The screams reach Aikaterina’s ears just as the sun hits its zenith.
She feels Alexander—Captain Ivor—snap to attention a moment before she sees his hand shoot up through the leaves, signaling a halt. Everyone freezes in unison. Their death mage is the last to stop, taking a staggering step in the sudden silence before Lieutenant Volkov catches his shoulder.
For a moment, everything is still. Aikaterina takes a careful breath, taking in the heady haze of the orchard—sun-warmed earth and figs and oranges oversweet, at the edge of rot. Above, a flock of geese fly in perfect formation, like rows of soldiers on the march, making their way northward, and home.
Ahead, Alexander listens, head cocked. The live-wire buzz of her brother’s fear hums at the edge of Aikaterina’s senses, but he lets none of it show on his face.
Another sound—a low moan—carries faintly through the trees.
Aikaterina readies her rifle, leaden hands fumbling to her pockets and finding the ammunition beneath the figs she had stuffed there when they first set foot in the orchard.
The moment stretches, hanging on Alexander’s fingertips as every eye strains to him or the underbrush.
Do the Angels still speak to him?
A bead of sweat runs down the back of Aikaterina’s neck.
“Cows.” It’s not Alexander who speaks; it’s one of the soldiers. “The noise. Those are cows, sir.”
Alexander’s eyes flick to him, and then back to his lieutenant, a question. Lieutenant Volkov shrugs, her fingers tight against the stock of her gun.
“He’s right, it’s just animals,” the death mage rasps, his voice strained as if he’s been shouting. Diadochi was the proper word for soldiers like him, the polite word; Aikaterina had never used it with her own company, but her brother cared about such things. As eyes swivel to the diadochi, he drops his gaze to the rot beneath his feet.
“All right,” Alexander says. “We may be nearing a farmhouse, then. Move carefully—and if anyone has taken shelter here, hold your fire. They’re more likely to be civilians than Chimaerans.”
This place is abandoned. Aikaterina feels it in the paths of her blood vessels down to her bones. What orchard keeper would leave fruit to rot and paths untended, in a year when war brought famine within spitting distance of every home?
Aikaterina and the remains of Second Company have been walking through orchards all morning, under rows of dark leaves curling in the sun and fruit rotting on boughs. After the mud-soaked nothing of the trenches it is dizzying to touch this much life. An itch crawls under Aikaterina’s skin, like a muscle unstretched, urging her to reach further, to nurture and bend the life that overflowed here.
But the voices of the Angels remain silent, so she does not dare reach for more of their tools. She profanes enough.
She shoulders her rifle and carves bites of fig as she walks. The fruit is fleshy and oversweet, turning her stomach as soon as it touches her tongue, but she forces herself to chew and swallow. Hunger is a fickle creature; never quite banished on the march, but quick to flee. The familiar sick feeling sweeps over her, but she must not fall, so she keeps chewing.
A perpetual haze hangs in the air to the south, reaching high over the trees, visible to the eyes even from such a distance. What Chimaeran monstrosity lurks beyond it has been left out of the orders distributed to company captains. All anyone knows is they must march towards it. She has seen the Chimaeran abominations pour down fire and poison onto the trenches at Mesoglia, driving soldiers from their fortifications like rats into the teeth of the barrage, wiping out whole companies in minutes. Once, she had been close enough to an abomination to see scales wrought in metal, sewn haphazardly to bleeding muscle with holding-sigils; raw life drawn out and pushed to overflow, rotting even as it thrived.
It was pure chance she had survived that. Fifth Company had been stationed just far enough away from the conflagration.
When they came against that onslaught, all her brother’s subtle watch wards and Sciathain Craft would be useless. Even the poor diadochi was just a man. If Second Company all died at once, he might be able to swallow their deaths and have enough power to blow a hole in an abomination—but death mages were just as likely to misfire.
The invaders built monsters from the very ground. All her saint-riddled homeland could do was make monstrosities of men.
The air changes before the farmhouse comes into view; the tang of deeper rot piercing the heady perfume of the orchard. The fruit flesh turns to stone between Aikaterina’s teeth, and she spits the mouthful into the dirt and unslings her rifle again, warding away nausea with the comfort of its weight.
