In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  “Jamie…I…”

  He put his hand up to halt her words. “It’s all right. I really am just tired. Good night.”

  He was gone out the door before she could say anything further. She spent the next hour giving Conor a quick wash before bed and then reading him his favorite books. After he drifted off she found herself rather agitated. She moved about the house, picking up the day’s detritus—tiny, sand-caked shorts and sandals, cups and bowls smudged and still sweetly smelling of the blueberries Vanya had brought back from town and crumpled flowers, wilted from being clutched in small, warm hands.

  Part of her longed to run down the path to the cabin, to apologize to Jamie, to take that darkness from his eyes. She knew what was required for such a thing and was frightened that she could even consider it. She bent to pick up a pile of wet towels that had been spilled in the wake of small, wet bodies, near the bathroom door. When she stood, she started a little for Vanya had materialized directly in front of her. She hadn’t heard him come in from the deck, where he had very tactfully removed himself during the end of the storytelling.

  He took the towels from her hands. “I will watch the children tonight. You go to Yasha, he needs you.”

  She looked at him, her face apparently as transparent as glass, for he smiled and touched her arm. The lucent cat eyes were dark with sympathy.

  “There has been, I know, no woman since Russia,” he said. “Don’t think, just go.”

  When the man had a point he made it well, she admitted. She paused only to straighten her hair a little, and then gave it up as a lost cause. She had gone sailing with Jamie and Conor that day and had a mess of salt-tangled curls on her head as a result. It’s not like Jamie hadn’t seen her all day, or for that matter, all summer, and she had given little care to her appearance most days beyond a shower and running a comb through her hair. Still, she had seen his eyes in more than one unguarded moment and knew that he saw a desirable woman when he looked at her, though he had been excessively careful not to show it.

  Outside the night was moonlit, every rock and needle on the pathway outlined, the path itself resembling a small stream that rippled directly down the hill to join the sea beyond, itself a swathe of rippling pewter through the gaps in the fir trees.

  She was at the door of the cottage in what seemed like three steps, the nerves along her arms and legs jumping with anxiety. She knocked quietly, half hoping he wouldn’t hear and she could run back to the safety of the main house. The man, however, had the hearing of a bat and quietly called out.

  “Come in.”

  His back was to her, and he looked out the window through the thick stand of trees to the ever-lamenting ocean, hushing softly against the stony shore.

  “Jamie, I’m sorry—” she began, but he cut her off swiftly, voice rough-edged.

  “Don’t,” he said, “you have nothing to apologize for, I’m the fool here. I wasn’t aware I was quite so transparent. Even a wee boy can see straight through me. I did not intend that any of this should make you uncomfortable or put you in an awkward situation. I only meant to give you this summer to distract you, to maybe even allow you to take a breath whole without Casey’s name beating inside you.”

  She walked forward and put her hand lightly to his back. “Jamie, I… sometimes I feel like I live there, on the far side of Barsoom, but there is no Wandering Wastrel to come and lead me out, and I have no map to tell me which road to take back home. There’s just shifting sand beneath my feet and I keep going in the same circle, thinking the journey will get less painful, but it never does. I want you to know that there were times this summer when it started to hurt less. And even though it felt like a betrayal later, in the moment it was a relief. There were even times I was happy, and I owe every moment of that to you.”

  The line of his back thrummed with tension against her hand.

  “Jamie, will you please look at me?”

  He turned and she caught her breath at the expression on his face. The cost of these magic evenings was suddenly there so clearly, tabulated in the dark fractured light of his eyes and the drawn lines of his normally mobile mouth. And yet…she shivered…and yet this man took her breath away and returned it with something that felt like she held a fiery star right there in the cusp of her hands. Impossibly beautiful, and utterly terrifying at the same time.

