An Inheritance of Ashes

by Leah Bobet

  I wiped my nose shakily. My fingers came away sticky with blood. The old city sat silent around me, dusty with destruction and smoke.

  “You’re still alive,” I whispered to myself encouragingly, like a good auntie would. I was almost to Windstown: I could see the barricade stretching above the rooftops, keeping out the rot. The militia had a door in it, always guarded, well-attended, for the nights they had to go out and repair the barricade or keep the ferals at bay. All I had to do was find it, and I’d be safe in the treed Windstown streets. Minutes from Mackenzie Green’s, or Prickett’s, or Alonso Pitts.

  I tiptoed toward the barricade, around corners and dead ends. It stretched stories high above me, a beacon, a testament to years of keeping civilization alive; keeping the wilderness and desolation out. And then I saw the latest impossible thing.

  There was a crack in the Windstown wall.

  The barricade that kept Windstown bright and safe gapped open, showing chair legs and bent metal within. I peered through the century-old hoardings and mortar dust. The slimmest sliver of light peeked all the way through.

  “We can’t spare a guard here,” a voice floated on its tail. “The fire brigade needs me. There’s smoke on Main Street.”

  “There’s smoke everywhere, dammit—” I heard, and that voice I recognized.

  I raised a fist and banged hard on the wall. “Johan? Johan Prickett?”

  The spat stopped abruptly. The wind whistled around me ominously. “Who’s there?” he asked. It was definitely Johan, Janelle’s other dad, tousle-haired and usually so very mild.

  “Johan?” I called. “It’s Hallie Hoffmann. I need to get in. Where’s the door?”

  The silence lengthened. “Ah, shit,” he said. “You need to get to Cooper Street. Where’s that on the—north, Hallie. Go north, two blocks. I’m going for the door, all right? We’re coming.”

  The voices faded into footsteps, and then there was nothing but wind and the rumbling sky. I scrambled against the rough base of the barricade and found north by starlight. It was impossible to count two blocks in the shattered ruins. They’ve left, an old shred of Papa said. They aren’t coming back.

  “Shut up,” I told him, and kept moving along the wall.

  Heartbeats, seconds, hours later I heard the raised voice: “Hallie?” It was Darnell Prickett, his rich innkeeper’s bellow. “Hallie, are you there?”

  “Darnell—” I started, joyfully. “Where are you? Where do I go?”

  “Hold on,” he said, and some ancient machinery creaked, tortured with time. A whole section of the wall buckled open slowly, dust and smoke shedding into the air behind it.

  Mackenzie Green poked her head through the opening and reached out both hands. “Child, how in the name of every god standing did you get out there?”

  “Mackenzie,” I said, almost sobbing with relief. “I came across the bridge. It finally broke. It’s gone.”

  Mackenzie’s eyes widened. “That’s what the sound was. Come on, quickly now,” she said, and pulled me through the gate into the safe, bright streets of Windstown.

  They were not as safe as I’d left them. Now the neat rows of redbrick houses had scars. Smoke rose over their shingles, fitful and dirty brown. The shouts of the Windstown fire brigade drifted up behind it: the sunset light had segued into the sooty glow of flames. They lit up paper signs plastered on the scarred concrete walls: row after row of John Balsam’s ink-drawn face, with MISSING scrawled atop it.

  “We have to get you inside,” Fatima Prickett said, and I gave up and let Janelle’s practical mother rub heat into my arms. She threw a blanket around my shoulders, and someone found a bottle of something stronger than plain tea. I swallowed what they gave me; it burned all the way down, but it was bracing. My belly squirmed.

  “There’s no time,” I gasped, and handed back the bottle. “There’s a hole into the Wicked God’s world, wide open, on the river.”

  “The Wicked God has a world—” Fatima started.

  “It came from somewhere else, with the Twisted Things—there’s no time. Our apple orchard’s gone, and the back field,” I said. “There’s a regiment headed this way on the high road.”

  Johan swore.

  Darnell and Fatima exchanged a dark look. “So that’s where the Twisted Things are coming from,” he said.

  “I need to talk to the council,” I said, feeling stronger now. “I need to talk to Pitts.”

