BELATEDLY, LEONOR REALIZED THAT MUN'S SPELL OF SILENCE HAD broken the moment the Altanese girl had seen her own bullet wound.
"Ahmed!" Heinrik breathed despite the encroaching Solnayans and the bullets that burst through the trees. "Get Mun further into the trees. We'll hold them off."
Ahmed winced, but did as he was told, springing up, trying not to drag his frozen feet. He rushed past Leonor to Mun, who was lying oddly still in the snow, picked her up, and in a swirl of shadows they promptly disappeared.
Heinrik dashed to the tree beside Leonor and tossed her the rifle on his shoulder. She caught it with her arms, her hands still full of her throwing knives.
"You stay back, Leonor," commanded Heinrik over the thunder of the guns beyond the trees. "Hassan, you're coming with me."
"Yes, boss."
Leonor planted the rifle in the snow, tucking her knives into her wrist sheathes with a flourish. "Ammunition, Heinrik."
He put a hand into his pocket, standing, and drew out a clip's worth of brass bullets. He tossed them her way. Leonor plucked them from the air when they neared her.
Heinrik nodded at her, pleased. "Make them count, mäuschen."
She glanced at her hands, the bullets heavy in her palms. There were five.
"Don't shoot!" Heinrik called. "I'm coming out!"
Mercifully, a single shot sounded, and then no more.
When she looked up again, Heinrik and Hassan had already moved from their positions, having ditched their rucksacks in the trees. Her hands shook when she grabbed the rifle, but her fingers knew what to do, loading the bullets into the clip in double time. Near the trunk of the tree a few steps to her left, the snow was stained with Mun's blood.
She propped the rifle up in her arms, staring down its sights. She spotted Hassan right before he blinked out of existence close to the end of the treeline. Heinrik, meanwhile, was taking his time exiting the forest, shuffling through the snow. At the clearing, he put up his hands—Leonor leaned slightly to keep her eyes on him—and said, "Hello."
Still staring down her rifle's sights, she tuned in to the weave, blinking away reality. In the strings, she could see Hassan again, encroaching on the five twitches she'd spotted earlier. Unlike his brother, Ahmed, who could stride through the empty spaces in the weave—shadow walking, as he liked to call it—Hassan was a master of disappearing and reappearing, rendering himself invisible to anyone who looked. Leonor had seen this tactic a hundred times in training: Heinrik would approach head-on like an angry bull, while Hassan would creep in from behind for support. But they'd never done it like this before; Mun was always there to muffle any noise, and Ahmed would mirror his twin in a deadly dance while Leonor picked their aggressors off from afar. They'd always been five, save for the days when it had just been Leonor and Heinrik and the Adlerauge had only been King Wilhelm's fever dream.
Three would have to do.
In heavily accented Leis, one of the Solnayans asked, "You were in trees. Why?"
"I was hunting," replied Heinrik.
"Citizens are not allowed to leave city," snarled the Solnayan.
Heinrik faltered a second too long. "I was just looking to feed my family. Now that supply lines have been cut off, things are getting scarce. Did you know that my wife was just recently attacked on the streets after buying a loaf of bread from the baker?" At the Solnayans' silence, Heinrik added, "I have some snares in the trees if you need proof. Would like to see them?"
"Aliyev. Vanzin. Idti."
"Is that a yes?" Heinrik asked.
"They will go with you. But we will watch."
Two of the twitches moved forward. Hassan was close. Leonor took a deep breath in, watching the weave for a moment longer before she blinked the world back into existence, lining up her sights with one of the five twitches that were imprinted on her eyes.
She squeezed the trigger.
The bullet zoomed narrowly past a tree trunk. She leaned over, exhaling, peering through the branches to get a better look. One of the men, dressed in a tan uniform with scruffy brown hair, fell backwards into the snow. She'd glimpsed a small red hole in his forehead right before he went down.
"Ipatiev!" cried the soldier closest to him, right before Hassan reappeared and smacked the handle of his pistol over the back of his head.
