“Where are we?” she begged to know. It was the thing that maddened her most, after years of navigating by maps and coordinates—having no reference in this world of trees and Polish road signs except the points on a compass. “Are we still in Poland, or—”
“We’re just outside Posen. That’s what the Jerries rechristened Poznań. Fort Rauch in Stalag XXI-D—we’re not even three hundred kilometers from Berlin.” Sebastian Graham leaned forward eagerly. His leg had to be hurting him, but giddiness and freedom seemed to be blocking the pain. “Is the Red Army close? We had a camp wireless getting news of the eastern front, but if there’s an advance arm nearer than we thought—”
“No. It’s just me.” Nina looked down at the pile of German loot—matchbooks, penknives, ammunition—and wondered how much to say about how she’d got here. “I flew off course and crashed,” she simplified at last. “I had to abandon my plane.”
Sebastian looked back at his bloodied leg. “Well, there goes my dream of being ushered to a Soviet hospital tent and receiving a liter of vodka.”
“Be glad,” Nina said. “Soviet doctors would give you the vodka, then cut that leg off.” Her voice was hoarse, partly from screaming as she threw herself at the German, partly because she hadn’t spoken to a soul for weeks. She’d had no idea how hungry she was for someone to talk to until this oddly bilingual English boy dropped out of nowhere. “How’s that leg?” She peered closer, but Bill gave her a glare and a shooing motion, squatting over Sebastian’s foot himself. “Your friend doesn’t like me,” Nina observed. The man had spent a while squatting beside his dead friend, only rising after a hissed argument that they did not have time to dig a grave. Nina suspected she was being blamed for not springing out of the bushes with her razor a few heartbeats sooner. I helped save you two, she thought, returning Bill’s stare. I could have kept walking and let all three of you be shot.
“Don’t blame him too much,” Sebastian was saying. “Our compound was split down the middle between those of us hoping to see Uncle Joe coming over the hill to liberate the camp, and those who thought Uncle Joe and all his troops were barbarians.”
“We are barbarians.” Nina smiled in genuine amusement. “That’s why we’re beating the Fritzes.”
Sebastian smiled back. He looked no more than sixteen or seventeen to Nina, scrawny and big-eyed with the barest scruff of stubble. So even the English were sending babies to the front by now. His Russian was slow, peppered with odd English slang she didn’t understand, but his accent was surprisingly good. “Where did you learn Russian?”
“Before I came to the stalag in Posen, they bounced me through another camp, and there were Soviet prisoners in the compound next to ours. I was there a good long while, and there isn’t much to do in the lockup besides play cards and listen to your stomach growl, so why not pay Piotr Ivanovich from Kiev a few cigarettes if he’ll teach you his lingo? I always had a good ear for languages.”
“What happened to Piotr Ivanovich?”
“Hanged for stealing.” Sebastian grimaced, not from the water Bill was sluicing over his wound. “They left his body to rot. They always do that, with the Soviets.” He gulped a breath. “It’s no picnic being a Limey in German hands, believe me, but we have it better than you Russkies. Poor devils.”
“In the Forty-Sixth, we all swore we’d put bullets in our heads before we’d be taken prisoner.” Nina peered at Sebastian’s wound. The shot had clipped straight through the calf. Not much to do with a wound like that but clean it, bandage it, and hope infection didn’t spread. The flaxen-haired Bill was already ripping an undershirt from one of the Germans into strips; he began strapping it around Sebastian’s leg, and the boy went gray. Nina reached in to help, but Bill swatted her away again, muttering something. “What?” Nina demanded.
“He doesn’t believe you’re a pilot. Says even the Reds aren’t idiot enough to put women in bombers.”
Nina raised her eyebrows. Stripping off her right boot, she reached into the heel and brought out her identification cards and insignia. “Tell him if he doubts me, I can take my red star and cram it down his throat till he’s shitting red enamel.”
