Blessed Are You Among Women

January 489 I.C., Odin

It was a lean winter in the old Von Kummel country home in the woods, far from the capital city. The group staying there— Baron Heinrich von Kummel, Evangeline, Magdalena, Hilde, and Elfriede, and a rotating cast of Mariendorf family servants (the rest gone home to their families)— had enough to eat, and the house was easily heated with wood fires and solar panels, but the leanness was present nevertheless.

For Evangeline, it was less of a physical lack than it was a spiritual one. Despite the abundance of people in the house, she found herself quite lonely. It would have been easier to explain her loneliness if it had originated from some definable source, perhaps the way she was the only woman in the house of common lineage. But that wasn’t it. In the woods, so isolated from the rest of the universe, there was no real status left to hold on to. There was simply an aura of misery that pervaded the air, clinging to each woman in her own way, and Evangeline found herself helpless to change it, or to shake off her own troubles. It was the lack of anything to do— any sense of purpose— that led to rumination. Before, when Wolf had been deployed, Eva had plenty to occupy herself with, and that had kept her able to maintain a cheerful rigor in her life. There was nothing like that now.

The four women drifted through the house like little ghosts. Hilde was the easiest one of them for Evangeline to talk to, but perhaps that was only because they had so little in common. With Magdalena, every conversation seemed to risk opening wounds. Eva didn’t know why that was suddenly the case, but it clearly was now. Magdalena’s smile always seemed false and brittle, even when there were guests to entertain. Certain topics of conversation made her flinch and stare off into space. Maybe Eva was the only one who noticed.

But with Hilde, there was nothing they could talk to each other about , so the conversation rarely risked falling into dangerous territory, or if it did, it was only in one direction, and Hilde was good at hiding it.

Hilde, Evangeline found, was a master of pragmatism. She spent most of her days in the library. She said she was studying, since she was missing her semester at Odin National University, but perhaps both of them knew that it was unlikely that she would simply rejoin her university course after the end of the war.

The books that Hilde stacked up around herself were not just the textbooks from her law course. When Magdalena went out on social visits or invited other guests to the house, Hilde always begged them for any books they might have in their country libraries. By doing this, she managed to accumulate quite a few on history and military strategy, which seemed to be her favorite topics. She said that reading kept her occupied, but when Evangeline walked by the library, she’d often find her standing by the window, looking out over the cold pines and the dim sun in the grey sky, hands clutched behind her back.

Eva, half out of genuine kind-heartedness, and half out of a desire to relieve any part of the house’s oppressive atmosphere, baked cookies one day and brought a plate of them to Hilde. She knocked on the frame of the library door, and Hilde, staring out the window once more, jumped in surprise.

“Have you eaten?” Eva asked. She held out the cookies, still warm.

“Lunch— ah, no.” It was almost five in the evening. “But I’ll take advantage of your generosity, if you’re offering.”

“Of course. What else would I be doing?”

“I feel like you should be telling me I’ll spoil my dinner if I eat right now,” Hilde said, checking her watch.

“Do you really think I’m that much of a nag?” Evangeline sat down on the couch, balancing the plate of treats on her knees, and Hilde took a seat next to her. There was a thick book open on the coffee table, lines of text so small that Eva couldn’t read it from where she sat.

“No! Of course not!” She took a cookie just so that she could stop herself from saying anything else that might accidentally offend, but then she mumbled around it, holding her hand over her mouth in a facsimile of politeness. “You just are always asking how I’m doing— seems like the kind of thing someone who cares says.”

It was an odd way of phrasing things— but then again, Hilde’s mother had died when she was young, Eva remembered. She had probably come to that conclusion in a roundabout way.

“I do care,” Eva said. “But do tell me if I’m being a pest— I don’t want to bother you.”

“Of course not. I appreciate the company.”

There was a moment of silence between them. Already, Eva had run out of things to say. “Have you heard anything from Herr Kircheis? I know he’s much better company than I am.”

“No,” Hilde said. “Not since last week.”

“Ah.”

“I wish I could tell you more,” Hilde said, sounding genuinely distraught. “I just don’t have any news…”

“It’s alright.” She leaned her shoulder on Hilde’s comfortingly, and Hilde didn’t seem to know what to do with the gesture. She stiffened, but smiled.

