An Inheritance of Ashes by Leah Bobet Page B

took the dockside lantern off its hook. “I’ll get the wheelbarrow; you unload the boat.”
    â€œMiss,” Heron muttered. He’d been withdrawn since we’d set sail. I shoved the lantern into his hands and hurried down the dock to the orchard, away from Tyler and Heron’s moods, into delicious privacy.
    Roadstead Farm’s paths were written in the folds of my skin; they were memorized in my tendons and bones. I picked my way up the orchard track, dodging roots and stones by memory, through sleeping apple trees that loomed like starless gulps of night. I closed my eyes and drank in the rustle of wind on branches, the smell of chilled soil in the fields.
Home,
I thought gratefully; aimed it defiantly across the river at the ponderous Pitts house.
Home
. My stomach flooded with sick tension at even the memory of Pitts glaring down his nose at us, so effortlessly ready to swat our whole lives away.
    The nausea curled around a new thought:
that knife.
Heron had said it was just steel and leather, unmagical, inert.
Steel and leather he doesn’t want me—or anyone—to touch
. There was something wrong between that knife and Heron, something that didn’t sum to whole numbers. A secret.
    I was already full into the argument with him in my head when my foot landed on something round and
wrong.
    I went down with a shriek in the cold dirt path.
Twisted Thing,
I thought, blind and frightened, and scrambled backward. The night before me stayed silent. Behind me, it exploded with footsteps. “Hallie?” Tyler called, his voice muffled against nothing at all.
    I listened hard for motion—the flap of wings or the stalk of feral dogs—but all I heard was the river, hushed with distance even though I knew it was just over the rise. I drew in a breath to shout back, call for Tyler, and I choked. The air was as thin as flour.
    The coughs clawed at my throat, racking, grating.
But the feather came out of my hand,
I thought, and wrapped both arms around my belly. It couldn’t be another Twisted Thing, or a fragment: no part of me
hurt
that much. Tyler shouted again, and then Heron.
    Heron had grabbed my arms, before, and pulled me
back.
    I clawed backward, coughing, over roots and hillocks: back out of the airlessness where I’d fallen. My hand closed on something cold and solid as I scrambled back down toward the beach—a round river stone, still damp from the water, trailing slimy water weed. And then another, and another.
    Marthe,
I thought with a thrill of fear—and joy.
She left a note.
Marthe and I had written notes in twigs or pebbles when we were younger, when there was danger. We’d left warnings for each other when we couldn’t speak aloud. She was talking to me again.
    I looked up toward the chimney. In the distance, the house was dark.
    Something is wrong.
    I let the stone go, and it clacked against another rock, the flat kind Thom had taught me to skip as a child. River water seeped through Nat’s gloves as I ran my fingers over heaps and piles of stones, disgorged wetly all around me, trying to read their jagged message.
    Sparks lit the night:
the lantern.
It wobbled wildly along the beach, Heron and Tyler’s footsteps slamming across the sand behind it. Heron shoved into the road, his fists clenched around a piece of driftwood. Tyler stumbled up beside him. The dockside lantern swung crazily in his hand, and its light smeared the dark trees gray, finally lighting the ground under my hands. “Hallie, what—” Tyler started, and confused horror spread across his face.
    â€œOh,” Heron said, small and fearstruck.
    I pushed to my feet and looked down.
    The path to the farmstead was choked with drowned stones. I’d been sitting sprawled between them, inside a giant stone-hewn scream. The rocks I’d touched, the rocks I’d thrown formed the curve of a message written too large:
WE’RE STUCK HERE. WE’RE DYING.