Sky Knights (6 page)

"It's broken," Ira said in a voice tight with pain.

"Come on," Meow said, breaking his silence. "We can't stay here. We'll figure out what to do once we get further away."

They struggled through the deep snow, Ira moving the snow around behind them with her magic to cover their obvious footprints. It was slow going, and Dounia hoped very hard that the Germans did not have skis, which would give them advantage in mobility.

After what seemed like hours, Meow's ears pricked up, and he growled in warning.

"I can hear them," Meow said in a low voice. "They're in the woods."

Dounia reached up and removed her cap, freeing her ears and listening. Yes, there it was, far off and echoing through the trees. There were voices in the woods, although it was hard to tell their position.

"They'll know we weren't in the plane," Dounia whispered. "They'll come looking for us."

"We need to find a place to hide for now," Ira said. "On a night like this, if they get close enough, they'll be able to see our shadows moving. We can't risk them seeing us!"

They found a tiny little cave, barely big enough to fit them, but at least it got them out of sight. Dounia helped Ira sit down and then knelt beside her.

"I don't know if we should take off your jacket," Dounia said. "It's cold out, and there's no shelter here if you get a chill."

"I don't have to look at it," Ira said. "I can tell it's broken."

"What do we do?" Dounia asked. "We don't have a medical kit or even any water or food."

"I can try to heal it," Ira said. "It can't be that much harder than fixing a plane."

Meow snorted. "Do carpenters ever perform surgery? No, they do not, because building a house and fixing a living body are two different things. Don't even try it. There's no telling what harm you could accidentally do to your body."

"You can make a splint," Dounia offered. "At least it is better than nothing."

Furtively, Dounia set out a little ways from the cave to try and find something sturdy that might help Ira build something. If only they had thought of this earlier when they were surrounded by broken wood! After a few minutes, she found some dead branches and brought them back.

"This will have to do," Ira said grimly, and set to work.

*~*~*

It finally started snowing in the early hours of the morning and the three of them could move from their hiding place. Dounia was in the lead, saying that the person with the broken arm shouldn't face the Nazis first.

Ira looked down at her crude arm splint and tried to move her fingertips again. Once again, that simple movement sent shocks of pain up her arm and into her shoulder and she breathed in deeply several times to keep from throwing up. She'd never had a large injury like this, and she was especially disconcerted that an entire quadrant of her body was immobilized.

For once in her life, Ira wished she actually had become a doctor.

"If I was a doctor, I could fix this," Ira said as they walked through the snow drifts that were beginning to pile up more as it snowed.

"If you were a doctor, you wouldn't be here at all," Dounia pointed out.

"My construction spells didn't do us much good, so I don't see why I should be here," Ira growled, flinching as the tense of her shoulder made her arm ache.

"You know, if the wings had stayed on, we would be dead, right?" Meow said.

"It was my fault," Dounia said, looking back over her shoulder. "You know it is. I shouldn't have released the bombs while we were flying so low."

"I think that we would have ended up shot down anyway," Meow said. "There were too many spotlights and planes flying around. I bet we weren't even the only ones to be shot down."

"At least we might have made it back to our lines," Dounia argued.

Ira sighed and stopped herself from snapping at them. The pain was making her less patient than she usually was. It was very distracting. Every second thought she had was surprise at how much having a broken arm
hurt
.

She blinked dark spots out of her vision and shook her head. She couldn't afford to pass out now, with the enemy hot on their tail.

"Let's just get out of here," she panted, an acrid taste filling her mouth.

Then she threw up, coughing and gagging as the additional movement jarred her arm again, sending spikes of white-hot agony up and down the limb. Dounia rushed to steady her, and Ira wiped off her mouth shakily.

"Let's go," Ira said again, and they set off in silence.

They'd been walking a long time, and apart from the angry throbbing of her arm, Ira was battling the foggy embrace of sleep. They'd been up all night, not daring to grab a quick nap with the enemy still close behind them. Light was filtering through the trees as dawn approached, and at its familiar appearance, Ira's body was insisting that she lie down and sleep.

