Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (111 page)

“It’s alright,” she said quietly and he felt strangely reassured, as if indeed things might be alright now, even if never the same.

“Was he very dear to you?”

“Who?”

“The friend ye lost. I’m blind in my eyes, Patrick Riordan, but not so blind in my heart. Ye’ve been grievin’ these last days. I could feel that clear, much as ye tried to hide it.”

“Aye, he was dear. He was the best friend I ever had.”

“Ye can break if ye need to. I can bear the weight of it,” she said, and he could feel it, the fault lines widening, the plates shifting to build the pressure up until he would not have control of it.

“Can ye?” His words came out half-choked, pushing past his throat thick and pained. “Because I don’t think I can.”

“Aye, I can, for it’s none so hard,” she said so quietly that her words fell light as snowflakes to touch his bruised skin, “to bear what ye can of another’s pain, when ye love them.”

Chapter Eighty-three
The World Both Under and Over

The air was alive today, the breeze sweet but brisk
with winter scent. Casey Riordan surveyed his bit of land with satisfaction. The fruits of the garden had long been picked and put up: the burlap bags filled with root vegetables, the onions hanging in loosely plaited bunches, the gleaming rows of jars filled with jewel-toned berries. All of this gave him a deep sense of satisfaction, a guard against the cold season ahead, an assurance of warmth and full bellies to ride out the winter winds and storms.

Velvety grass, skimmed with a milk frost of new snow, filled the hollows and dips between the trees. Beneath the snow the soil contrasted in thick black rills. Irish land had oft been described as black butter for its richness. The irony of such a thing was not lost on any Irish man or woman that a land so fertile, so lovely, was also tilled to its limits in blood and tears, which ought to have salted and destroyed the very soil beneath all their feet and yet still gave in plenty.

He began to walk, long strides into the woods. He liked to check the boundaries of his property once a month, see what might need mending, trees that may have fallen and just generally take stock of things. In his hand, he held a small bouquet of wild things: leaves blushed crimson from frost, silvered twigs smooth as a woman’s skin, and the drifting bits of seedpods that remained behind long after the seeds had flown. Today was also a pilgrimage of sorts, a strange pact he kept with a woman who had long flown herself.

He shivered a little as he walked beyond the pine coppice where the branches were feathered with snow. The day was cold, but his shiver had more to do with the fact that there were times in this wood when he felt that someone watched, someone neither evil nor benign, but most assuredly there.

He knew what his wife would say, witchy woman that she was. She would tell him it was one of those edge places where there was a fracture in time or in the world itself that allowed bits of other worlds to flit through, or creep in, she would say, and he could see her in his mind’s eye, her eyes dark with enchantment.

“You know when you sometimes catch a wee bit of someone else’s conversation, just snatched words, or someone says your name, but no one is there? Or you see someone just for a flash, and then you look and there’s only empty air? Those are the cracks in our world. Those are the holes in the borders between this world and that.”

The woman knew how to put a chill up a man’s spine, that was certain. But he knew what she meant all too well, for he had enough experience of the inexplicable things of the world to know there was much between the earth and the heavens that defied logic and scientific explanation.

A land this old, this rich in history, was layered deep in overlapping worlds. He often had the sense that if he turned at just the right moment he would see creatures from another time and place crossing through the borders of his own, just as Pamela had described.

Such thoughts brought to mind another place, one that belonged to the past, one he hadn’t thought about in a long time. Once, when he was a boy, he had been out roaming the woods and had gotten lost. He wasn’t one to panic in such situations as he knew that only led to getting more surely lost. On that ramble, though, he had come across an ancient crannog in the midst of a bog. He thought the bog must have been a pond or wee lake long ago but had dried up over hundreds of years and become ground, albeit of the loose and shifting sort. He had very carefully picked his way across that ground, and spent the afternoon inside of the daub and wattle building. It had been a magic place, as if time did not exist inside it and he might have been himself or a woad-faced warrior from centuries long gone. He had never told anyone about it, not even Pat, to whom he confided most things. Over the years he would go there from time to time; it had been a secret that was all his own, a place where he could step out of the world. He considered that this was how it was with Pamela at times, that in their most intimate moments, in their bed and in their life, there came into being a place where they stepped from the world, a place only the two of them could go, a beautiful secret known solely to them.

