Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (56 page)

“Sit,” the woman said, and though her tone was gruff, it was not unkind.

There was stew in the cauldron and a round of fresh-cut bread on the table. The woman served him a steaming bowlful and set another to cool for the dog. She gave him two thick slices of bread, heavy with butter. Jack tried to eat slowly, but found his hunger would not allow him his normal manners. The old woman merely sat down by the fire and drew a spinning wheel between her knees.

She spun the finest thread Jack had ever seen. His own mother was good at spinning and her threads soft as silk, but this lady spun thread that was almost translucent, like a spiderweb. At the same time she was grinding corn with her foot on a peddle that turned two silvery whetstones. He rubbed his eyes. Surely that couldn’t be right. But, indeed, she was managing both tasks at once.

“Why is a boy so young on the road alone?”

“I’m not alone,” he said stoutly, his hand on Aengus’ silvery head.

“No, of course not,” the woman said kindly. “I only meant to ask why you are away from your mother and father?”

And so he told her about the Crooked Man and asked if she had ever heard of such a being. She had slowed in her spinning, her face in shadow so that he could not see her expression, though he sensed that mention of the Crooked Man had disturbed her.

“Aye, there are always tales of such a one in all times and places, but I think this one is more than a bit of myth pasted together with half-truths an’ dreams, for there be times the stories take a turn an’ become something more so that ye know he is travelin’ the hills an’ dales hereabout.”

“Have you heard such stories of late?” Jack asked, half dreading the answer.

“I have, indeed. I did meet one such as you describe, long ago. Maybe that’s why ye’ve found yer way to my fireside tonight, for little is chance in this world of ours, spin an’ tilt as it will.”

She pulled the thread she was spinning out long and fine. It was the color of a rainbow, which was to say no clear color at all but rather one misty shade blending into the next for something altogether beautiful.

“’Twas a very long time ago. I was only a wee girl then, knee high to a cricket an’ bold as a brass penny. I’d a good mind an’ well I knew it. Ye’ll maybe be too young to know this, but ‘tis a gift to know what ye are meant to be in this world. I knew long ago, for I could grow plants an’ knew their uses from an early age. I could feel the healing in my hands, like a green thrum that needed release. My grandmother was a healer before me an’ saw what I was from early on.”

A ginger cat, hardly larger than a thimble, climbed up the worn linen of her sleeve and sat down upon her shoulder and proceeded to lick his paws with great gravity. Every so often, as the woman spun her tale along with her thread, the cat looked up and fixed Jack with an uncanny golden eye.

“I had gone out one afternoon, in the green time when the plants are waiting to be picked, just this side of the full moon when their medicine is most potent. It was my first time out gatherin’ alone an’ I was half excited, half afraid, for the woods are never empty even when it seems they are. I got lost in the searching and picking, an’ without my realizin’ it, the sun had sunk low an’ the shadows were grown thick and long. When I looked around me, I didn’t know where I was. Everything looked the same an’ yet not the same at all.”

Jack leaned forward, almost toppling off the stool in his eagerness to hear her next words.

“I’d strayed across the boundary between worlds, lost the path entirely an’ had no idea where I might be. ‘Twas soon full dark an’ there was mist comin’ up out o’ the roots of trees and from under the fallen leaves. Then the leaves started to move, though there was no wind, an’ the boughs of the trees creaked as though they were in pain.”

Jack sat bolt upright, the quiver of a cold arrow flying up his spine. It sounded like the same sort of mist and wind that he had experienced just before the Crooked Man appeared. The same dancing leaves.

“I was frightened near out of my wits, an’ clutchin’ the amulet my grandmother had made for me.” She patted the small silver vial that hung about her neck, near black with age and use, and strung from a bit of leather.

“Twas as if one minute there was little but leaves whirlin’ in the wind, an’ then before I knew it a man was standin’ in front of me.” She shuddered expressively. “An’ such a man too, dark an’ silent, but ‘twas as though I could hear a terrible laughter from inside him. My ears couldn’t hear it, still my spirit could. I wanted to run. My whole wee body was shaking, but I was rooted to the spot.”