Up ahead, the lines of her brother’s face draw stark and grim.
The farmhouse looks like something out of one of their childhood books; pale terracotta walls, perched on a slight incline, with pastures breaking through the rows of orchards behind it. An orange-paneled barn, carefully painted and maintained, peeks out from behind the farmhouse. In the farmhouse yard stands a lone dovecote, white-washed and shut tight against owls and hawks and the night’s dangers.
Shut tight despite the noonday sun.
Alexander’s hand shoots up, bringing everyone to a halt again. “Lieutenant Mage,” he says, over his shoulder to the diadochi. “Is there death here?”
The diadochi’s shoulders tighten, and he takes a steadying breath, and is still for a moment. No one in the company breathes; no one looks at him. “No,” he says at last. “But it would only linger for hours.”
Alexander nods. “Secure a perimeter,” he says. “Lieutenant Volkov, take a group west. I’ll go east. Clear the buildings first. Lieutenant Mage Cassander, with me. Private Ivor—go with Volkov.”
Aikaterina nods, and follows the strong lines of Volkov’s shoulders as she walks a careful path around the side of the farmhouse, towards the barn and pasture beyond.
Instinctively, Aikaterina finds the spots a sniper would stand; the edge of the grain loft, partially in shadow; the windows of the house; looking for a flash of metal or a twitch of movement. The Saints-hand at the top of the barn spins in the breeze, adding the thin screech of metal on metal to the animal cacophony.
No death here, the diadochi claimed; but its impending hangs heavy in the air, like pressure before a storm.
The groans of livestock grow louder as they approach the barn. The great doors are latched carefully with planks; there’s no sign of struggle. Volkov leans against the door, listening, but the sounds of animals in pain drown out any smaller movements. Pinned up and left in the summer heat, for who knows how long.
Alexander’s lieutenant is a broad-shouldered woman, a handful of years older than Aikaterina, with a strong nose and a face suited to smiling, though she is all business now. “You ever been on a farm?” she murmurs, peering around the side of the barn.
“No,” Aikaterina says. “Only dovecotes, and gardens.”
Volkov grimaces. “I have a passing acquaintance only.”
A tremor runs down the roots of Aikaterina’s perception, from behind the doors of the barn, so carefully closed and latched. Desperation shudders on the other side of the wood, in all its awful, fetid glory. On its heels, something else stirs. Not a voice, but an impression. Incongruous in its peace; the careful press of the orchard-keeper’s hands, day after day after day, a half-breath afterimage of morning rituals and the squeak of the door’s hinges.
Aikaterina shivers once, violently. It’s nothing more than a passing chill, and soldiers’ superstitions getting tangled with her crèche studies, she tells herself. She has seen more than enough desperation already, the human kind, clawing in the mud of the trenches.
By all rights, she should still be there. Would still be there, if not for Alexander—
“Ivor,” Volkov’s voice breaks through her reverie. “You all right?”
“Fine,” Aikaterina says. “There’s no human in the barn.”
There’s no hidden message in the look Volkov flashes her way; no hook of memories, only a casual sort of measurement. “Why do you say that?”
“It’s been closed from the outside, neatly—” By the orchard-keeper, she wants to say, but there’s no explaining that knowledge to anyone who isn’t Sciathain. “But—if you were fleeing the place you loved,” she says, forcing her lips to keep moving. “Wouldn’t you set the animals free?”
The words hang slack between them for a moment.
“It would be a gamble.” Volkov turns back to the door, weighing her words. “They may have expected to return. Losing livestock could mean death—the slow kind, in a year like this.”
A low cry rattles from the barn, and Aikaterina starts; for a moment she’s in the sodden wreck of the dugout where her company spent two months cowering from abominations, listening to some less fortunate bastard choke on blood and sorcery mere meters away. An animal, it’s just an animal.
“We’d best sweep the inside, to be sure,” Volkov says.
Aikaterina nods, and wrests the plank latch down from its place.
Horror trembles within, in the dark eyes of the animals tied and left for weeks; in those torn and crushed underfoot from fear and terrible thirst; in those still panting and twitching.
