The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

“Der’mo, no.” Nina waved a hand, and Ian exhaled. They’d been careful, but accidents happened. “I don’t want babies,” Nina went on, matter-of-fact. “I never did. Is strange? It seemed every sestra in my regiment wanted babies.”

  “I think people like us do not make for good fathers and mothers. Always on the hunt—”

  “And we prefer hunt to babies.”

  His wife had said we. Ian grinned.

  A long exhausting drive, no answer at the house where they knocked, several more hours loitering around a Pennsylvania suburb waiting for the occupants to return . . . and then the shake of Nina’s head as a stout balding man and his gray-haired wife returned to the house, hatted and respectable and probably bad customers, but not the bad customer Ian was looking for. They went through their little act anyway, so Nina could get her Kodak shot, but this was officially another useless road trip. Ian didn’t punch the steering wheel this time when they got back into the car, but he did lean back and press his eyes closed in weariness. “Florida next,” he said flatly. “I can’t say it’s ever been on my list of places to see before I die.”

  “Tvoyu mat.” Nina sighed.

  “Indeed,” Ian said, turning back for Boston. It would be pitch-dark by the time they returned, even with these long summer days. A day to sleep off the drive and then make a decision whether it would be cheaper to drive to Florida, or take the train. “Or we fly,” Nina wheedled. “I borrow a plane from Garrett Byrne’s little field, is easy flight.”

  “You can’t just borrow a plane like borrowing a cup of sugar!”

  “We lock him in closet,” Nina said reasonably. “So he can’t say no.”

  “Fuck your mother,” Ian said, laughing despite himself. “No.”

  The trouble didn’t come until they stopped to eat. Twilight was falling in long purple shadows, and as they slid through the outskirts of a derelict mill town several hours outside Boston, Nina insisted on stopping. “I eat something or I eat steering wheel.”

  Ian parked at the nearest restaurant, an establishment named Bill’s, which made the diner where they spent so much time watching Kolb’s apartment look like a palace of haute cuisine. “Let’s not linger,” Ian murmured, eyeing the crowd of diners. There were a good many men with beers in front of them, shooting not terribly friendly looks at the newcomers.

  The waitress gave a flat stare as she took the order, eyebrows rising at Nina’s accent. “Where you from, ma’am?”

  “Boston,” Ian said at the same time Nina said, “Poland.” The waitress stared some more. Ian stared back coolly. “Two hamburgers, extra ketchup,” he repeated, and she took it down with another sidelong glance. Nina seemed more amused than anything, leaning past Ian to direct a long look at a beefy fellow giving her the eye.

  “I wash up,” she announced and rose to stroll unhurriedly between the grimy booths. Two men in steel-mill boots said something to her Ian couldn’t hear, though he could well imagine. Nina laughed and said something long and staccato, accompanied by a hand gesture. The two men bristled, and she sauntered on into the washroom. One of them rose and lumbered over toward the seat Nina had vacated. Ian sat back, unfolding his arms across the back of the booth.

  “Your wife talks funny,” the man said without preamble.

  “She’s Polish,” Ian said.

  “I met plenty of Polacks during the war,” he persisted. “They don’t talk like that.”

  “You’ve traveled all over Poland, have you? Personally experienced the rich variety of regional dialects from Poznań to Warsaw?” Ian employed his most contemptuous drawl. “Do piss off.”

  The man’s brows lowered. “Don’t tell me to piss off.”

  Ian stared at him through half-lidded eyes. “Bugger off, then.”

  Nina’s voice came behind him. “Is problem, luchik?”

  “No,” Ian said without shifting his gaze. “No problem at all, darling.”

  She slid past the beefy fellow into her seat, looking utterly relaxed. Ian supposed that when one had looked Joseph Stalin in the eye, belligerent drunks from western Massachusetts failed to impress. “We make Boston by midnight?” she asked as though their visitor were invisible. “Is very slow, driving these trips. I still say we borrow a plane.”

  “She don’t sound like no Polack,” the beefy man muttered, returning to his table with a dark look. Ian released his breath as their hamburgers arrived, staying on guard even as Mr. Beefy and his two friends rose and left. Nina was still getting odd looks—even in a prim blouse and skirt, she didn’t quite look like the average tourist. Maybe it was the unblinking stare with which she returned those furtive looks, or maybe it was the way she ate hamburgers, which put Ian in mind of film reels about the eating habits of cannibal tribes in Fiji.

