“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