They move through the twilight of the barn, keeping eyes on each others’ blind spots. It’s easy to fall into rhythm with Lieutenant Volkov, maybe because she’s half of a rhythm with Alexander already, half in tune with Aikaterina’s heartbeat. But each twitch and whine has Aikaterina jumping in her skin. She would have thought herself dull to this, after the grey and red of the trenches. But amidst the carefully tended orchard and the barn with its beautifully painted walls, this charnel house is a terrible incongruity.
Perversely, the image of her mother’s dovecote keeps returning to her mind.
“Nothing,” Aikaterina murmurs, breathing through her mouth.
Volkov nods. Her face is a mask of shadows in the low light.
Again, Aikaterina feels the warning before she sees movement—a dull spasm of fear, before one of the hulking shapes of the cows lashes out at the intruder. The rope holding the animals has enough give to—
Aikaterina throws herself forwards, colliding with Volkov’s shoulder and pushing them both against the wall as the bulk of the cow crashed against the boards beside them. The dull white of its horns flash in the slivers of sunlight, scraping against the wood with frantic force.
For a moment they stay pressed together, frozen. And then Volkov laughs. “Imagine,” she says. “Coming from the trenches only to die to a cow.”
The thought makes Aikaterina dizzy. She can feel the frantic beat of Volkov’s pulse—she pushes herself backwards, and almost falls into the muck, but Volkov catches her. “Would steal the satisfaction from the Chimaerans,” she says.
“All the same,” Volkov says. “I’d prefer to keep breathing. Thank you, Ivor.”
Another handful of terrible moments, and they’re out on the other side.
Volkov is murmuring a wary order to the soldiers; stay back here, keep clear of the animals, keep a lookout, if I give the all-clear—
Something trembles at the edge of Aikaterina’s perception; the shifting of roots, the rustle of a carrion crow in the branches of a nearby orange tree. A bright spot on her tongue, hunger fulfilled twice over. She breaks off from the group, and steps into the perfume-haze of the orange trees.
The Angels so rarely speak to her, since she went to war. Even now there were no words, only the flicker of her dying Craft.
“Private Ivor?” Volkov calls, and Aikaterina lifts her head, coming to a stop.
Ahead of her, she can see the pale, flat, familiar color against the oil paint-riot of rotting oranges. The sting of fermentation hides the smell; but the orchard knows, and the Angels know the orchard.
It’s just a bundle of discolored flesh, bone beginning to poke through in places where it was exposed to the air. A halo of gold hair surrounds it, like the icon of one of the Saints of the Wingless.
The call is on Aikaterina’s lips, but the words choke her.
“Lieutenant,” she manages at last, almost doubled over.
Volkov appears at her shoulder, surprisingly light-footed. She comes around Aikaterina, stepping between her and the corpse, and then stills; her brows crease. “Ah. Well, that is that question answered.” She crouches down, and reaches out a hand.
“Don’t!” Aikaterina snaps.
Volkov’s head snaps up. Belatedly, Aikaterina remembers her rank. A half-second of anger plays out over Volkov’s face, before falling slack. Her eyes soften.
“We have to see what killed her, Ivor,” she says.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” Aikaterina says, fixing her gaze past Volkov’s shoulder. Blood is rushing to her face.
Her own commanding officer would have struck her for that insubordination, when she was sober enough to manage it. Aikaterina would have taken it in all defiance. But here, with Second Company, things were different. Of course. Not that it mattered, now.
“I’ll watch your twelve, Lieutenant,” Aikaterina says, catching up her rifle. Her legs take her to the other side of the clearing without her full will; shame and anger burn beneath her skin and in the hollow hole of her stomach, without reason, without sense.
“How did you spot it?” Volkov calls.
It.
Aikaterina twitches. “I saw a vulture,” she says. It’s just another bundle of flesh, like the ones in the barn. More charnel for the pyre.
Volkov’s eyes go up to the clear, empty sky. Devoid of clouds and birds alike, now. “Captain Ivor’s luck,” she says. “It’s hereditary, then?”
“No,” Aikaterina says, sharply.
There are the faint beginnings of crow’s feet at the edges of Volkov’s eyes, and they crinkle slightly as she looks at Aikaterina. “Apologies. That was prying.”
She bends back to her task, examining the corpse with careful professionalism.
