The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  “I work for English pilot. He comes out of RAF, starts a little airfield. I help.” Nina stirred her tea. “You have jam?” She wasn’t precisely rude, Ian decided, just abrupt. She had to be what, thirty-two now?

  Her eyes flicked at him. The blue eyes, he thought—those hadn’t changed. Very, very watchful.

  “Why are you here?” he asked quietly.

  “The message.” She tilted her head at Tony. “He asks me to help find your huntress. I help.”

  “You dropped everything and caught the nearest train across half Europe, all because you heard we might have a lead on die Jägerin?”

  His wife looked at him as though he were an idiot. “Yes.”

  Tony fetched the jam pot, then leaned back against the desk. “I hope you’ll tell me more about yourself, Mrs. Graham. Your devoted husband has not exactly been forthcoming.”

  “Just Nina. Mrs. Graham is only for passport.”

  “‘Nina,’ that’s a pretty name. You’re Polish?”

  He switched languages, asking something. Nina answered, then switched back. “I do English now. Who are you again? I forget to write name down.”

  “Anton Rodomovsky.” Tony took her hand that didn’t have a teacup in it and bowed, all his charm coming to the fore. “Formerly Sergeant Rodomovsky of the United States Army, but both me and the US of A thought that was a failed experiment. Now I’m just Tony: interpreter, paper pusher, all around dogsbody.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Interpreter?”

  “Grow up in Queens with as many babushkas as I did, you pick up a few languages.” Lazily. “Polish, German, Hungarian, French. Some Czech, Russian, Romanian . . .”

  Nina transferred her gaze to Ian. “Interpreter,” she said as if Tony wasn’t there. “Is useful. When do we leave?”

  “Pardon?” Ian was transfixed by the way she was dropping heaping spoons of strawberry jam into her teacup. He’d never seen anyone do that to an innocent cup of tea in his life. Bloody hell, it was barbaric.

  “I help look for the bitch,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “When do we leave, and where do we go?”

  “There’s a witness in Altaussee who might have information on where die Jägerin went after the war,” Tony said.

  Nina drank off her jam-clotted tea in three long gulps, then rose and stretched like an untidy little alley cat. Ian rose too, feeling enormous; she barely came up to his shoulder. “We leave tomorrow,” she said. “Where can I sleep?”

  “Your husband lives upstairs,” Tony said. “Shall I take up your things?” Ian shot him a withering look. “What, no passionate reunion?” he remarked, innocent.

  “Very funny,” Ian said, unamused. It had been the hardest thing to communicate to Nina five years ago when he proposed marriage—that he expected nothing from her, that he was honoring a debt and not looking to collect payment in return. The mere idea of pressing physical attentions on an illness-weakened, war-ravaged woman made him feel like a debaucher out of a Dickens novel. Nina had spent her wedding night in a hospital cot, and he’d spent his filling out paperwork in the name of Nina Graham so she could get to England as soon as she was released.

  “I doubt our landlady will be too keen on you staying under this roof,” Tony was saying. “I rent a room two blocks down from a nice little hausfrau. I’ll walk you over, see if I can get you into her spare room.”

  Nina nodded, sauntering toward the door. For all her crumb scattering and sprawling limbs, she moved absolutely soundlessly—that too Ian remembered from five years ago; how his bride even while shaky with weakness had moved over a hospital floor silent as a winter fox.

  Tony held the door for her, the speculative gleam back in his eye. “So tell me,” he began as the door closed.

  Ian turned, contemplating his office. One short visit had turned it to chaos: muddy footprints, rings of drying tea on the files, a sticky spoon staining the blotter. Ian shook his head, half irritated and half amused. This is what you get for putting off the divorce paperwork, Graham. The entire marriage should have been over within a year of the vows—he and Nina had agreed, in a combination of English, Polish, and hand gestures on the way back from the registry office, on a divorce as soon as her British citizenship was finalized. But that had taken so long, and he’d been heading out with the war crime investigation units, and Nina had been struggling to get used to ration-locked postwar England, and time had passed. Every six months or so Ian telegrammed to ask if she needed anything—he might not know his wife, but he’d felt a certain responsibility to make sure the frail woman he’d got out of Poland wasn’t utterly lost in her new country. Yet she always refused help, and most of the time he forgot he was married at all. He certainly had no woman in his life with designs on Nina’s place.