  The waitress stiffed them on the bill when she made change, but Ian didn’t quibble, grabbing his fedora and taking Nina’s arm. They stepped outside into the street, now fully dark, and Ian wasn’t surprised to see three figures step out of the shadows.

  He tensed, shifting onto the balls of his feet. At his side he could feel his wife relax completely, body flowing into stillness. Ian saw she was smiling.

  “Can I help you?” he asked the three men coldly.

  “I met Russkies in the war too,” the beefy man said, exhaling beer fumes. “She talks like them, not like a goddamn Polack. Is your wife there a Commie?”

  “Da, tovarische,” Nina said, and everything happened at once. The beefy man moved toward her; Ian stepped into his path and threw a right hook against his jaw. The man yelled, his friend behind him yelled too, and lunged at Ian, taking him around the ribs in a bull’s rush. Ian heard the unmistakable snick of Nina’s straight razor unfolding.

  “Don’t kill anyone—” he managed to shout, before a fist smashed against his side and took his breath in a huff, and the beefy man threw a wild punch that glanced off his ear. Ian could see flashes of Nina struggling with the third man, who had got her in a bear hug and lifted her off her feet. Ice-cold fear and white-hot fury swamped Ian, even as he saw Nina’s blond head snap forward and catch her attacker in the nose. An answering bellow split the night. Ian drove a boot into the beefy man’s shin before he could wind up another punch, then slammed an elbow into the kidney of the man who had Ian around the ribs. Finally wrenching free, he saw Nina’s razor hand whip round viciously fast, opening a slash through shirt and skin on the arm holding her off the ground. The man’s bellow scaled upward into a shriek, and he dropped Nina in the gravel. She caught herself, pushing off the ground, and caught the man’s backhand across the face.

  Ian sprang on him and put a straight right into the man’s Adam’s apple, hooked a foot around his ankle, and yanked him off his feet, kicking him in the ribs twice for good measure. When he saw Nina was on her feet, he shouted, “To the car!”

  She flew at his side, diving into the front seat even as Ian fumbled with keys and wrenched at the various start-up dials and settings. He heard a shout, felt the car shudder as a kick thumped the bumper, and then they were pulling away with a screech of tires, to the sound of Nina’s wild laughter.

  “You’re insane,” Ian shouted. “Goddammit, I lost my hat—”

  “You can fight!” She was grinning. “You said you could, I didn’t believe—”

  “I’ve had that hat since before the Blitz,” Ian complained, but he was smiling too. They were speeding out of this unsavory little hamlet into the darkness; the hand he’d punched with was killing him; he could feel blood trickle down the side of his face—and he couldn’t stop grinning. He glanced at his wife. “Are you hurt?”

  “I think maybe he breaks my nose?” She sounded unconcerned.

  “Bloody hell.” His smile disappeared. “I’m pulling over.”

  “Is not the first time. Papa broke my nose when I was eleven. I spilled a jug of vodka.”

  “Yes, you’re hard as rock, you were raised by wolves, just let me look at it.”

  The side of the road was dark as pitch, s
liced through by the Ford’s headlights and then the light of the torch Ian pulled from the boot. Nina’s feet crunched on pebbles as she slid out and let him examine her battle wounds beside the car. Her small nose was swelling rapidly and trickling blood, but despite her cursing as Ian pinched the nasal bones, nothing moved that shouldn’t have. “Not broken. Next time perhaps don’t taunt the drunks when they’re squaring for a fight.”

  “What is fun in that?” She wiped the blood away with the side of her hand. “So, where does proper English stick like you learn gutter fighting?” She mimed the elbow he’d dropped on his second opponent.

  “Every public school boy learns how to box. The elbow strikes and kidney shots I picked up from some guerrillas in Spain.” Ian’s blood was still pumping at twice its normal pace, the rush of excitement starting to drain. “I don’t pick fights, but if anybody picks one with me, I’ll be damned if I fight fair.”

  “I like this in you, luchik.” Nina approved, blue eyes glinting in the dark. Ian envisioned the flash of her blond hair outside the restaurant as the man backhanded her. He pulled her suddenly into a rough, hard embrace. He wanted to go back and beat the bastard’s head in.