  The moon filtered down along the firs outside, sifting amber scent along with silver light through the windows and outlining Jamie where he stood, clad in worn jeans and a t-shirt that said ‘Billy’s Bait and Tackle’ across its salt-beaten front. His feet were bare and glinting with the gold dust of sand from that day’s sail, his hair, so sun-bleached that it had streaks of near white in it, was still tousled from Isabelle’s attentions, the vertical crease in his forehead sharp as a knife, as it always was when he was particularly upset.

  Vanya’s words echoed within her, each placed delicately as pearls on a string, the intent unmistakable.

  “There has been, I know, no woman since Russia.”

  She knew, even if Jamie in all his wisdom did not, where this summer had always been leading them. It was for her to take the step across the abyss. Jamie could not be expected, nor asked to do such a thing. It was time for the Sea Princess to break her enchantment, as much as the breaking would cut her.

  “There is nothing to apologize for, Jamie. I suppose we ought to have seen where this might lead. Conor is too sensitive to the currents running about him at times, even if he doesn’t understand what it all might mean. And I’m sorry for saying what I did, only the story matters to him and he needs it to be true in his life right now. I couldn’t betray that.”

  “This isn’t your fault. What did your son recognize except the truth? I got so involved in telling the tale that I wasn’t as circumspect as I might have been about what to put in and what to leave out.”

  She took his long, fine-boned hands in her own, sliding the warmth of his palms to fit against hers. “Jamie, you have the key, only you, no one else. You told the story true, I’ve never loved a man other than Casey and you. I would have you unlock this door. I want to feel something again, and only you can help me do that.”

  His breath caught hard, his eyes as black as unmined emeralds. “Pamela, are you certain of what you are asking here?”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “I’d like you to make love to me, if you’d like to that is.”

  “If I’d like to?” he said and smiled, though she could feel the fine tremor that strung itself taut between their hands.

  “Well, would you?” She was starting to feel just a tiny bit ridiculous, because if he said no, it was going to be horribly awkward for the both of them in short order.

  “Like a Barsoom trader lost ten days in the Infernal Wastelands, who suddenly sees an oasis on the horizon.”

  They laughed, the tension easing a little between them. But there was no laughter in his voice as he spoke his next words. “Be careful, Pamela, because it matters what you decide. The regret in this instance, and it will come, won’t be of normal measures.”

  She owed him the truth as far as she understood it just now. “I’d be lying, Jamie, if I said I was ready for more than this—more than tonight, but for tonight I can let go of him. Just for these few hours.”

  He shut his eyes, seeking one last vestige of self-control and good sense, but she moved in toward him and touched her hand to his neck, drawing him down to kiss her.

  Time unlocked itself for them that night. The last of Jamie’s reservations fled with the touch of her skin under his hands, and the force of her own need, a need that pushed aside all barriers and gave to him a passion such as he had only dreamed before.

  And though he knew it unwise, he opened all the reefs and corals of his heart in those hours and gave her rule of them. Until they were both as boundless with love and heat as the great dreaming ocean that called ceaselessly from beyond the window.

  Once, long ago, he had told her it was no ordinary
thing to touch her, and so he found the truth of his words in her and she in him.

  They spoke little, but for once in the night when he quoted to her the words of his desire.

  O lente, lente currite noctis equi!

  O, run slowly, slowly, horses of the night!

  The horses of the night galloped by on silent feet, silken-maned and dark and heeded no imprecations to slow their run, nor to unspool time and halt the traitorous world that spun on regardless of lovers who would wish otherwise.

  Just for these few hours, she had said, and had intended the words to extend no further than that. It was his tragedy that he understood exactly what that simple statement had meant and yet had chosen to enter the fire anyway and allow it to burn him as fires will.

  She left the bed with the dawn light, but first she leaned over him, looking long into his eyes, her own unreadable. Then she bent down and kissed him. “I love you, Jamie. I always have.”

  At some point during the night the fog had rolled in, relentless and thick as swaddled cotton. Anything could be made blind by it, even perhaps, love. And so he watched her disappear away up the hill toward the main house and knew that, in all the ways that mattered she had already set out on a journey that was going to take her much further. A journey on which he could not follow and could only hope that one day the path would bring her back.