Heinrik rushed into the fray. He took out the one closest to him—Aliyev or Vanzin, Leonor wasn't sure—with two hands to his head, snapping the soldier's neck with a crack. One of the remaining soldiers turned in Hassan's direction and opened fire, but Hassan had already disappeared.
The other Solnayan was busying himself with Heinrik. He'd pulled out his pistol, shooting. Heinrik ducked underneath the first shot, weaving around the second, and disarmed the shooter with a kick to his chest, snatching the gun, and slamming him in the face with it.
Leonor remembered herself, then; she fiddled with the bolt handle, loading the next bullet into place. Hassan was taking awfully long to clear that last soldier, and she didn't know if she could line up her shot in time.
She paused. Where was Hassan, anyway?
It seemed the question of Hassan's location had caught Heinrik off guard too. When he dodged out of the way of the last soldier's gunshot, he faltered, stumbling. The soldier took his chance, hauling Heinrik up by the arm and pressing his pistol into Heinrik's neck.
"Come out!" he bellowed. He was the one who'd spoken earlier. Leonor recognized his voice. "Now, or I'll shoot!"
Leonor gulped. She looked at the weave again, and found Hassan a short distance away, dragging himself back to the forest. When Leonor blinked the weave away, she saw the blood that was trailing away from the skirmish.
"Now!" cried the Solnayan again.
Leonor fumbled with her rifle. She didn't need to look at the weave for this. She tried to picture herself in target practice, aiming at the small white circle painted on a board of wood with Heinrik encouraging her at her back. The soldier wasn't even moving—how hard could it be?
She lined up her shot. She took in a breath.
But the soldier moved before she did. He hurled a scream into the air and pulled the trigger, right as Leonor pulled hers.
The soldier's body met the snow with a muffled thump. Heinrik stepped away, rubbing at his pale neck. The Solnayans hadn't known about Hassan's invisibility, just as they hadn't known of Heinrik's superior strength and impenetrable skin.
"Hassan?" Heinrik's voice was muted.
"Here," Hassan groaned, phasing into existence as Leonor rushed out of the forest, rifle clutched in her hands. "Sorry, boss. They got me."
He was nestled by a tree, face set in an expression that was almost peaceful. His eyes were dull as the sun began to set, one leg laid out in front of him. Heinrik hurried over, crashing through the snow to inspect the wound.
"I figured that Leonor had it," whispered Hassan.
"I did," Leonor responded.
Heinrik looked up, his eyes wide, lips parted. "Leonor..." he began. "Are you...?"
"I'm fine," she told him.
He sighed and turned his attention back to Hassan. "Your leg, right?"
"Yeah. It's not..." He gasped when Heinrik began to roll up his pant leg. "... that bad."
Leonor slung the rifle over her shoulder, holding tight to the strap as she looked over the weave. The twitches of the soldiers had all winked out. They were alone. She bent down beside Hassan while Heinrik worked the pant leg up.
"Do you think Mun will be alright?" rasped Hassan, his face pale.
"I've heard that the Altanese can survive anything," Heinrik informed him.
Hassan leaned back, head pressed against the tree trunk behind him. "You're probably right."
"Don't tell me you're not worried about Ahmed."
"I'm not at all, actually," Hassan admitted. "I've been trying to get rid of him since we were in the womb. He just keeps coming back to bite me in the ass."
Heinrik let out a half-hearted chuckle. Leonor kept silent.
"Does it look bad, Heinrik?"
Heinrik rolled the pant leg up once more, leaning forward in the waning light. His furrowed brow smoothed out.
"It scratched you. There's no bullet."
"So that's good?"
Heinrik grinned, patting Hassan's cheek fondly. "It's really good."
Leonor leaned in, too. Hassan's skin was split up near his knee, trickling blood, but it was as clean a cut as she'd ever seen. Not even a sharp blade could be so precise. She looked up, eyes flitting from tree to tree. Had the bullet lodged itself in a trunk?
"What now?" she asked Heinrik.
He gave Hassan one last reassuring smile and stood. "We need to wrap up Hassan's wound, and we can't leave those bodies there. We should drag them into the woods, cover up the blood, maybe take their uniforms."