  Mackenzie’s face shuttered. “Oh, Hallie. That’s not a good idea. They’re panicking up a storm in there.”

  “Mackenzie,” I said, and grabbed her sleeve. “We know how to stop it. We can close the hole and rescue everything, but we need Windstown. We need to pull together like a constellation—”

  She frowned.

  My old, proud instincts seized, and I shut my eyes. Pretended, gut-deep, that I was asking Nat or Tyler for a cup of tea, or the salt. Asking something simple, something small from someone who loved me, and was kind.

  “We need your help,” I said clearly, and swallowed hard.

  When I opened my eyes, Mackenzie was watching me, her lips pressed tight together. “All right,” she said. “I’ll take you to the council. I’ll take you up to Pitts.”

  twenty-seven

  THERE WAS A HOLE IN ALONSO PITTS’S PARLOR.

  The Twisted Things had been here too, and burned during the night. That wall of old-cities windows, his treasured wall of white roses, had melted down to the redbrick frame. Glass lay slopped and frozen on the waxed hardwood, dusted with winter frost. They’d nailed wooden curtains over the mangled ruin, but they didn’t keep out the cold. The Windstown Council met in their wool coats, with the lamps up high, and I shivered, standing before them.

  This time, they didn’t offer tea. Nobody could have stomached it.

  “How,” Alonso Pitts asked, “did you get in? There are guards on the harbor. They were supposed to detain all boats.”

  I bit down a reflexive, rising rage. This is why we never ask you for help, you awful man. With neighbors like these, you could drown in the river in September and not be missed until June.

  No, I told myself, as firm as stone. Don’t think like that. It’s thinking that way that left you all alone.

  “I ran the bridge,” I said, and tried to keep my voice strong. “It’s finally come down. I barely made it to shore.”

  The councilmen sucked in a collective breath. “We’re trapped against the barricade, then,” Thao Pa said softly, and ran a hand through his gray hair.

  “We’ve got the boats,” Karen Kim reminded him. But her hand tightened on the truncheon at her belt.

  “Not enough to evacuate the whole town,” Pa retorted, and nerves ran through the room like spiderweb strings.

  Panic, I thought. This was what it felt like: weapons and guard postings and hurried conferences in half-shattered rooms. The wind rattled the wooden hoarding against the window frame. “Councilors,” I said, “we’ve been working with the Chandlers. We think we can stop the Twisted Things, but please, we need your help.”

  Councilor Kim looked down, and I wasn’t sure she saw me. Her eyes wouldn’t focus on my bruised-up face. “We can’t send forces across the river. We’re barely holding Windstown together,” she said.

  The frustration rose up in me. Forget Tyler’s talk about they have to; he’d never fought Windstown Council. He didn’t understand how they really were, deep down: the litany of betrayal the council was and would always be.

  “We can stop it,” I said, my voice rising frantically. “We have to try. The war’s not over,” I argued, and Alonso Pitts scowled. “The war’s in my front yard, right across the river. And we can end it if you pull together and help.”

  Pitts’s face set into a furious mask. “The infamous Hoffmann temper. Did you want to slam my door again once you’re done telling us what we owe you?”

  I gritted my teeth. Spite or pride, Alonso Pitts?

  Pride’s the Hoffmann failing, James Blakely had
said, but even he didn’t understand it: The Hoffmann failing was rage, black and absolute. The rage that ate you by inches. The rage that turned you against your neighbors, against your children, made you alone.

  I breathed in and summoned, inside me, the quiet place: the constellation of my kinfolk and friends, my steady stars. “No, I don’t,” I said, soft and cool, “and—I’m sorry we slammed your door. I apologize.”

  “I’m sure you are now, since you want something from me after all.”

  Silence pooled and froze in that beauteous, ruined parlor. And then Mackenzie said, tiredly, “Alonso, put it away.”

  “I should put it away—”

  She held up a hand, and the iron authority she’d always held, her sunburned dignity, stopped his mouth cold. “She’s sixteen,” Mackenzie said. “You’re fifty-three. It’s time to be the adult.”

  “I didn’t start this, Mackenzie,” he said heatedly.

  “No,” she answered. “Cyril Hoffmann did. And Cyril Hoffmann is dead in the ground.”