She was, every inch of her, Eva decided, a girl raised without any female companionship whatsoever. Without a mother and without any female friends, as far as Eva could tell. It seemed to her that Hilde lived a very lonely kind of existence, and was possibly even more out of place in the house than she was, even though they were all here on her cousin’s goodwill.

“I think all of the military details would go completely over my head, even if you gave them to me,” Eva said.

“I’m sure that’s not true. I could tell you what Hank’s plan is—” She reached for an open notebook and pen that were on the lower shelf of the coffee table before them, but then stopped herself. “But I’ll take your word for it if you don’t want to hear it.” She smiled, somewhat ruefully.

“I don’t think it would do me any good. And you’d get frustrated when I didn’t understand.”

“I promise I wouldn’t,” Hilde said.

Eva reached over and flipped a couple pages of the heavy book on the table, turning to a map with a dizzying array of colorful lines drawn across it. “I think if I understood what Wolf did out there, I’d be more worried than not.”

“Really? Not knowing drives me crazy.” She laughed. “Probably why I’m such bad company around here.”

“Well—” Eva put the cookies down on the table so she could explain, gesturing though there was nothing much to gesture to. “It’s that— you see— I trust Wolf to know what to do, and to come back to me.”

“Of course!”

“But if I had all of the information, I’d just start picking at it, thinking about all the ways it could go wrong— not that I wouldn’t expect Wolf to overcome them, but— I’d be afraid for him, thinking about it all, and there would be nothing I could do to fix it. And he’s never wanted me to worry like that— he’s told me not to, since it upsets him to think that I’m making myself unhappy, worrying for him. So I shouldn’t take it upon myself— it wouldn’t do either of us any good.”

Hilde was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” she said. “I understand.”

“It’s strange that you don’t feel the same way. I guess we’re very different people.”

“I don’t know…” Hilde said. “Maybe because there’s a part of me that thinks if I know enough, I can fix something. Maybe that’s silly.” She looked out the window. “Sieg offered to let me go back to the city to live with him,” she said. “Even though my father wouldn’t want me to.”

“It is much safer out here.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“I don’t really want to leave Heinrich,” Hilde said— but that was clearly a non-answer.

“Well, I think he has plenty of company. Do you want to be with Herr Kircheis?”

“I mean—” Hilde suddenly seemed very flustered. She picked up another cookie, but didn’t eat it. “There’s nothing to do in the city either.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” Eva said. “I wouldn’t want Herr Kircheis to be in danger.”

“Yeah.”

Again there was a moment of silence. “Well,” Eva said, “whatever you decide to do— I’ll support you.”

“Thanks. I suppose you don’t know my father very well, so you wouldn’t have to worry about upsetting him by letting me do something dangerous.”

“I’m not letting you,” Eva said. “You’re your own woman, and I wasn’t put in charge of you.”

Hilde laughed. “Very true. But thank you, really.”

“Of course.” Eva stood. “I should go see if there’s anything I can do to help move dinner along.”

Perhaps surprisingly, it was Heinrich that Eva spent the most time with. It might have first been out of pity, although she wouldn’t have admitted that. The man was suffering the winter’s leanness in the most physical way: his seizure medication had run out, and no matter how far and wide anyone looked, there wasn’t any more of it to be found. When one of the resulting seizures caused him to fall out of his wheelchair and fracture his collarbone, his doctor prescribed him an alternative, but it didn’t stop seizures at their source, and instead simply made him so weak that he could barely move. When one of them came over him now, instead of the violent clenching of muscles that had terrified Eva when she had first witnessed it, they were now a kind of vacant shudder that passed over him. His eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth twitched uncontrollably.

Eva had never before thought much about the way that the brain was an object, and a delicate one. Before coming to Heinrich’s house, she had maintained the vague belief in a soul that came from not thinking much about the idea. For some reason, learning from Reuenthal that Wolf’s secret was not what she had imagined had severely shaken her abstract faith. Watching the way Heinrich ceased to be himself during his seizures impressed on her how fragile and physical the spirit was, to the point where she found she had no faith left at all. She spent quite a lot of time thinking about it now, sitting at Heinrich’s bedside.

He enjoyed her company, and she his. It didn’t seem at all improper to spend so much time with him, which in itself Eva felt sorry for: even that part of being a man was denied to him. She knew Wolf would never resent her time with him, anyway.

