Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  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.

  “It is all ending now, Jack,” she said and the anger had been replaced by a solitary tear the color of a new violet that hung trembling upon her pale skin. “Why did you have to say anything? It was all perfect before.”

  “No, it wasn’t, Muireann, and you know it as well as I do.”

  “Why, Jack?” she said quietly and it broke his heart to hear the disillusion in her voice, as though she had truly thought they could stay here together, forever.

  “Because the world is ever-changing. That is the one certain thing about it, and we either change with it, or crumble to dust.”

  Once the decision was made by the Fair People, the world around them seemed to decay ever faster, the tower merely a half-shell of stone and pearl, a little less of it each day. One of the great battlements disappeared over-night, and the moat dried up to weed-scummed puddles. The fields lay fallow and cold, with dead leaves huddling in drifts in every corner. The sky at night was dark, with fewer stars each time Jack looked. Soon the signs of leaving were unmistakable as the Fair People pulled up the corners of their enchantment, tucked it into their moss-weave bags and prepared to travel far and away.

  Jack lingered, and was painfully aware of his lingering, for he did not know where he was meant to go when the Fair People left him behind. He did not know how he was to wander paths and cross water without Muireann’s grubby hand within his own. He wished courage was a thing a boy could take out and polish, and make it shiny and strong once again.

  On the last night, when all the horses were shod and the bridles gleamed like the few stars left in the sky, and the last of the berries had long been culled from the woods, Jack went in search of Muireann. There was a saying from his own world that he had never really understood, but thought perhaps he did now—she was extremely conspicuous by her absence.

  He found her on the edge of the woods, sitting in a heap of leaves so high that he would have walked straight past her had Aengus not snuffled her out and bounded in, sending the leaves flying in several directions. She was hunched up, slender arms wrapped around long bruised shins, gooseberry green eyes hidden on her scabby knees.

  “What’s wrong?” Jack asked, for like most boys, he often only saw the obvious and not all the underlying currents that might suck a boy under for asking such tomfool questions.

  “What’s wrong?” Two green eyes came up and scorched him where he stood. “What’s wrong? I’m leaving tomorrow to go that way—” she pointed her hand to the west, where the mists rolled in even now, hiding the land that lay beyond the great Western gates, “and you’re leaving to go that way!” She waved vaguely in the direction that encompassed the other half of the world.

  “But you knew this yesterday,” Jack said, “and you weren’t angry then.”

  Muireann gave him a baleful glare. “Honestly, Jack, sometimes you are stupider than a toe-berry newt. I wasn’t angry because I still was hoping. Because until today I thought maybe you would be able to come with us. But I—I asked, and the old mother said it’s not possible. Only those with the auld blood can manage the crossing. They
said it would kill you. And I cannot live in your world either, the old mother says. I would start to fade as soon as we crossed the border, and then one day you wouldn’t be able to see me and I would live like a ghost, neither seen nor heard, just a drifting thing with no place to be at home.”

  “I already knew that, Muireann,” Jack said gently, and realized as he spoke the words that it was so. The knowledge had been there all along, within him. It was why he had so often felt that drag of melancholy upon him, like a heavy shadow, pulling forever at his heels.

  She threw a fistful of leaves in his face and turned her narrow back on him. He sidled up beside her, huddling against her for warmth and put his hand where she could take it if she liked—which she did not for some time. But as the great carousel of the sky turned from a lambent blue to gold to lavender to crimson to velvet soft night, he could feel some of the hurt and anger go out of her. At long last, her hand crept across the ground toward his and took it, and she lifted her face up to the dark sky and sighed. They lay that way, silent, tired and connected through their two hands, like a small defiance set against the looming of their parting. They slept a little, Muireann turning into the curve of his shoulder as naturally as if they had slept that way every night of their lives.

  The morning, as morning often does, came early and too soon. Even the sun seemed to be sad, taking its time coming over the horizon, like an old man with sore knees and knobbled back, but coming on inexorably nevertheless. Beneath them the earth stirred under its mantle of leaves, the pulsebeat of it still there, but not as strong as it once had run.

  Jack yawned and turned to find Muireann already awake and watching him. The green eyes were soft as spring in the first light of the day. She smiled, but it was a sad smile and held not an ounce of her usual mischief.

  “I don’t feel as if I’ll ever really belong to myself again,” she said, soft as a feather drifting down the air, and Jack noticed that the myrtle leaves in her crown had changed over the night to a deep and shimmering crimson. “I told the old mother this and she said that when you love someone who belongs to another world, you inhabit a strange place of neither here nor there, where you have a foot in this place and a foot in that. The problem with straddling such a border though is this—worlds break apart. They go off on their own way, and the person trying to inhabit both places is rendered in half, heart shattered into terrible pieces like garnets crushed and blown to the wind. Perhaps one day, one might gather all those pieces together again. But regardless of what binding agent one brings to those shattered bits, and no matter how they might glimmer in the moonlight and smell of palmed roses, still there will be some missing, dust that is gone forever on that wind, into a far country from which they can never be retrieved.”

  They ate bread for their breakfast and a handful of dried-out berries that were sharp with the taste of late autumn. They were quiet, for all had been spoken between them, and words felt awkward, as though they would overspeak and destroy a fragile balance that was keeping them upright and moving forward.

