Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3) Read online

  The crowd was now focused on the number one seated players, locked in furious combat over the ball just as, Andrei saw with a lurch, the Irishman had intended they should be. He swerved, intending to jump the pony over to the right and avoid the man’s mallet. But in a movement too quick to even be seen, the mallet was tossed into the man’s left hand, which served a numbing crack to Andrei’s shin before being tossed back to the right. The Irishman’s mare did not miss a step and they flowed on like a golden stream down the field, where Jamie caught the ball as it shot out from Andrei’s number one’s mallet. He deftly shot it with his right hand straight between the posts.

  Andrei shook his head in outraged admiration. The bastard was left-handed, but had been playing like some ambidextrous demon the entire time. His shin was starting to throb horribly.

  They were even at four goals each.

  Five chukkas down, one to go.

  All hell broke loose in the sixth chukka. The field was slushy, the horses tired and the players all in the grip of a royal fury. Scarlet and emerald jerseys were near to indistinguishable under a thick veneer of mud and bruises in shades of vermilion and puce, ochre and verdigris were flowering on every bit of visible skin.

  Andrei knew it was time to dispense with tactics and go for broke. There was only a minute and a half left when he managed to get his mallet behind the ball.

  Number four in emerald green was a bruiser, broad shouldered and looking about as friendly as a pissed-off bull who’d had scarlet jerseys waving in his face for the past hour and a half.

  Andrei gritted his teeth and bore down as hard as he dared on the horse. He fixed his iciest Russian glare on the man. The bruiser in emerald green appeared entirely unimpressed and began to canter out from the goal posts.

  The big bay swung round and Andrei snapped his own pony’s bridle hard, forcing it to jump sideways.

  His pony was lithe and limber, almost acrobatic, and could dance around larger horses. He could, with a little fancy footwork and his own sleight of hand, keep the ball and then all he needed to do was get clear of the big bay and take the ball home. He had made such plays a hundred times before and was as certain of his mount as he was of himself. But then the big man, one minute seated like a warrior, fell from his horse and his shoulder—the size and consistency of a warship’s hull—hit Andrei’s helmetless head with the full force of the fall.

  For a moment the world went dark but Andrei shook his head and, with no small effort, kept his seat, and swung the mallet back, knowing the bruiser had neither intended nor had the opportunity to remove the ball.

  The ball was gone and his mallet swung across empty air. Andrei turned, confused, wondering if it had gone through the goal without his realizing it. But no, there it was swooping upfield like a gull in flight with that green-eyed svoloch on the wing beside it. The ball lofted through the posts in a straight and perfect line. The crowd went wild and the buzzer sounded.

  Six chukkas down, game bloody lost.

  Andrei threw his mallet down in disgust but managed to sit high and lordly in his saddle when they shook hands with the other team. Jamie Kirkpatrick took his hand in such a good-natured manner that Andrei wished he still had his mallet within reach.

  Later, they’d ridden off the field, Jamie and Andrei with both flowers and small bits of paper containing numbers and personal information raining down on them. Jamie had, in a gesture of both sportsmanship and a certain sarcasm, tipped his helmet to Andrei (returned to him by the blushing redhead, who had skin the consistency of milked apricots, damn the man anyway). At least the damned horse was going to be all right, Andrei thought, even if he himself never walked again. Then Jamie Kirkpatrick flashed him a grin that was both mocking and infectious as though to say, ‘Now wasn’t that bloody good fun?’

  The great Arctic flow of Andrei’s Slavic blood found itself in melt and he was laughing at a joke that needed no words to find the humor. He fully expected the man to cross the field there and then, for had he not summoned him by his laughter? By the silent moment shared across the arc of sunlight, reeking with blood and sweat—both that of horse and human?

  But the man did not cross and was even now sliding from his horse with champagne still dripping from his brow, checking his horse over, the redhead glowing with expectancy off to the side. After that Andrei lost sight of him, for he was busy seeing to his own horse and having his bruises tended by the brunette with the good teeth, who had returned his helmet along with a suggestion that seemed terribly hospitable of her.

  A few hours later, bruises well salved, Andrei decided that if Mohammed would not come to the mountain, then the mountain, Russian haughtiness notwithstanding, was going to have to bloody go to Mohammed.

  He knew where to look, for the man favored a dark, down-at-the-heels pub where workingmen and locals drank rather than the cream of England’s youth that clotted the pubs near the university.

  James Kirkpatrick was in a snug at the back, eating a green apple that nearly matched the shade of his eyes. On the table in front of him was a bottle of whiskey partnered by two glasses. He’d cleaned up and changed into a perfectly pressed pale blue shirt and grey wool pants. His hair was still damp from his ablutions and other than an indigo bruise on his collarbone, there was little proof that this was the murderous opponent from the polo green.

  “I did wonder when you’d turn up.”

  Andrei sat, not without a visible wince, but with remarkable grace—or so he felt.

  Eyes of Russian winter looked into those of an Irish spring in torrent and knew they had found their match, in mischief, in daring, in recklessness, in genius and in sheer bloody-mindedness. It was a heady feeling.

  “And so at last—James Kirkpatrick—or the next Pushkin—I’m told?”

  “Pushkin? I thought I was the second coming of Byron.”

  “Well, if you prefer to be compared to an English hack rather than the world’s greatest poet, so be it. Give me anything he ever put pen to that stands against Eugene Onegin.”

  James Kirkpatrick smiled, appeared to give it a second’s thought and then green eyes gleaming, recited in a mockingly Irish drawl—

  Now, I’ll put out my taper

  (I’ve finished my paper

  For these stanzas you see on the brink stand)

  There’s a whore on my right

  For I rhyme best at Night

  When a C—t is tied close to my Inkstand.

