Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  “No, I don’t.”

  He raised an eyebrow in question. “Ye seem very certain of that.”

  She shrugged, feeling unable to explain. “I think if he knew, he would have prepared me for it and he didn’t. The man isn’t God. He can’t anticipate the consequences of every action he’s committed in his lifetime.”

  “Well,” Casey said wryly, “he does a damn good imitation of bein’ all knowin’ an’ all seein’ much of the time. Do ye know anything about the mother?”

  “No—well nothing other than she must have dark hair and blue eyes.”

  “Aye, that would seem to be about all the boy took from her.”

  She looked up at him in question. “So, it’s not just my imagination? I started to doubt that he could possibly look that much like Jamie by the time I got to the top of the stairs.”

  “No, it’s bloody apparent to anyone who has ever set eyes on the man. That boy has to be his son. Christ, he even moves like him.”

  “I noticed that, too.”

  “Ye’ll have to come back downstairs in a bit, darlin’.” He squeezed her hand, shoring her up against the evening’s disaster.

  “I know. I just need a minute to pull myself together.” She squeezed his hand back, leaned up to kiss him and then put her forehead against his. “I’m glad you’re here tonight. I don’t think I would have managed without you.”

  He put up his free hand and stroked her head. “Well, I’d hate to think ye can manage without me at any time, Jewel, but I know that ye can an’ have been in this situation. Give yerself some credit, woman. This hasn’t been easy, an’ yer man knew it wouldn’t be but he felt ye were up to the challenge. An’ while I’m not overfond of agreein’ with Jamie Kirkpatrick, I do agree with him here.”

  “I think,” she said softly, “I think I have to start considering the possibility that he’s not coming back, Casey. I can’t hold the companies if it can be proven that Julian is Jamie’s blood. It will only be the matter of a blood test and they will have grounds from which to strike hard. Then I have to ask myself as well what Jamie would want, if he had known about Julian? We may have a stronger hold on the house and land, but as to the companies, blood will out, and maybe it’s right that it should.”

  “Take yer time over this and don’t assume right away that Jamie would view this boy as a blessing in his life.” He gave her a quick kiss and then stood. “I’ll see ye downstairs, Jewel.”

  After Casey left, she straightened her hair and re-applied her lipstick. She knew she still looked pale and shocked but there was little she could do to change that just now.

  She hesitated by the window. The snow had stopped falling and a thin skiff of it lay over the lawns. Unbroken by any footsteps, the grounds rolled away from her, a field of silver where the auld ones might dance under the half-moon that waxed in the sky. Below, a soft light came from the stables, creating a small circle of gold in the paddock. She put her forehead to the chill pane and closed her eyes.

  Like a small chapel deep in a wood where no wayfarer ever passed, there was a place inside that she kept for Jamie’s sons and her own lost babies, each name a folded petal on a delicate rosary: Michael, Alexander, Stuart, Maude, Deirdre and Grace, the last child she and Casey had lost before the miracle of Conor. It was not a place she visited often but she always knew where it was, the shape of it, the doors and windows and the altar, simple, just a place to kneel and remember, to say words that didn’t have real form or shape but could only be said in that small, deserted chapel in the forest of the heart.

  The prayer she said now was for Jamie and the sons he had lost, both those who had died and the one who had lived. And she prayed that the living son was not a thorn on that petalled rosary that she turned over in her heart.

  “Merry Christmas, Jamie,” she whispered, soft as the frost latticing and branching on the window. “You have a son.”

  Part Nine

  Russian Fairytale

  Russia – November 1974-September 1975

  From the Journals of James Kirkpatrick

  November 11th, 1974

  Born—Nikolai Andreyevich Kirkpatrick, sound of body and certainly sound of lungs, for he has made the entire camp aware of his existence in no uncertain terms, this son with three parents. He is, of course, beautiful and blue-eyed with a quiff of red hair that is Violet’s despair, for she had hoped he would be blond like his father. He weighed in at a very respectable 8 lbs. 11oz. and has a hearty appetite.

  It is as though we have been given a stay of execution, a stay that allows us to pretend that we are not in a camp from which it seems increasingly unlikely we will emerge. It is at best a game of pretend, yet it is our life at present. There is no knowing if we will be allowed to keep Kolya for more than eighteen months, which has traditionally been when Soviet children are removed from their mothers in situations like ours, and put into the nightmare of state institutions. One does not require a broad imagination to know what a child’s fate would be in such a place at such a tender age.

  Russians do not live in expectation of happiness. History has taught them far harder lessons. Russians endure, Russians survive, and at the end of the day, that is no small accomplishment. In this country it is often an act of heroism.

  But I think in our own way, we have found happiness. Perhaps it is only what is left of my Western naïveté, the part of my philosophy that says man and woman are due some measure of joy in this life, but yet… yes, we are happy in our own way. Stripped down to our essentials and in limbo so that joy is snatched at as bread by a starveling.

  This camp exists outside of time, or so it seems to those of us shut up here. It is as though we are beyond the bounds of even Soviet time and space, and live in some strange, dark fairytale buried deep in a Russian bor. Rarely do any officials come here and I know even within a system as secretive as the Soviet one, this camp is beyond the pale, to use a term from my own land.

