An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

  Marthe perched on the edge of her bed, wiping dirt and blood from Thom’s blistered face. She was crying silently, distractedly as he emerged: skull-thin, the twist of his mouth bitter, his dark brown skin ashy with illness. His good shirt hung loose on him, torn to shreds, half the buttons just stumps of brown thread. The rest glowed, scratched and dust-stained: a veteran’s polished pearl. I recognized him less and less with every bucket of dirty water I emptied off the porch.

  “What day is it?” he croaked, and shrugged off Marthe’s dabbing cloth.

  “It’s the third of December,” Marthe said. “Winter’s come in.”

  There was no sound in the room but his distorted breathing. “Did I make it in time?”

  A curious look came over Marthe’s face, and she shuddered down to her toes. “Just in time,” she said, like an afterthought. “Just.”

  Thom drew a harsh breath, let it out, and sank relieved into the nest of rucked-up sheets. I put down the bucket, mouth open. “Marthe—”

  “I’m pregnant, not dead,” she said, fainter now. “The contractions aren’t even regular yet.”

  She pressed a hand to her dress, her wet-stained dress, and I finally realized it wasn’t from spilled well water. There was fluid seeping through it onto the rug, down her calves. The baby was coming. The baby was here.

  “Marthe—” I whispered, and ran down the hall to Papa’s old room.

  We hadn’t used it since his passing—just closed the door and left it closed, as if we might board his ghost away. The room was a swim of fabric: moth-eaten dust sheets and a pile of bandages heaped high on the chestnut rocker Mama had nursed us in. Between them lay the Wicked God’s prophet, half stripped and unconscious, on the ruins of my parents’ bed.

  James and Cal Blakely stood in the far corner, clinging tight to each other’s hands. Mrs. Blakely paced past them, up and down the length of the bed. No one had cleaned Asphodel Jones’s wounds. He seeped under the scrutiny of three shaken, fear-lined faces.

  “Marthe’s water broke,” I whispered. Afraid to speak lest that man wake up.

  Round, homey Eglantine Blakely’s eyebrows shot up. “She’s early.”

  I wrapped both arms around my rib cage. I didn’t know what to say.

  Mrs. Blakely took a deep breath and smoothed her dress. “All right. We’ll do this in the washroom. I need boiled water, a cushion, and all the clean towels you have.”

  “Ma’am,” I said automatically.

  She strode to the dusty threshold, and hesitated. “Listen here, the both of you,” she said. “Don’t you do the fool thing you’re thinking once my back is turned.”

  “Eglantine—” James said, agonized.

  “Don’t make yourself a murderer, Jim Blakely. Not for him.” James flushed, and his sister-in-law disappeared down the hallway and rapped hard on Marthe’s door.

  James and Callum looked at each other, and their fingers twined tight. “We need to set a guard,” James said low. “He’ll wake up. We have to know what to do when he does.”

  A Twisted Thing clattered against the window and smeared down the pane. Callum, his eyes dark-circled, pulled shut the blinds.

  “Jim, I can’t do this,” he said simply.

  James put his head in his hands. “I know.”

  The Wicked God’s prophet bled onto Papa’s sheets, and I fled.

  Nat shoved through the door, wild-haired and soot-marked, just as I put the kettle on the stove. She took water straight from the dipper and drank it down, down, down.

  “How’s it look out there?” I asked her. The firelight made her face narrower, sharper: a study in fatigue and fear.

  “They got one of the kid goats. I’ve moved your animals indoors. We couldn’t save the orchard if we wanted to save the goats.” She coughed and shook her head. “They’re pouring into the brush now. The little monsters know I can’t reach them there. Tyler’s gone for the Chandlers, but they just keep coming.”

  This is how it started at John’s Creek, I realized. Slow, until it overran you. I met her bleak gaze. It looks, I read there, bad.

  “Heron won’t tell me what happened,” she said.

  The calm of that green, rain-soaked place peeled off me like a blister.

  I don’t know, bubbled up to my lips: the safe answer. The answer that would keep Nat’s sympathy on my side, smooth it all out for the days to come. Three little words of pretend ignorance in the ways of a god a whole army couldn’t understand.