She yawned, and Dounia turned back toward her in concern.

"I'm just sleepy," she said, a tad grumpily. They'd just been shot out of the sky, her arm had been broken and they were behind enemy lines. She felt she had good reason to be tetchy.

"We can't sleep now," Dounia said.

"I know," Ira replied, rolling her eyes. "Sorry for disturbing your concentration with my unnecessary bodily functions. Next time I'll keep my yawning bottled up."

"There's no need to snap at me."

"You started it!"

"Shhh!" Meow hissed, ears flat to his skull. "There's someone here."

And the woods around them erupted in gunfire.

Ira threw herself to the ground, heedless of her injury and kept the scream struggling to tear out of her throat behind her teeth. She couldn't give away where she'd landed. She heaved in ragged breaths and tried to concentrate on the wet, grainy feeling of snow melting against her cheek.

Dounia was crouched behind a tree in front of her, exchanging fire with the squad that had finally caught up with them. Meow picked his way across the snow and nudged at her face. Ira's ears were ringing again, and her stomach rolled with nausea.

Ira struggled to crawl her way up to Dounia's side, hiding behind the cover of a tree and a thick bush that might still provide cover even though winter had stripped it of its leaves.

"There has to be at least fifteen of them over there," Dounia reported. "I don't have many shots left–– definitely not enough for all of them."

"Why don't they just swarm us?" Ira asked.

"If they wait for me to run out of ammo, they can capture us without risking getting shot," Dounia replied, keeping her eyes on their enemy.

"But don't they know you're a witch?" Meow asked, crawling up onto Dounia's shoulder. "They must suspect at least."

"There are very few combat mages in the world," Dounia replied with a sharp smile. "Most of us don't have the power necessary to actually do any harm."

"Or they think that we have non-combative magic, like mine," Ira said. "You can't really fix someone to death."

"So what you're really saying is that they're underestimating you," Meow said, tail twitching.

"Yes."

"I think it's about the time to disabuse them of that notion," Ira said.

"I might catch the forest on fire."

"It's enemy territory. Let it burn."

Dounia stepped out of her hiding place, and for a moment, Ira was terrified that they would shoot her before she could begin. Dounia carelessly removed her gloves and dropped them on the ground. She raised her hands, and then turned over her shoulder to look at Ira.

"You might want to get behind something more solid than that."

Ira rolled to her feet and ran several yards, throwing herself down into the dip behind a nearby boulder. She really needed stop moving so much, her arm was broken enough as it was without additional help. She heard a whoosh behind her, and chanced a peek around the boulder to see the fate of their enemies.

The woods in front of Dounia were on fire, and Dounia was standing there, arms raised to shoulder level, simply watching. The soldiers that had been taking refuge behind the trees started screaming and the woods erupted in flame. Ira watched passively as they all burned, screams eventually dying down and stopping.

After a few minutes, Dounia lowered her arms and the flames extinguished completely, not even the residual heat of the fire remaining. Everything was cold ash, as if the fire's dregs were hours old and not minutes.

When Ira stepped out, she could smell charred flesh on the air and gagged, backing away from the scene and covering her face with her undamaged arm.

Dounia turned and retrieved her gloves, sliding them on over ordinary-looking hands.

"And to think that I mostly use my craft to start campfires and keep my tea warm," Dounia said, smile empty.

"The enemy will have probably seen the smoke," Ira said. "We should get out of here."

"I should have kept some of them from burning so that we could take their uniforms," Dounia said, sighing and shaking her head.

"We'll get another chance for that," Ira replied wryly. "That's one thing we won't run out of on this side of the lines, and that's Germans."

Meow crept down from Dounia's shoulders and into her arms, fur standing on end and tail lashing wildly. Dounia stroked his head, and he growled in the back of his throat.

"We would have died," Ira said. "If you hadn't burned them."

