From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 42
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
As the train hurtled away from London, Katya wondered what the English had done to be so blessed with what felt to her a kind of perpetual spring. The trees were all bare and no flowers bloomed, but she could see the ground, and for her, that was the definition of spring, not February.
They had only made it a short distance into the English countryside and it had already lived up to its reputation, something she couldn't say for London. Where was the gold? The blue? It had made her acutely homesick for her native St. Petersburg, which she would always call it, no matter who told her to do otherwise. 'Petrograd' was such an ugly, industrial name, one not at all fitting of such a beautiful city. St. Petersburg would always be her home, and Petrograd merely the place that had cast her out.
But the colour green in February was slowly inoculating her against the pangs she felt, as was the tea, she was finding. She was used to the strong black teas her grandmother had made, but the ones Katya had had thus far in England were a warm golden brown; teas for a pleasant afternoon conversation, not as fortification against opening the front door in the morning.
The thought of her grandmother made her suddenly desperate for a distraction, but all she found was Inga, and she was asleep. Katya had yet to work up the courage to ask just how she had known to come to that alley, but she knew it didn't really matter. It wasn't the first time Inga had saved Katya's life, or the lives of one of the others. It seemed like Inga always had an uncanny ability to know when trouble was coming, and got them away from it before needing to do what she'd done in that alley. Though she was tireless, Katya knew better than to wake a war veteran, especially for reasons as small as hers.
Across the isle, Alexandra was in a fitful, shallow sleep, while Svetlana was running her fingers over the fabric of the seat backs, counting the flowers in the pattern before looking up to gaze intently at the cream-coloured ribbons in the hat of the woman in front of her as they bobbed and wiggled with the movement of the train.
That left Katya to busy her mind with what she found out the window. But as telegraph poles zipped by just a few feet away while farmland crawled past in the distance, there wasn't much that qualified. It was undoubtedly beautiful, and perhaps she should have been content with that, but even looking out at something so soothing left her mind the opportunity to start eating itself again.
What then? They were less than two hours away from their final destination. After so long, that the remainder of their journey could be counted in minutes was still hard to credit as being real. Surely she would wake up in an abandoned farmhouse that still reeked of death, shaking with cold and fear, trying desperately to cling to the beautiful dream she'd been having.
But it was real.
They were really arriving. It was over.
Blinking away sudden tears that pricked the edges of her eyes, Katya took a deep breath and had to remind herself just how unfathomably lucky she was.
All that she had lost, all that had been taken from her, she was here. Her father, her friends, her home, her country, her future.
Her old future, she realised all at once.
She was a witch now, not a trader's daughter. She was among witches, on her way to live with more; she had been so fixated on the past it was almost too late for her to deal with the future that was hurtling towards her as fast as the locomotive could carry her.
But the past wasn't going to let her go so easily.
There were reasons she was so far from home. There were reasons she'd been on this nightmare journey for so long, and the unconscionable thing was, part of her was afraid to stop. When she stopped she would have to reflect, to look back where she'd been, to live in a world that was missing all the pieces that had held everything in place.
And yet.
Opportunity.
Opportunity that grew from a bed of ash.
A wizened voice broke into her thoughts from behind her, a voice not unlike her grandmother's.
"What do you see out there, zhar-ptitsa?" asked Zoya.
The low grey clouds were an insulating blanket, wrapping the world outside in the sky's embrace. Much as in London, the people here went on about their lives. Sheep moved about without fear of wolves, their shepherds among them without fear of being shot or their livelihood taken. Crops grew without their tenders fearing them being razed or stolen to shove into the bottomless maw of the war machine.
As fast as Katya was moving, the world outside was still.
"Peace," she said.
"Good answer," Zoya replied, and said nothing more.
There was a lot of Katya's grandmother in Zoya, yes, but there was also a lot of stranger still, even though they had been traveling together for so long. The old woman knew things, things she shouldn't have. Things that Katya's grandmother had taught her in the strictest confidence, but that Zoya shared among the four of them like they were common knowledge.
She had come to her in Katya's darkest moment, and for that she would be forever grateful, but she didn't know that she would ever be comfortable around her. Katya still didn't know why she had been chosen, why Zoya had come to her with her offer to get her out of Russia, but Katya knew she was only alive because she had. It had been difficult to believe at first. The fall of the Tsar and subsequent implosion of the provisional government had torn her life apart and scattered the pieces to the wind, leaving her with no choice but to be blown along without direction or hope.
Now, here she was, on the opposite end of Europe with three other young women who could not be more different, and she would have had difficulty explaining exactly how. Zoya had led them from one safe house to another, from unmarked basements to farmhouses, from the back room of speakeasies to many a miserable night sleeping under bridges.
It was still hard to believe what was waiting for them at the end of their journey. Zoya hadn't even told her until a few weeks earlier, when they'd found themselves hiding away in the still-smouldering ruins of a building somewhere in eastern France. Until that day, they had been moving what felt like randomly, from one place to another with no plan that Katya could see beyond staying alive. Once Zoya had told her though, they had moved with purpose, directly for Britain at a pace that had taxed their road-weary bodies to their limits. They'd only been allowed some rest once they reached Calais, as they awaited their paperwork going through.
