Nina had no idea what fish and chips was, or Piccadilly. Where her mind lingered was on the words as far west as you can go without leaving Europe.
“Survival now for citizenship later,” Sebastian said. “What do you say?”
IT WAS A STRANGE THING, Nina reflected, to have nothing in the world but a single partner. She had lived so long among hundreds of women, then she had been alone among the trees with no company but hallucinations. Now she had Sebastian Graham, and could any alliance have been stranger?
“I wanted to join the RAF,” Seb said. “Spitfires and glamour. But the recruiting bastard laughed in my face.”
“Flying bombing runs isn’t glamorous.” Nina pushed a leaf across the flat stone between them. Seb was teaching her poker, having patiently marked up a variety of leaves with a charred stick to make a deck of cards. “Are oak leaves hearts or spades?”
“Spades.” He cocked his head, listening. “That’s a nuthatch.”
“What?”
He imitated a birdcall.
“You don’t know anything about the woods, but you know birds?” Nina pushed the oak leaf that was the queen of spades across the rock.
“I like birds.” He linked his hands together, made a curious little gesture imitating flight. “My brother, Ian, gave me my first bird book. The other boys said it was sissy, until I punched them. Ian showed me how to punch the same day he gave me the book. He said I could like whatever I wanted, I’d just best be prepared to hit people if they gave me grief about it.” Seb tilted his head back, listening for the chirrups and twitters coming from the trees. “So many birds here—nuthatches, starlings, bitterns . . . it seemed like at the camp, there were only those tattered hulking crows.”
They were still at the same campsite for now. They’d need better shelter soon, but the weather was still mostly warm. Seb had no skill laying snares or tracking game, but he had a wiry toughness equal to hours of foraging as his leg healed, and his Polish was good enough to make him useful whenever they headed to the outskirts of one of the villages to trade game for bread. Nina managed to snag a pair of breeches and cap and jacket off a village clothesline, rough peasant wear that made Seb into a scruffy traveler rather than an escaped soldier. “We can’t risk it too often,” she warned the day they almost stepped out of the trees into a party of German sentries. “Never the same village twice, and never the bigger towns. They’ll be crawling with Fritzes, not to mention hungry villagers looking to turn in suspicious travelers.”
“You don’t have much faith in humanity, do you, Nina?”
“Do you?” she asked, surprised. They were washing dirty clothes in the stream, Seb entirely willing to whack wet socks against a rock without complaining it was women’s work the way most Russian men would. Maybe it was an English thing, Nina speculated, or maybe when you were already relying on a woman to gut game, there wasn’t much of a case to be made about women’s work.
“I’ve got quite a bit of faith in humanity, actually.” Seb wrung out a wet sock. “The fellows at camp—they weren’t all saints, but there were rules. You didn’t steal. You shared food with your friends when you had it. And even the Jerries weren’t all brutes. They had their rules too, and most tried to be fair.” Seb laid the socks out to dry on the sunny rock. “There was a lot of generosity inside those walls. More than I ever saw at public school.”
“What’s this public school? Aren’t all schools public?”
“It’s not collective education, that’s for sure.” Seb snorted. “My father would have died of shame if a Graham ever rubbed shoulders at school with peasants.”
“You’re rubbing shoulders with a peasant now,” Nina pointed out.
“And if my father were still alive, I’d bring you home to tea just to see the look on his face.” Seb smiled at the thought. “Ian, now, he wouldn’t blink even if you waved your razor at him over the tea sandwiches. Nothing shocks my big brother. But my father, cripes. One look at you and he’d choke on a scone.” Seb’s smile was rare and surprisingly sweet; paired with the dark hair now growing shaggy and those long lashes, he’d probably made a good many hearts flutter back on his foggy little island. Nina’s heart didn’t flutter in the slightest. He was a handsome boy, but he reminded her too much of Yelena. I’m done loving sweet-souled long-lashed idealists who dream of flight, Nina thought, wringing her own socks out viciously, because those are the ones who scoop your heart out and take it with them when they fly away. Like should stick to like. Let Seb and Yelena each find someone sweet and valiant to worship them all their days; Nina was done with love affairs. She’d sleep alone, or she’d find some clear-eyed hunter with a heart like a diamond; someone who would not carve out her soul and leave her hollow.
“Did you leave a girl behind?” Nina asked Seb, shaking her bleakness away. “Before you enlisted.”
His eyes shifted away. “No.”
“Boy?” Nina asked matter-of-factly and saw his face drain of color. “I don’t care, I just wondered.” If anything she was relieved, knowing he wasn’t likely to try anything with her.
He didn’t speak for almost an hour. Until Nina said into the silence, “I had someone. A girl. So . . .”
“Oh,” said Seb.
“I thought it was usual for the English, boys and boys? That’s what they tell us, that all the English bugger each other and that’s why they can’t fight.”
“No.” Seb’s face had nearly regained its normal pallor. “They say it’s a thing that happens at school, because you don’t have girls. That you grow out of it.”
“And you didn’t?”
“No. I didn’t have anyone, I just knew 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.