  At the last she placed a flower in his hands, a flower the petals of which glowed pearl-white as a slice of moon.

  “Take it to remember me,” she said, and curled his fingers around the flower.

  “I don’t need anything to remember you,” Jack said. “You’re in my heart for always. I can feel the shape of you there. What you put in your heart stays there forever.”

  “Yes, you do need it, Jack, even if one day it’s only withered petals that cause you to scratch your head over why you keep them in your pocket, or where you picked such a flower, for when we leave this place, we go to a country from which we can never return. Once we go through the Western gates, we are gone forever from the minds and hearts of man. Only a few will remember us, and even they will think we were merely stories made up to frighten children or to explain that which is not easily explained.”

  Jack folded the flower in a bit of woven cloth and tucked it in with the thread the old woman had given him.

  He kissed her, a first kiss and a last. He wished the taste of her would linger on his mouth and never leave him. He wished he could take her to his own home, but knew that what he had said before was equally true for her as it was for him—his world was not for her.

  And then one of the old women, gnarled and soft brown as winter moss, nodded at Muireann, and Jack knew it was time for her to leave. She gave his hand a last squeeze, all her heart there in the gooseberry green eyes, breaking infinitely into the smallest pieces.

  He watched the leaving until the mists rose up and swallowed them all. Muireann turned back at the last, her face as sorrowful as the starless heavens. And then she too was gone into the mists, where neither time nor tide could fetch her back.

  Jack slept in the room he had been given in the castle for the last time that night. For a long time he watched the tapestry, the wee figures moving, the Knight cresting the hill before the Castle and disappearing, with only dust left behind to tell of his ever being there. The lady was no longer at the window. There was only a blank of threads both black and gold where she had stood, though some of the threads were torn. Outside his tower window the wind grieved, for it had witnessed the Fair People leaving this land and knew they would not come this way again.

  In the morning, he awoke to find himself in a narrow hole dug in the side of a mound, cold and filthy. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, Aengus was already up and out, hunting no doubt. There was no sign of the castle and tower, of the sweet timothy and clover mattress or the Knight and his Lady. No great hall, no fireplace filled with hazel and apple wood, no tankards of honeyed mead, nor silver trays bearing steaming goose and hare. There was no music, no harp by the fire, no lute playing enchanted notes to fuddle his head and brim his senses.

  He might have believed that it had never been a real place, nor the lords and ladies real beings, except that he had a terrible raw pain around his heart that had the shape of Muireann at the center of it.

  He set off along the path, one that led up along a rocky highland and knew, with a bone and marrow knowing, that he was on the final leg of his journey to find the Crooked Man.

  Part Ten

  Butterfly

  Ireland – January-August 1975

  Chapter Sixty-six

  January 1975

  Firelight

  Casey sat at the table, a sheet of paper beneath his hand and a pen poised above it, but for the moment, still. His son slept soundly on the sofa, wee face burnished in the firelight. Both he and Conor had been restless earlier and he had thought to spare Pamela their wakefulness, so had come down to the kitchen for a cup of tea. He sat holding Conor for a long time. The boy was content enough, once he was changed and given some milk, to sit in his father’s lap and watch the flames making shadows upon the wall. Casey loved the firelight, for it had always seemed to him it created an enchanted boundary, inside which all that existed was what the firelight touched and held safe from tomorrow.

  Conor had eventually drifted off, his wee body a sweet comfort in its boneless weight and warmth, leaving his father to his own thoughts—which were in a vein far less comforting.

  Casey was well used to trouble. One could not live in this country and be otherwise, though it touched a man in deeper and darker ways when he had a family to protect.

  He knew the source of his discomfort and he knew what his wife thought of it as well. She had made her feelings clear, which he had expected. He had been offered a contract, a good one that in another country he would never have had to question.

  Pamela had been huddled over a set of proof sheets with a magnifying glass fitted to her eye when he approached her. He shuddered to think what it was she was looking at, though she didn’t bring the gorier aspects of her work home. The film for those went directly to the police labs.

  He had sketched the outlines of the project, telling her the positiv
e aspects first. He had wanted an optimistic view of it but his wife, familiar with his ways, had asked a trifle tartly,

  “If it’s such a good contract, why is it you’re hesitating over it?”

  “Well, it’s only that I don’t know if I should take the job on or not,” he said, hands flat on the table in front of him but thrumming with a tension that vibrated the very air around him.

  “Whyever not?” she asked, green eyes bright with suspicion. Damn the woman, he wouldn’t be getting any sort of optimism from her.

  “Because it would be a subcontract for the Simon brothers.”

  “Oh,” she said faintly. He could see she was shocked he would even consider such madness. The Simon brothers, of good Catholic stock, had constructed a small empire building structures for the security forces. They were rich men by Belfast standards and marked men as well, marked out by the IRA as traitors helping in the oppression of their own people. Scarce two months past there had been an attempt on Mag Simon’s life. A motorcycle had pulled up alongside his car while it was parked outside a construction site, the gunman emptying half a magazine through the driver’s side window and killing Mag’s twenty-five year old shop manager, who’d had the bad luck to borrow his employer’s car on the wrong day.

  “You can’t do that,” she said, her voice harsh with fear.

  He rubbed one hand through his hair, knowing he was setting it on end and that he no doubt looked like an annoyed porcupine—which wasn’t likely to further his case with Pamela.