Then there was the blast. Ahead of her there was shouting, screaming. She couldn't tell whether the explosive had landed on the road or the river, whether people were wounded or merely panicked. More panicked, actually. Because certainly numbness had not completely subsumed the animal panic that coursed just below the skin and behind the bloodshot eyes of this long and plodding throng of parents and children and very old people. Only as Anna watched the nearest soldiers and Volkssturm recruits trying to prevent the line from spreading north and south into the woods-here is that panic, she thought, we are like desperate beetles scurrying from a giant's boots-did she understand. The bomb had created a great spider's web of cracks in the ice.

For a moment her father and Helmut conferred, the two of them murmuring softly into each other's ears. Their army uniforms were still crisp. Then each of them walked to the front of a wagon-they were traveling with two-and her brother ordered her to come help him with the horses. After all, he muttered, they were more her horses than his. She thought he was being needlessly bossy, but she also knew that she didn't dare question him now. It seemed that their family, too, was going to leave the caravan and trek into the woods, and he was going to run ahead and find a spot along the river that looked suitable for a crossing.

Beside her, beneath the blanket in the wagon filled with oats, their sole remaining POW cleared his throat.

THE PRISONER, a twenty-year-old Scotsman named Callum Finella-a name that initially had made both Anna and her younger brother giggle, but struck her now as infinitely more lyric than the suddenly wolfish-sounding names of most of the males in her family-had been with them since September. He was one of seven British POWs who had been sent to the Emmerich family estate from the prison camp just outside of Thorn to help with the harvest. When the other six men-older