Sky Knights by Alex Powell

was broken enough as it was without additional help. She heard a whoosh behind her, and chanced a peek around the boulder to see the fate of their enemies.
    The woods in front of Dounia were on fire, and Dounia was standing there, arms raised to shoulder level, simply watching. The soldiers that had been taking refuge behind the trees started screaming and the woods erupted in flame. Ira watched passively as they all burned, screams eventually dying down and stopping.
    After a few minutes, Dounia lowered her arms and the flames extinguished completely, not even the residual heat of the fire remaining. Everything was cold ash, as if the fire's dregs were hours old and not minutes.
    When Ira stepped out, she could smell charred flesh on the air and gagged, backing away from the scene and covering her face with her undamaged arm.
    Dounia turned and retrieved her gloves, sliding them on over ordinary-looking hands.
    "And to think that I mostly use my craft to start campfires and keep my tea warm," Dounia said, smile empty.
    "The enemy will have probably seen the smoke," Ira said. "We should get out of here."
    "I should have kept some of them from burning so that we could take their uniforms," Dounia said, sighing and shaking her head.
    "We'll get another chance for that," Ira replied wryly. "That's one thing we won't run out of on this side of the lines, and that's Germans."
    Meow crept down from Dounia's shoulders and into her arms, fur standing on end and tail lashing wildly. Dounia stroked his head, and he growled in the back of his throat.
    "We would have died," Ira said. "If you hadn't burned them."
    "This is why I'm a pilot," Dounia said, voice still flat. "The fire is farther away from you."
    Dounia warmed up Ira's tea when it grew cold.
    "I'm not a combat mage," Dounia said, and Ira could see her hands were shaking. "I make tea and toast."
    Ira moved up beside her and grasped her shoulder, squeezing it reassuringly.
    "This is war," Meow said, from his perch on Dounia's other shoulder. "Tea and toast doesn't win battles."
    "One day, will we look back at this and wonder why we did these things? I wonder how I'll live with them," Dounia said, but reached up and curled her fingers through Meow's fur.
    As they walked away, the smell of smoke and charred remains cleared from the air, and Ira could breathe again.
    "I never knew I had that much power," Dounia said eventually.
    Ira hadn't either. She'd never seen anybody with the power to light the entire forest on fire. Healing and fixing things didn't come in levels that high. She couldn't take something too badly damaged and make it whole again. Eventually its structural integrity would collapse and she'd be left with nothing. And healers couldn't make a dying person live if they were past a certain point.
    "I could have killed them all with a small spark," Dounia continued. "Just a little fire, like the ones I start back at base for boiling water. Their clothes would have caught, and there would be nothing they could do to put it out again."
    "Why didn't you?" Ira asked, in spite of herself. She didn't like the way Dounia was talking right now, but what did one do in these situations? Every soldier had fractures in their heads that one didn't examine too carefully.
    "I wanted it to be over quickly," Dounia said in a small voice.
    "They make our people suffer," Ira pointed out.
    "I am not them," Dounia replied.
    There was silence for a while, as they heaved their legs up and out of the deep snow, only to plunge them back in again, time and time again. The hard work of walking kept Ira's mind off her arm, which was giving off a low background hum of pain in her head.
    "I wonder if Tanya died this way," Dounia said, sounding bleak.
    Ira didn't know what to say to that either, because Tanya probably had. The fire from the bombs they dropped wasn't much different from Dounia's fire, after all. Ira looked over at Meow, who stared back at her unblinkingly. One of them had to say