  I flinched, and her hand drifted down to my shoulder, hesitated, and then patted it awkwardly. “I’m sorry, Hallie. I truly am.” She turned back to Mayor Pitts and said, “Cyril Hoffmann’s gone, and nobody was sorry to see him go. He hit his wife and ran his brother off. He treated his daughters like slaves, and this town did practically nothing to stop it. But he’s dead, Alonso. How long are you going to prove every nasty lie he fed his girls to keep them isolated enough to stay?”

  Suddenly my face was very hot; my ears buzzed like a Twisted Thing’s, burning, burning. My father, I thought. They are talking about my father like a liar, like a brute—

  The next thought rose and ate the last alive: They knew everything. They knew it all along.

  I’d had no secrets. I’d had no dignity to protect. All of Windstown had known what went on in the Hoffmann house, and our whole life since—Papa’s will, our struggles, six years of isolation and silence—had just been another of Papa’s traps.

  I fought the urge to fly through the door and run: north, south, anywhere. Take to the highways. Never come back. No one in that room would meet my eye. No one but Mackenzie Green.

  “We tried to help them,” Mayor Pitts managed, avoiding my anguished gaze. “We offered land managers to look over the accounts, to take them into town where they could have proper adults about. It wasn’t wanted. Everything I offered came up against no.”

  “That”—I choked up, broken apart, breaking—“wasn’t help.”

  Mackenzie held up her hand again before he could say a word.

  My throat clogged. I struggled to push the words free, to put into the world something as fundamental as bread. “Tyler Blakely brought me a cup of tea the other day,” I said, and the words hung there uselessly.

  “Go on, child,” Mackenzie said softly.

  “It was the best thing he could’ve done,” I said. “Because he wanted to help me, to give me something. And he asked what I wanted him to do.”

  And then my head came up, because I had it. I had the root of the trouble between Windstown and Roadstead Farm. “If you wanted to help Marthe and me, you should have asked us. You decided what help was, or wasn’t, every time. Your help was never what we really needed,” I finished, “and the price was always too high.”

  I looked up at Mayor Alonso Pitts, and he met my eyes with a growing remorse. “We have been doing our best with a bad situation, and sometimes you’ve got to accept that we’ve lived a little longer, and know a few more things—”

  I fought to keep my hands from balling into fists. “You do, but it doesn’t matter if it’s not what we need.”

  Alonso Pitts stared at me and then rested one hand on his ruined wooden mantel. His fingers rubbed its burn-scarred polish: a remnant of the old-cities world he clung to so stubbornly. Never coming back, I thought. It was gone, like so many other things in the lakelands this wintertime.

  “Halfrida,” he said, halting, Mayor Hellfire doused and wilted away. “What is it you need?”

  Mackenzie’s hand on my shoulder relaxed fractionally. It was still a challenge, Pitts still daring me to prove him wrong. But it didn’t matter now: I had a niece now, and that farm would be hers. She needed a home to grow up in. A garden to plant. A river to love.

  “There’s a hole to the Wicked God’s world on the riverbank,” I said. “It’ll heal itself, but not for a little while, not soon enough to stop the Twisted Things from coming or the Great Army from quarantining Roadstead Farm, Lakewood, and Windstown, too.”

  Councilor Haddad’s eyebrows skyrocketed. “Alonso—”

  And Mayor Pitts did the impossible: he chopped his hand across the air, leaned in closer to me, and said, “Not now.”

  I swallowed, thoughts flying. “That was how the war ended at John’s Creek. Asphodel Jones and his irregulars made a hole between the worlds there, big enough for the Wicked God to get through—and get stuck, and burn so hot it burned the life out of the land and created the Great Dust. And when John Balsam opened that hole wider, it fell back in and died. It plugged the hole with its body, tight enough to seal the breach until the worlds could mend.”

  “How do you know all this?” Thao Pa asked. I dug my fingernails into my hands and told my last, most necessary lie.

  “From Ada Chandler. From my hired man, and from my brother,” I said, and thought—so I could at least think the truth—from Asphodel Jones.

  Darnell Prickett startled. “Thom’s home?”

