But there was nothing she could do about it . . .
Her hands began to play the fourth waltz, and her attention snapped back to the keyboard. Those soft little notes . . . that sad melody . . . this was not Strauss.
This was the Valse Triste. The Sibelius.
No one seemed to notice. They were all still vying for the attention of Brunnhilde. But the music woke Triste out of her horror, and carried her straight into grief.
She had not wept since her mother died. Not for her father, not for all the people she knew had, must have, gone to the camps, and who were probably dead by now. Not for herself. Her tears seemed to have dried and gone until this moment. But now, as her hands played, the floodgates opened, and the tears flowed, silently; she sobbed silently, weeping for her mother, her father, the sweet, sweet pair of men who loved each other and had unfailingly brought her chocolates, for her teacher . . . their sad, gray spirits rose up before her and she wept for them and for all the others she did not even know. Her grief poured out of her in a torrent—
And out on the dance floor, a strange mist began to rise.
The dancers did not notice it at first, and when one or two did, they must have thought it was some clever effect that the Gruppenführer had arranged. It rose to their knees . . . and then to their waists . . . and then it was too late.
The mist seized them, caught them as the Wilis of legend would catch unwary young men who dared their graves after dark. It caught them; Triste looked up, something telling her that there was something different out there, and saw the moment it caught them, saw the moment the mist formed into human shapes, separated the dancing partners until each of them had a partner made of mist, and whirled them off into a dance of terror. Brunnhilde spun past, her mouth in a soundless “O” of fear. The Gruppenführer, his pupils dilated. Even the servants.
And Triste’s hands played on, driving them into the frenzied conclusion of the Valse, their faces, their eyes now contorted with horror.
And then, as she brought her hands down on the keys in the final crashing chords, the mist rose up over each dancer like a wave, and engulfed them.
Then there was only silence. The mist vanished, leaving behind a room strewn with the dead.
Triste could not think, but her body, it seemed, had already decided what to do. She got up from the piano, and went to the body of one of the servant girls who was sprawled beside a table. Her hands stripped the girl of her maid’s uniform, and redressed her in Triste’s gown. Now wearing only her underwear and barefoot, Triste found herself going back upstairs. She left the maid’s uniform in one of the rooms, took armfuls of clothing, and the maid’s papers. When her arms were full, she took everything to her room. She went down to Didi’s room, and took a suitcase from a closet, and the pair of expensive and hard-to-get rubber-soled shoes Didi wore to go shopping. When she was done, she dressed in some of what she had taken, put on the rubber-soled shoes and her coat full of money, picked up the suitcase, and went back down into the silent house.
The mist was gathering again, following along behind her. But rather than feeling threatened by it, she felt comforted, as if it was protecting her.
At the music room she stopped. Her senses were coming back to her, it seemed; she found herself able to think again. She looked back at the billows of mist.
“I could escape to England,” she said, tentatively.
The shadows in the mist seemed to agree. But sadly. As if she were obscurely disappointing them.
“But . . . maybe I can . . . do something . . . ” she continued, groping her way through unfamiliar territory. Was this what courage felt like? “If I stay. If you help me. Will you help me?”
There was no doubt. She felt the surge of fierce assent.
She made up her mind. She would stay. And she would need an instrument . . .
She knew exactly what to get. The music room was full of instruments the Gruppenführer had confiscated, but there was one her hands would know what to do with, that was easy and portable to take—and would not be missed. She dashed inside and came out with the concertina in its case. Now she would have her disguise—a means of moving around Montmarte almost invisibly—and her weapon.
“Now we go,” she told the shadows, and headed for the door, and freedom. It would be a long walk to Montmarte, but her shoes would make no sound, and she could hide in shadows with the mist’s help when patrols came by. She had the maid’s papers, and no one would be looking for her now. She would find a little garret or basement room, begin playing in the cafes, and eventually, she knew, she would find the Resistance. And then her real work would begin.
She hurried out of the mansion driveway, into the streets of Paris, with the shadows gathering behind her like dark wings.
White Bird
Mercedes Lackey
White bird
In a golden cage
On a winter’s day
In the rain
White bird
In a golden cage
Alone
Jeanne Blanchette guided her Spitfire through the low-hanging winter clouds, ducking below the ceiling only now and again to confirm her heading. This was no kind of weather to be flying in, but the Armée de l’Air needed their planes, and as soon as one was fit to fly, one of the ferry pilots would be called from the barracks to take it out to its destination. British Spitfires and some P-51s were replacing the Dewoitine D.520s, despite much anguish on the part of the French pilots. Still, it could not be denied that the Spitfire was, in every way, superior to her French counterpart. Jeanne loved the way they handled, and whenever she had to turn her charge over at the end of a flight a part of her mourned at giving it up. They called to her soul, these lovely creatures of war. They called to her heart.
They told her that it was she who should be guiding them against the filthy Boche, and not . . . whoever would get them.