When he was awake and alert enough to focus, she would read to him: books of poetry and short stories, mostly, provided by Maggie’s friend Count Landsberg. Sometimes Hilde would bring in one of the books of history that she had finished, and Eva would patiently go through that one as well, but it wasn’t her preference, and Heinrich told her to pick what she liked, since he didn’t want to do anything that would risk straining her patience.

When Heinrich was too tired to focus, Eva would paint or knit. She set up her watercolor paper on an easel, tilted so that he could see it, and she painted picture after picture. She wasn’t anything more than a hobbyist painter, but she enjoyed it, and the paintings had a charm of their own. They were mostly imagined landscapes: mountains, summer skies, birds wheeling above the ocean. Heinrich liked watching them take shape, seeing some glimpse of a world beyond his bedside.

Sometimes, she painted portraits, working from old photographs. She drew a picture of Hilde and Heinrich as children, and that one ended up pinned to the wall where Heinrich could look at it at any time. She painted Wolf and herself from a photo taken at Hank’s wedding, and that one, too, was given a place of honor in Heinrich’s bedroom. She gave pictures of Hank and Kircheis to Maggie and Hilde, respectively, and even worked up the nerve to paint Reuenthal for Elfriede— though she didn’t quite work up the nerve to give her the picture. It was one of the best of the lot, painted more from memory than from the photograph. His expression was the one she had remembered from years ago: her wedding day, when he had kissed her hand. There was something so cold and miserable in his eyes that day, and that same look stared out from the otherwise unassuming portrait of Reuenthal, sitting in front of a dark window. She ended up tucking that painting in among the discarded stack of less-than-perfect landscapes, which were tossed into a desk drawer.

When Heinrich slept, she occasionally turned her easel around so that she could paint him. They were just simple little sketches, trying to capture the gentle way sleep smoothed out the pain in his eyes. These paintings, she kept tucked away. She supposed she would probably give them to Hilde and Count Mariendorf eventually, when the inevitable happened, but they were hers for now.

She didn’t always stay around when he was sleeping— he was only awake for a few hours a day— but she did spend most of his waking time with him. He was quite deliberate in telling her how much he appreciated her company, though it always made her flush.

“I enjoy your company, too,” she’d say. “You make it sound like I’m obliging you. I’m not.”

“You say so. But don’t feel like you need to stay for my sake, Eva.”

“Do you know, Heinrich— I’m quite lonely when you’re asleep.” She didn’t know if he believed her, but it was true.

The only time that she didn’t stay with him was when his priest came by. She didn’t know his name, since Heinrich only ever called him Father. He was as nondescript as men come, with brown hair and Imperial blue eyes. The only thing unusual about him was the white Earth Church stole that he draped over the shoulders of his black suit. The priest slipped in and out of the house without speaking to anyone, except the servant who let him in and Heinrich up in his bedroom. The door to Heinrich’s room was left open during his visits, in case he had an emergency, but it meant that Eva could hear the man’s sonorous voice as he read scriptures and gave Heinrich some blessed water to drink. During these visits, Heinrich rarely said anything aside from the words of the prayers, and Eva always gave him space afterwards. When the priest left, he usually stared out the window quietly for some time, watching the snow swirl across the glass.

Hilde didn’t mind her cousin’s religious beliefs, and Magdalena avoided the subject, but Elfriede was dismissive. On one of the rare occasions that the four women all ate dinner together, she told Hilde, “You ought to put a stop to that priest coming here.”

“Why would I do that?” Hilde asked. “It makes Heinrich happy.”

“Yes— exactly,” Elfriede said.

“And you want to take away a dying man’s happiness?” Maggie asked. “Come on, El. Even you’re not that sick.”

“They flatter him,” Elfriede said, ignoring Magdalena entirely. “They just want his money, when he dies. He hasn’t got an heir— he’ll leave everything he can to them. It’s twisted, isn’t it?” She delivered this in a very flat tone, though still somehow mocking. “I expect you’d inherit, if he doesn’t bequeath it all to them, in exchange for them feeding him a fantasy. I suppose every sick man wants to believe their soul will fly away somewhere.”

Hilde’s face turned various colors in the dim light, pale and then red. “I don’t care about the money,” she said. “And I’ll thank you to never mention this to Heinrich— and don’t bother his priest, either.”

“We’re all here because Heinrich is kind enough to let us stay here,” Eva said. “If he wants to be a charitable man, then I’m thankful to be a recipient of his charity.”

