An Inheritance of Ashes by Leah Bobet Page A

taller than me, her dark arms hard with muscle and her black hair close cut in tight, dense curls.
    â€œAda,” I said awkwardly. She anatomized me with a look; cataloged my own changes in seconds. The practical nod that was her verdict was Ada to the core: identify, recognize, and dismiss everything that didn’t interest her.
    â€œYou’ve got a Twisted Thing, then?” she said, and leaned in with an intensity I remembered all too well.
    â€œYeah,” I blurted. Not being sure what to do with Ada Chandler was a familiar, comforting feeling. “Yesterday. Just one.”
    Ada nodded, sharp as a rice merchant. “That fits. The nest we found yesterday was a new one—none of the specimens we caught this summer lived past two weeks. Their burns killed them off, and they disintegrated after, but this little guy’s still nice and fresh.”
    â€œCaught?” I said, scandalized. “You kept them?”
    Ada’s bright eyes narrowed. “Of course we kept them. There’s no way to fight something you don’t
understand.
”
    A horrid image flashed across my mind’s eye: twisted birds and lizards, centipedes as long as my arm, twined and floating in jars like Marthe’s canned carrots. I pushed the jar back at Ada. The lizard bumped against the glass, and Ada took it like I’d cradle a sick goat.
    â€œYou’re taking an awful risk,” I said softly. There were punishments for harboring now, ever since Asphodel Jones, the Wicked God’s general and living prophet, and his irregulars scattered into the hills above John’s Creek. The Great Army found those who harbored Jones’s men or failed to rid their lands of Twisted Things, and hanging was just the favorite death. There were dim rumors of others, less kind and uglier still. Stories had reached even our lonely farm of the swift blade of a regimental trial.
    â€œWell, you can’t harbor dead things,” Ada said with a practical shrug. “Think of it as part of the war effort.”
    Heron’s brown face took on a sickly tinge. “How long since you last saw a nest, before yesterday?”
    Ada settled thoughtfully onto her heels. “They were gone for weeks. Since August, maybe; they died out, the first time, when the soldiers came home. This little mischief arrived yesterday.”
    The courteous light in Heron’s eyes snuffed out. “Miss, I’ll help settle the cargo,” he said, and strode back down the pier.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with him?” Ada asked, much too keen.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said before it caught up to me: I’d watched Heron arrive on the black-paved high road. The road that came from the old city, where the Chandlers studied its ruins. He’d been there, and he’d been running. Bearing John Balsam’s knife, the relic that saved the world. The relic nobody wanted on their land.
    â€œTell us if you find any more of them?” I asked, stuttery and distracted.
    â€œOf course,” Rami said, and shook my hand. I hurried down to the rowboat. It rode lower in the water with the weight of our supplies, its floor strewn with packages tangled in sacking.
    â€œWe’re ready?” I asked nobody. Tyler avoided my eyes. He tucked his bad leg in and nodded.
    We cast off into the river under a cold sun, slipping mockingly behind the burnt-out ruins of skyscrapers. “Row fast,” I said once we were away from the shoreline, Windstown receding into smears and dots behind us.
    Heron bent over his oars, wooden, hidden.
    You and I,
I resolved grimly,
are going to talk.

nine
    WE REACHED THE RIVERBANK AT TWILIGHT.
    The dock loomed out of the evening, looking half abandoned after the bright glass and gardens of Windstown. I fumbled the mooring rope around the post. The world was already doused in evening gray, too dark to see our chimney smoke across the distant fields.
    â€œStrike a light?” I asked, and