Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (90 page)

“Yasha, you say a prayer. I don’t know how to talk to God, but you do.”

Jamie looked up and across the mounded dirt at Gregor. The man was perfectly sincere. And so he said a prayer from his own world, a prayer from the West, brought here with a mind and soul that had lived in the light and warmth of those philosophies all its years. As, were God merciful, Volodya should have done as well. American lines for a Russian man. The words came back to him as poetry always did, like a soft breath of air from one of the vortices in his mind and heart, hidden but waiting for the time it was needed.

…This covert have all the children
Early aged, and often cold, --
Sparrows unnoticed by the Father;
Lambs for whom time had not a fold.

The atmosphere of the camp changed swiftly
in the wake of the guards’ deaths. It came as no surprise to any of them, but it brought with it a cloud of doom that seemed to hang over all their heads. Jamie was banished back to the communal bunkhouse that he had previously shared with Nikolai, Shura, Vanya and Volodya. Even at night, the normal chatter amongst the men was subdued, for they all felt Volodya’s ghost lingering in their midst.

His time with Violet and Kolya was severely circumscribed, and often several days would pass without his being able to hold the child in his arms. Valentin had been apologetic but Jamie knew the man was in an untenable position. He had to come down on them all or it was his own head that was going to find its way onto the block, if indeed it wasn’t already there. They were all waiting, breath held, for an official visit. The fact that it was so long in coming only contributed to the unease that wrapped around the entire camp.

He managed a few minutes with Violet before nightfall most nights, saying good night to her in a public place, the falling dark the only measure of privacy they were now allowed. In the Empire, you learned quickly to take what you could get and hang onto it with both hands. Around them the camp grounds were uncommonly quiet, the orange glow of the sodium lights falling in patches here and there. The air smelled like the possibility of snow. She shivered and he put his arms around her, wishing he could will his heat into her.

“What is it?” He asked, for he sensed something off in her, some fear that she could not keep from him, though he knew she tried.

She looked up at him, expression pensive. “Last night I dreamt of mushrooms, an unending field of them, Yasha, and I am at the edge of this field but cannot walk into it. To dream of mushrooms is a sign of tears to come. A huge field of them like that,” she shivered again and he held her more tightly, “what can that mean?”

“I think it might be odd if you hadn’t dreamt of them considering all that’s happened in the last weeks.”

She shook her head, copper hair a dull gleam in the dark. “That is your rational Western mind speaking, Yasha, but your Russian half knows better.”

“My Russian half?” he said, laughing a little.

The face that turned up to his in the dark was entirely serious. “You cannot stay here this long, Yasha, and make a family out of a bunch of prisoners, cannot love us and have us love you without becoming Russian yourself. And once you are Russian, you are Russian forever. This country has changed you. Can you deny it?”

“No, I would never deny that,” he said and leaned down to kiss her forehead. She was right. His Russian side had told him there was dark trouble stirring that night when Shura had stood to sing that cursed song. He had known it then but it had already been too late. There was more trouble coming and that was, he supposed, the dark Russian wind rising in his spirit, telling him thus. Though one didn’t exactly need to be Baba Yaga reading the portents to know that what Volodya had done was going to come back to curse them all. Even his rational Western mind could see that clearly.

That night it was his Russian mind that dreamt. He was on horseback in a forest, the light an emerald gloom, and catching at the sides of his vision were small creatures, wizened and horrific, whisking in and out of the portentous dim. He had the sense that he was lost, but did not know how he had become so. Just lost in a way that left him without root or ground beneath him. Around him the forest grew thicker and thicker the further he ventured into it. This was Russian
bor
, forests that grew league upon league around the curve of the globe, unending, dense and dangerous.

And then he saw her, a willowy flicker in the trees, the scent of her filling all his senses, green and chill and amber-thick. She was the old forests incarnate, the ones that held witches and winged bears, and lakes so deep that an ever-running chain would never plumb the bottom of them.

He followed, because it was a dream, because he had always been meant to follow, for from the beginning she had been trying to tell him something, to make him understand. It was like following quicksilver; a flash here and a glimmer there, a darting in the dusk. Once or twice he thought he had lost her to the thick gloaming. Then he smelled something, a scent long familiar, one that lived in his blood and marrow, and it was this he followed.

The edge of the forest came up suddenly and his horse stopped under him, whickering gently at the wind that rose from a great sea. The woman stood on the shore, the water lapping at her feet, wind blowing through her pale stripling hair, looking out over the waves with a great yearning in her face.

She turned to him and upon her face was an expression of such exquisite sadness that it cut his heart to witness it. He started toward her but she backed away and disappeared with a flicker of watery green into the forest, which grew thick and dark right to the edges of this strange sea.

He stepped to the edge of the water, felt it foam around his feet, bent and cupped its salt and shimmer to his face. And then he looked up and over the great rolling waves, the swift running verdigris light that ran on into eternity. He understood the yearning in her face. He felt it himself, strong as any swift-running tide, as deep as any cold current.

Beyond the sea, he knew, lay the West. A place he had once called home.

The Tale of Ragged Jack, continued.

Each night when Jack lay down on his bed
, he watched the tapestry as it moved in the soft breezes that stole through every crack in the tower. And he noticed that the Knight’s face was sadder and a little older each time he looked, while the Lady retreated further and further into the shadows of the tower. It gave him an uneasy feeling that leaked into his dreams and woke him up in the middle of the night, leaving him staring into the dark. Then day, such as it was, for time was a muddle here, would come and he would go out in the little walnut wood boat with Muireann and she would play her silver pipe, and he would forget what it was that so bothered him in the quiet.