"And? Should we take the car?"
"That depends. Can you drive?"
Leonor gazed at him, frowning. He laughed her off.
"Only joking. I've got the wheel. Our first priority is to find Ahmed and Mun—"
"I checked," Hassan rasped, raising a hand to point to one of the barns that dotted the snow-covered field before them. "They're in there."
Heinrik nodded. "That's sharp of you, Hassan."
Hassan managed the barest of smiles before he closed his eyes, relaxing against the tree trunk.
Together, Leonor and Heinrik approached the five bodies they had left behind. They were all lying—looking strangely serene—in the snow, their guns and a few stray rounds of ammunition strewn about around them. Wordlessly, they both bent down, stripping the soldiers nearest to them. Leonor unbuttoned the Solnayan's tan coat, rolling the body over to pull it off. The body had a bullet in its forehead. This was Ipatiev, then: the first one she'd shot.
In training, she and Heinrik would chase chickens about their pen. Despite their size, the birds were fast, and could even flutter a few inches off the ground to speed up. By the time they were caught, and both Leonor and Heinrik had peck marks and scratches on their hands, they were to snap the chickens' necks, defeather them, butcher them, and then cook and serve them to their superiors just in time for supper. At first, Leonor had thought it to be a silly thing for them to do, an exercise in degradation, really, but after four months of the practice, Heinrik had told her the truth.
"They're desensitizing us," he'd told her. "Don't you see, Leonor? The chickens, the butchering, and all this talk of how the Solnayans aren't human? If we do this often enough, snapping a Solnayan's neck will be just like snapping the neck of a chicken. Easy. Without regret. Just another task to do to get it all over with."
It was an easier pill to swallow for the rest of the Adlerauge, Leonor knew. Mun was used to fighting off other clans back in Altan. She'd learned to fire a bow at three. Ahmed and Hassan grew up in the impoverished slums of Engana's capital city, Shahiveh, where it was kill or be killed, live or die.
She stared down at Ipatiev's scruffy brown hair and the beginnings of a beard poking out from his unlined skin. He didn't look any older than twenty. When Leonor shook out his coat and a picture came tumbling out, she realized that it was of Ipatiev, a fair-haired girl, and a beautiful baby boy.
Leonor looked away, snatching Ipatiev's fur hat from his head, tucking the picture into his breast pocket. She slapped the fur hat on her head, donned Ipatiev's uniform, and turned away.
Heinrik was hunched over the soldier he'd just stolen from, already in the same tan military coat and fur hat that Leonor had on. Unlike Leonor, he'd placed the Solnayan down with care, even if he and his fellows were only to be dragged into the woods later. Heinrik's fingers moved over the soldier's eyes, sliding them shut.
He took in a breath. "Just like snapping a chicken's neck, right?"
Leonor bowed her head, stepping forward to place a hand on Heinrik's shoulder. He quivered underneath her palm.
"Yes," she murmured. "Just like snapping a chicken's neck."
✵
The car they'd commandeered might've run perfectly fine over the roads, but it wheeled painstakingly slow through the snow.
In the back, Hassan groaned, "How long?"
The freezing air shoved its way down Leonor's throat when she tried to speak. She had to duck her head before replying, "We're coming up on the farmhouse now."
"Gods," breathed Hassan, before he was silent again.
Leonor twisted to check on him. He was laid on the flat bed in the back that had previously housed supplies—mostly ammunition and weapons, some of which Heinrik and Leonor had taken—and he was held in place, along with his precious rucksack, by the ropes that had kept the supply boxes still earlier. His leg was bound up in torn bits of one of the Solnayan's uniforms, the tan shreds already stained with blood.
Leonor frowned and faced forward again. Heinrik had his gloved hands on the wheel, humming, his hair drifting about his face. Driving, it seemed, brought him some measure of comfort, although Leonor couldn't imagine why. Vehicles spat out foul-smelling smoke. They made an unbearable amount of noise. Sure, they were good for travelling long distances at a speed her own feet or a horse couldn't manage, but did they have to be such complicated contraptions? One look at the gear shift and the pedals beneath Heinrik's feet left her baffled, scratching her head in an attempt to figure it all out.