  It’d be another secret to carry—forever. A dead thing, rotten and feathered, poisoning the soil of my oldest friendship.

  I shoved another stick into the stove and stirred the flame. Stop lying to yourself, I thought savagely. You made your choice. Face the consequences.

  “Nat,” I said—mumbled into the stove, and took a deep breath—“I couldn’t wait.”

  I felt her silence. Felt her draw back from me. “What?”

  “I couldn’t wait,” I said, and adjusted the kettle on the stove top. “Heron was leaving. The army’s on its way. I dug up the knife and cut the hole open to get Thom back.”

  This was how the truth hung in the air: clean, like a falling glass, for a long moment before everything shattered.

  “Good God, Hallie,” Nat finally said. “How could you—look at me, dammit!”

  I turned around, slowly, and met her appalled eyes.

  I don’t know what she saw in me, but her cheeks flushed even redder. “You let them in.”

  The first twinge of panic shook my chest. “I’m sorry, Nat—”

  “No, you’re not! Did you even think? Monsters don’t stop at fencelines, Hallie. Did you think about us or the Masons or the Chandlers? Did you think about our sheep? About any of the people who haven’t already decided they’re going to walk away?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You did,” she cut in. “You’ve had a bag packed for eight years, ready to blow out of here. I know where it is.”

  The kettle boiled. I silenced its thin scream with a flip of the whistle spout. Nat’s face was furious red; she looked as lost as a child. “This is just like you,” she whispered. “Walk away, mope and sulk, do whatever you damn well please because you’re convinced there’s no winning anyway. It doesn’t matter who it hurts. It’s always you and just you.”

  I sucked in a breath. “Nat, no, I never—”

  Nat put the dipper back in the barrel. “I’m not going to lie for you this time.”

  I shook my head, silently. No.

  She pulled her hair back—one last, fruitless frustration—and stomped out through the kitchen door.

  I stared after her until the kettle rattled from the sheer force of the steam. Picked it up and poured the hot water into my bucket. The consequences are that you might lose your best friend’s love.

  Tears squeezed out the corners of my eyes. “Turn around,” I muttered savagely. “Face it. You made a choice.”

  Just a morning ago, a mere day, Nat had given me the key: You want forgiveness, get downstairs and start making some amends. Fix it. Mend it.

  Turn around.

  I swallowed, hard. Not for gratitude, and not to prove something to the world or Alonso Pitts or my sister; not to keep people from leaving me, or to strike a blow in the endless battle in my head over whether I got to leave or stay, I had to fix what I’d broken so horribly.

  I had to close that hole on the riverside. I had to save Windstown, and the lakelands, and Roadstead Farm.

  “Start with chores,” I told myself: Marthe’s voice in miniature. And carried water up the stairs, one step at a time.

  twenty-three

  SUN STAINED THE ROOFTOPS BY THE TIME THE CHANDLERS arrived: bright, watery daylight filtered through ash gray. I led them to the riverbank through a damaged, changed world.

  Branches were down all over the orchard, seared into black charcoal. The fields were sickly spotted, stained with burns and churned mud; they rustled ominously as we passed. Past them, the hay bar
n sang its rattling hymns. Tin shingles clattered, leaflike, to the ground. I veered away from it and the river into the bare yard, looking for anything left unscathed.

  Heron was replacing blackened shingles on the poultry barn. He’d tied Sadie’s lead to an old post outside it, and she prowled back and forth, restless with the scent of Twisted Things. “She’ll terrify the chickens,” I said.

  “Too late.” He readied a nail. His fingernails were blackened with bruises and soot. “How’s your sister?”

  “Still pushing,” I said fretfully. They’d sent me for water, for towels and cushions, for broth, for honey so James and Cal could treat Thom’s burns. I’d brought it all, with Marthe’s exhausted moans beating at my ears, and then Eglantine Blakely had tossed me, unceremoniously, outside.

  I leaned, tired and beaten, against the barn wall. “You know there’s no point in fixing that roof right now.”

  “Just let me do this for you,” he said, and buried another nail deep. The chickens muttered on the other side of the wall, as normal as Marthe in the morning, putting fresh cream into my tea.

  Sudden, grateful tears stung my smoke-red eyes. “Do something else for me then?” I asked around the lump in my throat. “Help me guard Asphodel Jones.”