Aikaterina takes a steadying breath. “It isn’t—hereditary. But when one half of a soul has an aptitude, the other mirrors it.” It was close enough to the truth, or a truth that a Wingless like Volkov could understand; they have no frame of reference for the Craft, only mages they barely trusted.
Was it she, or Alex who had first reached for the Craft? She can’t remember; she had spent mornings in the crèche for all the weeks of her remembered childhood, running her hands through the blooming vines and learning of the seeds of life and the wings of the Angels.
Volkov makes a hum of interest, low in her throat. It’s a nice sound. She doesn’t ask any further questions, to Aikaterina’s relief. She can’t summon the crèche here, not among this death.
“Shot,” Volkov says, her attention returning to the corpse. “Once, from the back. She bled out.”
Aikaterina scans the sun-drenched boughs of the orchard, searching out the glint of a rifle’s muzzle in the high sun. Was it better, to bleed out here, in the orchards of home? Was it better to bleed into familiar soil?
The Wingless might say yes, and call it a martyrdom.
“Could have been opportunistic thieves, or —” There’s a grimace in Volkov’s voice. ” —deserters, but I doubt it. No thieves would leave the farmhouse untouched, and this looks like it was done with Chimaeran arms.”
Silence settles over the orchard, syrup-heavy, as Aikaterina turns the words in her mind. When she looks up, her eyes meet Volkov’s.
Now and then, now that they were out of the mud and there is room for more than desperation, Aikaterina has caught her looking. Once, when their eyes met the lieutenant had actually blushed. The hollow of hunger twists and aches in Aikaterina’s gut, giddiness eclipsing vertigo as Volkov’s eyes settle on her now.
Volkov’s eyes are dark and lovely. Her dark curls, cropped around her face, are shot through with silver, prematurely; the only concession to frailty in a form entirely unyielding to the wear of the war.
Aikaterina swallows desire-bright words, and lets the burn of them down her throat fuel her focus.
“Why would the Chimaerans leave resources?” Elsewhere, they stole everything they could, before burning and salting the soil. The Chimaeran war machine has strong supply lines, but they still have to cross an ocean; every time they falter, it is because they can’t feed the enormous cost of one of their abominations.
The crack of a pistol shot steals Volkov’s reply. The two of them turn, Volkov pulling her own pistol, Aikaterina pointing her rifle back towards the farmhouse. Her pulse hammers in her throat, bird-like, for a desperate few beats before settling as she wills her hands to steady. Her senses fly to her brother; but the connection is all static and copper-mouthed resolve, no hint of what is happening.
A few seconds pass, before the all-clear rings out in Alexander’s voice.
Volkov’s shoulders drop, and she sits down on a stump, exhaustion stealing grey onto her face. “Thank the Saints,” she murmurs.
Angels guard us.
Footfalls through the trees herald Alexander and his officers. The diadochi is last, and the others are giving him a wide berth; he’s holding his hand tucked against his chest, and blood is dripping down his fingers.
“Captain,” Volkov said. “What was the shot?”
There’s gunpowder on Alexander’s hands. “A dog,” he says, shortly. “Half-starved. It went for the Mage Lieutenant.”
An uneasy glance passes between the officers, save for the diadochi, whose eyes are fixed on the ground again. That was what came of death magic; life itself turned against those who twisted it. Even the Wingless knew that.
“We found the orchard keeper,” Volkov says, brushing off her hands. “Shot with Chimaeran arms.”
Alexander glances downwards, registering the corpse with a flicker of confusion. “The farmhouse is pristine,” he says. “There’s silver left in the cellar.”
Against the orange and green of the orchard, Second Company looks like a collection of grave-risen wraiths, muddy and wan, barely on their feet, as they stare at each other stupidly.
“It means the Chimaerans are fucking sure they’re winning,” Aikaterina says, sick of the silence.
Everyone blinks, even Alexander.
“They have a way to end the war quickly enough that they’re not worried about hunger.” It’s the diadochi who responds. He’s still cradling his bleeding hand, but he takes a step closer to the corpse. “They’re raising more monstrosities—or something worse.”
“Or they were in such a hurry they didn’t bother to look,” Volkov says, but she sounds unconvinced.