  He had cleaned up the mess and gone back to his files by the time Tony returned. “You have an interesting wife,” he said without preamble. “Please tell me you’re aware she’s not Polish.”

  Ian blinked. “What?”

  “She’s no native speaker. Her grammar’s terrible and her accent’s worse. Didn’t you notice she swapped back to English the minute she could?”

  Ian leaned back, hooking an elbow around the back of his chair and reevaluating everything all over again. How many surprises was this day going to lob at him? “If she isn’t Polish, what is she?”

  Tony looked ruminative. “You know how many grandmothers and great-aunts I had whacking me with wooden spoons when I was growing up? All these old ladies in shawls nagging their daughters and quarreling over goulash recipes?”

  “Will you get to the point?”

  “Hundreds, because the women in my family all live forever, and when you add in the godparents and in-laws—not just the Rodomovskys but the Rolskas and the Popas and the Nagys and all the rest—they came off the boat from everywhere east of the Rhine. There was one particularly mean old cow, my grandmother’s cousin by marriage, who talked about winter in Novosibirsk and put jam in her tea . . .” Tony shook his head. “I don’t know what else your wife is lying about, but if she’s from Poland, I’m a Red Sox fan. I know a Russian when I hear one.”

  Ian felt his eyebrows shoot up. “Russian?”

  “Da, tovarische.”

  Silence fell. Ian turned a pen over slowly between two fingers. “Perhaps it doesn’t matter,” he said more to himself than his partner. “She was a refugee when I met her in Poznań, and refugees are rarely fleeing happy pasts. I doubt her story is any prettier for starting in the Soviet Union than in Poland.”

  “Do you even know what her story is?”

  “Not really.” The language barrier had made it so difficult to exchange more than basic information, and besides, Nina hadn’t been a source he’d been interrogating to get a story. She’d been a woman in trouble. “She was desperate, and I owed her a debt. It was that simple.”

  “What debt?” Tony asked. “You’d never met her before; how could you owe her anything?”

  Ian took a long breath. “When I came to the Polish Red Cross, I was looking for someone else. His name was Sebastian.” A boy in an ill-fitting uniform, seventeen the last time Ian had seen him. I told them I was twenty-one, I ship out next week! Even now, that memory made Ian catch his breath in pain. “Seb had been a prisoner of war since Dunkirk, held at the stalag near Poznań. I didn’t find him, but I found Nina—she had his tags, his jacket. She knew him. She was able to tell me how he died.”

  “How do you know she told the truth about that?” Tony asked quietly. “She lied about being Soviet. She could have lied about anything else. Everything else.”

  Ian turned the pen over again. “I think I need to have a chat with my wife,” he said at last.

  Tony nodded. “After Altaussee?”

  “Altaussee first.” The witness, the hunt, die Jägerin. Nothing came before that.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Tony said eventually. “What debt did you owe Nina that you married her without a second’s hesitation to get her to Eng
land?”

  “Seb had promised to get her there. I kept his promise for him.” Ian looked at his partner. “He was my little brother. The only family I had left. And Nina watched die Jägerin murder him at Lake Rusalka.”

  But the poisonous doubt had crept in. If she had lied about one thing, why not this? That night when Ian sat awake in his dark bedroom with his mind consumed by a woman, it wasn’t the huntress. He leaned on his windowsill with a half-smoked cigarette, looking out over moonlit Vienna and wondering, Who the hell did I marry?

  Chapter 6

  Nina

  May 1937

  Lake Baikal, Siberia

  Nina broke the rabbit’s neck with a fast twist, feeling the last tremor of its heart under her fingertips. Spring had come to the lake, the air alive with the squeal and groan of ice as the lake’s surface broke apart into rainbow shards. Icicles dripped and water lapped on the shore as the air warmed, but ice floes still drifted in the farther depths. The Old Man had control of the seasons here, and he kept a long grip on winter.

