say I miss my kriegie bunk,” Seb said, trying to joke. “But at least it had a roof!”
Nina fought a wave of exasperation, thinking of Marina Raskova surviving ten days in the taiga without an emergency kit; Moscow-bred Yelena shrugging off the temperatures at Engels with jokes about the frost making her eyelashes look longer. But it wasn’t Sebastian Graham’s fault he was too civilized to know what real cold was. He was here, he was all she had, and Nina realized, looking at his hollowed face, how fond she’d grown of him.
“Malysh,” she said quietly, taking his cloth-wrapped hand. “It’s going to get worse. There will be snow. Our teeth will feel loose because I won’t find enough greens or berries. We’ll spend most of our time foraging for firewood, and even then it won’t keep us warm. There will be times you want to die, but you won’t, because I know how to survive a winter in the wild—and we aren’t in the wild, Seb. We’re in a tamed wood in Poznań, civilization just a few kilometers beyond the trees. We’ll survive, we just won’t enjoy it. You understand me?”
“Yes.” He made an effort to smile. “I’m the one who persuaded you to camp through the winter, rather than push west. Stiff upper lip, I promise.”
But from the way his smile fell away into silent brooding afterward, Nina still felt a pang of disquiet.
FORAGING THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, along the edge of the artificial lake. A long narrow body of water, edible reeds to be pulled, places to be marked for fishing if she could fashion hooks and lines . . . “What’s that?” Seb pointed at an inlet a good distance down the shore. They’d never foraged this far before. “Something yellow.”
Nina squinted, making out a peaked roof, glass windows. A house, and not a farmer’s cottage either. “Some Fritz’s lakeside retreat.” Anything gracious or expansive in Poznań these days was owned by a German. At least for now; there were more and more rumors (whenever Nina and Seb found refugees with whom they dared trade news) about the possibility of a German retreat toward Berlin.
“A big house like that, they’ll have a larder or cellar to raid.”
“Too risky,” Nina began.
“If there are too many people, we’ll retreat,” Seb cajoled. “Word of honor.”
Nina fingered the razor in her overall pocket, the revolver at her waist. No more ammunition; that had long run out. But Seb was right; they didn’t have to try. Only look.
Her stomach was growling as they set off along the lake’s shore. Beaches scattered along the far shore; perhaps swimmers came here in the summer, but now all was quiet, nothing but the chatter of birds overhead. Seb knew them all and imitated their calls, color flushing his cheeks. Nina was glad to see it. By the time they reached the ocher-walled house, it was late afternoon. Long, low, mellow in the sunshine, the residence overlooked a sweeping view of water and trees, a dock stretching out before it into the blue expanse of lake. Nina looked away. Even a lake so blue and placid—as unlike the wind-whipped, ice-lashed Old Man as possible—gave her the shivers.
No one seemed to be moving around the house; the shutters were drawn, but smoke drifted from a tall chimney. Seb and Nina crept toward the rear, where the trees had been cleared and landscaped to frame the house like dark encircling arms. No livestock or chicken pens, no laundry lines, nothing easily foraged. They exchanged wordless glances; Nina shook her head. Seb rose from his squat to follow her back into the trees, and then a woman cleared her throat behind them.
How did she get so close without me hearing? The thought went through Nina like a bullet, even as she whirled around. There had been no sound on the leaf-strewn ground, yet there the woman stood: slim, dark haired, blue eyed, about Nina’s age, warmly wrapped in a blue coat and checked scarf, placating hands held out. She smiled, but Nina’s fingers stretched for her razor. How did you get so close?
She was speaking Polish in a low pleasant voice. Seb replied warily, his own Polish stumbling. The woman frowned, switched languages. English? Nina could cobble simple broken phrases together by now, but she was far from fluent. Seb started in surprise, switched languages too, talking too fast for Nina to follow. She kept her eyes fixed on the woman in blue, her quiet feet in their fine