Her gaze fell to her lap, her hands settled upon it and now gloved in black, surrounded by the tan fabric of her stolen Solnayan military coat. Ipatiev's military coat. They were always taught, in training, that Solnayans were brutal, that they were no better than animals, the serfs ignorant to the new ways of the world and blind to the technologies of the new century while their king, the tsar, stood above them all, raking in what wealth and glory he could. The Solnayans wanted money. They wanted land. They wanted power.
She wondered if all that Ipatiev had wanted was to return to his wife and child. He would never get the chance. But those were the sacrifices one had to make in war, or so she'd been told. War, in fact, was one big sacrifice: one made for the good of every Leis man, woman and child.
"Leonor," Heinrik began, just over the rumble of the engine. "Right before the Solnayans started shooting... what did you hear?"
Leonor was distinctly aware of Hassan, quiet as he was behind her. She leaned over, moving closer to Heinrik.
"Sledui," she said. "Footprints."
Heinrik's grip tightened on the wheel. "I didn't count on a supply car coming through. I thought that the snow would cover our tracks in time."
"It's not your fault. You're only human, Heinrik."
A crease formed between his eyebrows, his nostrils flaring. "I should've considered everything. But I was tired, Leonor. So tired."
She could see that. The dark circles beneath his eyes were enough of an indication.
"Mun could be dying. Hassan is injured. Two of us, out of commission, just like that. It all happened so fast." He paused, letting out a puff of white breath. "I'm glad you were there to listen. Mun turned when you spoke. Did you know that? If she'd been just an inch to the right, that bullet would have caught her in the heart."
Leonor's cheeks heated. "Aren't you going to say anything?"
"Say anything about what?"
"About the fact that I could understand them," she breathed. "I don't know how you can continue to accept me."
He sighed. "Leonor..."
"I might've just killed one—no, two of my own people. It wasn't like snapping a chicken's neck, not at all, no matter what we said to each other."
"It wasn't like that for me either. We do what we have to." He looked sideways at her and let out another sigh. "I know you're an orphan. I know you can't remember much. I know, more than anyone, that you have no idea where you came from. But I don't care about any of that. You're the girl that comforted me when I cried after killing my first chicken. You're the girl that celebrated with me when I managed to shoot straight through the middle of a target. You're the girl that marched with me from Quellfluss to Bürfurt and back again. You're my friend, Leonor." He smiled, though she thought it was mostly for her sake. His eyes were filled with the sights of bodies and blood. "Nothing could change that."
She could have kissed him.
Instead, she jabbed her elbow into his ribs, just hard enough for him to shout, "Hey! I'm driving!"
"Don't be so sentimental," she muttered, even as her heart swelled.
Heinrik stalled in front of the farmhouse. He adjusted his fur hat. "Ready?"
"More than you."
"You alright back there, Hassan?" Heinrik called.
Hassan grunted, "Still alive, boss."
Leonor swung herself over the door of the car, taking the rifle with her. She met Heinrik at the front of the car, staring him in the face. He looked the part; his high cheekbones and the way his eyes were shadowed underneath that fur hat made him appear as Solnayan as any she'd ever seen. She wondered if she looked just as convincing with her mousy blonde hair and thin lips.
They approached the farmhouse. It wasn't a grand building by any means; the paint on the siding was nearly all worn away, the windows cloudy with dust and fog. Three steps, each with depressions in the middle of the wood, led up to the front door.
Heinrik rolled his shoulders back. Leonor glared at the wood of the door.
"Showtime, mäuschen."
Heinrik rapped on the door with his gloved knuckles. A few moments of silence passed before the door opened. A middle-aged man peered out from the darkness within, brown hair unkempt, lips trembling.
"Hallo," he said tentatively.
"We're looking for foreigners," Heinrik drawled, stretching his vowels like a real Solnayan. He leaned in, frowning. "We think you may be harbouring them."