Elfriede laughed. “Of course.”

“And where would you be if you weren’t here with us?” Magdalena asked. “If it’s so disagreeable, you’re free to leave.”

Elfriede tipped her glass at Magdalena in a mock toast. “Of course not, darling . I’m so very happy to be here with you.”

Hilde stood up without another word, then picked up her plate to bring it to the kitchen with such jerky movements that she dropped her fork on the floor. Eva retrieved it, gave an apologetic glance to the other two women, then followed Hilde out into the kitchen with her own dishes in hand. She dropped them into the sink while Hilde stared out the dark kitchen window.

“Are you alright, Hilde?” Eva asked.

“Yes, I’m fine.” But her voice came out choked, and she didn’t turn away from the window to look at Eva. “Thank you—” she said.

“For what?”

“For being kind to Heinrich.”

“He’s my friend,” Eva said. “You don’t have to thank me for that.”

Hilde nodded and didn’t say anything else.

Evangeline brought up the subject the next day, when she was sitting with Heinrich.

“Heinrich,” she said. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

He rolled his head towards her; he had been staring out the window again. The sun was just going down, and his bedroom was lit by the light, incongruously golden for how cold it was. It made his white hair and pale face seem less deathly, at least for a moment. “Of course.”

“How did you start believing in Terraism?”

“Oh—” He laughed, which turned into a wheeze. “You’ll think I’m very stupid if I tell you.”

“I’m sure I won’t.”

“Years ago— back when I was a little better, and could still go out sometimes— the church put on an exhibition in the capital. They put up paintings for display that hadn’t been shown publicly in hundreds of years… all landscapes of Earth. The exhibition was called “A Home You Can Go Back To,” I think. And there were so many paintings that I thought had been lost in the Thirteen Days’ War, and after… but there they were.” He closed his eyes. “There was one— mostly they didn’t have figures in them— but a few did. There was one that had this girl in a field of dry grass, crawling— dragging herself by her hands— towards a house off in the distance. It was all by itself on one wall, and I just sat in front of it— you really must think I’m silly.”

“No, of course not, Heinrich.”

“I cried like a baby,” he said.

“Do you have a picture of it?” she asked.

He pointed to the bookshelf on the other side of the wall. “They printed a book of the exhibition.” Eva got up and found the book, taking it down from the shelf. It instantly fell open in her hands to the correct page— not by miracle, simply because Heinrich had opened it himself so many times. The book’s floppy spine was creased to the point of nearly falling apart.

The painting itself was greyer and grimmer than Eva had expected, but she could immediately see why Heinrich was drawn to it. It had an arresting, simple composition, and the little blurb off to the side described the woman’s crippled condition.

“It’s a beautiful picture,” Eva said. “I can see why you like it.”

Heinrich hadn’t yet opened his eyes. “I know I’ll never— do anything, never go anywhere,” he said. “And it looks like she’ll never make it there either— the house is so far away. But the idea that there was a place for her… somewhere she could go where…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but Eva could imagine the end of it.

Eva sat back down next to Heinrich and took his hand. It was very cold and waxy, like a corpse. “I understand,” she said.

“You should tell me that this is just propaganda working on me,” he said, deflecting some of the painful earnesty.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I think it’s a beautiful story.”

“I don’t see how.”

She was quiet. “I think I would find it very hard…” she said. “Hard to believe in a kind natural world when…”

“When I’m like this?”

“Yes. I would want to blame— you worship Mother Earth, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“I would be angry,” Eva said. “I don’t know— I feel angry for you.” And it wasn’t just for Heinrich, she realized, though it would have felt too gauche to bring up her own troubles. Her other hand balled into a fist against her stomach. It was difficult to believe in a loving mother when that was the one thing she couldn’t be.

He turned his head away. “I am angry,” he said. He kept his voice very flat. “But what can I do with that? Could you read to me again, Eva?”

“Of course— of course, Heinrich.”

There wasn’t anything to do in the von Kummel house except wait for time to pass. It would have felt maddening, if she had framed it that way to herself, but she just focused on individual moments, and not the larger days that they formed, and weeks on top of that, and then months, January giving way to February. It would soon be March, but she didn’t let herself look forward to spring: that seemed too far away to be real. Eva thought that perhaps she could pass an indefinite amount of time this way, in a spiritual hibernation, except that one day, quite abruptly and without any warning whatsoever, it ended.

