Sky Knights

by Alex Powell

  "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 wa
lking 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.

  It didn't feel like enemy territory until they came to the edge of the forest and looked out upon a burnt and blackened landscape, dusted neatly with a layer of snow. The jagged, black ends of what had once been trees thrust up through the snow, the only remains of what had once been a dense forest.

  There was a long, black-on-white corridor of destruction, grown cold now, but Ira could imagine what it looked like all aflame. She'd seen it herself from the cockpit of her plane.

  "This was the front line," Dounia said, scanning the horizon with her eyes. "They've advanced even further than I thought."

  "Do we have to cross that?" Meow asked anxiously. "It's very out in the open. If that plane flies over again while we're crossing it, they'll see us right away."

  "And anyone on the other side would see us coming," Ira said grimly. "But the fact stands that we have to cross. We've bombed the hell out of this area, and going around would take us days."

  "We don't have days," Dounia said, shaking her head.

  "We have no food or water," Meow said. "Or any survival equipment."

  "I can't even start a fire," Dounia said. "Not if the enemy might see the smoke."

  They all looked across the vast, empty space in front of them, littered with the remains of the destruction they'd rained down only weeks ago.

  "If we cross it in the dark, they might not see us," Ira said, squinting across to try and see if she could see the other side. It was all just trees, with no sign of where the enemy could be.

  "True," Meow said. "I really don't like the idea of us crossing in the daylight. Too many people could see us and kill us from a long way off."

  One German sniper or one scout plane was all it would take, and none of them would have a chance, not without a place to hide or take cover.

  They made themselves as comfortable as possible at the edge of the forest to wait for nightfall. They had several hours before it began to get dark, even this deep in winter, when night came early. Dounia cleared them a space by melting the snow off a small patch of ground. At least they would be dry while they waited.

  Ira tried to make a better splint for her arm, and she wondered again if maybe she would be able to fix the break herself. Dounia must have known what she was considering, because she gave her a sharp look. Ira sighed, but knew that if she did it wrong, she could do enough damage that the shock could kill her.

  A little while later, Dounia melted them some snow to drink. Ira's stomach gurgled and the water she'd gulped down swished around inside. She was so hungry, but there was nothing out here to eat.

  "Sleep," Dounia told her. "I'll keep watch for a bit."

  "I'll take the next shift," Ira said, already yawning and settling down, uncaring that the ground was so hard and lumpy.

  "No, Meow will take the next shift."

  She heard Meow protest, but the rest was lost in a darkening haze as she surrendered to sleep, unable to keep her eyes open once she'd given her body permission to rest.

  FOUR

  Night came swiftly, and across the empty expanse in front of them, a string of lights illuminated the forest where the German front lines were setting up for the night. Maybe from above, their camps were blacked out, to keep the night bombers from seeing their position. But from the ground, Dounia could see them perfectly.

  "Do you think they're keeping up watch on the other side?" Ira asked, coming up beside her, Meow curled over her good shoulder.

  "Most likely they're watching the sky for our sisters," Dounia said. "Or looking toward our lines. No one looks for enemies from behind."

  "Do you think that they are still searching for us?" Ira asked. "I haven't heard a thing since that plane, but you two are the ones with the hearing."

  "Not a sound," Dounia shook her head. "Not anything at all."

  She hadn't heard any birds in the trees or animals in the woods the entire time they'd been here. It made sense that no animals wanted to live near an active warzone, but it was still eerie, the lack of life here. Just them and snow-covered trees.

  "Let's cross. We have to hurry; we can't still be in sight once the sun rises again," Ira said, but paused, looking at Dounia. "Is it just me, or does it feel wrong to step across this burnt earth?"

  "I don't want to cross either," Dounia admitted, a crawling feeling beginning in her belly at the thought of being out in the open. "But we must."

  "It's a different feeling," Meow said, eyes glinting in the night. "This was where our front lines were a few weeks ago."

  "We'll retake it," Ira said, voice steel-hard and determined. "They thought they had us beaten once, but we forced them back from the gates of Moscow. They will never win."

  "Never," Dounia agreed, and took Ira's hand in hers.

  Together, they stepped out into the vast corridor, feet crunching on the new snow. The bombing had wiped away all the snow that had fallen previously, and it was less deep than the snow in the forest. Dounia walked as fast as she dared, making sure that Ira kept her footing in the rough, uneven landscape.

  "What a dead empty place," Ira said, and the sound echoed in the barren, snow-coated landscape.

  "Shhh," Meow hissed, ears flattening. "Your voices will carry over th
e snow."

  "Do you think anyone heard that?" Dounia asked in a whisper.

  "Can't say," Meow replied, ears pricking forward to listen. "I can't hear anything."

  They continued, and Dounia guided Ira as best she could. Dounia and Meow could both see the ground just fine in the dark, but Ira was almost blind. It was a cloudy night, and it might yet start snowing again, so there was no moon to light the way. But it also meant there was no light to see them by, so Dounia was thankful for that. She just had to make sure that Ira didn't twist an ankle on the uneven terrain.

  It was slow going, but Dounia dared not rush Ira any faster. If she injured a leg, that was it for them. Dounia could try and carry Ira all the way to their front lines, but it would put their chances of success at almost zero. The odds weren't that great as it was.

  That's when she heard it, the rattling, whistling sound of wood and canvas wings on the air.

  "Do you hear it?" she whispered to Meow.

  "Yes," Meow said, eyes to the sky. "They're coming."

  It wasn't long until up ahead of them, spouts of fire shot into the air and the earth rumbled as the night bombers dropped their loads on the front lines. Soon, parts of the enemy line ahead of them blazed scarlet, and the Germans shouted commands as they tried to bring the fires under control.

  "At least we know where we're headed," Ira said, smiling grimly as the bombardment of the Germans continued.

  "It almost looks pretty from here," Dounia said.

  "Yes, look at those sparks, thrown so high into the air," Ira said, pointing at a particularly large fire. "Huge embers flying up and up, like a signal for us to follow."

  The spotlights came on, sweeping over the night sky, searching for their tormentors that rained death and fire down on them from the air. Sometimes they would catch a flicker of movement, the edge of a wing or the flash of a tail, but there was hardly any sound to give them away. Just a whoosh, as if there were giant birds swooping in from above, giant birds of prey.

  "It sounds so strange, like a demon in the night," Dounia whispered. "I had no idea that we sounded like that when we came diving in. It's scary."