Alexander, who had turned to admonish Aikaterina, just nods. “Either way, we have to approach Rouette with caution.” He’s silent for a moment, staring into the trees, and then seems to collect himself. “Volkov, Cassander—with me. We need to plot our course, and there are maps in the farmhouse I want to compare with our own. Aikaterina—choose one of the roofs and keep a lookout. I don’t want to risk any Chimaeran scouts getting the drop on us”
“Yes, sir,” Aikaterina says, throwing him a crisp salute. Mostly because he looks so tired. She can play the good soldier, if it will keep him together.
Their eyes meet, and the ghost of a grin crosses Alexander’s face. “I can trust your eyes?”
“Always.”
As the rest of the Company spreads out across the grounds of the farmhouse, Aikaterina finds a perch at the top of the barn, and settles down to watch, her rifle across her lap as she calls in her Craft. Her senses expand to take in the whole of the farmyard.
Her own little blasphemy.
The soldiers flit across the farmyard like drab olive shadows at the corner of her vision. She catches a glimpse of Alexander, weary-eyed, tracing wards in the water over the door of the farmhouse; the death mage pacing at the orchard’s edge, eyes fixed on the blur on the horizon; Volkov resting in the shade, her hat tipped over her eyes, the grey threading her dark hair silver-bright in the sunlight.
A brief reprieve this will be. Gratefulness ill suits the thing the war has made of Aikaterina. Sometimes she wishes she was back in the press of the trenches, if only because she didn’t have time to parse her fears there.
Did Second Company truly need her? Their last sniper had eaten a bullet, but requisitioning her for the march looked more like a concession to her brother’s rank and popularity than a matter of tactics. It left her own unit unprotected. All the length of the march, she has been turning that thought over in her mind; why now?
In all likelihood, the answer waits on the horizon. If we are to die, better to die at arms’ length of each other. But Alexander is no fatalist.
Aikaterina pushes the thought aside. She presses the splintered halo of her senses wider, wider, wider, from the sun-warmed soil dancing and writhing with life to the reach of the orchard branches, and the intricate workings of blood and life moving within, and keeps watch.
When she imagines returning to the house of her mother, to the gardens and sacred enclaves, she imagines telling her confessor this: sister, I know how to kill a body at a thousand paces.
Sister, I have bloodied my Craft again and again and I am not sorry.
Sister, I know the sacred songs of life, and each and every one of them is useful in a foxhole.
Below, the diadochi stops his pacing. He’s a blot in her senses; reaching too far towards him hurts like brushing her hand over barbed wire; something that catches, and cuts. Is that what she would be, in the sacred enclaves?
The Sciathain always counseled forgiveness. The confessor would say: you did what you must to survive, my sister, with tight-lipped acceptance. Survival was paramount.
They would not say aloud: it was never your place to be there. Such arrogance, to think you could withstand war. Such arrogance, to take something precious and ruin it. Such arrogance, to shadow your brother’s place.
The hours slip by, until dusk is rising from the foothills and another soldier climbs up to take Aikaterina’s place. “Lieutenant Volkov’s orders,” he says, and Aikaterina gives him a nod and slings her rifle over her back.
The dovecote stands in the yard, still shut tight by the hands that had once set the farm to right each night.
Aikaterina approaches with sun-bleary eyes. She crosses the distance in big strides, in case someone glances, or questions; the yard is empty, the company dispersed to watch or sleep or dredge what camaraderie they can from this place, but interruption would be shameful for a reason she can’t name. The shadows of the sinking sun catch at the edge of her vision, and the smell of cooking meat curling from the farmhouse chimney makes her stomach twist.
She should eat. But what good is hunger, now? All she can think of is those eyes in the dark, tied at their posts, waiting for the orchard keeper’s return.
All that is winged is holy, or so the Sciathain proverb went.
Did you shut the dovecote, Aikat? Her mother’s voice whispers in her mind, a strand of thready memory as she presses a hand to the wood.
From inside the farmhouse, her brother laughs. Her senses are burned-out, like a poorly exposed photograph, but she can still feel him without reaching; a sepia ghost in her impression, her double.
Once, this connection had been inviolate. Now it feels only a matter of time until it is severed, until the Angels no longer even whisper to her.