Oskar von Reuenthal and Siegfried Kircheis appeared at their door one evening, long after the four women had already eaten their dinner. They must have missed their own meal, since the city was several hours’ drive from the country home, and the servant who answered the door ushered them both into the dining room so that they could eat something.

Kircheis slipped out to find Hilde immediately. Eva encountered him in the hallway, but there was something very unhappy in his usually-placid eyes, so she let him brush past without saying more than hello, and telling him that Hilde was in the library.

Reuenthal was in the dining room, but he hadn’t sat down. He was looking at the painting of Hank, which Maggie had hung on the wall. The wooden paneling was darker, less sun-faded, in a large rectangle around where the simple watercolor portrait was hanging: Maggie had taken down an old framed hunting scene to put Hank up in its place. The old painting, which no one had removed yet, leaned against the wall near Reuenthal’s feet. He looked over at her when she came in, then turned back to the painting.

“Did you paint this?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s a good likeness.”

“Oh— I wasn’t sure if I had gotten his expression right.” In the painting, Hank lounged on a couch, his arm beneath his head, smiling wistfully out at the viewer. Eva had used as a reference a photo from his wedding, but she had tried to temper the alert, almost nervous, smile he had on his face in the photo, to give him a more peaceful expression.

“You did.” Reuenthal kept looking at it.

“Is everything alright, Herr Reuenthal?” she asked. “I assume you wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t urgent business.”

“Braunschweig took Iserlohn,” Reuenthal said.

Involuntarily, Eva put her hand over her mouth. “And Wolf— and Hank—”

“I don’t know,” Reuenthal said. “The only reason that we know this is that the remainder of the Iserlohn Fortress Fleet issued a command to the outlying Imperial forces, declaring Braunschweig an enemy of the state. They’re to make every effort to kill him, and anyone working for him.”

Eva’s heart twisted in her chest and she felt faint. Blindly, she reached for one of the dining room chairs and sat down in it. Reuenthal didn’t turn to look at her at all. When she had collected herself enough to speak, she asked, “Is that why you’re here? To warn us?”

“No. I need to speak to Elfriede. I told one of the servants to get her.”

“Why?”

“This has given Littenheim a way to win the civil war. If he finds Lichtenlade, and Lichtenlade surrenders to him and declares his daughter the Kaiserin, Braunschweig would have to fight the entire Imperial Fleet to re-take whatever measure of legitimacy he has— all Littenheim would need to do would be to hold out until the Imperial fleet arrives, and they’re on their way. The only way Braunschweig can now win is by forcing Lichtenlade to surrender to him and order the Imperial fleet to stand down.”

“Oh.” She didn’t quite understand the ramifications of everything Reuenthal was saying, but she didn’t have any reason to doubt that it was true. “Why do you need Elfriede?”

“She’s Lichtenlade’s grand-niece, and knows where they’re hiding.”

“You didn’t already ask her that?”

“It hadn’t been necessary before now.”

“Oh.” She should have asked what Reuenthal planned to do with the information, but she didn’t.

“Lichtenlade hopes that Braunschweig will destroy Littenheim for him, and then the Imperial fleet will take out Braunschweig,” Reuenthal said, talking mostly to himself. There was almost a smirk in his voice. “I don’t think Lichtenlade expected to win, before now. But now he thinks he might, without lifting much of a finger. How convenient for him.”

Eva opened her mouth, but then the door to the dining room opened, and Kircheis entered, followed by Elfriede and Hilde. Reuenthal finally turned away from the painting of Hank.

“Hello, Oskar,” Elfriede said. “Did you miss me?” She crossed the room towards him and touched his cheek with two fingers, tracing from the corner of his mouth towards his ear. He didn’t move at all until she had almost brushed completely past him, and then he grabbed her wrist.

“Of course,” he said.

She laughed, but it sounded as false as his voice did. “You must be lonely in your house without me.”

“I’m staying in the Braunschweig safehouse,” Reuenthal said. “I wouldn’t even know if my house had burned to the ground.”

“Maybe it has.” She pulled her hand out of his grip and took a seat.

“Are you staying?” he asked Hilde.

“I would like to,” she said. He looked at her with a cold, evaluating expression, but said nothing to contradict her. There were only four chairs in the smaller dining room, and so Eva stood and offered her seat to Hilde.

“Oh— I could get another chair,” Hilde said.

