The Forest of Vanishing Stars(76)

Yona stopped often, breathing into the stillness, waiting for approaching footsteps that never came. She had to be certain she wasn’t being tracked, that she wasn’t leading the Germans straight to their quarry. She walked on leaves and grass and strode through streams so her footsteps would vanish. And though grief weighed her down—she couldn’t take a step without seeing Sister Maria Andrzeja’s empty eyes—she also felt lighter, untethered at last from a past that had always been an invisible weight. She was not Jerusza’s—she never had been, and she knew that now. But neither was she her German father’s. She belonged only to herself, a dove of the dark forest, the forest that called to her now.

She walked for three days, pausing for only a few hours here and there to sleep in the hollows of fallen trees when the sun crested the sky. She ate berries and leaves, caught fish in the streams, picked green-capped russula mushrooms, and slowly felt like herself again as she put distance between herself and the carnage. By the second day, she found herself talking to Sister Maria Andrzeja, apologizing at first and then pleading for guidance, for some sign of a way forward. But the nun never replied. Jerusza had remained after she died, whispering from time to time in the wind, but the nun’s soul was already far away. By the third day, Yona began to talk directly to God, asking why he would let such terrible things happen to his earth. Couldn’t he hear them?

But it was Jerusza’s voice in the breeze answering the question. The universe is always in balance, she said. Summer and winter. Day and night. Sustenance and poison. Good and evil. To know the light, you must also know the darkness.

“I’ve seen too much darkness!” Yona answered in an angry whisper, the wind carrying her words skyward. “We all have! When will it end, Jerusza?”

There was no reply.

She knew she was getting close to a group on the move when she found several bushes picked entirely clean of their bilberries, and three spruce trees stripped of their bark. There were burned logs and dace bones in a clearing, and as she bent to inspect them, she knew they’d been discarded no more than a day before. Judging from the number of fish bones, it was a group the size of the one she’d left behind, and this was in the same part of the forest she’d left them in a month earlier. She felt a surge of hope. Had she found them so easily? But there was fear there, too, for in discarding the bones instead of burying them, in leaving the traces of a fire and a meal behind, they had drawn a map for their hunters. Yona’s pulse pounded; she needed to make them disappear.

It wasn’t until she had walked another half day that it hit her; when she found the group, she would have to face Aleksander for the first time since she’d fled. It was enough to make her stumble, nearly fall, though the ground beneath her was flat and even. She caught her balance on a sapling, her lungs constricting. She hadn’t thought of him much at all in the last few weeks, but distraction wasn’t an impenetrable dam.

She forced herself to begin moving again. It didn’t matter, did it? There was nothing he could do to wound her more than she’d already been wounded. It’s the cracks in us that make us who we are, Zus had said, and perhaps he’d been right. When a linden tree broke, it often grew back, stronger and more beautiful in its damaged places. What if the same was true for man?

And so it was Zus’s deep voice in her ear, not Aleksander’s, when she finally found footprints that had been made within the last hour—a man’s footprints, alone, the path curving into a wide arc. It was almost certainly one of the group’s patrols, and if Yona had found them simply by walking east, they would be far too easy to find when the Germans came. She closed her eyes briefly and then snapped them open again, because the image she saw in her mind’s eye was one of carnage.

Just then, she heard footsteps, and hastily she slipped behind a tree. Within a minute, she could make out a man’s broad-shouldered form approaching from the darkness. A few seconds later, her heart lurched. It was Zus, his brow furrowed, muttering something to himself as he walked his patrol, a rifle slung over his shoulder. She stood frozen for a few seconds, simply watching him, taking in the growth of his thick stubble, the few white hairs that had found their way into the darkness of his hair. How had she never noticed them before? And then summoning her courage, she stepped out from behind the tree, her hands up in surrender.

Zus spun on her immediately, his gun raised and aimed as easily as if it were an extension of his own body. But in a split second, suspicion changed to relief, fear turned to surprise, anger turned to something tender and sad that she couldn’t quite name. When he lowered his weapon and said, “Yona,” she was sure it was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard: her own name—not the name that had been given to her years ago by strangers—spoken in a deep voice that cracked with emotion.

“Zus,” she said as he strode quickly to her.

“It’s really you,” he said, stopping abruptly just inches away, as if he’d thought to embrace her but had changed his mind. “Yona, I was afraid you were…” He trailed off, his voice thick. “Thank God,” he said, his voice so deep and low, it almost vanished into the breeze.

She wanted to stay in this moment forever, pinned by the familiar weight of Zus’s gaze, but she couldn’t. “We have to move, Zus,” she said, and he blinked a few times, as if pulling himself back from somewhere far away. “The Germans,” she added. “They’re coming.”