  “He fell through the hole at John’s Creek, and he still walked all the way home,” I said, tearing up again and, for once, not ashamed of it. “All the way home in the Wicked God’s world. When the hole opened on our riverbank, he came out. But now we need to plug it with something so big that nothing can come out from the other side.”

  “How big are you thinking?” Mackenzie Green asked.

  I took a breath. “Beast Island. Ada says it has to be stuff from the other world, stuff that belongs there, that’s acidic. Anything of ours will just burn away. But if we push Beast Island in there, we have a chance. We need all the boats,” I said, and my voice trembled with fear and desperation. With hope. “And we need rope.”

  There were too many faces to watch now. There were too many sounds in my ears. I focused on Alonso Pitts, his red-cheeked face, and hoped.

  “When?” he asked, shaken.

  I swallowed, giddy. “Tonight.”

  The trip back from Windstown was a haze of ice and water. Mackenzie Green loaded me into the smallest boat in the Windstown fleet, the one that could be best spared from the hasty drive to harness Beast Island with the strongest rope in Windstown. The Thaos took the oars. They escorted me, slowly, from shore to shore by lantern light. I sat in the back of the rowboat as we inched around dead foxes and drowned Twisted Things, and I felt bruises bloom on my kneecaps, my legs, my bad hand.

  From the water, I could see the tear between worlds: a shimmering haze of heat that rose above the winter air. It was massive. It hung low in the sky over the gray river and turned it green and white with summer flowers.

  Hang couldn’t stop staring. His hands stilled on the oars. “Beast Island going to be big enough?”

  I don’t know, I thought, stunned. I don’t know.

  At the other oar, his sister shook her head. “Focus,” she said, and flicked a struggling cockroach-mouse away with the blade of her wooden oar.

  The desolation was worse on our own shore: vines choked the shallows and snarled the corpses of winter pike and splayed-out river crabs. I spied the Blakely dock in the distance, a finger of hardy wood still standing in the desolate night. “There,” I said. “I can get off there and walk in.” They steered me to it, and I pulled myself to my wobbly feet.

  “Thank you,” I breathed, and hit the Blakely dock running. “Come for first light!”

  “Right,” Hang said, and cast off nervously. “We’ll be there.”

  I put my head down, picked through the fields, and ra
n.

  There was light in our farmhouse, even this late—the light of a good fire, and warm bread, and someone reading aloud in the parlor. I stopped at the doorstep and held my breath for just a moment. Heard the low murmur of voices and Hazel’s mumbled cry, the pick of a finger against a ukulele string.

  A home, I thought wonderingly, and burst into the kitchen, into Marthe’s and Heron’s shocked arms. “They’ll come,” I said, and fell into the closest chair, dripping with sweat, stinking, safe. “They’re bringing Beast Island. They’re coming.”

  We felt the noise before we heard it: a cringing shudder in the ground, a rhythmic banging. Marthe’s hand fell to Hazel’s delicate skull. “What is that?” she asked, and I slipped out to the porch.

  You could see all the land around the river from the house my great-grandparents built at Roadstead Farm; you could see all the way to the falling stars. Down the highway, I saw a mass of small bodies, dark against the snow line, moving like river waves. I squinted. “What’s that?”

  Behind me, Heron sighed.

  “The regiment’s here,” he said, and we stood together to watch them march toward us, endless soldiers, all in rows. The sky glittered above them, smoke and diffuse moonlight, and somewhere in the dying fields the first star winked out in the sky.

  twenty-eight

  THERE WERE OLD BOARDS IN THE HAY BARN, FOR A ROLLING chicken coop we’d dreamed up three years past and never built. We dragged them out in the light of our perpetually burning fields and nailed the house windows shut. There might not be broken glass, I thought as I held them steady for Nat’s hammer. There might not be walls to hold it, soon. It didn’t matter. If we failed, and the regiment scorched our land clean, perhaps we could save the house, the outbuildings. Perhaps Hazel could return here when the land came back, someday.

  Marthe sat in the kitchen, Hazel cradled in her lap, surrounded by four generations of our family’s striving. We blocked the smoky light, board by careful board. Our most treasured things—Mama’s cookbooks, the rose teacups—faded under the dim brown of lumber.