Jenny Rae Rappaport - [BCS315 S01]

by Girls

  “You want more?”

  “Always, darling,” he says, lighting his cheroot. The smell of tobacco wafts sweet and woody, the smoke illuminated by the light of the full moon peeping through the clouds.

  “And if I don’t have more?”

  “Then I know you’re lying.”

  Of course, I’m lying. I spend every minute of every day lying. When I avoid Elzbet out of guilt, when I kiss Maksim, when I try to fill Madam’s place: lies, all of it. By the time the dragon comes, I’ll be an empty shell, filled with nothing but lies.

  But I won’t get any of the information that I want, if I don’t feed Maksim more breadcrumbs. So, I tell him about a millinery shop in a village on the city’s outskirts and a tavern in another village, two days’ ride from here.

  “Good,” he says, when I’m done.

  “What do you have for me?”

  “I don’t have to give you anything.”

  “But you will.”

  I lean forward and take the cheroot out of his hand, dancing away from him with my prize. He follows, trying to get it back. I dart out into the rain and back under the bridge again; Maksim runs after me. We play like two children, slipping on the wet grass, running and giggling at the same time. Maksim manages to back me against the bridge, caging me in with his body, and takes the now-extinguished cheroot out of my hands. He tucks it into his pocket and kisses me again, his mouth a riot of tobacco.

  I’m a bad person, a bad friend, a bad lover for Elzbet because I enjoy all of this way too much. The stone against my back is cold, Maksim’s body is a furnace against mine, and the juxtaposition of the two makes the back of my neck tingle. I am in danger of losing myself like this; of confusing the purpose for why I am here and what I need to do. I gently push him away from me.

  “Where are they?” I say.

  It takes him a moment to catch his breath, before he answers, “Polina’s father is in the northern forests. At a logging camp. According to the records.”

  “And Elzbet’s brother?”

  “I couldn’t find him.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “I swear to God I’m telling you the truth.”

  Of course, that’s a lie too. He knows that I know he’s lying. His army is full of meticulous record-keepers; somewhere, locked in an office, there is a document with the name of Elzbet’s brother. But pushing him on this would be like trying to get blood from a stone—painful and fruitless. There’s only so much of me left, and I must ration it carefully.

  “Why are you here?” I say instead. “Not under the bridge. But here, wearing that uniform?”

  “Money, fame, the usual glory?”

  But he is lying again. And somehow, this lie bothers me more than the other ones do.

  “That’s also a lie.”

  “It’s better that it’s a lie, Roza,” he says, and the expression on his face is a little boy’s—hurt, confused, unsure who to trust. I lace my fingers through his and say nothing. Because sometimes, there’s nothing you can say.

  I should hate him; I should hate all of them. I should have a burning fury toward them, a hatred that doesn’t die—I should want them all dead, like Elzbet and Polina do. I should be sewing my stars and writing my coded letters, and praying for their deaths. But what I should do and what I will do have never been quite the same.

  I lean my head on Maksim’s shoulder, and we stand listening to the rain together, long into the dark winter night.

  Elzbet is waiting.

  “Where?” she says, as I pull off my wet boots. The kitchen is lit only by the dying embers of the fire.

  “I—”

  “Who?” she says, stabbing the star she’s sewing with her needle.

  “I can explain.”

  “Try me.”

  “I’m being blackmailed.”

  “Try again.”

  “Why do you assume that—”

  “Who. Is. She,” she says, each word as sharp as a knife.

  “Elzbet, please, it’s not—”

  “I know what you look like when you’ve been kissed.”

  My knees go weak at that, and I sink into the nearest chair, banging my shin on the leg of the kitchen table. I can’t tell her the truth because telling her destroys my only potential source of information about her family. She would ask Maksim, and he would be forced to report us to his superiors. I would be a fool if I thought that kisses outweighed Maksim’s chances for a higher rank, as pleasant as they are. And we are close, so very close to summoning the dragon.

  “You don’t know them,” I say. “You don’t want to know them. It’s safer that you don’t.”

  Elzbet stares at me for a long while, and I see tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. She is proud, so very proud, and I have managed to wound her. I am a mess of contradictions, wanting to collapse into her arms and tell her everything and wanting to run far away before I hurt her further. I am so very bad sometimes at playing games.

  “You sleep in the sitting room tonight,” she says at last, standing to hide her half-sewn star behind the hollow carvings built into the mantelpiece. I watch her check that the fire is banked before she climbs the stairs that lead to the bedchambers above the shop.

  “Please let me explain,” I say, as I follow her, sticking my foot in the bedchamber door so that she can’t shut it in my face. “It doesn’t mean anything. If you only—”

  “Be quiet!” she says, motioning across the hall at Polina’s small bedchamber. “You’ll wake her. Wait here.” I move my foot aside to let her close the door.

  I am quiet because the words coming out of my mouth are lies and the words I wish that I could say are dangerous. There is no easy way to explain that I have spent half the night kissing a man who will likely betray me.

  A minute later, the door opens, and Elzbet shoves a pillow and blanket in my arms before closing it again.

