The Forest of Vanishing Stars(60)

Yona took a step back. “I can’t take them from you. What if you need them?”

“I will not,” the nun said firmly, reaching for Yona’s hands and placing the papers there before Yona could pull away again. “I won’t be going anywhere but this church, and the others will vouch for me. But they might help you if you’re stopped on the way to deliver the child.” Yona glanced down and saw on top an identity card with the nun’s picture. In it, she was younger, and without her nun’s habit she looked like a different person altogether. Her hair was as dark as Yona’s, and though their faces were contoured differently, they were papers that might work on first pass.

Yona hesitated only a second more before nodding, taking the papers, and slipping them into her pocket with a murmur of gratitude. “I’ll bring them back,” she promised.

“Don’t.” The nun smiled. “After you’ve dropped Anka off, you must go, Yona. Things are happening here, bad things.”

“But—” Yona began to protest, but she was interrupted by Anka, who moaned in her sleep.

“It’s time,” Sister Maria Andrzeja said.

She didn’t wait for Yona’s reply; instead, she shook the child gently out of her slumber. As Anka blinked up at them, Sister Maria Andrzeja explained, her tone impossibly light, that Yona would take her to a place where she would heal and be safe until the end of the war. Anka looked uncertain, but when Sister Maria Andrzeja bent to kiss her forehead, she lifted her head and kissed the nun on both cheeks. “Thank you,” she murmured. “Thank you for saving me.”

The nun turned before Anka could see her tears, and then she pulled Yona into a brief, tight hug. “God be with you, child,” she whispered in Yona’s ear, and then she turned and hurried out of the church basement without looking back.





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN




Anka was light as a bird in Yona’s arms—too light. Holding her precious cargo, she hurried past a cluster of German soldiers who paid her no mind, past a queue of empty-eyed townspeople outside a butcher shop with cobwebs on the windows, past a deserted school. Across the town, curtains were drawn tight, most shop fronts were closed, and the few people who walked around did so with eyes downcast, their clothing as gray as the buildings surrounding them, as if they were trying to disappear.

By some miracle, she and Anka reached the edge of town without anyone stopping them. Then again, the town was quiet, waiting. Heart pounding and arms aching with the weight of the child, Yona quickened her pace and headed east on a dirt road toward the safety of the forest until she spotted the farmhouse Sister Maria Andrzeja had described, the white one with red window frames and a broken eagle’s wing on the weather vane.

“Is this it?” Anka asked weakly. She had been drifting in and out of sleep, and now she opened her eyes and peered around as Yona walked up the dirt drive to the farmhouse. Out back, a weathered gray barn stood stubborn against the bleak morning sky, its back to the trees beyond. Looking past it, to the edge of the forest, made Yona’s heart lurch unexpectedly. She belonged out there, in the wood, not here in this village. But Jerusza had always told her never to question God’s plan, that even when things felt like they were falling apart, there was always a reason, always a purpose.

The door to the farmhouse opened, and a tall, slender woman in her fifties stood there staring for only a second or two before rushing toward them. She looked once into Yona’s eyes, nodded, and put a hand on Anka’s forehead. She pulled quickly away as if she’d been burned. “Who sent you?”

“Er… the Siberian iris. You are Maja?”

The woman pursed her lips and nodded. “Into the house, before anyone sees you,” she said, and though there didn’t appear to be another soul around, Yona followed, realizing that in this world, as in hers, invisible eyes could watch from the darkness.

Inside, the farmhouse was dimly lit and smelled of yeast and straw. Dust coated the chairs and table. Without a word, the woman led Yona, still carrying Anka, into a room in the back and closed the door. “There is a trapdoor in the floor, beneath the rug,” she said, finally turning to them. Her words were clipped, tense. “Not a good solution for the long term, but good for you to know if you were followed today.”

“We were not.”

The woman’s eyes flicked to Anka and back. “You should put the child down,” she said without waiting for an answer. She gestured to the small, threadbare sofa to the side of the room, and Yona gently lowered the girl, who groaned softly. “She is wounded, I see.” Maja’s forehead creased in concern. “Badly.”

“Yes. She was shot. We have cleaned the wound, and the bullet is gone, but she needs to heal.”

The woman muttered something under her breath, an indiscernible expletive, and then she studied the girl for a long, silent moment before turning back to Yona. “I will help. I give you my word. But who are you? How have you come to bring her to me? You are not her mother.”

Yona wondered how Maja could see that so clearly. “I—” She began to speak, but then she stopped. How could she explain who she was, what she was doing here? She could hardly understand it herself. “Her parents are dead,” she said at last.

Something shifted and then softened in Maja’s expression. “They all are these days. So many children without parents.” She shook her head. “What is her name, then?”