The officer who told us had half a smile on his face; he’d thought of the job as a demotion – most of them did, at first, to be in a camp full of girls – but if the Germans were already bleating back and forth about bounties for the heads of the Night Witches, then maybe he had real fighters on his hands.
Popova cracked a laugh when she heard, turned to me with grin that was all teeth. “I like that,” she said. “Should we start screeching when we sail through, do you think?”
“I think not,” I said. “The best witches know not to give away their position.” And she laughed a little louder than she had to, as if she thought it was actually funny.
A couple of the girls glanced over from across the runway. They never took Popova’s cue in being kind to me, but they were never cruel, and that might have been all Popova could hope for.
“She’d love being called a witch by the enemy; she might already be one,”
Popova said after a second, sounding circumspect, sounding a little reverent. (She was Commander Raskova; at some point, she hadn’t needed a name any more.)
But Raskova was elsewhere now, with only her shadow cast over us.
Bershanskaya was the commander who lined us up and sent us out. She was as steady as they came, and her humor was thin and dry as air. The first time Bershanskaya heard the name, she raised an eyebrow, and glanced quickly at me before she turned to Popova. Then she nodded, hands behind her, and said, “Let them call us what they like, if it suits them.”
“Suits me, too,” said Popova.
It suited all of them, I think, even if I was the only witch the 588th ever had.
ONE OF THE important things about the 588th was how little it cared where you came from. If you could take the recruiter’s withering stare and the doctors’ lingering hands and the open loathing of the men who ran you through your paces, and you managed to crawl under the stalled train cars to reach the station from the farthest set of tracks they could find to park your train, by the time you got to training they had no doubts about your nerves, and that was all they needed to know about you before they put you in a plane.
I’d come to the 588th out of necessity; my village had reached the end of their patience for someone who seemed always to know when it was going to rain and yet couldn’t call it down for you even if you paid her. Easier to go find an open fight than to wait for the one that was brewing back home.
There was no way I could have accommodated village needs. It’s too hard to do small magic.
From a one-room farmhouse or a palace in Moscow, anyone you ask will talk to you until their tongues turn blue about all the magic they’ve seen or heard of, even if they say they don’t believe in it. They’ll all know how it’s being used against them even as they speak, and the hundreds of whispers shared in the depth of the forest by the witches, who gather there for market days and trade in secret spells in a currency of dirty looks.
It’s all very well to keep people out of the woods at night, but it’s foolish.
There are only three kinds of magic: water, ash, and air. For ash to work, you give blood. For water, you spill tears. For air, you give your breath. They all run out; our gifts are designed to be spent.
The woods will never be a gathering of witches. We don’t live long enough.
OUR PLANES WERE crop dusters, wood frames covered in canvas, held together with metal cords. They were the leftovers of aviation, planes given to people for whom no one had much hope.
But they were so flimsy and so slow that they made a kind of magic – gold out of hay. The German planes couldn’t drop down to our speed or they’d stall out and plummet, so when they aimed for us we turned and they hit nothing but air; their anti-aircraft bombs would pop right through our wings and keep going, bursting a hundred feet above us as we banked a turn and the explosion illuminated our path back home.
Raskova courted us with those planes, showed us how to make them spin and make lazy loops in the air like the plaits of a braid, leapt down from the cockpit with her dark eyes glittering behind her goggles, and you could hear her heart pounding even from where you were standing. It was easy to want to go to war, to make Raskova proud.
And once you learned them, those planes were kinder to us than horses, and to sit inside one was to feel strangely invisible, a thrill crawling up the back of your neck like a ghost every time you settled in.
You settled in four, five, eight times a night: the plane couldn’t carry more than two bombs at once, and you had work to do.
“YOU GO OUT at sundown,” says Bershanskaya.
Her lips are drawn thin, her hands folded behind her, her buttons marching a straight line to her chin. (She didn’t want to lead, when Raskova appointed her. She hated sending us out to die.)
It’s a bridge; we all know why it has to disappear – the Germans can’t be allowed to move anything else into place. But they’ve stopped underestimating us, witches or not. They’re prepared to throw us a flak circus now, every time they see us coming.
It’s rows of guns blooming outward from the ground like flowers made from teeth, and searchlights by the dozens that flood the sky for fifty miles in each direction, and you can’t get free of it no matter how you try; when you twist long enough this way and that way like a rabbit, you start to panic for your life.
We lost a team that way, not long back. Their cots are still folded up on the barracks, two thin mattresses for girls who won’t be needing any more rest.
“You’ll go in three planes at once,” says Bershanskaya.
Next to me, the muscles in Popova’s jaw shift as she realizes what Bershanskaya means.
Decoys. We’ll be drawing fire in our little ghost planes.
WE LOST OUR hair to be here.
They made us cut it when we were first preparing for combat; for practicality, the commander said, though I had seen one or two of the training men glare at a line of girls walking off the field those first days, their long glossy braids swinging at their waists, and I always wondered.
I didn’t mind, for myself – my hair was the watery brown of old deerhide, and there was no husband or want of a husband to stay my hand from the knife. For me to cut it just meant fewer pins I’d have to scramble for every time the sirens went up. But you can’t tell girls for a hundred years that her hair is her crowning glory and then one day tell her to hack it off and not have her pause before the scissors.
We all did it, in the end, every last one of us submitting to the shears, slicing one another’s braids off to the jaw.
Recklessly, I offered to burn the hair for any girl that wanted. It was forbidden to leave the base alone – it wasn’t safe – but some things go deeper than regulations, and some superstitions aren’t worth testing.
You never leave so much hair where anyone can take it from you; petty magic has uses for that, and none of them are good.
I was an odd fit in the barracks, just strange enough that we all knew I was strange, but this superstition was so well-known that not even Petrova looked twice at me as they each thanked me and handed me their braids of brown and black and gold.
As I headed for the woods with three dozen braids draped like pelts across my arms, Bershanskaya saw me. She was standing outside, near the engineers who were patching the planes. Her hands were behind her, and she had the narroweyed look of someone who had been watching the sunset longer than was wise.
I held my breath and kept going. If she called out to stop me, I’d keep walking until she shot. Some orders are holy; I had a duty deeper than hers.
She didn’t say a word, but she watched me carry the plaits like a sacrifice into the cover of the trees.