Katya wasn't even sure Zoya had told the others, though she must have at some point. To drag them all the way to the middle of England without telling them why would have been the undertaking of an insane person, but none of them had spoken so much as a word to the other about it, as far as Katya knew. Through all their time together, they were still as good as strangers to one another.
Alexandra and Inga rarely spoke, and though Svetlana tried, she also seemed lost half the time; just keeping her from falling behind or wandering off was exhausting. As for Katya, she had made no effort to build any bridges herself, and every night before she fell asleep, she reminded herself why. It was only in the middle of the day, when she was furthest from her dreams, that her resolve began to waiver. But she had thus far managed to keep her secrets, and she saw no reason to risk giving them up now. Perhaps life in a strange land would drive them together eventually, but Katya was content to wait for that day to force her.
The train eventually slowed, crawling through an area that never really seemed to grow any denser than the first few buildings they came across. It was not a built-up area by any means, and a lot of what she did see looked to be brand-new. Had the entire town sprung up during the war? That's what it looked like. So much of what she'd seen of England so far was old, lived-in. What awaited her when she alighted on the platform hadn't been lived in at all. The paint on the walls was shiny, the wood still bright as if it had been felled yesterday. The smell of both was still strong, even through the coal smoke of the idle locomotive.
The others gawked as well as they awaited their bags, even Inga seemed to have wide eyes for the place they had found themselves in.
What was more than the newness was something that struck Katya all at once, like it had been dropped on her from the roof: everyone on the platform with them was female.
The staff was male, as she would have expected, but those milling about collecting their bags and those who had been awaiting them were all women.
Katya sought Zoya's eyes for some kind of explanation, but they were too busy searching for something or someone specific, and slid over Katya completely every time they came near her.
Soon enough Zoya found what she was looking for, and several porters came over to gather their things, such as they were, and took them in twos and threes down the stairs and out to a waiting fleet of taxis.
But there was one bag Katya made sure she grabbed for herself, fending off half-a-dozen offers to take it for her, as it was one that she wouldn't let out of her sight for anything now, no matter how awkward it might be for her to carry it. Heavy in her left hand, she begged leave to visit the ladies room and lugged it into the first open stall.
Before she could march forward into this new life, she needed to put on her armour.
The convoy of taxis carried Katya and the others through a town that looked like the station did: as if it had been built yesterday. The homes that lined the street were all the same ruddy brick, even if the weather was doing its best to pulverise it into gravel.
Aside from the newness of it was the fact that it all looked so neatly arranged that it took Katya aback. Longstown didn't at all feel like it had risen organically from the countryside, it was far too neat. Trees and benches lined the single street that was open to vehicle traffic, but given the weather, there were very few pedestrians to use the space that had been reserved for them.
The few people that were out and about all wore dresses. Katya hadn't seen a single man since she'd left the station, and she didn't know how to feel about that. She should have been ecstatic, but the sheer novelty of it was locking up her brain. According to the information already tucked away in the bag in her lap, the Long Aircraft Concern employed over 800 women, the majority of which lived in Longstown. The difference between seeing the words and seeing the reality was even more marked than she had anticipated.
In spite of the whipping wind, the women who braved it walked without fear. None of them cast their eyes around, only forward, with their heads held high, and each and every one looked like they had a purpose. None of them needed escorts, and none of them needed permission.
How far Katya was from home was only amplified as they turned out of the town and passed through the gates to the airfield, where the two largest buildings she had ever seen loomed like wayward ships, stranded hundreds of miles from any body of water large enough to hold them.
These too, were far more than the black-and-white numbers on a sheet of paper. 800 feet long read impressive, but looked nearly incomprehensible. The scale just wasn't what was encountered on a regular basis, and that made it hard to credit as even being real.
The Winter Palace in St. Petersburg was huge, she'd seen it more times than she could count, but it was a sprawling structure with hundreds of rooms, meant to house hundreds of people, built up over decades. These were single structures with nothing inside them to hold them up, built for the purpose of housing a single aircraft big enough to warrant an 800-foot building to keep it in.
Then she saw that beside one of them lay their destination, and the line of women standing in front of it, and a different kind of overwhelming feeling came over her. She needn't have read all their names to know who they were, she could feel it.
Six Manifested witches were impossible to hide from another witch, and they were making no effort to even try. Six blazing beacons of magic burned before Katya's new home, six pairs of eyes that wore equal parts apprehension and curiosity.
Beside them were the two women who had saved their lives, and Katya felt a weight form in her stomach. Without the Longs, they would still be dashing between hovels in some godforsaken section of the Continent. Now, they had faces to go with the names.
It was a moment of truth, Katya knew.
In her head.
Her heart, however, was still bleeding.