Jack nodded without realizing he was doing so, for it mirrored his own experience almost exactly.

“He touched my forehead, an’ it was as though I could feel somethin’ wild within myself tryin’ to get out an’ follow him, or maybe ‘twas only the bit that he would take an’ tuck in his filthy bag. Is that what he did to you? Took somethin’ of value?”

“Aye, he stole some of my dreams—put them in his bag just as you said. Though I never saw him do that exactly…” Jack trailed off, suddenly confused.

The old woman looked at him sharply, and he could feel the prick of her eyes like a needle poking gently at his skin. “Oh, it’s likely he did exactly that. He’s a master of the sleight of hand is the Crooked Man. Steal the shirt off yer back an’ have ye lookin’ at the moon whilst he does it. I will tell ye this for free though, laddie, he cannot harm you, unless you allow it,” she said, and bit the thread off the spindle neatly, winding the remains into a tidy ball and tucking it into the pocket of her apron.

“I don’t understand,” Jack said. How was he, just a boy himself, supposed to fight off such as the Crooked Man?

The woman smiled, sadly. “You aren’t meant to understand. It’s a sort of knowing that goes deeper than that. When the time comes—and it will, for you have seen him already—you will either know what to do or you won’t.”

“That seems stupid,” Jack said angrily, turning his face away from the woman so she would not see the tears that stood in his eyes. He was tired, and the warmth of the fire, a full belly and the woman’s kindness had him undone.

“It’s long past time for you and your wee dog to be abed,” she said crisply and rose from her low stool, setting the spinning wheel neatly into its corner.

She put a pallet by the fire, sweetly stuffed with rosemary and lavender, and once he and Aengus were tucked up cosily on it she covered them with a quilt that made his throat go tight with thoughts of his warm bed at home, his blankets that smelled like sunshine and hay and the scent of lilacs that sometimes drifted through his windows at night. Maybe that was why he dreamed of home that night, of his mother crying and his father roaming the hills and valleys of the kingdom, calling his name. He must have cried out in answer to his father, for he awoke in the ashy light of dawn with the old woman above him, her hand on his arm, steadying him out of the dream world into reality.

In the morning, she fed him on oats and honey and filled a satchel with bread and cheese and goat’s milk for him to take away with him. During the night she had mended his breeches and the tear in his shirt, for which he was very grateful.

The sky was rosy with dawn when he was ready to leave. Aengus had been fed too, and stood eager to go, scenting adventure on the horizon once again. For a moment Jack felt a spear of ice drive through his stomach, for he was afraid of what lay ahead and wanted nothing more than to be here with the old woman, do chores for his keep and to stay well away from the borders of the forest. But he knew he could not, for though Jack was young and sometimes foolish, still he knew that some paths are chosen and guided by an invisible hand and cannot be avoided.

The woman halted him outside the door of her cottage before he set out upon his lonely road.

“I have three things for you to take on your journey. The first is a length of thread, the second a bag of bones and the third is a weight of salt.”

The length of thread was from the wool she had spun the night before, neatly coiled and, in the morning light, an odd green in color—not like a rainbow in the least—yet he knew it was thread of the same spinning. Jack couldn’t swear to it, but he thought it wriggled a bit when he tucked it into his bag. The bag of bones was light as air, and the bones rattled about inside as though chattering one to another. The sack of salt was a solid weight in his hand, yet when he put it into his satchel it was light as a feather.

“Now drink this,” the lady said, and handed him an old silver flask, dark with age.

“What is it?” Jack asked, for a very dubious smell was floating out of the neck of the flask, forming a small black cloud.

“It’s a potion, one that will allow you to see and hear and speak in a different way. These are skills you will need on the rest of your journey.”

Jack drank it and could not decide if it was the sweetest thing he had ever tasted, or the foulest. It tasted of earth and berries, pine needles and willow bark, of moonlight on the forest floor and of the things that scuttled there, but it also tasted of sunshine and afternoons spent haying, of ripe apricots and pomegranates and honeyed dates.

“There can be no honey without bitter gall,” the lady said, and put the cap back on the flask, though the tiny cloud of its scent still hung in the air. “No rose without thorns. You must always remember that. Now open your eyes.”

