Free An Inheritance of Ashes by Leah Bobet

kitchen chairs and fall coats, there was no way to be sure.
    Courtesy dictated that you walked a visitor to the roadway, or at least to their waiting cart. I pulled on my boots and kept pace with the Blakelys as they straggled out past the gardens. The blue cart was waiting at the edge of our nearest field, guarded by the now-napping dogs. James Blakely boosted his sister-in-law onto its worn leather seat and pointed the horses to the highway, back to the soft clover of Lakewood Farm.
    â€œI’ll see you tomorrow,” Tyler said, still quiet and frostbitten. I nodded. I didn’t know where to look. The injured leg stood out like a bruise; the cool anger on his face was worse. Everywhere, like fingerprints, the marks of the world outside the lakelands stood out on his skin—a constant reminder of how much he’d walked through to come home. How much he’d returned a stranger.
    He glanced over my shoulder, and a memory dredged loose. “Back on the beach,” I said, trying to be casual, “what was that you saw?”
    Tyler blinked, his injured dignity forgotten. He looked at me sidelong, wary. “The bird.”
    He’s lying,
I thought, shocked, and shook my head. “No, before that. The bird was on the ground. You looked up.”
    He looked down at his hands, then back up at me, his face a small torment. I swallowed. Tyler was
afraid.
    He opened his mouth, and I realized:
He’s going to lie to me again.
I suddenly could not bear to hear him lie.
    â€œIt must have been a deer,” I said, too loud. The terror on his face froze and stuck. “They’ve been straying in all summer. I’ll have to check the fences.”
    â€œRight,” he said in a strangled voice. His shoulders slowly came down. “Right.”
    And then: “Tyler!” Callum called, and Tyler hopped up onto the cart like a marionette. One crackle of the reins and they were gone, rushing down the pathway past our empty fields, shrinking into a small hard knot against the sky.
    I stared at the dust cloud they left me, and then at the slanted sunlight as it settled. He’d seen something for certain, something too terrifying to tell me about. Or thought he had, out of his broken eyes.
    A throat cleared soft behind me, and I jumped.
    Heron stood a full ten paces back, his hands up cautiously. “The cistern’s full, miss,” he said. And then, apologetic: “I said I’d find you when it was done.”
    I rubbed my eyes with my unbandaged hand. “Right,” I said, and pushed down the urge to scour the riverbank.
The goat pen,
I recited.
Firewood, and a start on the malt.
Whatever Tyler was hiding, ferreting it out wouldn’t feed us through the long winter.
    What did that was chores.
    â€œCome on,” I said, and shook myself, and sighed. “I’ll get you a shovel.”

seven
    I WOKE INTO THE GRAY DAWN LIGHT TO DRESS FOR WAR.
    My town dress had sat unused since springtime, buried in work clothes and mothballs. It was already an inch too short. I ignored the shamefully high hem and fished under my bed for Marthe’s old town boots. Nat was a girl in a family of men, and her mother bought her new boots for the Windstown dances, but Marthe and I made do with creased hand-me-downs, the kind that made men like Alonso Pitts sniff with aggrieved charity.
Let it go,
I told myself, and swiped at the musty old boots. Everyone already knew Roadstead Farm was poor. We told them with every stitch.
    My denimless legs felt light and strange as I clattered into the kitchen; my hair trailed down my back like spiderwebs. One summer contained in braids and buttons, and I’d already forgotten how town clothes felt. In town clothes, I could almost remember visits to Prickett’s, holidays, the quiet pace of life before Thom marched south. I swallowed and pushed all that aside. I was sixteen; I lived here and now.
    We had chores.
    Marthe was at the kitchen table,