Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  After checking the borders of the property and making a mental note about an elm that had come down since his last inspection, and a bit of the stone wall that needed mending, he arrived at his final destination.

  The tree still held its leaves, though there had been a terrific storm only the week before that had ravaged most of the wood and left the deciduous trees bare-branched in the stark November wind. The leaves were crimson, glowing deep in the glowering wood like blood hung in warm drops against a night-dark windowpane. He shivered again. This bit of wood always put the hairs up on his neck and brought strange thoughts to mind.

  He put the wee bouquet there on a soft break in the peat, in which a plant he did not recognize grew, green even now as it lay surrounded by the first snow. He remembered just where the woman lay, just as he remembered the soaked copper streams of her hair, the ethereal ivory of her ancient skin and the strange necklace she wore, in which the flower and fruit and thorn were together, indicating passage into the world of the Others.

  He paused there, touching in his heart those he loved, one by one, like the beads on a rosary, those gone: his Daddy, Lawrence, wee Deirdre and Grace, and then those living: his wife, his brother, his son and his daughter. And a prayer for the man who was missing, gone from a tower room in an evil house, leaving no trace of himself behind. People disappeared all the time in this country. He was another to add to the list of those stranded in the twilit borderlands where they were neither alive nor dead, simply gone.

  Above, the leaves fretted to and fro, speaking in their own sibilant tongues of the winter come down from the skies. The leaves shone preternaturally against the limitless blue of the sky and it felt as though someone touched him… laid a hand upon his back… light… a woman’s touch… but not his wife’s. His breath caught in his throat and he felt that he dared not look behind him, not because he was afraid, but because something was there that was better not seen.

  It happened sometimes, though never before this vividly, as though an entity brushed him in passing and opened his eyes briefly to other lives, other possibilities. It turned an ordinary moment into one of those fleeting times when all the multiplicity of universes seemed to exist, as though a thousand bridges lay before him and he could choose a different destiny by crossing the span of each one. All lives that had been granted to him at the beginning of time, all the bridges crossed and not crossed, ways by which he would not return, there pulsing in the supercharged air. And then the moment was gone, the leaves merely leaves again, the bridges having disappeared to wherever such things go. The entity behind him had gone back into the fractured air from which it had entered. But he could still feel traces of the moment on his skin and in his blood, a half-bittersweet, half-relieved lingering as such things always were.

  “I would still choose this one,” he said softly and only to himself, though he felt that someone else listened and smiled at his words.

  He crossed himself and stood, leaving the offering to the red-headed bog woman. It was time to go home.

  The Tale of Ragged Jack, continued.

  Jack walked for many days after he left the Land of the Fair People, and he felt its ruin behind him leaving no trace of the magical people who had once lived and loved there. The autumn lasted for a time, the leaves so red they looked as though blood moved within their delicate veins. They fell in great drifts, muffling his footsteps, and at night he and Aengus made their bed in those stacks of leaves, each morning awaking to find a skeletal sheen of frost over them.

  When he wasn’t sure which way to go, he simply reached into his bag and let the bones guide him. They always helped him decide which way was the right way, even if, he had noted with no small frustration, the right way always seemed to be far more brambly and pitted and dark, whilst the wrong way often went along a gently-graded slope filled with sunshine and a soft way for the feet.

  It was a mellow afternoon late in autumn when he came upon a fork in the path he was following. Right there at the crossroad was a treehouse, with a tiny set of stairs winding up from the ground into the thick, sturdy branches of an oak tree.

  He stood looking up the stairs and thinking how nice it would be to know whoever lived inside for it looked very cozy and homely. It would be wonderful to have walls around him for a night so that he might sleep sound and not drift under the surface, not even daring to dream lest a predator steal upon him and Aengus. He was about to turn and continue on the path when a voice halted him, a voice he recognized.

  “Come on up, Jack. I’ve been hoping you would happen this way on your travels.”

  He looked up to find the Owl Woman who had bound his ankle for him in the Hollow Hills. He wondered if he had slipped back somehow, yet the terrain around him remained the same, the stairs still leading up to the cottage in the boughs. The fork still there in the road.

  He climbed the stairs, feeling dusty and worn. Even Aengus’ pewter coat was a dull grey and matted with burrs. Ahead of them the Owl Woman climbed the long set of stairs so gracefully he was certain she was using flight in some manner invisible to the naked eye. The cottage, small and crooked, was very high in the boughs, so high that it swayed softly from side to side and Jack couldn’t fathom how it stayed put in a storm.

  “It’s a thing of the air, not of the ground,” the Owl Woman said, and Jack wondered if he had asked the question out loud, though he was certain he had not.

  “I thought you belonged to the Fair People,” he said when they had finished climbing and entered the crooked hut, tilting a bit to one side. His voice was as gritty as water drawn from the very bottom of a well. He was used to silence these last days, and his throat hurt with the movement of words.

  “Like you, Jack, I was not one of them. They allowed me to come and go from their world but I was never one of them. They are gone now?” she asked, and the soft strange piping of her voice was unmistakably sad.