  Chapter Sixty-two

  February 1975

  Russian Fairytale

  Jamie left the bath hut feeling remarkably light in spirit. He had managed a shower in privacy, with hot water and real soap. He was looking forward to cuddling Kolya, having a hot cup of tea, his bed and his wife, in pretty much that order. Valentin, the camp commander, had allowed them permanent occupancy of their small bridal hut and the privacy was a cherished thing, even if it had caused pangs of envy amongst those who did not have such luxuries. He did not feel enough guilt about it to change the situation. Envy in the camp was a given, small shards of it existed everywhere for everything. Envy over bread rations, envy for the extra potato in the bowl of the man next to you, envy for release, even when it was only the release of death.

  Shura approached him as he crossed the yard, fine snow falling on his shoulders and frosting the dark waves of his hair. Jamie shivered, still damp from his ablutions, the stubble of his hair immediately stiffened in the cold.

  “What’s wrong?” Jamie asked sharply, fear already hurrying him forward. Had something happened to Kolya? Had he felt hot when Jamie held him those precious ten minutes before dinner?

  Shura held up one thick hand. “It is not the baby or Violet, do not fear.”

  Jamie’s brows rose in query, for the dwarf looked unnaturally flummoxed.

  “It’s Gregor,” Shura said with a heavy breath. “He’s drunk and raving and he won’t listen to anyone, except, perhaps, you. He has cut his hand badly, and I need to get him calmed enough to clean and stitch it. He’s in the banya.” Shura gave an apologetic shrug, for few would volunteer to go inside a confined space with an angry Gregor.

  “Drunk?” Jamie considered that the idea of drunkenness and Gregor did not seem to belong in the same sentence. He did not think there could be enough vodka in the entire camp to make Gregor drunk. His capacity was legendary.

  When Jamie entered t
he banya, Gregor was quiet, which alarmed him more than if the man had been raving as Shura had said. But the detritus of his recent rage lay littered about the place. The structure itself remained sound, for it had been built to withstand Russian weather and was as solid as a Shoreland tank. The hut was hot and dry as hell for there was a fire going strong under the stones and a full bucket of water on the rough floor beside them. Gregor was partially clothed and seated on the long bench, slumped against the wall, huge hands lying open on his lap as though beseeching an invisible guest. Blood dripped steadily from the injured one.

  “Gregor.” Jamie said his name quietly but with enough authority to make certain the man heard him clearly.

  The man’s head rose slowly, like that of an aggrieved titan. His eyes in the dim of the banya were deep pools with neither fathom nor shore. Jamie sat down beside him. The animal reek of anger was thick in the air, under-noted with the sweet copper salt of fresh blood. The stones on the grates were smoking with heat, making the air thick and hard to breathe.

  “What’s going on?” Jamie kept his tone as bland as if this were any ordinary night in the gulag. Which it was in many ways.

  For a moment it seemed Gregor was not going to answer but then he sighed, expelling breath that was nine parts vodka into the thick heat of the banya.

  “It is my mother’s birthday, or I think it is. I woke up with the echo of it in my head. This makes me sad and so I drink to drown it and when the sorrow drowns, the anger surfaces. She was a big woman, the sort that one sees on Soviet posters—as though if you scratched her skin—you would find the iron of the nation beneath rather than flesh and blood. I believed for a long time that she did have iron under her skin. She had beautiful hair though. It hung to her knees when she took it out at night. I remember lying beside her, wrapped in it. It was the color of sunrise, all red and gold.”

  Jamie had a sudden clear picture of his own mother, one of those moments that the mind snatched and stored in the heart so that one could see it unroll years later as clear and sharp as the moment it happened. She didn’t move like other people. She barely seemed to touch the earth, as though the strings that bound and held others could not contain her. As though her elements refused such dull matters as gravity. She had been a being of grace and he missed her.

  “I don’t know exactly when my mother abandoned me, but I think it was June because those first nights in the fields and ditches I remember the flowers that were blooming. At night they would be all wrapped up tight like they were holding a secret, but in the morning I would drink the dew from their cups. It was the only water I could find those first few days. I don’t even know how old I am. Isn’t that odd, Yasha? To not even know when one arrived in this world?”

  “It is indeed,” Jamie agreed thinking of his own childhood and how there had not always been stability but there had always been love, a roof over his head, food on the table and someone to worry if he didn’t come home at night. This man had never had any of those things and the burden of it he would carry for a lifetime. And there was nothing anyone could say or do to lighten that load. There were some things that, because they were lacking, caused a person to carry them for the rest of his life. A parent unable to love her child was one.

  “Why do you think she abandoned you? Isn’t it more likely that she was killed or taken away?”

  “I don’t know why. Only that if I ever did know the truth, it left me long ago. Maybe I told myself that she abandoned me so that I would be angry enough to keep going, so the thought of one day finding her and punishing her would goad me to survive.”

  “What do you remember of her?” Jamie asked.