The man gaped. "What? No!" He raised his hands, shaking them back and forth viciously. "I don't know what you're talking about!"
"Possibly unintentionally," Leonor added, trying her hand at a Solnayan accent. Beyond the doorway, as her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, she thought she glimpsed a child sat on the floor within, having paused in his scribblings on a loose piece of parchment to watch her. "Their accomplice," she told the man, jerking her chin at Hassan where he lay in the car, "says they may be in your barn."
"I haven't seen any foreigners," the man choked.
Leonor crowded the doorway with Heinrik. "Do you consent to being searched?" she asked him, reaching back to hold the barrel of her rifle.
The man blanched. "What? But I—"
"Do you consent to being searched?!" Heinrik pressed.
The man threw up his hands again, backing away. "Yes! Yes! The barn is empty but—yes! Just... please don't hurt my son. Please."
Again, Leonor caught sight of the boy on the floor. The dregs of light that crept from the outside into the home seemed to glint against his blue eyes. She stepped back, startled at the shine.
"We only want to see the barn. We don't care for the child." Heinrik turned his chin up in a classic Solnayan impression, his patrician's nose silhouetted by the setting sun. "Thank you." He motioned for Leonor to follow him off the porch, waiting for the man to close his door before he spoke again. "I'll stay with Hassan," he whispered. "You check the barn."
She gripped the rifle, shoving it in his direction. "You should take this."
"I'm bulletproof, remember?"
"But Mun and Ahmed have weapons, Heinrik. You don't."
His lips tugged into a brilliant smile, white teeth on full display. He put a hand on her head, patting her fur hat. "If you insist." He took the rifle. "Be careful, ja?"
She turned away, shuffling through the snow. "Only if you will be."
The barn wasn't far. It was, like many barns Leonor had seen, faded and washed out by time, the colour drab, suggesting that it might have been red once. A small rectangular door was posted facing southeast, and there was a crack between where it would have met the wood of the barn wall.
When she was close, she grabbed the edge of the door and slid it to the left. It creaked and shook on its rusted hinges. She tried pushing it all the way open, but it would only go halfway.
She swallowed and peered inside. She was simultaneously met with the scent of dry hay, old animal manure, and rust. Several stalls lined the back wall, all stocked with a coating of hay on the floor, although as she'd seen through the weave earlier, the animals were missing, leaving the barn empty. Rope hung on hooks on the walls, and a bracket for an oil lamp sat on the wall next to her by the door. A set of wooden steps led up to what looked to be a loft above.
"Leonor," said a soft voice.
"Ahmed?"
"Up here."
She spotted him peeking down from the steps, head hanging over the cut-out in the loft floor, brown curls askew. She slipped into the barn and scrambled up the stairs, the wood creaking and groaning beneath her feet.
On a musty pallet, pale as the snow outside, was Mun. Her coat had been laid out beneath her. Ahmed had done what he could, it seemed—he'd torn away Mun's shirt, wrapping her bullet wound with it, but the starched white of the shirt fabric was already soaked, the blood blooming through, visible only by the scant light that filtered in through the single square window.
"It missed her heart," he explained. "The bullet went through her shoulder." Ahmed's fingers hovered over the wound, marking the entry point just below Mun's left clavicle. "But I can't get it out."
Leonor hovered by the steps. Mun's chest rose and fell so slowly that she could be mistaken for dead. Her lips were leeched of colour.
"Has she been asleep this whole time?"
"Unconscious," Ahmed corrected. He glanced to Leonor's left. "How are Heinrik and Hassan?"
Leonor thought her face might have said everything. Ahmed's expression fell. He stared at her with wide eyes. "What happened to my brother?"
"Shot," said Leonor. When Ahmed paled, she was quick to add, "The bullet scratched him in the leg. He's bleeding, but there's no bullet. He should be fine."
His relief was palpable. "Thank the gods." He put a hand in his pocket, pulling out a string of jade prayer beads, holding them close to his heart. A single shard of quartz was nestled in the center of the string, sandwiched between the jade. After a moment of quiet reverence, he nodded at her. "Congratulations on the victory."
