Gingerly, she rose to her feet. It was important she not wake Martin or the von Lingenfels girls, asleep on the pallet they had dragged downstairs. They would only get in her way. With rare clarity, Benita knew exactly what she must do: warn Herr Muller before the prisoners discovered him. She took her shoes and the paring knife she always carried and tiptoed out the door.

Upstairs, the kitchen was empty. Marianne and Frau Grabarek had apparently gone up to their rooms. Outside the window, in the gray light, Benita could see the smoldering bonfire and the blackened carcass above it, an obscene thing. Around it the men slept, splayed out like corpses on a battlefield.

Herr Muller’s ax was louder once she was aboveground. Pulling her cardigan close, she hurried out the kitchen door to the courtyard. On the other side was an old bakehouse with an opening for shoveling waste into the moat. She had often seen Fritz and Martin climb through it and down to the murky bottom. From there they splashed along to a ladder of footholds carved into the moat wall, then up to the meadow between the castle and the woods.

Moving too swiftly to allow time to reconsider, Benita jogged toward it. The morning was fresh and cool, and the wild morning glories climbing along the wall were still closed. From the roof overhang, swallows began to stir, darting out in missile-like feints and swoops. They reminded her of something from her childhood—the swallows in the eaves of the asylum outbuildings; the baby birds that would fall out of their nests to the ground. One year she had tried to care for them, feeding them milk from a medicine dropper, offering them the worms she had dug. They had been so soft and fluffy and pitiful—their tiny bright eyes blinking up from her palm. It had never worked, though. One by one they died.

Inside the bakehouse, all was dim and rotten. It had not been used in years. The opening was not difficult to find; it was not even covered. Benita dropped to her hands and knees and lowered herself through. The drop was farther than she trusted, but she closed her eyes and let go. She staggered upon impact but remained on her feet. From here it was easy to make her way through the muck to the footholds in the wall. In a moment, she had scrambled up and out. Then she was free of the castle with only a short stretch of field between her and the woods.

Again, Benita heard the thunk of the ax.

She did not stop to look beyond the castle to what was visible of the stable, the fire, the sleeping Russians. Instead, she ran across the shaggy grass until she reached the safety of the woods. A scramble of weeds and low brush edged the forest, prickly and sharp, but she barely noticed. She was going to save Herr Muller. It was in her power to do this. The knowledge made her palms sweat and her heart race—but also filled her with a potent determination. She had been saved so many times—by Marianne, by her neighbor Frau Kessler in Berlin, by the prison warden who kept her in the hospital instead of a concentration camp . . . even, at one time, by Connie, her knight in shining armor, who had saved her from her life. But who had she ever saved? No one. Not even her own son.