I didn’t . . .” He trailed off. “I always thought once I got to know any women, it would be different. Growing up with just my father and brother, then school with nothing but boys, then the army, then four years as a kriegie . . .”
“You don’t have to know anything about women to know if you want them in bed or not,” Nina pointed out in some amusement.
“I suppose.” Seb blushed. “Your girl, when did you know . . .”
“I don’t talk about her,” Nina said, and they were done with the entire subject.
Days grew shorter, an autumn note touching the air as September slid toward October. Laying snares, cleaning game, washing socks and shirts and their own grimy bodies in the stream. Nina still got bouts of the shakes, longing for her Coca-Cola pills, and she couldn’t sleep longer than a few shallow hours at a time, but mostly she was bored. Seb had endless ways to pass the hours: poker with his leaf deck, practicing birdcalls, trying to teach her English. “You’ll have to learn if you’re coming to England.”
“English is a stupid language.”
“Take it slow. God—save—the—King.”
She parroted back, trying to imagine a life in a fogbank eating these strange things Seb called pudding and scones, drinking tea from a teapot and not a samovar. Perhaps she could get work at an airfield? But even if she could, there would be no women like the Night Witches. No mechanics singing as they passed wrenches, no armorers blowing on their blued fingertips, no pilots sprinting toward their planes, straining for the honor to be first.
Yelena’s flying dark hair, her soft mouth.
Nina rose abruptly. “Forage?”
They always avoided busy roads and towns, waiting hidden in trees or crouched behind brush until there were solitary refugees or peasant women with baskets who could be approached. Seb had a story about how they’d fled Warsaw and were now living rough; there were all too many such stories. Every crossroads was strewn with the discarded detritus of refugees seeking safety: upended traveling cases, an empty handcart, ransacked bundles abandoned by travelers following signs to towns Nina had no desire to seek out. Few looked suspiciously at Seb and Nina when they came to barter essentials; Seb did the talking, and Nina kept her eyes open for trouble.
Seb held up the day’s prize, a few mealy potatoes in a sack. “Tonight we feast. Better than trying to sneak past Berlin, eh?”
I don’t know, Nina thought, trying to shake her superstition that this wrecked country was cursed. There was no rhyme or reason to be found in this bleak, wasted moonscape of a land where the passing hand of war had swept through, raked its sharp claws, and moved on. She raised her nose to the wind as they trudged back toward their camp, sniffing. “Winter’s coming.”
BY NOVEMBER, the cold had begun to wear Sebastian down. The trees stood stark branched, films of ice gleamed here and there in the darkest hollows, the earth was hardening, yet winter had only started to close its jaws. “This is nothing,” Nina said, trying to bolster him. “You should see the winds come howling across the Old Man.”
Seb was sitting huddled in every piece of clothing he had. He was thinner, his eyes shadowed. “Can we light a fire?”
“It’s not even freezing. Save it for tonight when the temperature drops.” He didn’t complain—he never did; Nina liked that about him—but his mouth pressed into a straight line of frustration. “Weren’t you used to being cold in that camp?” Nina said, her own frustration rising.
“Forty men sleeping in one hut warm the room with their breath. It’s enclosed.” Seb gestured at their shelter. They’d left their old camp, looking for something more shielded for the winter. Seb had argued they should make their way into Poznań itself, the wide forested swath that cut through the city to add a touch of the wild—calm lakes and thick woods—in the midst of civilization. Closer to the Germans, Nina argued back. Close to the city means easier foraging, he countered, and Nina reluctantly agreed, finding a good-size rock hollow in a tumble of boulders northeast of one of the artificial lakes, sheltered among pines and protected by an overhang on three sides. With a fire pit dug and all their laundry-line-pilfered blankets, it was as dry and snug a shelter as they were going to find. But it didn’t keep out the cold. “I won’t go so far as to