Garrett Investigates - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,35
to stand. She might be starved to the bone, but there was still strength in her body—far more than there should have been.
“You’re a wampyr,” Ruth said.
“Guilty,” Mary admitted, assisting her out of the trunk.
Ruth wobbled as her feet, puffed out by two sets of stockings, settled onto the clean-swept cement floor. She hobbled the two steps to an oval braided-rag rug and stood there as if that had been the end of her strength. Mary winced, imagining the cramps of such long confinement on living flesh.
Mary bent to fetch Ruth’s shoes from the corner of the trunk where they had been crammed.
She continued, “And you’re an Ulfhethinn. But I’m trying not to hold it against you.”
Ruth laughed; it sounded worse than the coughing. When she had her breath back, she said, “And I’m the one climbing out of the coffin.”
“Do you need a toilet?” Mary asked, setting Ruth’s shoes down for her.
“I’ve nothing in me to get out again,” Ruth admitted with a flush. “You said Paris? Is it liberated yet?”
“Not yet. Here, this stool—” Mary draped threadbare shawls and afghans around the girl’s shoulders until she resembled a moss-hung boulder more than a young woman. “I’ll fetch you tea.”
“Not yet,” Ruth echoed hoarsely, while Mary boiled water over the camp stove. “I’m sorry, I’m—” another painful, gasping laugh “—behind on the news.”
“Berlin is under siege,” Mary said. “The Russians and the Iroquois. Pavelgrad is liberated. Prague.”
Ruth lifted her head on a neck made longer by lack of flesh, eyes burning. She had beautiful bones, even recoiling. “I knew about Prague.”
Of course she would have. They’d brought her out of the death camp at Terezin through Prague.
Some griefs were too deep to be eased through conversation. Mary had her own—so many friends, sisters, courtiers lost to the Prussians…
She did not allow her tone to shift. “Kyiv. Stockholm. Warsaw. The Fascists have been overthrown in Spain. The Prussians still hold London and Paris, and the Russians and Americans are mopping up units all over the countryside, but—” she shrugged. “—you have cut the head off the snake.”
Huddled under her wraps, head drooping, Ruth didn’t answer. Mary didn’t know if she was conserving her strength, or if she was not ready to hear praise for an act of murder. In the interests of picking at open wounds as little as possible, she lifted the boiling beaker from the flame and poured in silence.
There was honey for the tea. Ruth cupped the chipped cup in her palms for a long time, breathing in the steam, before she tasted it. As she swallowed, her gaunt face lit in gratitude. “It’s sweet.”
“You need it,” Mary said. “We haven’t a lot of food. But more than you’ve been getting, to look at you.”
Ruth’s voice was improving with use and tea. “Anything would be more than I’ve been getting. So if Paris hasn’t been liberated, why did your people in Prague send me West instead of East?”
There was no easy way out of it. “Because the Russians want you as a war criminal. You and all the Sturmwolfstaffel.”
Ruth didn’t raise her eyes from the steaming tea. Her face betrayed no surprise, no fear. Only the calm acceptance of someone who had been pushed so far past the boundaries of her strength that she no longer even fought to regain them.
“And if they catch me,” Ruth said with dry irony, “I suppose they will send me to a labor camp.”
“It seems likely.”
Ruth nodded. She sipped her tea and said, “Of course.”
***
“Food,” Mary said, when they had sat in silence for a little while. “We have turnips and salt pork—”
“Pork,” Ruth said resignedly.
Mary winced. She knew—they all knew—Ruth had been raised Jewish, before she became an infiltrator. But Mary was no longer accustomed to thinking in terms of the necessities of human diets, except inasmuch as the smells of food now nauseated her.
“I am so sorry—” she began.
Ruth shook her head. “It’s all right. I’ve been eating what the Prussians ate for years now. God will forgive me one more meal of trayf faster than He would forgive me wasting food in a time of famine.”
You are very brave, Mary thought, but her time in service had left her acutely aware of the moods of others, and she didn’t think—just now—the comment would
be welcome.
***
The girl was too exhausted to stay awake—especially with a lined belly—and too traumatized, still, to sleep as heavily as her body demanded. Mary wondered what scars her skin would have displayed, if she were