Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (67 page)

He took quick refuge in a quotation sprung up vivid in his head. Translating it simultaneously into Russian woke him up nicely.

‘…taken together with violets, roses, lettuce, mandrake, henbane, nutmegs and willows, or you may smell at a ball of opium as the Turks do, or anoint your temples with a mixture of opium and rosewater at bedtime, or, less agreeably, apply horse-leeches behind the ears and then rub in opium.’

Shura turned, face piqued with interest. “Horse leeches?”

“It’s very messy. You wouldn’t like it,” Jamie said.

Shura grinned. “I believe you are most definitely on the mend.”

“I still don’t understand,” Jamie said, the light sarcasm gone from his voice, “how you saved me. But I am very grateful.”

“You are welcome, Yasha.” Shura paused to roll the pulverized golden grains, sweet as honey upon the air, into the waiting alcohol. He then put it aside and covered it with a heavy cloth before he poured several balled-up leaves into a different stone mortar, and began grinding industriously.

“The others believed you were in a coma. This I did not agree with. I have seen comas before, and you were not like that. Gone somewhere far away, surely, but not like a coma and therefore, I believed, retrievable. Someone else believed that too.”

“Your medical training,” Jamie said dryly, “must have been highly unorthodox.”

“My Babo taught me most of what I know of plants and people. She could find the right plants for healing this or that ailment merely by following her ears.”

“Her ears?” Jamie asked, sitting up. His own grandmother could do much the same by scent, or so he had always assumed. Leastwise, it was how she had taught him. His grandmother had an exceptionally keen nose, amongst other attributes.

Shura nodded, taking several small glass vials from the hoard he kept in one of the less visited drawers.

“She told me that the plants sang to her, each in their own note, and that was how she knew which was to be used for what sickness. If you had known my Babo, you would not doubt it, for she could cure almost anything, even the terrible diseases of the blood. I asked her to fix my size once, for I believed she could do it. She told me that God had given me a larger heart than most men, so I had to be content with the small body. I did not see why I could not have had the big heart and the big body, but,” he shrugged, “such are the questions of life.”

“What drugs did you use on me?” Jamie asked.

“How do you know that I did?” Shura asked, curiosity rather than accusation in his tone.

“I am well acquainted with the traces they leave behind. This signature was rather unusual.”

Shura shrugged. “Does it matter now? I will not apply them again. I imagine it was something similar in nature to what was used on the other end.”

“The other end?” Jamie echoed.

“The woman who came to you in spirit, though not in flesh—the one you seemed to require for your survival. I believe she used similar medicines to make her journey as were used for you, to meet her there.”

“That’s impossible,” Jamie said shortly.

“And yet it happened.” Shura dusted off his hands and poured the powdered leaves into a tincture of alcohol, creating a swirling green mist within the glass.

“I still don’t understand how I survived, or how I ended up back in the camp.”

“You must ask Gregor about that. He’s the one that brought you back. You were very sick. The infection from your wound had spread through your body and you had lost a great deal of blood. Gregor said he would kill me if I didn’t manage to save you. He sat with you for many nights, he and then Nikolai, night after night.”

“Are you telling me I owe my life to Gregor?”

Shura smiled grimly. “Yes, at least in part, unless you believe his story about the tiger.”

“He’s telling a story about a tiger?”

“Yes, he says he followed tiger tracks to find you. He said the only trace of Isay he found were his boots and some bloody clothing. The hound came back alone to the camp and has been cowering in corners ever since.”

“You sound as though you don’t believe him.”

“I think the tiger that saved you,” Shura said, “walks on two legs and has a spiderweb tattooed on his neck, but that is only my opinion.”

Jamie considered the implications of this, and then decided he wasn’t well enough to consider such things yet and turned his mind to another subject that had been vying for his attention.

“Violet has not come to visit,” Jamie said, knowing Shura would understand the question within the simple statement.

Shura was to the point, a trait Jamie appreciated.