After checking the borders of the property and making a mental note about an elm that had come down since his last inspection, and a bit of the stone wall that needed mending, he arrived at his final destination.

The tree still held its leaves, though there had been a terrific storm only the week before that had ravaged most of the wood and left the deciduous trees bare-branched in the stark November wind. The leaves were crimson, glowing deep in the glowering wood like blood hung in warm drops against a night-dark windowpane. He shivered again. This bit of wood always put the hairs up on his neck and brought strange thoughts to mind.

He put the wee bouquet there on a soft break in the peat, in which a plant he did not recognize grew, green even now as it lay surrounded by the first snow. He remembered just where the woman lay, just as he remembered the soaked copper streams of her hair, the ethereal ivory of her ancient skin and the strange necklace she wore, in which the flower and fruit and thorn were together, indicating passage into the world of the Others.

He paused there, touching in his heart those he loved, one by one, like the beads on a rosary, those gone: his Daddy, Lawrence, wee Deirdre and Grace, and then those living: his wife, his brother, his son and his daughter. And a prayer for the man who was missing, gone from a tower room in an evil house, leaving no trace of himself behind. People disappeared all the time in this country. He was another to add to the list of those stranded in the twilit borderlands where they were neither alive nor dead, simply gone.

Above, the leaves fretted to and fro, speaking in their own sibilant tongues of the winter come down from the skies. The leaves shone preternaturally against the limitless blue of the sky and it felt as though someone touched him… laid a hand upon his back… light… a woman’s touch… but not his wife’s. His breath caught in his throat and he felt that he dared not look behind him, not because he was afraid, but because something was there that was better not seen.

It happened sometimes, though never before this vividly, as though an entity brushed him in passing and opened his eyes briefly to other lives, other possibilities. It turned an ordinary moment into one of those fleeting times when all the multiplicity of universes seemed to exist, as though a thousand bridges lay before him and he could choose a different destiny by crossing the span of each one. All lives that had been granted to him at the beginning of time, all the bridges crossed and not crossed, ways by which he would not return, there pulsing in the supercharged air. And then the moment was gone, the leaves merely leaves again, the bridges having disappeared to wherever such things go. The entity behind him had gone back into the fractured air from which it had entered. But he could still feel traces of the moment on his skin and in his blood, a half-bittersweet, half-relieved lingering as such things always were.

“I would still choose this one,” he said softly and only to himself, though he felt that someone else listened and smiled at his words.

He crossed himself and stood, leaving the offering to the red-headed bog woman. It was time to go home.

The Tale of Ragged Jack, continued.

Jack walked for many days after he left the Land of the Fair People
, and he felt its ruin behind him leaving no trace of the magical people who had once lived and loved there. The autumn lasted for a time, the leaves so red they looked as though blood moved within their delicate veins. They fell in great drifts, muffling his footsteps, and at night he and Aengus made their bed in those stacks of leaves, each morning awaking to find a skeletal sheen of frost over them.

When he wasn’t sure which way to go, he simply reached into his bag and let the bones guide him. They always helped him decide which way was the right way, even if, he had noted with no small frustration, the right way always seemed to be far more brambly and pitted and dark, whilst the wrong way often went along a gently-graded slope filled with sunshine and a soft way for the feet.

It was a mellow afternoon late in autumn when he came upon a fork in the path he was following. Right there at the crossroad was a treehouse, with a tiny set of stairs winding up from the ground into the thick, sturdy branches of an oak tree.