Rubbing the back of her neck, Leonor said, "We took their car."
"I heard the engine." He gazed to her left again.
She waved at him, trying to grab his attention. "What are we going to do, Ahmed?"
He smiled wryly. "Whatever Heinrik says."
She shook her head. "This is bad. Don't you realize that?"
"Not as bad as it could be," he told her, eyes flickering to the side.
"What are you looking at?" Leonor huffed, finally following Ahmed's gaze. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw it: it was the child from the farmhouse, the one that had gazed up at her with shining blue eyes. At first, she tried to figure out how he'd made it in without her noticing. Maybe he'd snuck through the back door of the farmhouse, darting through the snow and out of Heinrik's notice. He wouldn't have made much noise coming through the door at his size; Leonor had left it ajar, after all. But how had he come up the stairs? She looked down. No—those stairs had protested when she had come up, and she was the smallest of the Adlerauge, smaller even than Mun with her fine bones and willowy body.
She took a step away and got a good look at the boy. He was peering at her with those same blue eyes. What she'd mistaken for a glint earlier was really a glow, the light from his eyes brightening the shadows of the loft.
"How did you..." She trailed off, realizing that he wasn't entirely opaque. She could see straight through his fair head.
"You're not Solnayan," the boy observed.
"He's gifted," Ahmed said. "Like us."
"Does your father know?" Leonor asked.
The boy shook his head.
Leonor bent down, hand moving forward. Her fingers passed through the boy's torso. He looked down at her hand and smiled.
"I can project," he informed her proudly.
"What about your body? Were you doing this when I was at the door?"
He nodded. "I can be in two places at once."
"He's been here this whole time," admitted Ahmed. "Gave me quite the shock when he first showed up."
Leonor crouched in front of the boy. "What's your name?"
"Otto," he told her.
"Otto." She pressed her lips together. She hoped she looked friendly enough. "Do you think we could stay here for the night?"
"Papa never comes to this barn, not since the soldiers took our animals away. You'll be safe," he whispered conspiratorially.
"Thank you," she whispered back. She stood and turned to Ahmed. "I'm going to go let Heinrik know."
Ahmed shook his head, standing. "I can get behind the car without anyone seeing, remember?" He eyed her stolen coat. "You could probably use some rest."
"Ahmed—" she called, but he walked forward and disappeared in a puff of darkness. She sighed and turned to Otto, but he, too, had vanished.
At last, she set her eyes on Mun, pale as death on the remnants of her bloodstained, standard issue coat. With her bone-white skin and her colour-sapped lips, Leonor could almost believe that Mun was still lying in that snowy forest. That time had not passed, and that the first shot had only just been fired, piercing the silence.
It had taken her too long to understand what the Solnayans had been saying. She knew that well enough. Not much had made sense to her until that last word, sledui, and by then it had been too late. She had spent so long trying to forget that the language hardly came to her anymore. The only thing she had been left with were the memories. Those were not so easily forgotten.
She rubbed at the back of her neck, making her way to a corner and slumping there, watching Mun's chest rise and fall. She didn't have all her memories, of course; many of them had slipped away from her in the years since she'd awoken in Romhalde's only orphanage, already filled to the brim with war orphans. All she had were fragments: the quiet of night, the smell of mint leaves, a woman's soft fingers combing through her hair, a silver chain hanging from her neck, and a sharp pain on the skin of her nape that even now she tried to stifle. Still, without the memories, she knew the truth: that she was likely an orphan of the war, her parents Solnayans that had probably been killed in the countless border raids that had taken place in the early days of conflict, and she herself a tiny, inconsequential thing that had been pitied and taken to Romhalde out of guilt.
Her eyelids grew heavy. She tucked her knees up close to her chest, hugging her thighs to her torso. Her head fell forward, forehead coming to rest at her knees, the warmth of Ipatiev's coat around her and the scent of the hay beneath her lulling her away.
She was guilty of two deaths today: two chickens, two snapped necks.
But they had not been Adlerauge. Mun and Hassan were not her chickens.
And that would have to be enough.