Alexander had left home with the auspices of the Angels, not their mother’s condemnation. Did that make a difference, in the muck and the mire? With the tendrils of that mage’s meddling hooking into him, hungry for the moment when the soul fled?
Beneath the wood, wings flutter. Weak, but constant. Fear constricts Aikaterina’s throat and sinks into her chest, sharp as a knife thrust to the hilt.
She wrenches open the door to the dovecote in one violent gesture as the door of the farmhouse crashes open. Someone says something, but it’s lost in the rush of wings; desperate, feathery bodies spilling from the confines and slamming into her, battering her with feathers and talons in their rush to escape.
Flee, sing the voices of the Angels, clear and sweet.
“Aikat?” Her brother’s voice. “Aikat, what’s wrong?”
She turns.
Alexander is standing a few paces from her, backlit in the warm light of the farmhouse windows; it makes his skin look paler, the circles under his eyes darker. There’s a regal set to his face; but his voice is ragged, and he’s breathing hard, like he dashed across the house to reach her. She must look a fool, standing dusty and stupid in the dark. He must have looked a fool, dashing out of the house to her on a whim. What did his Wingless officers think of that?
She laughs. “I’m fine.”
“What are you doing?”
She feels him, reaching out along the familiar pathways, a question and a comfort as he winds his Craft around the stunted roots of her own. She shoves at that, roughly. Let him keep his comfort. Her hand and face are smarting; there are splinters of brightly painted wood beneath her nails. “Dealing with the birds,” she says. “Freeing them.”
“It’s night.” Alexander’s voice is grim.
Beneath the dusty smell of feathers and pigeon shit, there’s something else: death. Aikaterina keeps her eyes fixed on Alexander, not on the dovecote, or the broken bundles of flesh left there.
“They have a better chance with the owls than trapped,” she says. “Better a little good—”
“—than the evil of a task not done,” Alexander finishes, stepping closer. He’s swaying a little on his feet; drunk, or just tired. It used to be that Aikaterina could tell with a glance. Now she just doesn’t want to know.
“Alexander,” she says, and then stops, the words too terrible to say.
She used to know how to speak of grief. She knew how the family would gather in the alcoves, knew how the air would smell of flowers and blessed water, knew the seeds that would be placed in their pockets and the prayers laid over their lips. But none of that truly seems to exist anymore; when she reaches for the images, all she can see is the corpse left in the orchard.
Fly.
“I can’t,” she croaks.
Alexander does not hear her. He reaches up, and touches a scratch on the side of her face.
Suddenly, everything makes sense. She knows what he’s going to say before he says it.
“We’re three days’ walk from the rail lines. The birds would lead you, if you asked. I’ve written you a pass that would see you onto a train.” He holds out a scrap of paper to her, strangely pristine against his ragged uniform.
This brings the matter from hypothetical to desertion.
“They’ll strip you of your rank,” Aikaterina says. “They’ll shoot you.”
He looks at her with dead man’s eyes. “They’re sending us to Rouette. If the brass wants to court-martial me, they will have to pry us out of the jaws of the Chimaerans first.”
“Your men will know. They know who I am.” She can see the lines of duty crossed in her brother’s eyes, twisting and tangling in on each other, biting into his flesh. She knows which will win.
Ever a Sciathain.
“I know,” he says. He runs a hand through his hair, looks almost abashed. “But I’m their Lucky Ivor.” He takes a steadying breath. “And I have already spoken to Volkov. She would back me in this, if the men got out of line.”
Volkov. It says much that Alexander would bring a Wingless into this. “You planned this. All along.”
He doesn’t deny it.
`”You never needed a sniper.” She bites the inside of her cheek to quell the helpless, thoughtless violence coiling in her chest. Every senseless act of violence she has done, every time she’s bloodied her hands—but then, she had chosen to follow him.
“I would rather have you watching my back than anyone else,” he says, softly. “But I—Aikat—”
“The Wingless can stomach a Sciathain commander when he’s debasing his Craft to save their lives,” Aikaterina says. “They may not be able to stomach a Sciathain who dishonors himself for the sake of his people’s tradition.”
“Fuck tradition,” Alexander spits. “It’s about you. Aikaterina, I can’t lead you to your death.”
“You won’t.” Aikaterina feels a thousand miles away. Her only tether is the anger coiling in her gut, hot and sharp and vicious. “I will be called back to my unit before then.”