  Nina reset the rabbit snare under the trees. She was nineteen now, her blue eyes wary under a shapeless rabbit-fur cap, razor never far from her hand. Her father was too drunk much of the time now to set snares or to stalk game, so Nina did it. The rabbit in her hand would go into the stewpot, and the pelt could line a pair of gloves or be traded. Hunting let her make a living without a man, but Nina still glowered restlessly across the lake. It had been three years since she lay gasping on the ice with her eyelashes freezing together, looking up into the vast sky thinking Get out of here. Three years of waking up with the choking feeling of cold water closing over her head, the terrible drowning sensation. But where was there for a girl like her to go, little and wolverine-mad and knowing nothing except how to stalk and kill and move without a sound?

  She didn’t know, but she had to find it, or else she would die here. Stay, and Nina knew the lake would take her in the end.

  She stood swinging the dead rabbit by the ears and pondering her useless questions as she’d done for so many mornings, and the day might have ended as so many did: with her stamping back to the house, and skirting her father as he lay snoring. But today, Nina heard a rumble from the sky.

  The gornaya? she wondered—but it was too early in the year for the mountain-bred wind that could whirl out of the northwest from a warm sky, whipping the lake into a frenzy and hurling waves three times the height of a man across the shores. Besides, this was a droning mechanical sound that seemed to rise from everywhere. Nina shaded her eyes, hunting for the strange buzz, and her jaw dropped as a shape rose sleek and dark from the horizon and glided down over the trees. An airplane? she thought. The village traders who had been to Irkutsk claimed to have seen them, but she never had. It might as well have been a firebird rising from myth.

  She thought it would streak across the sky and be gone, but there was a skipping sound in the drone of its engines. Nina had a moment’s terror the machine would crash into the lake. But it banked stiffly, descending below the tree line, and Nina began to run. For once she didn’t bother to move quietly, just crashed through underbrush and squelching mud. At some point she realized she had lost the rabbit, but she didn’t care.

  The plane had touched down in a long clearing in the taiga. The pilot was standing by the cockpit with a toolbox, cursing, and Nina stared at him, mesmerized. He looked as tall as a god in his overalls and flying cap. She didn’t dare come closer, just sank to her heels in a stand of brush and watched him work on the engine. She couldn’t stop looking at the plane, its long lines, its proud wings.

  It took her a long time to work up the courage to approach. But she moved out from the brush, slowly came forward. The pilot turned and found Nina under his nose.

  He jumped back, boots slipping in icy mud. “Fuck your mother, you scared me.” His Russian was clipped, strangely accented. “Who are you?”

  “Nina Borisovna,” she said, dry mouthed. She raised a hand in greeting, and saw his eyes dance over the dried rabbit blood showing under her nails. “I live here.”

  “Who lives in a mud splat like this?” The pilot looked at her a little longer. “A real little savage, aren’t you?” he said, turning back to his toolbox.

  Nina shrugged.

  “This isn’t even Listvyanka, is it?”

  “No.” Even Listvyanka was bigger than her village.

  The pilot swore some more. “Hours off course from Irkutsk . . .”

  “Planes don’t land here,” Nina managed to say. “Where are you from?”

  “Moscow,” he grunted, slinging tools. “I fly the mail route, Moscow to Irkutsk. Longest route in the Motherland,” he added, unbending. “Detoured past Irkutsk in the fog, had some engine trouble. Nothing serious. I could fly this girl home on one wing if I had to.”

  “What kind of—I mean—” Nina wished she could stop blushing and stammering. She could have eaten the local boys for breakfast, but here she was tripping over her words like a lovesick girl. Only she wasn’t in love with a man, but a machine. “What kind of plane is this?”

  “A Pe-5.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Nina whispered.

  “She’s a brick,” the pilot said dismissively. “But a good Soviet brick. Eh, get back, little girl!” he barked as Nina reached toward the wing.

  “I’m not a little girl,” she flashed. “I’m nineteen.”