Sebastian didn’t translate that. Bill fingered Nina’s identification, grudging, then tossed it down. Sebastian picked it up and handed it back more formally. “My friend isn’t inclined to offer an apology, as he doesn’t like being proved wrong, but I’ll offer one on his behalf. We owe our lives to your intervention, Lieutenant Markova, and I offer our sincere gratitude.”
Nina nearly laughed. Englishmen really were a different breed. How had any of them managed to survive this war, tripping over all those good manners? “I’d have slit that German’s throat whether you were there to save, or not. But you’re welcome.”
Sebastian looked startled, but he turned and had another discussion in English with his companion. “Bill and I will make camp here for the night,” the rejoinder came eventually. “Would you care to join us, or are you looking to continue east as quickly as possible?”
He thought she was aiming to rejoin her regiment, of course. “I’ll stay tonight,” she temporized, reluctant to leave the only person in this wilderness with whom she could hold a conversation.
Good thing you did stay, she thought a few hours later. These two are useless. They’d have used up every match they had trying to start a campfire if Nina hadn’t showed them how to nurture the flicker of smoke into flame. They looked bemused when she brought out birchbark peelings and explained how they could be chewed for sustenance. And when Nina went out to hunt with the German’s pistol and came back dragging a skinny young doe, Seb looked downright nauseated as Nina slit open the deer’s belly and reached inside to pull out the innards. “You clean out the cavity and bury the guts,” she explained, hauling out the slimy blue and red ropes. “Then butcher the usable meat. You’ve never hunted game?”
“Bill’s from Cheapside,” Sebastian said, “and I went to Harrow.”
“Where’s that?”
“Never mind.” The boy looked at the slick pile of viscera. “All I’ve been able to think about for four years is food and suddenly I’m not hungry.”
“Wait till you smell it cooking.” Nina sat back on her heels, cleaning the razor. “Four years you’ve been a prisoner? How old were you when you enlisted, twelve?”
“Seventeen,” he protested. “A few months later my unit got nabbed outside Doullens.”
“You surrendered?” Nina couldn’t help saying, remembering Comrade Stalin’s Not one step back and the whispers about men shot by their own officers if they so much as edged backward, much less surrendered.
Sebastian’s face showed a flash of shame, even four years after the fact. “It was hardly my decision.” Stiffly. “I was just a gunner. We’re supposed to be fighting a rearguard action, keeping the Fritzes off the Doullens–Arras road, and we’ve got one rifle and fifty rounds per man, and only eighteen Bren guns. Not much to do once the ammunition’s gone and the tanks are rolling in.” He looked around the tall dark woods, which were just starting to darken in twilight. “Four years behind barbed wire . . . and now I’m out.”
His bony face was full of soft, dazed wonder, and Nina’s heart squeezed despite herself. Four years locked in the flat stasis of fear and restlessness and hunger, and he was still capable of wonder. Nina couldn’t decide if that was foolish or admirable.
Night fell, and the two Englishmen jumped at every noise from the woods as Nina cooked their dinner. Bill was still inclined to bristle whenever she gave him an order—English soldiers clearly weren’t used to female lieutenants, Nina saw in amusement—but he stared at her when he thought she wasn’t looking, and so did Sebastian. “I’m sorry,” the younger boy apologized when Nina caught him watching her with that air of slight disbelief. “We don’t mean to be rude. You can’t imagine how strange it is, seeing a woman’s face after forty-eight months of nothing but chaps.”
Nina paused, rotating venison strips over the flames. “Am I going to have trouble with either of you?” she asked bluntly.
Sebastian’s shoulders began to vibrate. Nina tensed, then realized he was shaking with laughter. “Lieutenant Markova,” he said between gusts of mirth, “I was raised a gentleman. Now, my father’s version of a gentleman pulls out chairs for ladies and otherwise doesn’t think they’re good for much, but my older brother’s version pulls out chairs, asks a lady her opinion rather than assuming it, and never puts a hand where it isn’t invited. But even if I weren’t a gentleman, I’m not an utter idiot. And only the greatest idiot on earth would force anything on a woman he first met erupting from a bush to slash an armed man to ribbons with a razor.”