An Inheritance of Ashes by Leah Bobet

Author:Leah Bobet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

sixteen

IT WAS A TENSE AND SILENT AFTERNOON. I TAPPED A DOUBLE dozen shingles onto the poultry barn, filled the lye barrel with ash and snowmelt so we could finally make soap, burned twenty-seven Twisted Things to dust down by the river dock, and Tyler still didn’t return. I worked like a proper farm girl, from light ’til dusk, and it still didn’t block the quiet out of my ears.

A way of life becomes normal so quickly. I’d forgotten how lonely the farm was without Tyler here; without Heron just around the corner, whistling low. Fifty acres was a lot of land, much too much for just two people to live on. Much too desolate and cold.

Supper was even tenser. Marthe was angry—real anger, for the first time since the soldiers arrived—and her rage splashed out across the kitchen, into the air. The goat sausage drying on the rafters had a squeezed and vicious look, and she pushed pickled beets across her plate in short, sharp shoves. I kept quiet, kept from calling her rage my way, snuck glances at the windowpanes and listened for Tyler’s step. Marthe gave up on the beets and shoved her plate away. I glanced at it, awkward. There was nothing to say.

I took my empty plate to the basin, dropped it in. “I’m going to check for Twisted Things,” I said, and lifted my coat off the hook.

Her eyes veiled with suspicion: hard, mean, and hurt. “I swear,” I added, small. “Just to the poultry barn and the river. No secrets.”

“You still haven’t told me why Heron left,” she said. I swallowed, but she just waited: a fisherman’s sort of patience, the kind with a hook pushed through your lip.

“Please don’t make me make things up,” I blurted desperately.

“Nobody makes you,” my sister said, flat and even. “You tell people the truth or you don’t.”

I bit my lip. Marthe winced behind her long bangs and put a hand on her belly.

“You okay?” I asked immediately.

“It’s just the baby kicking,” she said, and lifted a baleful brow. “You can’t change the subject like that.”

My stomach knotted. “Do you need me to get something, or—”

She stared at me skeptically. “I’m pregnant, Hallie. Not dead.”

You either tell the truth or you don’t, I thought, and sucked in a breath. I didn’t even know where I’d begin anymore; I couldn’t begin. I could see only one way out of Marthe’s carefully laid trap, and it was the worst thing I’d ever done, ever.

I looked straight at Marthe’s belly and—deliberately—flinched.

Her eyes opened wider—all the way. “Hallie, talk to me.”

“What Cal Blakely said,” I said, and took care to make my voice stumble. Her eyebrows rose. “About the baby. About upsetting it, and—”

Marthe darkened like a storm cloud. “That is an absolute stupid fairy tale,” she said. “Uroma was pregnant with Opa while the old cities were falling, and she spent all day building the house and all night chasing bandits off our land. It takes more to lose a baby than this.

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