  “Nu, ladno—” Nina squirmed free, looking impatient. “Is fine, no one is hurt, we drive.”

  That’s it, Ian thought, fighting back all his inner turmoil as he slid into the car. I’m not letting you go. I don’t know what I have to do to persuade you to stay, Nina Markova, but I’m going to find out.

  Chapter 44

  Nina

  September 1944

  Outside Poznań

  Nina folded her arms. “It’s been two weeks. It healed clean.”

  Sebastian winced as he put his weight on his wounded leg. “It hurts to walk.”

  “You’re faking,” she stated.

  The English boy sighed. He was just five years younger, twenty-one to Nina’s twenty-six, but she couldn’t help but think of him as a boy. There was something open and trusting about him; even his years in captivity hadn’t dimmed it. “Can we sit down? Please.”

  Nina sat, glowering. Their camp looked considerably more lived in now that they’d been ensconced for a fortnight waiting for Seb to mend: stream-rinsed laundry hanging to dry, fire pit now lined with stones and rigged with a crude spit. Nina couldn’t wait to leave it. “You know I want to head west.”

  “That’s mad, Nina.” He said it with embarrassment, hating to contradict her. “No destination, no plan—”

  “I want out of Poland.”

  “You think Germany will be better? We have no papers, no clothes.” Gesturing down at his dirty battle dress. “Odds are we’d get nabbed and then you’d be a kriegie right alongside me. Only you’d be the only woman in a camp full of men, and trust me, they aren’t all gentlemen.”

  “We make our way west through the woods, then.”

  “You’re going to take backwoods trails all the way across Germany, with no maps? What about when it gets cold?”

  Nina laughed. “I’m from Siberia, malysh. It won’t get cold enough to kill me.”

  “Don’t call me little boy. All I want is not to get caught, and for you not to get caught.” His long-lashed eyes held hers. “I owe you my life, Nina. If you hadn’t come along, that German would have shot me, or if I’d got away from him, I’d have stumbled around in these trees till I died of thirst or some other Kraut scooped me. I owe you, and if we both get pinched, I can’t ever pay you back.”

  Nina opened her mouth. The little English snail is right about one thing, her father remarked. Your plan is mad.

  “We hide here,” Seb persisted. “In the woods, something better than a camp clearing. Near enough to Posen to forage, keep our ear to the ground for news. Why move on? We won’t find anywhere better to wait out the war.”

  “Wait out—!”

  “It can’t be long now,” Seb rushed on. “A few months, maybe even before the end of the year, and this country is running over with Allied instead of German sentries—”

  “Running over with Soviets, when our forces arrive. I won’t wait for that.”

  “We’ll tell everyone you’re Polish instead. You lost your papers. The Red Cross will help, at the very least.”

  “What do we do until then? Sit around embroidering?” That brought Yelena painfully to mind, unpicking blue threads from state-issued men’s briefs so she could embroider stars into a scarf.

  “I’ve spent four years doing nothing but pass time. If we can stay warm, stay secret, and feed ourselves—”

  “We.” Nina glared again. “You mean me.” Two weeks in the woods, and this city boy still couldn’t light a fire without wasting half the kindling.

  “Until the war ends, I need you,” Seb acknowledged. “After the war, you’ll need me.”

  Nina raised her eyebrows.

  “I’m a British subject. Once the Germans are finished, I can get myself shipped back to England. I’ll take you with me.”

  Nina blinked. “How?”

  He shrugged. “My brother has connections everywhere; he can sponsor you. You could get British citizenship eventually. You just have to know people, and believe me, we Grahams know people. You keep me alive till the war ends,” Sebastian Graham repeated, “and I’ll get you to England and see you settled there. I owe you that.”

  Nina hesitated. What did she know about England except that it was full of fog and capitalists?

  “England,” Seb wheedled. “As far west as you can go without leaving Europe. Not to mention that we’ve got Piccadilly. The Egypt wing of the British Museum. Fish and chips—you haven’t lived till you’ve had fish and chips, Nina. No Komsomols, no gulags, no collective apartments. A nice king with a stammer who doesn’t go in for mass executions. It’s a big improvement on the Soviet Union, believe me, and you can call it home. All we have to do is hunker down and stick together.”

  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.