One night the Knight came to him in a dream, a dream so vivid Jack couldn’t be certain he wasn’t awake at the time. Even later he would doubt it, for it wasn’t fuzzy as dreams often were when he awoke, but a memory with a clarity like mead. In the dream the Knight had been out of the tapestry and they had been sitting together on a fallen tree, thick with moss and lichens, with tiny primroses growing out of the fissures in the bark.

“You cannot stay, Jack—such things are not possible in this land between worlds. She must go on, beyond the Hollow Hills, and you must find the Crooked Man and then return home. You know it in your own heart. You just don’t want to listen. Please Jack, if you don’t leave, the Lady and I will be trapped inside that tapestry forever, as surely as you will be trapped here with Muireann for all time.”

Jack awoke cold and sweaty, the dream lingering all day like a frosted spiderweb around his senses, and he knew no matter how many boat rides they took, or picnics in the great golden harvest field, no matter the enchanted music and the water that tasted like honey and snowflakes, that he could no longer stay here. Only the pathway out seemed to have disappeared, if it had, indeed, ever existed at all. Not too many days later, he caught a glimpse of himself in the still water of a moon-soaked pond and reared back in shock. He had grown older in his time here, his hair grown long and wild, the bones of his face closer to the surface with a scurf of whiskers clouding his chin. He rubbed a hand slowly over his face, wondering when this transformation had occurred. Looking down he saw that his pants were far too short, his shirt threadbare and the sleeves well above his wrists. Aengus too had changed, for he was large now, and there was the odd grey whisker in his muzzle.

At dinner that night, his long hair tidied back in a knotted cord of leaf stems, his clothes replaced by green and brown pants and long shirt from the woman who wove such things, Jack sat beside Muireann, who looked especially pretty with her hair combed for once and a crown of myrtle leaves and strawberries woven amongst her curls. The long hall was unusually subdued. There was none of the music that normally accompanied dinner and though the goblets were filled with mead and peat whiskey, not many were drinking. Even the talk was low, people whispering to their neighbors and friends, many simply looking off into the distance, the food on their plates congealing.

“What’s going on?” Jack asked Muireann, noting that she too was unusually pensive.

She shook her head, expression troubled. “There’s been talk about moving on, all of us, to the Western Islands, over the Great Sea. Those islands can’t be found by any but our own people and once we’re there, there is no coming back, not ever.”

“Why now?”

“Because Jack, no one believes in the auld ones anymore. People have forgotten us and so you will notice that this world around us is beginning to decay. If they don’t leave, they fear that one morning they won’t be here either. They will simply have disappeared like smoke in the night.”

“Why do you say
they
?” he asked, a chill wind crossing his bones.

She stuck her chin out stubbornly. “Because if they go, I’m staying here with you.”

“You can’t stay, Muireann, nor can I.”

The stubborn look remained, the gooseberry green eyes gone dark the way they did when her anger was stoked.

He put out a hand and waited patiently until she took it.

“I need to show you something. Will you come with me?”

She nodded reluctantly and he led her out of the long hall, up the winding stair where the ivy grew thick through the cracks, silver berries ripening with autumn’s approach. He was certain it must be autumn this time, for the air smelled faintly of smoke and leaves turning brown and gold, and in the fields the pumpkins grew fat and indolent and the wheat was bowed down with grain that filled the air around with the scent of winter bread.

Inside his tower room it was chilly despite the mellow evening sun setting beyond the thick walls.

“I need you to look at the tapestry, really look and see the story it is telling us.”

She quirked the fine lines of her inky brow at him but looked at the tapestry. At first she furrowed her face, and tilted her head, jarring loose one of the strawberries in her crown. He saw her take it in piece by piece, the Knight forever riding up toward the Castle but never arriving. The lady’s hair like a silken banner rippling in the wind.

“She—she looks like me—only older,” she backed away from the tapestry, eyes wide with consternation. “And the Knight—he…” she trailed off, her eyes flashing angrily at him. “Why did you show me this?”

Jack sighed. It was in her nature to be difficult. He wished just once, though, she wouldn’t be. This was the hardest thing he had ever said to another, and the worst of it was he didn’t want to say it, not in the least.

“I think what it is trying to tell us, is that if we stay here together,” Jack said, “we will be trapped forever—we—we can’t stay.”

Muireann shook her head. “You can’t know that—it’s just a tapestry, Jack, and those figures are made of thread. They aren’t really us.”

“Maybe not us, exactly,” he said slowly, “but an echo of what we will become if we stay. It’s as though someone, maybe us in another time, left this as a warning so that we wouldn’t stay, wouldn’t have to suffer this fate.”

“Suffer?” she said, small face piqued at his words. “Is that what you consider staying with me? Suffering?”

“No, only it’s not the life we’re meant to lead. We can’t stay here alone in a world that soon won’t exist. You know without the magic this place will fade away and then we’ll be stuck in a dreadful limbo.”

“At least we’d be together,” Muireann said, though he heard the first tremor of doubt in her tone.

“We’d be alone, just you and me, forever,” Jack said. “I know it seems like what we want, and I think for awhile it would be like a lovely dream, but then when you couldn’t ever wake up from it, it wouldn’t be so lovely anymore.”

She shook her head, the myrtle crown tipping to one side, the berries woven within it bruised and spoiling now. He looked about and realized that the tower was missing half its roof. Surely it hadn’t been that way yesterday, or even this morning, had it? The lichen grew thick as sin along the crumbling stone, and the ashes in the hearth were scattered about the floor. And he understood suddenly that this world was undoing itself, even as he stood within it looking at the girl he loved.