He stood looking up the stairs and thinking how nice it would be to know whoever lived inside for it looked very cozy and homely. It would be wonderful to have walls around him for a night so that he might sleep sound and not drift under the surface, not even daring to dream lest a predator steal upon him and Aengus. He was about to turn and continue on the path when a voice halted him, a voice he recognized.

“Come on up, Jack. I’ve been hoping you would happen this way on your travels.”

He looked up to find the Owl Woman who had bound his ankle for him in the Hollow Hills. He wondered if he had slipped back somehow, yet the terrain around him remained the same, the stairs still leading up to the cottage in the boughs. The fork still there in the road.

He climbed the stairs, feeling dusty and worn. Even Aengus’ pewter coat was a dull grey and matted with burrs. Ahead of them the Owl Woman climbed the long set of stairs so gracefully he was certain she was using flight in some manner invisible to the naked eye. The cottage, small and crooked, was very high in the boughs, so high that it swayed softly from side to side and Jack couldn’t fathom how it stayed put in a storm.

“It’s a thing of the air, not of the ground,” the Owl Woman said, and Jack wondered if he had asked the question out loud, though he was certain he had not.

“I thought you belonged to the Fair People,” he said when they had finished climbing and entered the crooked hut, tilting a bit to one side. His voice was as gritty as water drawn from the very bottom of a well. He was used to silence these last days, and his throat hurt with the movement of words.

“Like you, Jack, I was not one of them. They allowed me to come and go from their world but I was never one of them. They are gone now?” she asked, and the soft strange piping of her voice was unmistakably sad.

“Yes, they are gone,” Jack said, feeling the shape in his heart where Muireann was absent.

“I thought so, for I went to the borderlands two weeks past and all I saw was a hummock of earth and beyond only the empty sea.”

She sat down to knit, a long scarf that split in two, one side running out the window to the left of the hearth all the way into the forest, the other side flowing out the door and heading off over the hills. Both sides furled so far he could not see the ends of them and wondered what sort of dread giant needed a scarf of such length.

“I’m glad you remember them,” he said, “because I was afraid I had dreamed them.”

She smiled at him, pity in her great gold eyes. “Jack, you carry part of Muireann with you. How could you doubt that she was real?”

At first he thought she meant that he carried Muireann in his heart, but then he realized she meant the flower. He took it out of his pocket and unwrapped it, expecting a small withered ball of desiccated petals, but instead found it as whole and fresh as the day Muireann had placed it in his hand. There was even a drop of dew on one petal.

“Be careful with that flower, Jack. It is more than it appears to be.”

Though that was apparent, still he asked her what she meant, but she refused to explain further, instead saying she must make supper for she knew how hungry boys were wont to be at his age.

Hunger was the only thing keeping him awake. Beyond filling his belly, he wanted only to sleep, to lie down on the hearthrug beside Aengus who was already snoring and twitching in the deep dreaming sleep of the canine. Today the bones had not spoken to Jack, had not told him which path he was to follow, and this worried him.

“All roads are the same, all arrive somewhere after journey and toil. Only they don’t always arrive where we might want or expect. But expectations and wants are shifty things at best, so often we find where we end up is where we needed to be all along. Even if it’s not a comfortable place.”

Once again, Jack was certain he had not voiced his question aloud, or had he? How could the woman know the questions in his mind to which even he had not yet given words?

“We don’t need words between us, Jack. I can see the shape of your worries in the air before me.”

And indeed she could, for even Jack could make out the small spiral of smokey threads which writhed in the air, yet if he tried to look at it from any other angle, it promptly disappeared.

The Owl Woman built a small fire in the crooked hearth inside the crooked hut and she fed him soup from a cauldron, soup that tasted of pine needles and roots, dark berries and a sprinkling of something grainy that she said it was best he didn’t know about.

He fell asleep to the soft clacking of the Owl Woman’s needles, made of bone, he noted, and polished fine from long use. He slept soundly that night in the small hut, up so high that the boughs swayed with the night wind and the stars sprinkled their dust on the rooftop.