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and perhaps it is true that there are no ways but the well-trodden one
and no hands for miracles but those that are pure
but still only the wolves and ravens warmed us
as they blessed us on our way to the bright star
When they told her that Luka was coming back, she ran out to meet his horse, not knowing what she wanted more—to hug her brother until his bones cracked or to give him a good smack on the back of the head. Brother! The word felt fragile and foreign to her, and she barely dared to believe it. The melting snow squelched under her boots.
In the distance, a figure on horseback appeared, barely visible in the rapid approach of the evening. The orange glare of the lanterns around the temporary camp lit up the horse's gallop and the rider's fair hair.
"Luka," she cried, and saw that he had not returned alone. The horse stopped abruptly beside her. Luka's smile was pale as he wrapped both arms around a large, almost shapeless figure, indistinguishable behind what remained of the once black overcoat. A survivor? One of their own? Someone from the site of the second Star's explosion?
"Help me get him out of the saddle," he managed to say, getting his foot out of the stirrup. All his clothes were scorched, deep scratches and cuts covered his face.
"Tell me you're not hurt," she replied, signaling to the soldiers standing in the distance, but he interrupted her:
"No, no! Don't call anyone... Help me, Len, I can't carry him myself, he's heavy..."
Something inside her turned cold.
"Who did you bring?" She said, already knowing the answer, feeling the relief drain from her face as her hands, stretched out to her brother who had miraculously returned from a trap, clenched into fists.
His breathing was ragged. Hope flickered in his wild eyes.
"Please," Luka whispered. "He saved my life. Lena, please? He blew up the train, stabbed the commander-in-chief. He‘s shot in the chest, I... I couldn't leave him."
Kicking the nearest snowdrift, she hissed:
"And what are you going to do with him here? I won‘t help you!" But, trembling with anger, she held the unbearably heavy body in the blood-soaked overcoat while Luka pulled it down to the ground with himself.
She waved to the orderly:
"Get a medic here, quick!"
"A medic, a medic," Luka muttered feverishly, kneeling next to the overcoat in the dirty snow and holding the head in his hands.
The medic was for him, not for that… that man. She considered a brief eruption despite the worry for his possible wounds, then saw a face behind the overcoat, previously hidden in the tangle of black rags, and could not hold back a startled breath.
Without his infamous mask, the general was both frightening and pitiful. Old, unhealed sores covered his face, and with part of his upper lip missing, his teeth were bared as if even unconscious, the general was snarling. Deep wrinkles crossed the forehead above his eyebrowless eyes. Only a stump remained of one ear. This man mowed down villages with fire and iron, Lena told herself, this man hanged people from lampposts.
Luka held the general's head on his lap, held his hand, and whispered something gently, as if to a small child.
"It's okay," Lena heard him whisper hoarsely. "I'm with you, it's okay, the doctor will be here soon, I'm here..."
"You know he's done for at the tribunal," she said. "If he even lives that long."
Luka grimaced and trembled even more than before. Did he realize how tightly he was clutching the general's lifeless hand?
"No one in their right mind will acquit him."
"I d—"
"Better let him die here," she interrupted through clenched teeth. She suddenly wanted him to remind her that the man in black was her father too. Then she would have said that her real father had raised her and taught her everything he knew, that his name was Boris, that they hadn't even let her say goodbye to him. The rapidly darkening sky was falling on her head. The howling of wolves rising above the distant strip of forest merged with the ringing in her ears.
But Luka said nothing to her, let her words pass through him, and Lena regretted her fury. She reached out and ruffled his snow-wet hair. His face, which had filled her with confidence just yesterday, seemed strange and heartbroken to her. He was there — just a few hours ago she thought him dead — and yet not there at all. She suddenly felt terribly tired.
The medic ran up, slipping on the brown puddles, and immediately stopped dead in his tracks, staring at the black lump in Luka's arms. His face darkened.
"Comrade commissar," he addressed her, unsure of his own eyes. "What is this? Isn't this the Crimean hangman?"
Luka looked up at the medic, and Lena flinched at his gaze. Very quietly, Luka said:
"I won't let him die."
His rasp rang with his sire‘s pitch blackness, but his hands shook. His fingers turned white from the cold. One hand had no fingernails—he had been tortured. He was the kid from the Karakum Desert who had blown up the Star, and her gentle, curious boy, and the best shot she knew, and a reckless cavalryman, and the son of the hangman general, and her brother. Lena squeezed his shoulder tightly.
"Take the beast to the infirmary," she ordered the medic. "No arguing. He'll get what he deserves."
The medic nodded, his mouth in a sharp curve.
*
With his hands wrapped in bandages, as if in mittens, Luka stayed by the general's bedside. He did not notice the glass of milk and the crust of bread that Lena had placed on the wooden floor by the bed an hour ago.
"You need to sleep yourself," Lena reproached him, getting only a faint sound in response.
She lingered beside him. The figure in the bed drew her gaze like a swollen ulcer on clean skin. She had to go—there was a barrage of work, reports and pleading faces to deal with at the headquarters, and she hadn't eaten since the previous evening—but something bolted her feet to the floor. She stared at the unfamiliar, broken profile on the bed, unable to find what she was looking for. Pale milky light filtered through the half-boarded-up window, turning the bed and the people around it into spectres, outlines of a dream.
Who could have dreamed that in this war she would find two blood relations, and they would all be silent in the same room.
Barely warm lips pressed against her hand. Lena shuddered and looked down—with his eyes closed, Luka buried his face in her palm.
"Thank you," she heard his quiet voice. "Thank you, thank you, thank you..."
It was as if they were alone in the world.
She kissed him on the top of his head.
"Luka," she said, inhaling his scent, bloody and watery. "What is your patronymic, then?"