As soon as the words are spoken, her anger turns to ash; Alexander’s face goes white, and he sways on his feet.
“No,” he says, softly. “Aikaterina—”
“That’s the way this works,” she says, jutting her chin out. “We’re not chosen, we’re charnel.” She’s trembling too; she wants to reach him, pull him close like they’re children again, but she stands her ground. Bones in the orchard, bones in the dovecote; what good is hunger or fear?
“Do you want to go back to your unit?” he asks.
“No.” She turns away from him. “But I will not see you distracted to your death.”
“You won’t go back home.”
Fly, beg the desperate rustles of dove wings. But that’s a fancy; the birds are long gone.
“We came here together,” Aikaterina says. “If we go home, we go home together. If we die—” She chokes on the word. “I will not leave.”
Alexander blinks, and then nods, once. She can see the gears in his head turning. He will never accept death, no matter how he is smothered in it.
“Goodnight, then,” he says, touching her face once more. The lack of finality is a small relief.
Aikaterina turns the pass between her fingers, this fragile paper that could have saved her life.
She feels Volkov more than she hears her; feels her brush shoulders with Alexander, the obscure comfort of her hand on his shoulder bleeding through their frayed connection for just a moment.
“Goodnight, Lieutenant.”
“Goodnight, Captain.”
Aikaterina brushes her hand over her own shoulder, as Volkov steps up to her.
The lieutenant gives her a nod.
“I am not a thing to be passed back behind the lines,” Aikaterina says, not willing to gloss over her involvement in this whole farce. “Did you want to see Alexander shot?”
A smile tugs at the edges of Volkov’s lips. “Am I speaking as an officer to a soldier, or a friend to Alexander’s sister?”
Aikaterina takes a deep breath, oranges and figs and rot. “I make a poor soldier.”
Volkov inclines her head at that. “I have family, back North,” she says. “All these last months, I have been turning these things in my mind. Whether it would be right to tell them to flee. They had their reasons for coming to this country; if they fled, they would have almost nothing. Now, it’s likely too late for any message I send to reach them. And we march to the slaughter.” The words are measured. “I wouldn’t say this to a soldier, you understand.”
“I can’t leave,” Aikaterina says.
“I understand,” Volkov said. “But I understand why the captain had to try.”
Noble Alexander. Mindful of his duty; opening the dovecote, whether or not he would return to it. Something aches on her tongue. It could be—hunger, fear, the selfish desire to pull Volkov closer and devour to find some solace in the world.
But the words that come from her lips surprise her.
“I heard the Angels. For the first time in—months.” For the last time, maybe. “Clear as song.”
Volkov doesn’t dispute that; doesn’t say anything, just listens with serious eyes.
“They told me to fly,” Aikaterina says. “Fly. A holy imperative.” She laughs. “But I won’t.”
Volkov nods. “I understand.”
A helpless sob escapes Aikaterina’s throat, and she presses her hands to her chest for a moment, as if she might hold herself together, and then lets them fall back to her sides.
Volkov watches, her eyes flitting between Aikaterina and the orchard’s treeline. She doesn’t cross the distance between them, as Aikaterina crumples the pass between her hands.
“A smoke?” Volkov suggests, producing a tin of tobacco from the breast pocket of her greatcoat.
“Sure,” Aikaterina says, holding out her hand. “I‘ll roll.”
She tears the pass down the middle, bisecting her brother’s name, and hides his steady handwriting under tobacco.
The only evidence of her brother’s crime goes up in smoke between their lips.
Volkov tips back her head, watching the smoke rise into the branches and up towards the stars. The sky is empty of wings.
“When I was a child,” Volkov said. “We burned prayers.”
Aikaterina bites back a laugh. “Does this count as a prayer?”
The brief brush of their hands is the only answer.
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S. M. French-Byrne is a Washington-based playwright and author writing stories about queer love and death. They seek to find mirrors of disability and transness in the speculative; the undead, the ghosts, the things that come back wrong. Their work has been produced by Eclectic Full Contact Theater and Theatre Between Addresses and published in We/Ourselves: Twenty-five 10-minute Plays Celebrating Gender Diversity. | |