  He chuckled, went on working. Nina wished she understood what he was doing. She could have opened up a rabbit or a seal or a deer and known every organ and bone, but the Pe-5’s innards were strange to her. Masses of wires and gears, the smell of oil. She breathed it in as though it were wildflowers. “Where did you learn to fly?”

  “Air club.”

  “Where are there air clubs?”

  “Everywhere from Moscow to Irkutsk, coucoushka! Everybody wants to fly. Even little girls.” He winked. “Ever heard of Marina Raskova?”

  “No.”

  “An aviatrix who just set the distance record. Moscow to . . . Well, somewhere. Comrade Stalin himself sent congratulations.” Another wink. “Probably because she’s pretty, Raskova is.”

  Nina nodded. Her heart had stopped its pitter-pat, settled to a purposeful rhythm. “Take me with you,” she said when he finally shut up his toolbox and rose. She wasn’t surprised when he guffawed. “Just an idea. I’m a good screw,” she lied. She hadn’t screwed a man before—most of the ones she knew were nervous around her, and anyway she was too wary of getting pregnant—but she’d do it right here in this clearing if it got her into that plane.

  “A good screw?” The pilot looked at the blood under her fingernails. “Do you pick your teeth with a man’s bones afterward?” He shook his head, stowing his tools. “Good luck, coucoushka. You’ll need it, stuck out here on the edge of the world.”

  “I won’t be stuck here much longer,” Nina said, but he was swinging up into the cockpit and didn’t hear. Before he could start up the engines, she darted close and laid her hand against the wing. It seemed warm to her, pulsing under her palm like a living thing. Hello, it seemed to say.

  “Hello,” Nina breathed back, and she darted away before the pilot could shout at her. She raced to the edge of the clearing as the deafening sound of the engines filled the air and sent birds spiraling up from the trees. Then she watched, delighted, as the plane slowly turned toward the long treeless edge, straightened, began to gather speed. Her breath caught when it lifted into the air, rising into the pool of blue that was the sky—aiming west. She stood there long after it had disappeared, crying a little, because at last she had answers.

  What is the opposite of a lake?

  The sky.

  What is the opposite of drowning?

  Flying. Because if you were soaring free in the air, water could never close over your head. You might fall, you might die, but you would never drown.

  What lies all the way west?

  An air club. Maybe it wasn’t all the way west, but just
a few hours west lay everything Nina had not known she needed.

  She ran all the way home, feet already so light she could feel herself straining to take wing, and packed everything she owned—a few clothes, her identity cards, the razor—into a satchel. Without hesitation, she emptied every kopeck out of the jar her father kept as a money tin. “I’ve been making all the money anyway,” she told her father, snoring on his filthy bed. “Besides, you tried to drown me in the lake.”

  She turned away to pick up her satchel. When she looked back, she saw one wolflike eye open a slit, regarding her silently.

  “Where you going?” he slurred.

  “Home,” she heard herself say.

  “The lake?”

  Nina sighed. “I’m not a rusalka, Papa.”

  “Then where are you going?”

  “The sky.” I never knew I could have the sky, Nina thought. But now I know.

  His snores started again. Nina almost leaned down and brushed her lips over his forehead, but instead, she took the half-empty jug of vodka from the kitchen table and set it by the bed. Then she flung her satchel over her shoulder, hiked to the station in Listvyanka, and slept on the platform waiting for the next train. The ride was cold and malodorous, dumping her into Irkutsk the following twilight. At any other time she might have gasped at the sheer grubby expanse that was a city and not a ramshackle village—there were more people visible here in the blink of an eye than she was used to seeing in the course of an entire week. But she was honed sharp and straight as her razor on only one thing. It took all night, but after being laughed at or shrugged off by half the people in Irkutsk, she found it: an ugly block building off the Angara River.

  At dawn, the director of the Irkutsk air club came to work yawning and found someone had beaten him there. Bundled in her coat, blue eyes barely visible between rabbit-fur cap and scarf, Nina Markova sat curled in a ball on the top step. “Good morning,” she said. “Is this where I learn to fly?”

  Chapter 7

  Jordan