“It’s alright. I don’t think I need to be involved,” she said, offering Hilde a smile. “I’ll see if Maggie is around.”

“She went out,” Elfriede said. “Visiting her count again.”

“Oh?” Reuenthal asked, a certain viciousness in his tone that startled Eva.

“Count Landsberg,” she explained, trying to soothe whatever was annoying Reuenthal. “He’s a nice man, and she’ll be back soon. Are you planning on staying the night?”

“No. We need to get back to the capital as fast as possible.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” She looked around at everyone at the table. Although Hilde and Kircheis smiled at her, it was clear that they were waiting for her to leave. She gave an apologetic smile and stepped out, shutting the door behind herself.

The meeting went on for several hours, and Magdalena returned in the middle of it. Eva was in the kitchen, waiting for her to come back. She was drawing to keep herself occupied— another picture of Heinrich— but she tucked the preliminary sketch away when she saw the headlights of Magdalena’s car pierce the snowy air. Magdalena entered through the side door with her typical bluster, shaking her fur coat off and stomping her boots, the little bells that decorated the ankles jingling merrily.

“Hello, darling,” she said to Eva. “Am I late? Did you miss me? I see Herr Kircheis is here for a visit.”

“And Herr Reuenthal,” Eva said.

Magdalena immediately grasped the severity of the situation. There was no world in which Reuenthal would come all this way for a social visit. After she recovered from her momentary shock, she plastered cheer to her face again. “Marvelous. I should have invited my friend back with me— we could have made it a real party.”

“They’re not staying the night. They have to get back to the capital right away.”

“Oh, El will be so disappointed to hear that.”

“She knows. She and Hilde are in the dining room with them.”

“And they’ve shunned you— a pity.” Magdalena’s lightness was ringing falser by the second, and she finally dropped it entirely, except for her tone. “What are they talking about, do you know?”

“Hank and Wolf took Iserlohn, he said.”

“Oh! Well, of course they did. So they’re on their way back?”

Eva explained what Reuenthal had told her, though she feared the explanation was so garbled that Magdalena wouldn’t understand any of it. But Magdalena seemed to understand it just fine, so much so that she had to turn away from Eva, to stop her from seeing the paleness of her face.

She opened and closed the kitchen cabinets, muttering, “Oh, where are the tumblers,” to herself as she pretended to look for glasses and bottles of alcohol, though she knew very well where all of the things were.

“You should ask Herr Reuenthal to tell you about it, before he goes— I’m sure he could explain it better than I could,” Eva said.

“I understood you perfectly well, darling.” Magdalena stopped fishing in the cupboards and took out the whiskey and glasses. “Care for some?”

“No, thank you.”

Magdalena filled her own glass to the brim. “To Hank and Wolf! And Iserlohn!” she said, and then drank.

“Maggie—”

She gave a little wave and walked out of the kitchen, holding her glass and the bottle. Eva was tempted to follow her, but she didn’t want to be followed, that was clear.

Eva sat in the kitchen, tracing the wood grain of the table in there with her finger, until she heard the dining room door open and voices in the hallway. She headed into the foyer to meet them, but found only Kircheis and Hilde— Reuenthal and Elfriede had already gone off somewhere else.

“Are you sure?” Kircheis was asking. In the dim foyer, they were facing each other. Hilde clutched a sheaf of papers under her arm. “You don’t think your father will mind? Commodore Leigh will be mad at me.”

“I think he’ll have to understand,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind. Unless you don’t want me to?”

“Of course— I—”

They both stopped talking when Eva came in. “Am I interrupting? I can go— I just didn’t want to miss you, if you were leaving.”

“No, it’s fine,” Hilde said. “I’d tell you in a moment anyway— I’m going to go back to the capital. I’ll leave tomorrow, after I’ve packed.”

“Oh,” Eva said. “Why?”

“Maybe I can be useful there,” Hilde said. She proffered her sheaf of notes to Kircheis. “Do you want these, or can I transcribe them?”

“If you’ll be in the city tomorrow, you can keep them. Do you want me to stay the night?”

“No— it’s fine. I’m sure you have things you need to do. You can pick me up outside the city tomorrow. I’ll have to hand off the car.”

“Right,” he said.

Reuenthal entered the hallway. “Are you ready to go?”

“Yes, sir,” Kircheis said.

“Did you see Magdalena?” Eva asked Reuenthal. “I’m sure she wanted to say hello, or goodbye.”