  “Yes, they are gone,” Jack said, feeling the shape in his heart where Muireann was absent.

  “I thought so, for I went to the borderlands two weeks past and all I saw was a hummock of earth and beyond only the empty sea.”

  She sat down to knit, a long scarf that split in two, one side running out the window to the left of the hearth all the way into the forest, the other side flowing out the door and heading off over the hills. Both sides furled so far he could not see the ends of them and wondered what sort of dread giant needed a scarf of such length.

  “I’m glad you remember them,” he said, “because I was afraid I had dreamed them.”

  She smiled at him, pity in her great gold eyes. “Jack, you carry part of Muireann with you. How could you doubt that she was real?”

  At first he thought she meant that he carried Muireann in his heart, but then he realized she meant the flower. He took it out of his pocket and unwrapped it, expecting a small withered ball of desiccated petals, but instead found it as whole and fresh as the day Muireann had placed it in his hand. There was even a drop of dew on one petal.

  “Be careful with that flower, Jack. It is more than it appears to be.”

  Though that was apparent, still he asked her what she meant, but she refused to explain further, instead saying she must make supper for she knew how hungry boys were wont to be at his age.

  Hunger was the only thing keeping him awake. Beyond filling his belly, he wanted only to sleep, to lie down on the hearthrug beside Aengus who was already snoring and twitching in the deep dreaming sleep of the canine. Today the bones had not spoken to Jack, had not told him which path he was to follow, and this worried him.

  “All roads are the same, all arrive somewhere after journey and toil. Only they don’t always arrive where we might want or expect. But expectations and wants are shifty things at best, so often we find where we end up is where we needed to be all along. Even if it’s not a comfortable place.”

  Onc
e again, Jack was certain he had not voiced his question aloud, or had he? How could the woman know the questions in his mind to which even he had not yet given words?

  “We don’t need words between us, Jack. I can see the shape of your worries in the air before me.”

  And indeed she could, for even Jack could make out the small spiral of smokey threads which writhed in the air, yet if he tried to look at it from any other angle, it promptly disappeared.

  The Owl Woman built a small fire in the crooked hearth inside the crooked hut and she fed him soup from a cauldron, soup that tasted of pine needles and roots, dark berries and a sprinkling of something grainy that she said it was best he didn’t know about.

  He fell asleep to the soft clacking of the Owl Woman’s needles, made of bone, he noted, and polished fine from long use. He slept soundly that night in the small hut, up so high that the boughs swayed with the night wind and the stars sprinkled their dust on the rooftop.

  In the morning the fire was out but the sun warmed the roof of the little treehouse and the day outside was fine. Looking down he saw something strange, a long skein of knitted wool the color of blackberry wine, running up and away over the hills and down into the great forest beyond. It was neither the fork to the left, nor the fork to the right, but a road in-between.

  “I have knit your road, Jack. The one you must follow, the final length of your journey that will take you to your destination.”

  “And what if I don’t know what that destination is anymore?”

  “Follow the road and it will find you. That’s how destinations are.”

  After a breakfast of berries and nuts and warm bread sweet with new butter, he made his way back down the stairs and took his first faltering step onto the blackberry path. It was knit tight to last and would serve him well. He turned back once more before he left the Owl Woman. “How do I know when I’ve arrived, if I don’t know what it is I seek?”

  “You move forward and you hope. That is all anyone needs Jack, a path and some hope for their pocket. You have both those things now. Just don’t look too long into the abyss when you find it, for if you gaze overlong you will end up walking amongst the dead, a ghost stuck between realms.”

  The Owl Woman kissed him on his forehead and it felt like a benediction, something warm in his veins to take with him and boost his courage when it faltered. Then she plucked a feather from her own wing, leaving a bead of blood like a ruby on the bare spot left behind.

  “The feather is for you. It will summon help when you need it most.”

  “How will I know when I need it most?”

  “You just will.”

  He looked back only once, and found she was standing still, gold eyes watching him go. She raised a wing in farewell and Jack raised his hand in kind and then on he went, down the hill into the forest’s edge.

  He was not alone on the road in the days that followed, for there were other wanderers: vagabonds, urchins, wayfarers, medicine men, tricksters, pig herders and gypsies, beggars and seers. Some he avoided, with others he shared their fires and food, giving of his own small store of what he had picked or captured that day. The road grew thinner as he went until there were days when he had to search high and low for a thread snagged in a tree, or a bit of blackberry wine fluff caught on a thistle. But always, if he looked hard enough, he would find a trace of it.

  As the autumn passed, with its fires and fallen leaves, its frosts and deep blue skies, the travelers thinned on the road until those left walked with their heads down, muffled in wool and furs, with only a grunt in greeting to those they passed, if that much. The creatures of the woods had gone into their burrows and holes, their nests up high or to the depths of ponds that would soon solidify into ice. Until one afternoon, as the first flakes of snow were dancing light on the air, Jack realized he and Aengus had not seen another soul all day. The woods surrounding them were grey and old, the trunks of the trees stunted and gnarled, reaching up from boggy ground like grasping claws waiting to pull a boy and his dog down.