Jack felt a faint buzzing sensation in his forehead, as though a nest of bees were stirring lazily. He opened his eyes and closed them again, shook his head to clear his vision and opened his eyes again, but it didn’t help one whit. The forest was absolutely teeming with tiny people, animals, carts, chatter, laughter and the odd screech or two. These people were dressed much as the lady was dressed, in things that looked as if they were made of leaves and tiny skins, with willow wands for crowns and birch bark for hats.

The women—for they were women despite being no taller than his own longest finger—had baskets over their arms and babies on their hips. The baskets were filled with all sorts of things: lovely floury loaves of bread, stone bottles of whiskey and mead, tiny apples no bigger than a sparrow’s beak. One woman had a basket filled with sparkling powders: deep gentian, brilliant scarlet, gooseberry green, and pigments he could hardly have imagined before—stardust and the gentle pink of a mole’s paw. And there were pigments for things he had before only smelled or thought—like the scent of bread fresh from the oven, or the way rain felt on your skin on a hot day, or mud between your toes after you’d pulled off shoes and socks, and other darker colors that were like a good sharp bang on your head, or a deep bruise that hurt to touch, or the way that a cut felt when the air moved across it.

He turned to look at the lady and his jaw dropped open in shock. She was no longer the old, needle-faced woman with worn hands and stooped back. She was beautiful, like a queen in a tale told over and over, whose beauty is never diminished by the telling.

“Never judge someone by her exterior, Jack. It’s important to remember that as you go on your journey.”

“Aye,” he said, “’tisn’t likely I’ll ever see anything in the same way.”

“No,” the woman said, and touched a hand to his face gently, as his mother used to do. There was both kindness and sorrow in her voice, and Jack knew that he had crossed some boundary since his encounter with the Crooked Man that could not be uncrossed, and that he had left something precious behind in doing so.

Chapter Forty-two
November 1973
Red Raven

And then as it was wont to do in Russia
, winter came once again.

The cold was so severe that breathing hurt and talk was unthinkable. Words would surely freeze and fall to the ground before ever making the journey to another’s ears. He had heard tell that the natives believed that each winter all laughter, tears, words and stories fell to the ground and froze, only to be awakened by spring’s thaw, when suddenly the air would fill with chatter, laughter, gossip and tragedy, a cacophony of humanity borne on spring’s gentler air. But what
this
ground would have to say was likely more than any human could bear to hear. For in what tone did blood and grief speak?

Fragments and tendrils of the people who had once walked here, lived here, died here were left behind. You could feel their ghosts walk in step with yours, like a shadow that you could not detach from yourself, until the time came when you wondered if you were seeing through your own eyes or viewing a vanished world through theirs. To be here was to live in a place apart, to feel as though you inhabited a planet out at the very limits of the solar system, where the sun’s warmth could not be felt and there was no home other than this.

Russian land was once measured by the counting of the souls that tilled its earth. Thus an estate with one thousand able-bodied male adults was valued at one thousand souls. The value of this earth since Stalin’s time was incalculable, beyond the measurements of feeble humans. Russians also referred to ghosts as ‘souls’, giving a whole other element to what a land was worth.

Russia had stripped him down psychologically until he felt there were no hidden crevices in his life or mind anymore. Some days, he felt as cold and as alien as the landscape. Life here was survival—bread rations and cutting above quota to increase that meager bit of food allowance. It was keeping an eye half open at all times because someone always wanted the little you had, and you had to be willing to kill to keep it. It was life at its most raw and fundamental.

It was late November and Jamie had now been in this camp for almost ten months. It had been a long and bitter day of cutting timber, and now they were returning to camp for the night. They walked in a shambling line, heads down, for the wind was too bitter to face. Even Gregor, normally one to spit in the wind, no matter how frigid, was silent today, merely putting one foot in front of the other on his way back to the camp, to a bowl of soup, a crust of bread and a chilly sleep in a drafty hut. Only to get up and go through this numbing routine again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that one,
ad infinitum
, a dreadful dark fairytale without a hero to ride in and rescue them, without an ending of any sort.