“I saw her,” Reuenthal said. “Goodnight, Frau Mittermeyer.”

“Goodnight,” Eva said. She felt very strange. When Reuenthal reached the door, she said, “Herr Reuenthal—”

“Yes?”

“Please do stay safe, whatever you’re planning to do.” She brought to mind the strange, sad expression of his in the hidden painting upstairs. “For Wolf and Hank’s sake,” she said.

He stared at her, and she met his eyes. He searched for something in her expression, and didn’t find what he was looking for. She was too guileless, maybe, and he was too cold. “Goodnight,” he said again, and headed out the door, followed swiftly by Kircheis.

Eva leaned against the wall, feeling the sudden weight of the hallway’s silence.

“Are you alright, Eva?” Hilde— always sweet— asked.

“I’m fine.” She straightened and smiled. “You must be exhausted. You were in there for a long time.”

“Oh, no. It was very interesting.” She looked down at the sheaf of papers in her hands. “Honestly, it’s for the best that I don’t think I could sleep after all that. I’ll have to put these in some kind of order.”

“Is it very complicated?”

“I don’t know,” Hilde said. “It’s nothing like the wargames I used to play with Hank and Sieg… But I guess life isn’t ever really like that.”

“Do you know where Elfriede went?”

“I think she was going to find Maggie, with the rear admiral.”

“Right, right.”

Hilde sighed. “Oh— Eva, you’ll have to help me.”

“Of course, with what?”

“I don’t want to tell Heinrich I’m leaving. He’s—”

“He’ll understand,” Eva said. “I think you should give him more credit.”

“I know. It just seems like I’m abandoning him.”

“I’ll be here,” Eva said. “But you should tell him yourself. He would rather hear it from you.”

“I know, I know.” Hilde sighed and looked down at her papers again. “He’s asleep right now?”

“He probably won’t be awake until ten tomorrow.”

“I’ll see him then,” she said, resolving herself. “And then I’ll have to go.”

“Alright,” Eva said. She put her hand on Hilde’s arm. “If you change your mind— I’m sure you’re always welcome here.”

Hilde smiled. “I know.” She checked her watch. “I’d better get to work on this, if I want any chance of packing and sleeping.”

She trooped up the stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, leaving Eva alone in the foyer. She looked out the front window. The tracks where Kircheis and Reuenthal’s car had driven off were already being swept away by the hard wind. She couldn’t wait for spring to arrive, but it seemed further off every day. How long she lingered by the window, she didn’t know. She didn’t want to go find Maggie and convince her to go to bed, but it was almost certainly a duty that she would have to undertake. She shook herself out of her reverie, from picturing Reuenthal out in the snow, and made her way through the dark house.

She could hear Elfriede talking to Magdalena in the back parlor. The door was ajar, as if inviting Eva to walk in. This was a common tactic of Elfriede’s— she’d bait out an interruption, and then be annoyed by it. It seemed to amuse her, though Eva couldn’t fathom why.

“I don’t know how you can be so heartless about it,” Maggie said.

“Heartless? I thought I was doing this out of love.”

Magdalena laughed, hard and uncharacteristic. She was very drunk. “Love? I don’t think you’re capable of it.”

“I’m not? That’s very funny, from you.”

“Oh, you never loved me,” Maggie said. “We were just in the same place at the same time.”

“And here we are again.”

“You’re doing this just to hurt me.”

“Maybe.” It was Elfriede’s turn to laugh. “I certainly don’t care what happens to my family.”

“They’ll live,” Magdalena said. “Oskar needs your grand-uncle alive.”

“Oh, but not poor, poor Erwin Josef.”

“He’s a child!”

“And that makes him so much easier to get rid of. Doesn’t it? He’s an inconvenient little king to have around.” When Maggie didn’t say anything, Elfriede just kept talking. “They need my grand-uncle to have a reason to surrender— he can’t have a little child-Kaiser that he thinks he can keep on the throne. Poor little Erwin—”

“I hate you! I hate you! Fuck!” There was the sound of glass shattering, and Elfried laughed.

“Oh, go ahead. How do you think I feel?”

“I don’t care! You’re fucking sick.”

“He’s seven— right?” Elfriede asked. “Well, whatever. How many years did you cost me, Mags. How many?”