  Gregor did not answer the question at once, but looked long into the cup of his big hands as though he held the past there within them and could read and understand the lines of it only if he looked long enough. “Nothing, just echoes in my head, only half heard, a snatch of a song I think she once sang, a long story that she never finished telling about a boy who was born of a mother but had no father. I think, Yasha, even if I do not know, that boy was me. But how is a boy born without a father?”

  Some men wore the protective clothing of quiet citizenship, of belonging to one tribe or another, but in their hearts they were fugitives and always would be. Some men had never known how to find nor wear that protective cloak that hid their inner life from the prying eyes of others, those who would hunt, who only understood the chase. Gregor, despite his bravado, was a fugitive and naked in the world. Jamie knew this because he was one too.

  “I remember the forest—it was my first friend. I remember how the mosses whispered to me. Did you know that lichens only grow when a human voice is near? And that some flowers, the most beautiful, grow only in the rot of dead things. Or that some curl their petals up like a young girl ashamed just because of a man looking at her?”

  “No,” Jamie responded quietly. “I did not know that.” He took Gregor’s hand, judging that it was safe enough at this point. The cut across the palm was deep and ragged, with the glisten of exposed tendon, pearl white amongst the rubies and garnets of torn flesh. However, it was not life threatening, and there was time for Gregor to say what he needed to say.

  “I can still tell you what the light was like on those days, how it rippled and ran before me, and was a living thing, like a playmate that you could never quite catch. How it fell in the hollows and slid over the hills, and how it seemed to point out to me what I could eat—the gleam of it on a berry so that it shone like a jewel and attracted my eye and tongue, how it sparkled like a dance on the water so I would stop to drink. I look back and remember those days as if they are film, a strange story of a changeling like the ones you told us about. I don’t know though, Yasha, if I was the real child or the strange one left by the fairies.

  “The world is so vast and strange at night, especially to a small person. There is nothing familiar, nothing to which one can hold. I would sing myself to sleep, lisping the words, my own voice seeming too small to be of much use. I remember the strangeness of the night sky, and counting the stars I could not name. But it was not long before the forest became home, before I could smell as the wolf does, and know as the deer when the rain was coming. I could spend hours watching fish swim in ponds and then kill one with my hands and eat it raw. I knew which mushrooms were poisonous, and which were not. I never made a mistake. How I do not know, only that the earth was my mother, the forest my guardian angel. You learn to live in your body rather than your head. You listen to your ears, but also to what your skin tells you. You understand what the birds are saying and can talk to a wolf merely by looking her in the eyes. This happens after a long time with the land, and no human being to talk to, to hear. Language becomes something far more than words. It becomes everything.”

  Gregor stood and threw the bucket of water onto the stones, now heated to a deadly temperature. The steam billowed out, the stones hissing violently in protest.The heat hit Jamie in a wave and he felt sweat bead instantly across his skin. Gregor sat back down beside him and leaned in, grasping the back of Jamie’s neck, putting his forehead, slick with heat, against Jamie’s own. Jamie could feel the man’s pulse pounding against his temples. The smell of blood and vodka rose between them like a musk, steam floating around them in thick tendrils.

  “Tonight, between you and me, no masks, my beautiful harlequin, just truth.”

  “Just remember that the truth, to quote Heisenberg, becomes less certain the more closely one attempts to know it. Like all stories, truth is subject to the interpretation of the teller.”

  Gregor laughed, but it was a dark sound. “You are such a bastard, Yasha.”

  “So are you,” Jamie replied.

  “The woman will break your heart.”

  “Perhaps,” Jamie said, the taste of blood and sweat in his mouth like an elemental ether. “It is a risk one takes.”

  “Some
stories are written in blood while it is still flowing.”

  “Stories exist already. How they are written or told is merely a matter of mechanics.”

  “Mechanics can kill you.”

  “This I know as well as you do.”

  Gregor released his hold on Jamie and the two men drew apart.

  “You are a storyteller, Yasha, and so you know that even for one man there are many ways to tell one story. Perhaps, no matter how you tell it, it is still the same story at its heart, always.”

  “Finish your own story,” Jamie said, perfectly still, his breathing matching that of the man across from him.

  Gregor acquiesced with a sharp-toothed smile.

  “I convinced myself that I too was iron beneath the skin, like my mother, that I could not bleed as an ordinary boy, that I was impervious to cold and snow and the dark, black nights. I think it is why I survived. I believed I could not die and so I could not. Then one day I was proven all too human. There they were, standing in the dust of a road, the fields stretched out behind them. They were filthy, clothes too small and torn, a ragged group of children. They were older than me and I saw them as I might have seen an alien from a distant planet. I had not looked in a mirror within my memory and it had been long since I had seen another human.”

  Through the steam there were the jeweled tones of the man’s chest, the domed blue towers, the coiled tail and fiery breath of the dragon—the elements of a fairytale, the cruellest one ever told, because it was true. Indeed, there were many ways to tell a story. Words inside of words like an unending matryoshka doll.

  “They were a feral tribe and I was not one of them. Nor could I be. I was frightened but so longed to be one of them at the same time. To no longer be alone. But they feared me as only a mob can fear a single person. They were of one mind and their leader did not want to find a challenge in her midst.”