“It is a matter of embarrassment for her, I believe. There is no way to explain to you what it was like in this room that night. I have known strange things, some of which I have shared with you, things that have no explanation in the rational light of day, and I will say to you, that night was one of the strangest I have known. We will all deny it now, but there was someone else here in the room with us, invisible but undeniable. She came because you needed her, and your need of her was in all possible senses. You know what happened, I am certain. You can see why it might be of embarrassment for the woman whose body is used as substitute.”

Yes, he could see quite well how it might be from her point of view. He was more than embarrassed from his own limited view. He had no need to speak of it further because there were, perhaps, things he was not ready to know.

Shura went on with his work of grinding, the warm scent of herbs hovering in the air against the crackle of the birch in the stove.

Jamie was still tired and prone to dropping off into a heavy sleep without warning, but this afternoon he felt alert enough to allow his thoughts to drift along the plane of sunlight that arced across the infirmary floor. What had happened apparently was not merely a dream, unless, of course, he was still stuck fast in the amber of fever, paddling in place, and only dreaming that he was awake.

How far could time and space bend, and could both become a function of the human will and heart? What did he himself believe? Viewed from either a religious or a scientific angle, it was possible. Even if one had to go out to the bleeding edges of current scientific wanderings to make it possible, still it was. He could hear Father Lawrence’s quiet, careful tones inside his mind telling him it was so, and was glad today of the Jesuit’s mold and grasp upon his own mind, for it was steadying in his current state.

“Shura? I must ask a question of you.”

The dwarf went still, his head bent over his mortar and pestle. He answered before Jamie could find the words to ask his question.

“She did not suffer, Yasha. By the time her throat was cut she was entirely oblivious.”

“Thank you.”

Shura turned, dark eyes curious.

“It matters to you?”

“Yes, it matters. I did not love her, but it matters.”

The Tale of Ragged Jack, continued.

It was a fair autumn, with long, light-spilling days
that stretched to the farthest edges of the horizon. The fields were heavy with bounty, the stalks of grain bowed down with weight, the apples dropping fragrant as perfume along the roadside. The chestnut trees handed down their fruit directly into Jack’s hands, so weighty were their boughs.

Along the way there were others who had seen the Crooked Man, or thought they had, though their memories seemed oddly porous and so they were never truly certain they had seen him. Maybe it was only a story they had heard told on dark, chilly nights by the fire. It was always this way, Jack thought with frustration—whispers, hints and small traces on the wind of a scent that lingered and then was gone before you could name it, or register it in memory. Something dark with a moral at its center to frighten children in from the dark, or to make them avoid isolated pathways.

He wondered at times if he was mad to continue on this journey, to follow a man who only left a trace upon the air. What was the worth of a few dreams anyway? Surely he could live without them, slightly diminished, but alive.

The snow fell on the night of Hallow’s Eve and it continued to fall for four days and nights after. It was achingly cold, the wind blowing the snow up into whorls, where they hung like frosted diamonds upon the air. The cold had stiffened Jack’s hands and he could no longer feel his feet. Even Aengus was cold, his coat frozen into frosted tufts that stood up across his back making him look like a silver-dipped hedgehog. A fringe of ice hung in the dog’s eyes and both of their breaths furled out upon the air, freezing into small sailing ships that skimmed off along the ice and disappeared.

He did not know how much further they could keep going, for he was very tired and could feel the same exhaustion echoed in Aengus. The thought of lying down and simply allowing the snow to cover them both in a final blanket was almost dizzying in its appeal.

By late afternoon of the fourth day, the snow was coming down so hard that Jack knew they would have to stop for the night. They had lost the path some way back, the snow filling it in great drifts. Where to stop was the question, for nothing looked familiar or sheltering.

Then something caught his eye, a puff of steam—though surely it was only the snow stirred into a whirligig by the incessant wind. But there it was again, and it was unmistakably steam.

