“Your company commander—what was his name?”
“Voronin.” A good man, one of the few officers I liked. I remembered a trench-side discussion once about favorite museum collections; the young officer had waxed eloquent about the Scythian-gold collection at the Hermitage, and I’d told him about the archaeological excavation I’d been lucky enough to attend after my first year at university. Just one brief hour in which I’d talked tenth-century grave barrows and the Kostromskaya stag, feeling like a student rather than a soldier. And now he was gone, and I’d be carrying my rifle to yet another hasty funeral between sorties, marked by a few mumbled words and a red plywood star.
“Kostia?” I asked, dreading the answer. “Is he—”
“Promoted to corporal. He’s been underfoot looking in on you, whenever he’s not leading sorties.”
“He should have stitched me up on the front line rather than rushing me here,” I grumbled. But at least my makeshift squad was in good hands while I was gone. “When can I go back?” I tried to rise from my cot, but a wave of dizziness nearly flattened me. Lena reached out with one finger and pushed me down onto my pillow.
“When I need two hands to shove you back down and not my pinkie, you can go back. At least a week.”
“A week—”
“Are you that eager to add to your tally? I hear you’re over a hundred now.”
I was. Well over a hundred. But the last thing I wanted to do was discuss my tally. “Lena, speak to the doctors. They can sign off on—”
She drew a long hard pull on her cigarette, reached into her pocket for a battered compact, and held the mirror up to my face. I hadn’t looked at myself in so long, and I recoiled at the sight. My cheeks were gaunt, my eyes shadowed in their sockets; a patch of hair had been shaved away to treat the splinter wound, which marched parallel to my hairline in a centipede of black thread. The area had been daubed with brilliant green antiseptic. I looked like . . .
“Death,” supplied Lena. “You’re not going anywhere, Mila, because you look like death.”
I pushed the mirror away. “I am death.” To over one hundred invaders, anyway. Not enough, the thought whispered.
Too many, whispered an answering thought.
Lena pocketed the compact, rising. “You can still be killed, Lady Death,” she threw over one shoulder as she resumed her rounds.
“Lady Death?” I said to Kostia when he visited the following day. I’d braced myself for a lot of “thank goodness you’re not dead” heartiness, but my partner just pulled up a stool without a word, leaning his rifle against my bed. “Why did Lena call me that?”
“They’re all calling you that.” He looked at the dried flowers I’d scattered across half the sheet: the latest batch of samples for Slavka. “Iris, chamomile, rhododendron,” he said, naming them.
I began folding each one into its own piece of paper, marking the name in large clumsy letters. My hands weren’t quite steady yet, so maybe Lena was right that I needed more time. Before anyone else I’d have been embarrassed of those shaking hands, but not my partner. “Lady Death—like Lady Midnight, Baba Yaga’s servant?” Polunochnitsa, servant of the fabled witch in the old lore before the revolution swept away superstitious myths.
“Was she your favorite from the old stories?”
“I preferred Lady Midday. But really they’re the same thing. I wrote a paper once on how such pre-revolutionary folkloric figures represented the opposing faces of pre-Soviet womanhood.” Tucking another dried flower into its envelope. “It got a grade of Excellent.”
“Of course it did.” My partner’s trigger-calloused fingers sorted through some dried daisies. “When I was growing up, I thought my father was old man Morozko.”