  He turned toward the bed and closed his eyes against the sight of the rumpled sheets. But then he opened them again and allowed the images and scents to flood his senses. Later he would lock them away, keep the memories somewhere that would not cause him to bleed inside at their very presence. But for now…for now, he would allow himself a moment of weakness and feel the pain and the joy of it, fully.

  He recalled how afterwards, when desire was both sweetly abating and re-building, she had seen the dagger drawn sharp against his chest, had understood its message with the fine scrollwork of a folded lily at the base and had bent to kiss him right there above his heart, and he heard Gregor’s voice in his head, as he had not in a very long time.

  “To love another man’s woman is a fool’s game.”

  Part Seven

  The Dark Man

  Autumn 1977-Autumn 1978

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Solitude

  October 1977

  HE CAME UPON THE WOOD late one evening as he walked under a waning moon the color of marigolds. He liked the night walking, liked the empty country lanes and the occasional cottages, inhabitants slumbering under their snug thatched roofs, unaware of the tall, dark stranger who passed by, silent as a wolf, scenting the turf smoke of their humble hearths. He had taken a turn just out of a small village this night at a country crossroads. He took the right hand road, a narrow track up a long hill, thickly bordered by hedgerows, the dwellers thereof asleep in nests and burrows, the last of the blackberries falling overripe from the brambles to be crushed beneath his booted feet. He stopped and gathered a handful from a branch sticking out into the narrow lane, the last of summer’s sun and soft wind thick upon his tongue with the taste of them. There was an old superstition about picking them so late in the season, for after the end of September the fruit was said to belong to the fairies. He didn’t know where he’d come upon that nugget of information, but it was there in his mind even as the taste of the berries lingered in his mouth.

  The walk up the narrow lane was long, but so was the night and it was a rare time when his knee wasn’t giving him overmuch grief. The weather was fine, just a soft wind sighing over the hills and through the trees. A man could manage many a mile in such conditions. When he crested the hill, he saw a narrow path which led into long grasses and a small wood. The light was bright enough that he could see to put one foot ahead of the other. Sometimes on such nights, if he walked far enough, he felt weightless, as though he might float away, become merely spirit and leave his flesh, battered and scarred, behind and become a part of the night and the wind, the wood and the water and drift upon such currents until he was just a bit of the sky or one of the smoke-soft stars. Sometimes he thought a man could just walk until there was no longer need in his bones, no longer want in his cells, no longer an ache in his heart for things to which he could put neither name nor form. And so he kept walking as the night spread like a mother’s comfort over the land.

  He was aware of a larger wood off to his right; it was kept somewhat invisible by its own dark nature and his need to keep his eyes to the path which he was on, for his knee couldn’t afford a stumble. Then the path turned sharply to the right and upward and he had no choice but to enter the wood. The trees soared into the night and blotted out the face of the moon. The silence they held was eerie, like that of a cathedral or a place of worship far older, far wilder, a place for a moon that was as narrow and sharp as the blade of a sickle. He kept walking, despite the jolt that shot from the primal seat at the base of his brain down his spine to settle low in his stomach, leaving a prickling awareness of something behind, always behind him. Long ago, in that other life, he remembered a man telling him that the trees had eyes, and not just those of the birds and animals which dwelt in them, but eyes far older, things that peered out from that other realm, the one that was always a half-heard whisper away. He felt all those eyes upon him, as though from a strange distance, eyes that assessed and knew the measure of a man in a glance. They would bless or curse, those eyes, at their own whim and in their own time, which was the time of wood and water and the turning of the seasons.

  “You walk until the land gives you back to yourself,” Eddy had said to him as they stood in the grasp of a cold South Dakota morning. “Let the land heal you and when you find your woman, let her finish the job.”

  And so he had walked—walked off the freighter he had taken out of New York on a beautiful September morning, into the harbor of Cobh. He had walked straight out of the town, his canvas bag slung over his shoulder until he felt the roll of the countryside beneath his feet.