He blinked the snow from his eyelashes, unable to believe what he was seeing. There at the roadside, was a huge copper teapot and a column of steam emerging in great clouds from its spout. He thought he was hallucinating, even down to the sound of a rolling boil. But as he drew close and could smell actual tea and feel the heat of the enormous copper pot, he knew it was real.

There was a cup there, with a small note fixed to the side. Jack took it out and carefully unfolded it and then read the few lines it contained.

Please drink if you will
‘Til you’ve had your fill
But leave a jot in the pot
For the next vagabond
That comes along.

The cup had a spider or two inside, but Jack shook these out gently near the heat of the teapot so that they might not freeze. He got a glare from each for his pains, before they scuttled off on hairy legs to the dark and warmth under the pot.

The next problem was how to pour the tea out. There was no way for him to move such a huge pot and he risked giving himself a scalding shower if he tried. But they simply had to have something warm if they were to survive the night and unless the note was designed as some special sort of torment, there had to be a way to get the tea out. The scent of it was overwhelming, making his mouth water and his stomach tremble.

Several minutes later, he was ready to kick something in frustration. It didn’t matter how he approached it, there seemingly was no way to get at the tea. The sides of the pot billowed above his head, too slick and far too hot to climb. He sighed and sat down in a pile of melting snow, feeling utterly defeated.

“Try stickin’ the cup under the spout, ye wee eejit.”

Jack thought he was hearing things at first, for the voice seemed to issue straight out of the teapot itself. Though this was a strange thing in a strange land, still he didn’t think teapots would talk, no matter where in the universe they found themselves.

“Over here. Are ye blind as well as thick?”

Jack looked toward the irritable words and found, to his great surprise, the head of a frog, or a very small unhandsome man, sticking up under the edge of the teapot. He crawled forward on his knees to peer more closely at the strange being.

There was a big gap under the pot—under the fire as it were—impossible as that seemed. In this gap stood the frog, or man, for even up close it was not clear which he was. In this world perhaps one did not need to be either, but could exist as something in between.

“It’s the Hanging Fire of Wick. You don’t know of it? This fire came from the original Wick Fire, deep in the heart of the Perilous Peaks. My own grandsire brought it back with him from the Wick Wars and it has burned from that day to this.”

Jack placed the cup beneath the spout, and the hot tea poured out, filling the cup to the brim. It was scalding, but his hands relished the warmth, and his senses filled with the scent of black tea with cardamom to warm the blood. He took a sip. It tasted delicious and his stomach growled at him to send it down.

The frog spoke again, startling Jack into spilling a little of the tea onto the snow. A small fire started where the drops had landed.

“You and your dog will have to come in out of this weather, for it’s a dark moon and the night will be terrible cold as a result. Neither beast nor boy will survive it without fire. Come, give me your hand. I’ll pull you in.”

Jack hesitated. Was the frog proposing to pull him through the flames?

“It will not burn you, not even singe the gold of your hair. It’s special so ‘tis, an’ not made to burn the flesh of a child nor any other innocent creature.”

Jack wasn’t sure if this could be true but they would have to risk it, for if they stayed out another night in the cold they would surely perish. The wind beyond the teapot was howling, a ravening beast waiting to swallow small boys and dogs alike.

The frog-man had surprising strength and Jack tumbled into the hole, straight through the Hanging Fire. That it wouldn’t singe him hadn’t been quite true, for the frog had to beat out sparks lighting in his hair. Aengus tumbled in behind him and landed in a furry mass on his lap. He smelled slightly smoky but was none the worse for wear beyond that.

It was beautifully, intoxicatingly warm beneath the pot, though it occurred to Jack that he had left the cup of tea, mostly full, up above.

“Not to worry, I’ve a pot on the stove a-brewin’. Come with me.”

The frog-man lit a reed off the Hanging Fire—a curious violet color when seen from below—and indicated that Jack and Aengus should follow him.

The walls seethed with chill vapors, oozing a strange liquid that glowed a sludgy green in the dark. The light from the Hanging Wick fire was strange, pulsating rather than flickering the way a normal fire would.