron had cut the belly from a storm, alone. And I wasn’t alone.

  “Thom?” I called again, and stepped into the soft forest shade.

  Long green leaves bent in streamers to touch the loamy carpet of veined white flowers. A spinner bird flitted from branch to branch, brown-winged, its talons crafting a web to trap crickets. The air drew a loving finger across my cheek, brought the scent of dampened earth. Through the branches I saw clouds forming for another round of quiet rain.

  And through it, improbably, I caught a whiff of home fires.

  “Thom!” I called, and followed the smell of cooking, of safety, of community, through the rain-whipped trees.

  The source of the smoke was less a cave than a hummock, hollowed out painstakingly by stones and blistered hands. The low sound of human voices wisped out of it on the smoke: the most welcome thing I’d heard in hours or years. I peered into that crevice, ready for ghosts, men, gods—and a human face, battered and burnt, short hair matted with illness and road dust and pain, peered back.

  “Hallie?” Thom Clarlund said.

  “Thom,” I whispered, and flung myself toward his scratched-up arms.

  He backed up fast; far, far away from me. His seared face stretched into terrible lines. “This is another nightmare. This isn’t real.”

  “It is,” I insisted. “I came to get you. I’m here.”

  From behind him, another voice—a thick, deep, musical voice—said, “Are you talking to yourself again?”

  The man at the campfire looked like the specter of death: a dark hat, tattered sleeves, a bloody bandage twined around his left knee. His boots were drying by the fire, or what was left of his boots: a pair of rot-soaked, beaten leather rags, reeking of mold and dirt. His grayed eyebrows rose to his hairline. “Who in God’s name are you?”

  “Hallie?” a voice called—howled—against the trees, and I whipped around. “Hallie, goddammit, where are you?”

  “Heron!” I answered. Heron was here. Heron had walked through the worlds for me.

  “Thom,” I said urgently. I grabbed his hand, and he winced. “We’ve got to go. Marthe’s waiting. There’s soldiers coming—we’ve got no time.”

  Thom’s hand spasmed on mine. His face was as gray as a burial cairn. “You’re real.”

  I blinked away sweat, blood, hot tears, and nodded.

  “Hallie,” he said, dead urgent. “Go.”

  “I can’t leave you behind,” I said.

  “We’ll be right behind you,” he said, and put both hands on my cheeks. “Go.”

  I crashed, desperate, back through the alien trees, John Balsam’s knife frozen to my hand. Branches whipped at my face and I ducked them, listening, listening for the sound of Thomas Clarlund behind me, coming home.

  I broke into the clearing where the hole sprawled between the worlds, and Heron—pacing, coughing helplessly—looked up.

  “Hallie, dammit,” he said around a gasp—one that had nothing to do with the thin air floating about us. “Do you know where you are?”

  “I’ve found Thom,” I said joyously, tears starting in my eyes. “Heron, I did it. He’s coming. He’s safe.”

  “You absolute madwoman,” he said, taking both my arms, and propelled me through the rent between worlds.

  Sound snapped back into my ears. Sound exploded.

  The riverbank I’d left was obliterated. Stones flew and rattled through tornado-force winds; the screams of Twisted Things rose shrieking against the winter chill; and everywhere, everywhere, I smelled burning.

  Heron dove after me onto the shattered shore, materializing in pieces against that forest sun: a blistered hand, a leg flailing for solid ground, shirttails flapping in the breeze. And after him, through the rain of feathers and lightning, came Thom, bent down against the bloody purple light.

  “I have to go back,” he croaked, and collapsed on the sand. “There’s another man in there.”

  “Where?” Heron asked, behind me, through the storm, and Thom’s jaw dropped.

  “You,” he said. “Godslayer. You’re the one with the knife.”

  “Yes,” Heron snapped. “Where is he?”

  Thom pointed. And Heron sprang into the stormwinds, through the rain of Twisted Things, into another world.

  I dropped John Balsam’s knife on the windblown, root-split stones. Wormed my arms under Thom’s shoulders and dragged him desperately away from the hole. He shook me off weakly. “Wait.”

  “We can’t—”

  “Have to,” he insisted, and then Heron emerged from the awful tear in the sky with a black-clad body, limp over his shoulder.

  Thom stumbled to his feet. I took his hand: a twinned mess of scrapes and blisters and burns. We stumbled through the death-lit night, through the destruction, with all hell at our heels.

  The orchard trees smoked under the rain of Twisted Things; we cleared their shadows just as the first flame licked free. We limped past the pens, rounded the corner to the house. “Marthe!” I shouted as we climbed the rise to the kitchen porch. “Marthe, it’s Thom, please!”

  She opened the kitchen door as the flames bloomed in our cherry trees, wild-haired, eyes full of reflected lightning. “What—” Marthe said, and stopped cold. Her arms unfolded from her chest and reached longingly. “Thomas?”

  Thomas Clarlund staggered up the steps he’d left so many months ago, into my sister’s arms.

  “We found him,” I gasped as I sagged onto the porch. A last bit of vanity. Before I put it away, became myself. Stopped telling stories tha
t weren’t true. “We did it. We brought him home.”

  Through the dirt, through the rough fabric of Marthe’s nightdress, his voice choked out, “Baby, baby—”

  She squeezed out a sob, her hands trembling, and then looked past me to Heron behind me and to the man he’d laid out like a carcass on the porch. “Hallie,” she said, “who is that?”

  Heron looked up—his mild eyes twisted with rage. “Yes, tell us who it is, Thomas.”

  “Heron—” I objected.

  Thom wiped his eyes, his bleary, sick eyes, and said, “That’s Asphodel Jones.”

  Behind me, rainbowing through the night, the smoke and screams and ash reached upward, and Roadstead Farm began to burn.

  THE QUIET PLACE

  twenty-two

  “HEAVE!” HERON CALLED, AND WATER BUCKETED OVER THE burning trees.

  Small green lizards, flushed by the smoke, squeaked and fled the orchard, and Joy and Sadie darted quick-limbed through the shadows and herded them into our knives. It was already a losing battle: thin tangles of web shone between our fence posts, growing thicker with every passing minute, and they were nothing to the monstrosities that stretched into the sky. Beyond the fields, Tyler’s nightmare tree shambled across the lane on fat roots, the points of its knotted horns bobbing dark against the moon.

  There were gods in the lakelands now, for real. There were monsters, and I had let them in.

  In my head, everything was still silent and calm. Bucket in the well, water to the upstairs basin, I recited with a coolness I had never felt before. Don’t give up. Keep walking.

  I’d run out of fear. I’d run out of fury. They would spit on my name from Windstown all the way to the old battlefields, but I’d made my choice there, on that shattered riverbank. My brother was finally back from the war.

  Now I just had to live with the consequences.

  I hauled clean water up the stairs to Marthe’s room, bucket after bucket, while the world burned.