  Heron’s fingers hesitated in the nail pouch at his belt. “I told you I don’t know how to fight gods and prophets—”

  I held up a hand. “I’m not asking John Balsam,” I said, and scrubbed my eyes. “Heron, I’m asking you. And besides, I know you still have June Chandler’s gun.”

  Heron flushed. “Hallie, that’s too much to ask.” Beneath his three-days’ beard, his Adam’s apple rose and fell. “I have never hated anyone like I hate that man.”

  “I know,” I said, remembering the flat death in his eyes as he’d dug the knife’s thin grave. “But I don’t want him near Marthe when he wakes up. I don’t want him near anyone, and we can’t let him loose. There has to be a trial, something, when the army comes.”

  John Balsam—God-killer, cheesemaker—tapped in another nail. “They’ll hang him, most likely. If he’s lucky. Drawing and quartering was also talked about.”

  I squirmed in my sopping boots. “As long as it’s just. As long as it’s done by law.”

  Heron squinted down at me. “As long as it’s not by our hands, or as long as you’re not your father?”

  “Who told you that?” I snapped.

  He shrugged. “You did. In all the corners of what you didn’t say.”

  I looked away, down at the neat pattern of fresh shingles on the roof.

  “Where are we taking him?” Heron asked, and put the hammer down.

  My mouth curved, a grim sliver. “Where else? The smokehouse.”

  No one had dared, yet, to put a hand on the sleeping Asphodel Jones. James and Callum lingered near the doorway, eyes averted, as Heron appraised the body of the prophet of the Wicked God.

  Papa’s old sheet had stuck to his blisters where they wept and seeped. Heron tugged the cloth gently and frowned. “We have to take it with us. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not,” I said, and rolled down my sleeves so my skin wouldn’t touch his skin.

  “Hold the door for us,” James said neutrally, and Cal turned away as I took Jones’s wrapped feet. James shouldered a torso so emaciated it made me want to cry. Heron cradled the prophet’s head, lamb-fragile, breathing shallow, and we steered him awkwardly down the stairs, past the gruff sounds of Marthe’s labor; past the rustle of bandage cotton held against Thom’s wounds. The sheet trailed under him, a fluttering, living shroud, through the kitchen and out the porch door.

  Jones shuddered as we pushed outside into the frost. Heron’s tight expression tightened further. “Keep up the pace.”

  “I’m trying,” I muttered, and we waddled to the abandoned smokehouse.

  “I’ll light a fire,” Heron said once we’d laid Jones on the flagstones and James, disapproving and silent, had departed. The small stove had gone cold in the days Heron had spent hiding. He brushed ash out of the woodbox. “What do we do with him?”

  I don’t know, I thought, and sat back on my heels at Asphodel Jones’s side. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting from his face: dastardly eyes, a pointed chin, a classic villain out of Windstown summertime theater. Asphodel Jones was a plain, sickly man, his skin leathered rough from war and a lifetime in the sun; short brown hair threaded with gray over drooping, self-satisfied eyes. He looked more like a sleepy village cooper than a prophet—the kind of man who fed pigeons outside the Windstown coffee shops.

  “He’s normal,” I said, surprised.

  Heron snorted at the stove. “He slit a dozen throats a night and wiped out a whole town. There’s nothing normal about that.”

  I rolled up the tattered sleeves of his coat. Here and there, an uneven button glinted in the foggy light. Army buttons, I realized. The knots were split and fumbling. Brown thread raveled beneath them, mismatched on a shirt that had once been deep green. I counted the buttons on my fingers, then counted the buttons we’d peeled off Thom’s shredded shirt. They’re Thom’s.

  I dropped his sleeve. “Why would Thom bring him here?”

  Heron caught a spark in tinder. His dark look came clear in the thin flame. “That’s a question I’m looking forward to asking your brother.”

  What do we do with him? circled behind my exhausted eyes—and came back with an answer. “Heron?” I asked softly. “How much do you think Jones knows?”

  Heron’s eyebrows went up, surprised—considering—and then Asphodel Jones’s basset-hound face contracted, and he shivered. “Heron,” I said, tremulous, and the Wicked God’s prophet opened his bloodshot eyes and found, with them, my face.

