An Inheritance of Ashes by Leah Bobet Read Free Book Online Page A

just like Marthe if they saw me
truly:
Needy. Messy. Frightened.
Weak.
    â€œHey,” Nat said. I looked up, and there were tear tracks on her face: thick ones beneath her fierce eyes. She put a hand on my shoulder, and I shuddered free. Nat’s fire retreated behind her eyes. “Tyler,” she said. “Bandages.”
    Tyler passed the faded bandages without a word.
    I wiped my nose on my shirttail—
forget laundry, and forget propriety too
. Anything to get the disemboweled strings of my emotions back into my belly. Nat’s touch came again, through the cotton fabric, and Tyler’s veiled eyes stared at us and then fled past to Heron’s jumbled belongings. Tyler was harder to read now, without the color in his eyes. The two darting green blotches in his left eye, the three in his right were as good as a beekeeper’s mask.
    â€œWe should burn this,” he said, and shoved the wicker basket. It was blackening slowly, like the first frost over the fields.
    Nat’s scowl deepened. “Right.” She snugged the bandage tight where my thumb met my palm. The pressure gave me something besides my own shame to think about. I almost wept again for the gift of
normal
pain. I inspected my tender, wrapped-up hand: still red, the wound seeping, the veins of infection already gone. “So fast,” I murmured.
    Tyler got painfully to one knee. His balance wavered. I bit my lip hard. “It’s like that with the Twisted Things,” he said, out of breath. “Once they’re gone, you heal fast.”
    If you heal,
I filled in silently, and didn’t let myself shiver again.
    I braced myself on the red brocade stool and got up to my knees. My legs were dangerously wobbly. The muscles above my knees felt like an earthquake each. I pressed down on the stool, and rotten old-cities stuffing gave beneath my palm—around something lumpy, ungiving, and hard.
    Something that was not supposed to be there.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” Tyler asked.
    I prodded at the stuffing. Something was hidden in the stool’s ancient cushion, and I hadn’t put it there. I dug two fingers into the hole, pried through the yellowed wool in layers and chunks, and brushed something as cold as the January trees.
    The shock of it went up my fingers, into my palm. I jerked it out and held it up to the light: a bundle of bunched-up leather wrapped around metal a handspan long. A ridge of old iron peeked out the top and faded into a mess of what might have once been leather binding. The shreds remaining were darkened and slick with sweat, in patterns that spoke of one owner, one hand.
    I unwrapped it and dropped the leather strips to the floor. It was a hilt: the iron and leather pommel of the strangest hunting knife I’d ever seen.
    The hilt was twisted, nearly wrenched off the line of the scarred-up metal blade. The blade swept down from it in a spiral, a hot-forged ringlet curl. I turned it with two careful fingers. Despite the nicks and use marks, the knife’s blade shone like new forging.
    â€œYou couldn’t cut a thing with this.” I touched a finger to the edge. “But it’s sharp.”
    Nat leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “Who sharpens a knife you can’t use for anything?”
    â€œWho sharpens a knife you can’t sheathe?” I said. “Unless you carry around a stool.”
    â€œOh, God,” Tyler said, sudden and strangled, and he slumped against the wall.
    â€œWhat?” Nat whirled. “What is it?”
    â€œIt’s mine,” came another voice, quietly, from the doorway, and this one I knew without seeing. Nat paled. I turned slowly to face long, lean Heron, standing silhouetted on the smokehouse step.
    â€œMiss,” he said, perfectly without emotion, “please don’t touch that thing.”
    My throat prickled, and my cheeks: hot and ashamed. “We weren’t looking to go through your