  I spend the rest of the night face-down on Madam’s uncomfortable settee, the musty scent of its horsehair stuffing lingering in my nose. I quickly learn that tears only make the smell worse.

  Two weeks later, we start handing out the violet stars, sneaking them deep inside customers’ corsets and stitching them to their petticoats. A steady stream of women fills our shop as word spreads, whispered from one mouth to another. To an outsider’s eye, business is booming, despite Madam’s continued incarceration. We are girls with needles, after all, and dresses wear out, no matter who is currently ruling the country.

  Maksim and Olaf search the shop several times more, continuing to find nothing. Olaf pushes us around and looms over us with his bulky body; Maksim merely mutters “Sorry, it’s orders,” and keeps his head down. We are skilled at hiding, but I begin to suspect that Maksim is equally skilled at misdirecting Olaf away from the more obvious hiding places. There is a moment when our eyes meet over the top of a curio cabinet, and I am left feeling that everything I have been doing is instantly visible to him. The fact that I like this is not reassuring at all.

  There are more secret meetings and there are more kisses, and there are more people’s names that I betray to my enemy. I am caught in a spiderweb of lies, and I cling to Maksim, because he is just as covered in the spider silk as I am.

  Elzbet refuses to speak to me, conveying all her requests through Polina in an elaborate game of hurt. I don’t blame her; I am clearly wrong here, and yet what I am doing also feels strangely right. I move into Madam’s bedchamber, and that also feels both wrong and right. At the very least, it is a bed to sleep in and a small writing desk to use as I write coded letters.

  Every night, my dreams are full of the sound of great wings beating.

  They hang Madam on the day the true snows begin.

  We cram into the central square, the copper-covered onion domes of the Grand Cathedral looming above us. The army has built a platform with a gallows in front of it, obscuring the entrance to the cathedral itself, as if they can block what they are doing from the heavens above. It feels like
the entire city is standing with us, herded like cattle into the square to watch. Soldiers line the perimeter, preventing anyone from leaving. Maksim refuses to meet my eyes.

  There are audible gasps when they bring the prisoners out. Madam looks horrible—her ankles shackled, her hair stringy and lifeless, her dress gray with dirt. Whatever hope I have crumples inside me at the sight of her hands tied behind her back and the defiant set of her head.

  Some of the dressmakers who I have told Maksim about are also in the line of prisoners. I do not know whether they ignored my coded letters or whether they were tracked down separately by the army. All I know is that I bear responsibility—of course, I bear responsibility—and that knowledge alone is enough to make my stomach sour.

  Polina starts to cry before they’re even done reading the charges aloud. Loud sobs roll through her body until she is doubled over in the middle of the crowd, shaking like a leaf.

  “Make her stop,” Elzbet says, speaking directly to me for the first time in weeks.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  People start to stare because Polina has begun keening like a broken whistle. It is loud and annoying, and more importantly, it is drawing the attention of the soldiers.

  “You hold her back, I’ll hold her at the front,” I say. “She needs to be quiet.”

  Elzbet and I bend down to pull Polina into a more upright position and sandwich her between us. She is still loud, still shaking, but I have her mouth pressed into my chest which is muffling the sound. I can’t see what’s happening near the gallows, but the officials are still listing the supposed crimes of the accused. For crimes of high treason, of rebellion, of overt acts against the army and the country that has conquered us—of all these things, they are guilty. Madam will die, and the others will die, and there is not a thing I can do but hold my friend as she collapses.

  “They’ll shoot us, if we try to leave,” I whisper across Polina.

  “Yes,” Elzbet says, tightening her grip on Polina’s back and shoulders. “Even your friend.”

  “He wouldn’t,” I say, deliberately not rising to her barb. Elzbet is smart; she was bound to figure it out. I don’t know how, but clearly she has.

  “He would,” she says, and I don’t want to believe her. But all the bitterness and hurt in Elzbet’s voice can’t hide the fact that she is likely correct.

  Polina’s sobs cannot drown out the sound of the trapdoors on the gallows opening, nor the raucous cheer of the soldiers around the square as the “traitors” are hung. They cannot cover the noise that the crowd makes, a cry of resigned dismay that ripples and moves throughout the square. They can only exist in their own bubble of sound, as Elzbet and I stare at each other and fat flakes of snow start to turn the square white.

  “We see this through to the end,” I whisper to her, as if I had a choice in the matter. Madam knew what was required, and so do I.

  Elzbet nods, the slightest movement of her head in the falling snow, and it is enough.

  We have stars to sew.

  The snow is falling in vast clouds when Maksim and I meet again under the bridge. My hood is icy and has barely managed to keep the snow out of my eyes. Maksim is huddled under the bridge, his leather-gloved hands tucked into his armpits, stamping his feet to keep warm.

  “My mother,” he says, when I get close enough to hear. He’s brought a lantern this time, its small shuttered light making a glowing circle at his feet.

  “Your mother?” I say, stepping into the circle of light as I let my hood fall backward onto my shoulders.

  “My mother is why I’m here. You asked me once, and I never answered.”

  “Maksim—”

  “My father drinks and she’s sick and the little ones—”

  “Maksim,” I say again, putting a hand on his arm, and something in my voice makes him stop. “Your army just executed the woman who was the closest thing I had to a mother.”