  On that first day he walked until the light began to fail and then he stopped and looked around him. The sun was setting low against the backdrop of checkerboard fields, washing over the stone walls and setting the land all around on fire with the jewels of autumn: the ruby flush of haws spilling over a wall, the chrysoberyl of broken stone, the brown-gold topaz of the changing leaves and the amethyst shadows spreading out from the hollows of thicket and wood. He took a deep breath in and smelled the land, the cold chill of it on an October evening. He knelt down and took a handful and put it to his face. He touched his tongue to it, remembering a bit he’d read months ago about the Irish peasants eating dirt during the Famine in a desperate bid to stay alive. He swallowed a little of it, the grit lingering in his throat. He had the odd notion that if the land was inside him, it would somehow be the magic potion which would give him back his memory. It didn’t and he snorted a bit at his foolishness and returned to walking.

  The weeks of walking would be a time he remembered for the rest of his life. There seemed no separation between him and the land and he felt porous, as if everything he saw and touched went through him and became part of him. Everything from the vast limestone pavements he walked in the Burren, to the smell of the seaweed on western shores to the Icelandic swans he heard one afternoon coming in to roost for the winter—great grey swathes of them with their lonely trumpeting resounding over the barren rock on which he stood. The fields turned over rich and black and gone fallow and drowsy for the winter, the hedgerows edged in frost in the mornings, the woods he came upon thick with all of Mad Sweeney’s trees—the hollies and the oaks and the yews from which Sweeney had embarked on his flight away from madness. All of these things were a part of Casey, and he suspected, always had been.

  The voices which sometimes spoke in his head, those bells of his past, were more resonant here and lingered longer with him. He found a strange sort of peace and was aware of small pieces of the puzzle lodging within him, stopping to find their corner of the picture and to fasten themselve
s in place. He began to hope he might regain his memory, if not in its entirety then at least enough to know who he had once been.

  All that walking had brought him here. To these dark woods in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains. The last few days he’d been thinking he would need a place to see through the winter but the idea of staying in a town felt claustrophobic to him. He wanted quiet and solitude. He would need to make a decision soon.

  He had quiet now—just a wee bit more than a man needed on a dark night. There was little undergrowth amongst the tall pines, as the light couldn’t filter down through the dense plantation, and so it was easy walking, the ground soft with a thick layer of needles and the scent of them astringent in his nose. He was relieved when the stand of dark pine ended abruptly a few minutes later, cutting a straight line across the hillside. Forestry plantings were like that—they began abruptly and ended abruptly and formed no natural part of the landscape. He came out into the open, grateful to be out of the oppression of the woods and found himself in an old field, one that had not been cultivated in a very long time. Long grassed-over ridges stood stark in the moonlight, broken only by the occasional white of stone rising up and splitting the earth here and there. He walked into the field and the scent of the pines, amber and cold, followed him as he walked the ridges, jumping over the crevices between and feeling the softness of the soil beneath the thick furze of grass. He walked all the way over to the far edge of the field before his knee complained in a way that meant if he didn’t stop for a rest, he would be stopping here all night. He didn’t want to attempt sleep with the dark wood still looming so close by.

  He sat down on a ridge, and eased his leg out, resting it on a hummock of grass. This was an old potato field; he recognized the form of it. The ridges were lazy beds, so called by the English overseers who didn’t understand the Irish method of cultivation. Each ridge was roughly a spade’s length wide and was made by slicing and turning over rough sods, then spreading manure over the top into which the seed potatoes were set. He realized he’d done it himself, that he understood this method of cultivation because he’d used it. He wondered if this field had been deserted after the Famine. It seemed an odd place for it, so far away from any town. It was possible it was part of an old estate; many of those had been abandoned after the Famine and the small villages that depended on them had become ghostly places where only the occasional decaying cottage remained to remind a man of how fleeting and fragile life was.