It wasn’t as if she wanted to be a ferry pilot. She was as good as the best of the Frenchmen flying now, and better than most. She had thousands of hours in air races under her belt, and she knew this countryside from the air as most folk knew the roads and lanes around their little villages. Most of the poor boys in these airplanes hadn’t a fraction of her air-time. She had been racing over this land since she had been old enough to beg, bribe, and browbeat those around her into letting her into a cockpit. Most little girls were horse-mad, and grew out of it. Jeanne was airplane-mad and never would. Unlike the vast majority of those horse-mad little girls, Jeanne had the wherewithal to satisfy her craving, and the stubborn temper to persist in the face of the most adamant opposition.
She dropped below the clouds again, just verifying that she was where she thought she should be. The war-torn landscape was a hell of shattered trees, shattered villages and cratered fields, but the wretched Boche tried to refrain from shelling the village churches directly. Not because they were any kind of religious, the opposite in fact, since they went out of their way to defile the places and murder and torment priests and nuns. No, it was because the tall steeples gave them landmarks to fly by to, as well as marking points to shell or bomb.
She spotted the tipsy little shell of Saint Marie au Fleur below her, and corrected her course a trifle, then eased back up into the shelter of the clouds.
No, she did not want to be here, in a plane she must give over into the hands of some clumsy recruit, a plan with empty six guns, an easy target for Eisenfaust’s Messerschmitts. She wanted to be fighting. How not? She was raised in Orleans, she was named Jeanne, and like every little French girl, she was fed the tales of Saint Jeanne d’Arc the way American children were fed the tales of Mickey Mouse.
A broadside wind buffeted the little plane, and again, she dropped below the cloud cover to check her bearings. The storm was worsening. She remembered another day, another storm.
The leaves blow
Cross the long black road
To the darkened skies
In its rage
But the w
hite bird
Just sits in her cage
Unknown.
White bird must fly
Or she will die
Jeanne played in the opulent nursery of her parents’ chateau outside Orleans, with her birthday presents. Or, to be precise, with one of her birthday presents, the only thing she had specifically requested that she had gotten. The lovely dolls, porcelain beauties all, sat on a shelf with the rest of her dolls, pristine and untouched. The beautiful dollhouse, a miniature of the chateau itself, served only one purpose: to house the wood and paper, the glue and thread that she used to make her air fleet. And now she played quietly with the pride of her air fleet, an exact model of a real plane. But she did not play with it as another child would, soaring it over her own head as she ran, and making it do all the aerobatics she had seen the stunting pilots and fairs and shows do. No, she was studying it, so that she might make more. Only her Grandmere, who understood her, had given her the model airplane she had asked for.
Her Papa should have understood her. Her Papa was mad for motorcars, for speed, and raced as often as he could escape from the business of his wine and vineyards. But he did not. Perhaps because he seldom saw her, and then, never looked at her. She knew why. He did not want to see her, he wanted to see the boy that she should have been; instead, she was the disappointing girl who had cost her Maman her life. She understood all these things dimly, for eventually Grandmere had explained them patiently to her. Still, too many times, she retreated to her room in abject misery, after facing his cold rejection of even a simple greeting. Papa was Grandmere’s son, and it made her sad to see how he neglected Jeanne, so it was Grandmere who tried to take the place of both Maman and Papa.
And it was Grandmere who was there when, with a clap of thunder that seemed to herald the end of the world, the doors to the chateau burst open, and the building erupted with screams and wailing; Grandmere who held her and tried to comfort her, when the body of the chateau’s master, killed by the speed he worshipped, was carried in on the raging wings of the storm.
White bird
Dreams of the aspen trees
With their dying leaves
Turning gold
But the white bird
Just sits in her cage
Growing old.
White bird must fly
Or she will die
White bird must fly
Or she will die
Jeanne might have been like a hundred other rich little girls, if it had not been for Grandmere. But Grandmere would not let her give up her need to fly. It was Grandmere to whom she told the dreams she had, of soaring, arms outstretched, through blue skies and stormy, without need for a plane. It was Grandmere who bought her books on aviation, took her unfailingly to aviation displays and shows. It was Grandmere who persuaded a pilot who gave lessons that teaching the little girl could do no harm, for after all, what would she do with the lessons? Everyone knew that girls did not fly. Of course, the fat wad of francs did a great deal of persuasion too.
But girls did fly, were flying, in increasing numbers. Jeanne got her lessons. Then Jeanne got her airstrip where the unused tennis courts had been. Then Jeanne got her racing plane. And before she died, Grandmere got to see Jeanne win her first race. She did not weep at Grandmere’s funeral. People whispered, she knew. But she had had a dream that night, of flying free beside a startlingly youthful Grandmere, who told her, “The sky is your home, and your lover, cherie. Never let anyone make you give it up.”
“But what about you?” she asked, crying then, as she had not at the funeral.
“Ah, my home is the stars now!” Grandmere had said, with a brilliant smile. “I am going on such a journey!”
And with that, she had shot ahead of Jeanne, soaring into the night sky, until Jeanne lost sight of her altogether and she was gone.