  He stares at me and I stare at him, trying to fight back my tears. Madam died for something that she believed in; it would be dishonorable to cry over that. She left me this revolution to run, and to give in to tears would be weak. Cowardly. Revolutionaries are not allowed to weep.

  But girls with needles are, and when Maksim gathers me into his arms, the tears come. I bury my face in the crook of his neck while he rests his cheek on top of my head. I sob and sob, as he strokes my back and murmurs things softly to me in his own language. I don’t know how long I cry, only that there are so many tears in me, all fighting to escape. My nose is dripping cold snot, and my eyes are red by the time I manage to stop. Maksim holds me at arm’s length and brushes my hair away from my face.

  “When?” I ask him, as he hands me his handkerchief.

  “When what?”

  “When is it my turn to die?”

  At this point, I see no way that I’m getting out of this alive. The army will find me, will track me down, will string me up like they did to Madam. The only question is whether we can summon the dragon before that happens. It is a waiting game, it has always been a waiting game, and as much as I care for Maksim, I know that I’m living on borrowed time.

  “When do you tell them about me?” I say, wiping my nose. “When am I the one dangling from the gallows?”

  “Never.”

  “When do you stop lying to yourself about that?”

  “You’re not allowed to die,” Maksim says, closing the distance between us and kissing me. His mouth is gentle, and it feels like a prayer as much as a kiss; something tender and ineffable passing between us, as if we were always meant to be in this place, in this time, under this snowy bridge with one another. It is a kiss that says fragile things that we dare not speak, too afraid that they will shatter.

  “Roza,” he says, his hand on my cheek. “Run away with me.”

  “Run away, with you?” I say slowly, as if that will make the words any more logical.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “The forest. The northern sea. Across the great ocean. Anywhere but here.”

  “I could sew,” I say, because the fantasy is tempting.

  “And I could farm. Or hunt. Or even chop wood.”

  “We could have a home.”

  “And children. Lots of children.”

  “Maksim—”

  “Please,” he says, and I kiss him because there is nothing else I can do. In another place, in another time, perhaps. But then we would never have met, and this would never have started. And whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, I cannot say.

  I break the kiss and take a step back.

  “I can’t,” I say.

  There are too many people depending on me, too many lives that I am trying to save; my own life is not worth a fraction of theirs, when all is said and done. All our work with the violet stars would mean nothing.

  “Roza, please, I—”

  “Don’t say it,” I say, placing a finger on his lips. “If you don’t say it, we can pretend. That you don’t really care. That it’s fine that you’re going to lie to me about the whereabouts of Elzbet’s brother yet again, when I ask you. That we’re just two people who know each other, and we meet occasionally to trade secrets. That you never wanted this.”

  And now I’m crying again, the tears rolling down my cold cheeks, because the look on Maksim’s face is breaking me in two. If I was another person. If I had any choice. But there are no choices; there are never any choices.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and step away from the lantern light. I pull my hood over my head and tie it tight against the snowfall. I turn my back on Maksim, check carefully for patrols, and start down the path toward the main part of the city. I am still holding his handkerchief.

  Over the noise of the storm, I hear boots crunching in the snow, and when I turn my head, he is running after me. I stop walking, and he skids to a stop, wrapping his arms around me from behind. We are terribly exposed, but only fools are out tonight, and we
are both that.

  “Wait,” he says, kissing the small amount of uncovered skin on the back of my neck, between my coat collar and my hood. “Please.”

  I stay still, as the snow blows into my wet face. Maksim’s arms tighten around me, and then his voice is in my ear.

  “Elzbet’s brother is in Dublensk, a city just past the eastern border. They have him working at an iron foundry. And Roza?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve always wanted this. Don’t you ever dare doubt that.”

  I search for his hand and hold it for the space of one heartbeat, for the time it takes the two of us to say none of the things that really matter. There is only the storm and the snow and the moments that cannot last.

  I drop Maksim’s hand and walk into the night.

  We place the violet stars in the windows at sunset, two days later.

  “Quickly,” Elzbet says, and she and Polina hurry, affixing stars to the window glass with small drops of paste. I dart out the shop door, my boots slipping on the snow-scattered cobblestones, avoiding Maksim and the other soldiers on patrol.

  There are stars in all the windows. More and more stars in more and more windows as I glance up and down the street. I run to the corner, and in windows everywhere, I can see women placing them.

  Fresh snow begins to fall, and the bells of the Grand Cathedral ring out for evening prayers. The soldiers I pass in the streets are gaping at the stars and shouting angrily amongst themselves, their hands on their sword hilts. It’s a relief to run back through the shop door and slam it behind me.

  “Everywhere?” Elzbet says, and I can only nod as I catch my breath. “Truly everywhere?”

  “Every house and shop, as far as I could see,” I say.

  “It’s working, isn’t it?” Polina says. She is quivering with excitement, and tears of hope glisten on her cheeks.

  “We’ll know soon enough.”

  Elzbet and Polina have spent the days since the snowstorm accelerating the distribution of the stars; I have spent them writing even more coded letters, holding meetings with other coordinators, and not sleeping.