“It wasn’t me—” Magdalena’s voice broke. “You—” She was crying. Eva had never heard Maggie cry before, not like this. Open sobbing, hard breath, words that she couldn’t get out right. “You can’t do this—”

“It’s really your fault, Mags,” Elfriede said. “If you hadn’t introduced me to Oskar…”

“I was trying to make it right,” Maggie said. “I was trying—”

“Well, so am I.” Elfriede stepped towards the door, and Eva pressed herself back against the hallway wall as she came out. There was no way Elfriede could avoid seeing her, and their eyes met as she brushed past.

Despite the calm cruelty in Elfriede’s voice, she looked shaken and pale, and when she nodded at Eva, she didn’t muster anything else horrid to say, even though it would have been very easy to. She headed upstairs, and Eva went into the back parlor where Maggie was sobbing on the couch. She shut the door behind herself, and Maggie didn’t even look up at the sound, her face buried in her hands.

Eva had to be very careful to avoid the shattered glass on the wood floor as she made her way to Maggie’s side, and she squeezed herself onto the couch beside her and silently wrapped her in her arms, tucking her face against Maggie’s shoulder. This only made her cry harder.

“Eva—” Maggie sobbed. “Eva, I can’t live like this. I can’t—”

“Shh,” Eva said. “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay…”

“I promised— I did everything to keep her safe and I promised— I never wanted this to happen— I can’t live like this—”

Eva rocked her back and forth in her arms. Magdalena was crying so hard that she was choking on her own tears, unable to breathe, shaking and coughing. It wouldn’t have surprised Eva if she threw up from it, but she didn’t. Eva clung to her with all her strength, afraid if she let go, Magdalena might do something truly drastic. There was only so long a person could cry, Eva knew. There had to be an end to the tears, and Eva would just hold on until then. However long it took. She could do that, at least.

“Maggie,” she whispered. “It’s alright, it’s alright.”

“It’s not alright. It’s never—”

“I’ll get Kircheis to stop it,” Eva said. “It’ll be alright…”

“He can’t stop it,” Maggie said. “He won’t even be there.”

“I’ll talk to Herr Reuenthal, then,” Eva said. “I’ll go back to the city with Hilde tomorrow. He’ll listen to me.”

“He won’t,” Magdalena said. “You know he won’t. You know it—”

She didn’t know it. In fact, it frightened her that Maggie thought the man that Wolf and Hank clearly trusted would not be dissuaded from murdering a child. Had she been deliberately ignoring something, or was Maggie wrong? The possibility of the former discomfited her, because of how easily true it was. She turned a blind eye to at least one thing— one thing she knew would hurt her, whatever it was. She clutched Maggie tighter.

“There has to be something we can do,” Eva said. “Shhh.”

Magdalena’s sobbing began to quiet, until it was just her ragged breathing, and even that steadied. It took some time, but Eva held her steady.

“Eva…”

“What is it, Maggie?”

“Will you help me?” she asked. Her voice was still rough, still full of pain, but whatever thought that she had seized on had given her strength.

“Of course,” Eva said. “Of course.”

“Don’t say that until you know what I’m going to ask of you,” Maggie said. “Never agree to a favor before it’s asked. Never.”

“What do you want me to do?” Eva asked. “I want to help you.” She pressed her cheek against Maggie’s shoulder, inviting Maggie to rest her head on hers. But she sat up straight now, though her whole body trembled, shivered. Maggie stared straight ahead of herself into space. “We have to get him out of there,” she said. “That’s the only way he’ll live. Is if he’s not here anymore.”

“Okay,” Eva said. She knew she was agreeing to something much more difficult than she could possibly imagine, but she couldn’t say anything else. She pictured the child-that-wasn’t, the child of her dreams, and then she pictured the young Erwin Josef, whom she had only seen in photos. He was real, if nothing else, and Eva wanted him to live, too.

Perhaps that was all it took. Perhaps she would have said the same for any child— but this was the child that Maggie loved, and Eva would do it for her. She didn’t have a choice, not at all. It was like when Wolf had asked her to marry him— her mind had been made up in some fixed, unchangeable way long before the moment came.

Maggie looked at her. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize— I want to help.”

“I don’t think you understand—” Maggie said. “I don’t think you know what it will cost you.”

“I don’t care,” Eva said. She turned Maggie to face her, looked into her red eyes. “I’ll do it for you. Tell me what I have to do— I’ll do it.”