Ashes Read Online Free

roost, you ninny. Climb higher if you require more room.”
    He did so without another word. Since winter he’d grown even taller and more broad across the shoulders. He was near twenty years, but he still thought himself the size of a boy. In his absence the crook was perfect-size for me, as if the tree had seen me coming and grown a special Isabel-shaped nesting place where I could shelter safely through the day and doze until dark. Except I knew there would be no sleep for me. The cool mist rising from the ground brought to mind the last visit I’d made to my mother’s grave, back when I was young enough to believe that people held to their promises and the world would treat all children fair. That was the day our journey had truly begun.
    Was the spirit of our mother watching over us? Did she know how long I’d been searching?
    Fearful questions crowded in. What if Ruth had died long ago? The notion chilled me and made me shiver. I’d worked hard to keep such terrible thoughts away, but they surrounded me now. Would strangers have buried her proper, with a preacher and prayers and weeping? Was there a lonely stone in an empty field to mark her passing? Was her grave already grown over with vine and grass? Or did her bones sleep at the bottom of the sea?
    â€œI smell corn,” Curzon said in a low tone. “Meat, too.”
    The interruption was a welcome one. I gave myself a pinch. Pay attention. Keep your wits about you.
    A cow mooed. There should have been a dozen calling by now, eager to be milked. The birdsong grew louder, accompanied by the chirrup of frogs and the thrumming and buzzing of insects. Lowering clouds made it hard for the sun to rise, but I could see enough to be confuddled.
    Where are all the people?
    The plantations in South Carolina were all bigger than the plantations of Rhode Island. When I was a girl, my family lived on a farm near Newport with another twenty people also held in bondage, along with a few indentured white servants. As we’d drawn closer to Charleston, the plantations had grown ten times that size and more, with miles of fields, and overseers keeping watch to make sure no one ran off. The stolen–for in truth, that was the circumstance of every person enduring the condition of slavery–the stolen people had to wake long before the sun. Riverbend should have had at least fifty people on their way to the fields, plus the kind of bustle we’d seen behind other big houses at dawn: women carrying wash water, old men repairing tools, little children chasing one another and kicking up dust. Despite the faint smell of cooking nearby, there were no voices in the air.
    Clouds shifted and the sky brightened enough for me to see the house in more detail. All of the windows had been broken. Smoke had stained the bricks above a window on the second floor, mayhaps caused by a fire set to burn down the building. Many of the shutters lay in splinters on the ground. The legs of a fine chair poked from the charred remains of a bonfire at the side of the house.
    The war had brought trouble here, too.
    â€œDon’t fret,” Curzon said. He understood my manner well enough to know I’d be upset by the sight.
    â€œBut–” I started.
    â€œDon’t fret,” he repeated. “We’ll wait and we’ll watch. Tonight we’ll learn what we came here for.”
    â€œWe’ll wait,” I muttered.
    The sun broke free of the horizon and lit the ground afore us like a giant lantern raised by the largest hand. A tidy building some twenty paces behind the house was the source of the breakfast smells, a summer kitchen with whitewashed walls and gray smoke curling up from its chimney. Across from the summer kitchen ranged small buildings made of rough boards, likely the homes of families, and beyond that, a barn, with the edge of a garden visible behind it. An old dog lay in a patch of sunshine in front of the barn, and a few