In a moment, her visage melted into a default she had perfected years earlier, her body language shifting to match, and the Yekaterina Gurevich who awaited her moment to open the taxi door was not the one who had closed it.
"Here they come," Millie said, her eyes locked on a trio of cars trundling up the main road that connected the airfield to the rest of Longstown. They didn't look to be in any kind of hurry to get where they were going, but Millie supposed they needed time to acclimate to the pair of gigantic airship hangars looming right in front of them. The first time Millie had seen them from that angle, they hadn't even looked real. Her brain had refused to accept structures that large, even though she'd seen theirs from the inside first. But Russia was huge, maybe they were used to large things, Millie thought as the cars made the turn that would bring them straight to the residence.
That the weather had turned so quickly Millie chose not to interpret as an omen. She didn't believe in them, and even if she did, she would be damned if she was going to let something like that dictate how the rest of this was going to go. Still, she kept one eye on the thick, angry clouds that looked like they were about to unleash a torrential rain at any moment.
As much as Millie wanted to recreate the feeling she had had when she was first brought here by welcoming the new arrivals in The Shed, it had been decided that they should be welcomed to their new home, rather than their new workplace. And so all of the witches of EVE were arrayed along the drive in front of the residence, bracing for more than one oncoming storm.
Breath from eight mouths puffed in the cold, and Millie was already starting to shiver under her heavy coat. She wriggled her toes to remind herself they still worked, but her thick socks kept it from being very reassuring.
The wind picked up, and Millie could hear the fabric of coats and dresses flapping about, even as her teeth began to chatter over it. She didn't know what kind of first impression they were going to make, but if it was at all like she felt, she hoped the Russians would be too tired to notice.
Then the cars were upon them, and it was too late to worry anymore.
First to be let out by the driver was an older woman that looked much closer to what Millie had imagined witches looked like before she'd actually met one. Her largely grey hair was pulled back into a tight knot on the back of her hatless head, and in spite of what looked like an advanced age, she didn't seem to be bothered in any way by the weather. Ignoring the Longs completely, she went straight to Selene and embraced her in a tight hug.
"It has been too long, Selene," she said in a voice that bore every year of just how long.
"Zoya," Selene said. "How are you?"
Millie never found out, because the largest woman she had ever seen had just unfolded herself from the taxi, and Millie was compelled to look.
Standing before her, Millie felt small for the first time in her life. She was tall for a woman, it had been one of her greatest torments growing up. That, combined with her hair, was why she'd never had use for the word 'anonymous.' But the woman taking stock of everything before her was big for a human. She had the build and proportions of a statue, like she had been crafted by someone with a chisel and a hammer, since Millie had difficulty believing she could have been conceived and grown inside another person. Even her eyes looked carved, black and inscrutable, giving away nothing of what she thought about what she was seeing. Her hair was as black as Vickie's but even shorter, with the same style Millie had noticed a lot of men bringing home from the war: cut very close on the sides, but left to grow longer on top.
Zoya looked away from Eustacia to gesture to the Amazon. "Inga Tupoleva."
Inga inclined her head smartly, but made no other motion.
And she's a witch, Millie thought. If introducing Inga first was a conscious attempt at a first impression, or if she had just needed to straighten her legs, the effect was the same, and Millie felt the ground under her soften slightly. It had been easy to imagine a sort of general, identity-less 'witch' as being who was going to join them at EVE. But now that the first one had an identity like Inga, Millie was forced to reckon with the fact that those vague 'other' witches were actual individuals, and EVE was going to prove to be far more eclectic than they had ever imagined.
Millie swallowed hard as the next door opened.
The woman who emerged had the youngest face of any witch Millie had seen, inset with eyes that were some of the oldest. Though she was able to make the most perfunctory of greetings, it was very clear that she would rather have not had to. It wasn't fear that Millie saw in her dark blue eyes, but something else—something she had only seen on the faces of men returning from the war. The vacant, distant look that the most traumatised carried back with them; the 'thousand-yard stare' she'd heard it called.
On those boys coming back from the horror of the trenches, it made a depraved sort of sense, given what they'd been through. On a young woman, however, it was jarringly out of place, which only made it more ghastly.
She'd been introduced as Alexandra, and Millie suspected Elise was already committing her features to memory in hopes of helping to improve them.
The next woman, Svetlana Yakovleva, seemed simply overwhelmed. Her hazel eyes were constantly searching, looking at everything and everyone, and once she had, doing it again. Of the three of them Millie had met so far, she looked the closest to how Millie imagined she had herself looked when she'd first arrived.
When Svetlana began shaking hands, however, she did more than look. Everyone she came to, she made sure to feel the fabric of their sleeves, running her hands up their forearms to their elbows and back down again. She said something to Selene that the wind carried away, but the older witch nodded to whatever it was and Svetlana grinned before gently fingering the ends of Selene's long, raven hair. Looking pleased with whatever it was that she felt, Svetlana smiled and moved down the line to stare into Vickie's eyes with an intensity that made Millie uncomfortable, to say nothing of how it must have made Vickie felt.