"This is why I'm a pilot," Dounia said, voice still flat. "The fire is farther away from you."

Dounia warmed up Ira's tea when it grew cold.

"I'm not a combat mage," Dounia said, and Ira could see her hands were shaking. "I make tea and toast."

Ira moved up beside her and grasped her shoulder, squeezing it reassuringly.

"This is war," Meow said, from his perch on Dounia's other shoulder. "Tea and toast doesn't win battles."

"One day, will we look back at this and wonder why we did these things? I wonder how I'll live with them," Dounia said, but reached up and curled her fingers through Meow's fur.

As they walked away, the smell of smoke and charred remains cleared from the air, and Ira could breathe again.

"I never knew I had that much power," Dounia said eventually.

Ira hadn't either. She'd never seen anybody with the power to light the entire forest on fire. Healing and fixing things didn't come in levels that high. She couldn't take something too badly damaged and make it whole again. Eventually its structural integrity would collapse and she'd be left with nothing. And healers couldn't make a dying person live if they were past a certain point.

"I could have killed them all with a small spark," Dounia continued. "Just a little fire, like the ones I start back at base for boiling water. Their clothes would have caught, and there would be nothing they could do to put it out again."

"Why didn't you?" Ira asked, in spite of herself. She didn't like the way Dounia was talking right now, but what did one do in these situations? Every soldier had fractures in their heads that one didn't examine too carefully.

"I wanted it to be over quickly," Dounia said in a small voice.

"They make our people suffer," Ira pointed out.

"I am not them," Dounia replied.

There was silence for a while, as they heaved their legs up and out of the deep snow, only to plunge them back in again, time and time again. The hard work of walking kept Ira's mind off her arm, which was giving off a low background hum of pain in her head.

"I wonder if Tanya died this way," Dounia said, sounding bleak.

Ira didn't know what to say to that either, because Tanya probably had. The fire from the bombs they dropped wasn't much different from Dounia's fire, after all. Ira looked over at Meow, who stared back at her unblinkingly. One of them had to say something now, but it looked as if neither of them had the words.

Ira was almost relieved to hear the low rumble of an aircraft engine heading their way until she remembered that it meant the enemy was making a serious effort to find them. Which meant the Germans suspected they were still alive.

"Get down!" Ira said, grabbing Dounia's arm and rushing them under the cover of the nearest clump of evergreens.

"How far do you think we are from the burn site?" Dounia whispered, even though there was no way for the enemy to hear them from all the way up there.

"Not far enough," Meow growled, bristling. "And we haven't covered our trail at all since then."

Ira winced. She hadn't been wiping away their footprints since they stopped at the small cave after they crashed. That, and making the splint for her arm, had drained all her energy, and it was all that she could do just to stay on her feet. Pure exhaustion threatened to drag her down with every step, but they had to put distance between them and the patrol they'd killed.

"Can't," Ira said, and even getting enough breath in her lungs to talk was draining. "I'm just about done right now, and if I covered our trail, you'd be carrying me right now."

"I wouldn't mind," Dounia said.

"You need your hands free in case we run into another patrol," Ira said. "We can rest later."

"I just wish we knew how far the front lines were," Dounia said.

"It can't be that far, we've been walking all night," Ira replied, trying to calculate where they might be.

"We haven't been going very fast, what with your arm and the snow," Dounia pointed out. "I know you're the navigator, but it's pretty hard to do anything without a compass, or even a map."

"Not that I can see anything above the trees anyway," Ira said glumly. "If I could just make out some landmarks I might be able to triangulate our position, but I can't see a thing from here."

The plane above them started flying back and forth in an obvious search pattern, and the three of them huddled together, very still under the cover of their patch of trees. Eventually, it flew off, and Ira peered out from under the branches to watch it go. Its flight path was very close to the one that Ira and Dounia were walking.

"We must be going the right way," Ira said, looking around.

"Must be," Dounia repeated, and they all came out from under the trees and continued their trek across enemy territory.