  “Don’t try anything,” I said.

  The Wicked God’s prophet coughed wetly against the stones my great-grandfather had laid. “What could I try?” he rasped. I looked away. It sounded foolish. He couldn’t even walk.

  “He needs water,” Heron said grudgingly. “It’s still murder if we let him die.”

  Shallow breath hissed out through Jones’s broken teeth. “You.”

  Heron pulled himself to his feet. “Asphodel Jones.”

  The look that passed between them was drowned songbirds, their feathers raggled with river water. There was something old and bad in that space; something soaked with the dust of the broken southlands, as wide as the bones of a killed god. Utterly unbelonging in the old stones of my smokehouse; in the ever-damp lakelands soil, where there had never been a war.

  Jones twitched in his cotton shroud. “Look at me. You must be absolutely thrilled.”

  Heron looked down at him, hands shoved into his worn pants pockets. “No,” he said evenly. “You’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  The defiant lines around Jones’s squint loosened with surprise. “Well, then. What do you want?” he asked after a moment.

  Heron bowed his head. “That’s up to her,” and I startled against the smokehouse wall. “It’s her farm.”

  Jones turned toward me slowly. His eyes flickered, uncertain, for a moment before he wiped them as blank as the grave. “Well?”

  I wished I had another step to back up. Not from the menace of a man who had brought down a town, but to get away from the calm despair of his gaze. I knew what to do with Asphodel Jones, and it was the biggest gamble I’d ever taken in my life. “I want your help,” I stammered. “You know about the Wicked God’s world, and I want to know all of it. Every last detail.”

  His face clouded over: a storm of loss, pain, and wistful grief. “Don’t call Him wicked,” he said simply. “He had a name. A good name.”

  My curiosity caught. “He did?”

  Jones met my eye. “You’re a heathen, young miss. That’s sacred knowledge. I’m not telling you that.”

  I swallowed. I was not a general. I was not cut out for negotiating with prophets and killers.

  “Don’t change the subject. You talk—honestly, mind�
��about how the way to the God’s world was opened, and how we can close it again, and you’ll have food, water, the best medicine we have.”

  “But not my freedom,” he said.

  I shook my head. “The Great Army’s coming. They want to quarantine our land. They’ll be here inside two days with a full regiment.”

  Jones propped himself up on a weak elbow. “You’re hoping to give them me instead.”

  “You did murder,” Heron broke in, a little too fast and harsh. “You were never going to get away from them. If anyone put your head in the noose, it was you.”

  The Wicked God’s prophet raised one grayed brow. “I suppose that’s true,” he said, and sized me up, frankly, from the flagstones. “I’ll die by lynching if I cooperate. And if I don’t?”

  Papa’s ghost laughed. I shrank back into the dark.

  Heron shuffled closer, until he loomed above that scarecrow man. “I’ll put you back,” he rumbled.

  Jones flinched. “You wouldn’t go in there.”

  “I already did,” Heron said quietly. “To bring you out.”

  Jones’s eyes widened to the whites. “You?”

  Heron shrugged. “Me.”

  Asphodel Jones, the Wicked God’s dark prophet, closed his eyes on the smokehouse floor and barked a hollow laugh. “Of all the irony,” he said softly. “Of all the nasty cosmic jokes.” His chuckles bounced off the old stone walls. At the right angle, they sounded like sobs.

  “You have a deal, John Balsam,” he said when he could breathe again. “Food, water, medicine, and I’ll give you my confession. I know my own price.”

  I let out a breath and nodded, weak with relief. “Deal.”

  “Deal,” Heron rumbled quietly from where the stove had begun to burn. “Don’t make trouble, or I’ll bury you to the neck in that forest floor.”

  “I do not doubt it,” Asphodel Jones said softly, and I dipped a rag in the water bucket to clean the most wanted man in the land’s bloodied wounds.

  There were three voices in the washroom when I came back into the house for provisions: Marthe’s gritted one, Eglantine’s, and something high and sharp and utterly new. I swallowed a rush of feeling: joy, and fear, and guilt. I couldn’t go up there. My hands felt filthy with the skin of the Wicked God’s prophet, and I had no excuse, nothing to give.