The sunsets come
The sunsets go
The clouds float by
And the Earth turns slow
And the young bird’s eyes
Do always know
And she must fly
She must fly
She must fly
The wind buffeted the plane again, slewing it sideways. Jeanne did not fight the controls, she caressed them, eased them over, making the plane fly with the storm and not against it. No one really understood how she was able to feel so at one with machinery. Not even Henri, who lovingly worked on these beauties, who crooned to them and talked to them and coaxed them back to life after grievous injuries.
It was hard for a woman like Jeanne to find a lover. Fellow pilots did not hold the women in great esteem. Some regarded them with anger, as interlopers. Some regarded them as an affront to nature. Some laughed at them, as if this need that they shared was something in a female that was nothing more than a childish whim, soon grown out of. And last of all, some men regarded them as something to be conquered and cured of their affliction, so that they could display their trophy before all the other men as proof of their prowess.
But Henri Dubois, engineer and mechanic, shared her love of the planes without sharing the love of flying. He did not understand it, but he did understand how it was an all-consuming passion. He of all the men she had ever met was willing to share her with that passion. He had given her the nickname of “White Bird,” a pun on her name of Blanchette.
But perhaps even that would not have happened had the war not come. The war, and the Boche, and their hideous supermen . . . which she must, at all costs, avoid, every time she delivered an airplane to the airfields of Belgium.
She dropped below the clouds again, into lashing curtains of rain. And a tiny, tiny thread of alarm thrilled along her nerves.
This storm was stronger than it should have been. Much. Not only had there been no prediction of such a storm, but it felt wrong. Jeanne had always had a kind of sixth sense for the weather, as she did for her planes. And this storm felt wrong.
There was one of Eisenfaust’s hellish squadron who was said to fly in on storms like this one.
Valkeyria—
—that sixth sense was all that saved Jeanne at that moment, when the clouds tore open, and lightning slashed through on either side of the golden Messerschmitt with its distinctive snarling-horse nose painting. As bullets from the Messerschmitt’s guns tore through the place where she had been, Jeanne had sideslipped the Spitfire out of the way, and sent her into a steep, diving turn.
The forces of gravity and centripetal force shoved her back and sideways into the seat; she felt the skin of her cheeks stretching back over her bared teeth. She squeezed her insides as hard as she could to keep from blacking out and felt the tell-tale juddering in her hands wrapped around the stick, as the Spitfire warned her that she was reaching the limit of what the plane could take.
At the last possible moment, she pulled up, mere feet from the churned-up earth of the field below her. The Spitfire soared, and she glanced down and sideways, hoping without much hope to see the smoke and crater where Valkeyria’s own craft had plowed into the ground.
Instead, she felt, as if in her own body, the bullets stitching across her right wing.
She had no weapons of her own. All she could do was try to outfly the German bitch. And Valkeyria was one of the super-humans. She could take more g-stress, she had better, faster reactions—and should Jeanne somehow make her crash, she would walk away from it.
No! thought Jeanne, as she did a wing-over that turned into a hammer-fall. I will not let you take my sky!
They did not fight their way across the sky, with lightning arcing all around them, even striking the planes themselves. There was no fight here, for Jeanne could not fight. She could only try to run, tiny silvery-white falcon pursued by the cruel golden eagle, losing a little more ground with every line of bullets that stitched across some part of the plane.
And then, Jeanne felt it. Felt the moment when the damage reached the critical level. Felt the weakened wings start to part from the body, the tail-empennage bendin
g and about to snap under the stress of the turn. And felt, rather than saw, the massive bolt of lightning that enveloped plane and Jeanne and all in a moment of searing whiteness and a mental shriek of outrage and denial.
There was a single moment of unbelievable pain, as if her entire body was taken apart in an instant, and instantly reformed in a whole new shape.
And then—
She was flying.
She was not in the plane. She was the plane. Wings were at her back, her arms stretched out beneath them, both swept back like a V. She felt—something—something strange and alien. It felt like a second set of lungs, except it was above her, and it sucked in air and squirted it out so that she was propelled as she had once seen a squid propelled. She vaguely remembered something Henri had been obsessed with. Something—a rocket? A jet?
She felt the armor, a part of her, a silver-white metal skin covering every part of her, but especially heavy on her visored head.
Visor?
Yes, she had a visor, a glass visor, protecting her eyes. And she sensed the inches-thick plating on her hands, and her head. And she saw Valkeyria’s plane below her, and she knew what it was she had to do.
She would knock that Teutonic bitch out of her sky.
She went into a steep dive, and only the German’s own sixth sense and lightning reflexes saved her. Now the shoe was on the other foot. She was faster than the Messerschmitt, and more maneuverable. But that speed was her undoing, for she overshot Valkeyria time and time again, and had to turn and make up the distance before she could try to close.
And finally, she was defeated in her attempt to get to the German by the only weapon Valkeyria could bring to bear to cover her retreat.
The storm.
Suddenly, Jeanne herself was all but knocked out of the sky by the torrent of rain that poured out of the clouds. She couldn’t see. She could barely stay aloft. She certainly could not find the German.
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