  This must be the November Wood that the gypsies had told him about after he had sought their advice on finding the Crooked Man. One old woman, who reminded him of someone in his life before, had spoken these words to him.

  “Such as is dark souls seeks a dark place. I hear he winters in the November Wood, deep in its heart, where neither man nor boy should like to find himself after the frosts come down.”

  The woman’s words echoed as a warning now, as dark, tangly underbrush tore at his clothes, the bog, only partially frozen, sucking at his boots. Discouragement seemed to rise in the greenish-grey mists that the ground exhaled and sank straight into his bones and heart. But he kept going, Aengus plodding wearily at his side, the ground so soft and nasty in spots that he had to lift the dog up and sling him around his neck so that they might continue on.

  Somewhere in the late afternoon as the light was fading into a thick and disturbing twilight, they came to the edge of a sluggishly-flowing stream, gelid with ice at its edges. It was just wide enough that Jack did not see how they could cross it. He was tired, so tired and would have stopped for the night and slept right there, using the thick, wet moss for a mattress, except he knew that would be a mistake that could kill both him and Aengus.

  He felt something move in his bag just then, and wondered if a mouse had crawled in last night while he and Aengus slept. He opened the flap, his heart dipping a little as he saw the proof of how little food they had left. But then he saw a small glowing light in the corner of the bag and reached in to grasp it and pull it out. It was the thread spun by the woman he had met so long ago, the ageless beauty who had hidden in the sharp exterior of the crone, though perhaps it had been the other way round for all he knew—women could be tricky like that. The thread glowed with a strange light, blue as frost under the moon, and it moved as though it knew the way forward, even if he did not.

  He stepped to the river’s edge, understanding now what its purpose was. He threw the thread out over the dark water. It flew high, light sparking all along its length and then began to weave itself in the very air, crossing and re-crossing and then fastening itself tight to a rock upon the other side. It had built a narrow bridge by which he could cross the river.

  “Wait here for me, Aengus. I have to do this part alone.” How he knew this he could not say, only that it was a knowing without doubt or hesitation, something bone deep. “I will come back for you as soon as I’m done.” This last was said rather shakily, for he understood the Crooked Man waited for him on the other side of the bridge’s span. He must face him alone, or not at all.

  Aengus gave him a look of profound betrayal and turned his back on Jack before finding a more stable patch of moss to lie down upon. Curled up around his grievance, the dog was feigning sleep when Jack looked back from the start of the bridge. He took a deep breath and stepped out onto the thread.

  It held tight under his feet, strong as wood but swaying slightly. He crossed the river quickly, arriving on the other side to find that winter had been in possession longer here, for snow hid the bleak brown grass, and gathered deep on the withered arms of the trees. The moon was high, a fingernail slice of cold and the hills, hummocked with snow, breathed out chill air that shimmered like diamonds.

  He was so still that at first Jack’s eye slid past him, thinking he was just another black-boughed tree, but something pulled his eye back and he realized here he was at last, the man he had sought for so long now that he had gone from a soft-cheeked boy to one with a whiskered jaw and broad shoulders in the interim.

  “Hello, Jack,” said the Crooked Man, his voice no more than a hissing of leaves moving on the forest floor, but crawling straight into Jack’s spine nevertheless.

  “Hello,” Jack said, with an arrow in his own voice, directed right at the dark shape ahead of him, light snow outlining his broad-brimmed hat, hi
s satchel, his long and terrible form. The only response was a thin-lipped smile, revealing a dark hole, a gaping wound in the white night.

  Jack stepped toward the Crooked Man, fear gripping his insides like an ague, but knowing this was what he had come for and he could not hesitate, could not let the man smell the fear that twisted his guts.

  “You stole something from me long ago. I have come to retrieve it.”

  “You want your dreams, boy?” The hissing of his voice was less like leaves now and more like a serpent coiling in dry straw. “Come and take them, if you dare.”

  Jack stepped forward again, then stopped, for the Crooked Man’s shape shifted, slowly, almost imperceptible at first, like an atmospheric disturbance, felt long before it was seen. And for one second he was a border creature, neither man nor animal. And Jack knew he had to do something fast, before it was too late and he was prey. Weaponless, a human boy was a fragile creature, all delicate head and yards of soft permeable skin. He grasped the feather from the Owl Woman’s wing tight in his hand, for he had need of help now as he had never needed it before.

  A wolf appeared on the edge of the forest to Jack’s right—a big male, grey as smoke drifting through the dark wood. His eyes were the color of stone, cold and prickling as frost on Jack’s face.

  There was a wolf at his back and now a wolf in front of him, for the Crooked Man had fully changed into a wolf as black as night. Jack felt as though every inch of him were exposed, no more than blood and frail bone to be left behind for the scouring winter winds. However, he did not feel menace from the wolf now trotting out from the forest’s edge, rather a strange pulling sensation. Jack stepped backward carefully, away from the snarling black coil of razor-sharp teeth and springing muscle in front of him and closer to the smoke-colored male who was now only feet away. If this was what the feather had summoned, then he would take its help gladly.