  “Touché,” Andrei laughed. The man took another bite of the apple in his hand and smiled in that familiar mocking manner. Andrei narrowed his own eyes. He wasn’t used to people discomfiting him in such a manner.

  “Your hair is too long,” he said imperiously.

  “Your lips are too red,” James Kirkpatrick replied in a maddeningly calm manner. “And you owe me forty pounds for the vet bill.”

  Andrei, who had always been rather vain about his lips, considered kicking Jamie with his good leg and then limping off into the sunset. But Andrei had an itch that was driving him mad, and from what he had heard this was the only man at Oxford who might be capable of providing the desperately needed and highly skilled scratch.

  “I hear you play chess.”

  “I do.” Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking me to play?”

  Andrei drew a deep breath to rein in his famous temper. Was the man completely ignorant of who he was dealing with?

  “If you want me to play, ask me—it’s called civility.”

  “Do you know who I am?” Andrei asked, looking down the length of his aquiline nose in his haughtiest manner.

  “Aye,” Jamie said and reached down beside him. Andrei frowned, and then smiled as he saw what the man had brought with him. An old chessboard, with a worn velvet bag that held the comforting clack of King against King, of Bishop about to bow to Queen, and of Queen taken by Kn
ight. Andrei swallowed down a surge of electric excitement.

  Three hours later, brow furrowed in astonishment, he lost.

  Jamie re-filled his glass with amber nectar and said, “Again?”

  Andrei’s leg hurt like a polar bear had bitten it. He’d drunk half a bottle of that poison the man kept offering him and he’d never felt so happy in his life.

  “Yes, again.”

  “This time, man, give me your best game. Otherwise you’re wasting your time, and what I find most offensive, mine as well.”

  And so Andrei gave him his best game and won, but only narrowly and after a nerve-wracking, mind-numbing two hours. He was dumbfounded, but only had one question for Jamie.

  “How?”

  “I see the board exactly as you do, three dimensional and with the lines running through it of every possible permutation. Mine are blue, what color are yours?”

  “Red,” Andrei replied, flabbergasted into revealing a secret he’d never told anyone. There were visible lines, like whisper thin threads, that ran between the pieces on a chessboard and allowed him to see in a lightning glance how many moves he could make and what the consequences of each move would be one, two, seven moves down the game.

  “What are you looking at?” For that disconcerting green gaze was upon him again, the golden head cocked to the side.

  “I’m trying to decide which of us is prettier. I’m quite certain it’s me, but I can see that in certain lights and if you were to wear pink, it would definitely be you.”

  “You are just as much of an outrageous bastard as they say,” Andrei laughed.

  “Isn’t that why you sought me out? Because you’re bored?”

  Andrei responded with an eloquent Russian shrug. “I think the very least you owe me is the redhead.”

  Jamie grinned, a flash of impudent white. “Ah, she’s sworn off other men now. Says I’ve ruined her for all men in general but for Russian prima donnas in particular.”

  “Svoloch,” Andrei said.

  “Takes one to know one,” Jamie replied and set the chessboard up once more.

  Sleep came heavily that night under the low eaves of the dacha, for he was exhausted from his travels and had fallen into a heavy doze in the midst of his remembering…

  He hears the drumbeat of hooves, one horse, one man coming across the white wastelands, a black cape floating around him, hanging in the falling snow. There is a sense of menace so deep that it is like falling into a well with no bottom. He has to keep away from the man, hide as deep in the forest as he can. The snow is so heavy, up to his knees and it is hard to make headway. His breath comes in heaving gasps and he is afraid that the exhalations of air will hang shroud-like, making a cloud-path by which to track him. He does not know why the man pursues him, but as prey will always know its predator, he knows the man does not mean him well.

  He has been running for a very long time. He must find somewhere to hide soon and somehow cover his tracks.

  Just ahead, the trees are dense, long swooping boughs heavy with the shadowed snow. He can hear the horse’s chuffing breath, can feel the icy trails of it sliding along his spine. His feet are shod in rough leather shoes and they make little sound on the snow, which is lighter here under the trees, allowing him to move faster.

  His mind is a blur. He is in the natural state of prey, running solely upon instinct, upon the knowledge that lives in the blood, not the mind. Ahead is a windfall where a few fir trees have fallen in a ferocious wind. If he can make that before the rider catches up with him, he might have a chance.

  He makes it to the windfall, dropping to his knees and crawling in as the branches scrape his back and head and the needles fall in a stinging shower into his eyes. Whether this will be shelter or trap he does not know and does not care, for he has to stop before there is no breath left in his lungs.

  It is pitch black under the shelter but dry and thick with the scent of resin bled out from the dying trees. He catches at his breath the way he would at a falling branch, trying to pull it in, keep it from the hound’s nose. His lungs hurt, scraped raw with running and breathing in the ice-crystalled air. It is, at the very least, a moment of respite.

  He lies in the carpet of needles, grateful, drinking the scent as though it is the essence of salvation though he knows this is not so. But humans live in hope, and he is, after all, a mere man.

  He dozes, or at least thinks he must have, for suddenly there is a woman in the trees, naked, skin tinted palest green under the moon. Her hair is wet, frost limning the pale stripling color of it, like the underside of birch bark when it is torn away in spring. He can smell the water and the wood of her, and knows she is of these things, just as he is of blood, bone, and the warm density of flesh. She walks atop the snow and does not seem to feel the cold. She does not look his way but he can feel that she is aware of him, just as she is aware of everything that moves and breathes and scents in these great cold Northern forests.

  He longs to follow her, the way day longs to follow night, the way water yearns after fire, even if it should mean death, and he is certain it would. But he knows her, in some wordless way, a knowing that is in the cells, in the blood and not of the mind at all.

  He moves, ready to leave his shelter to follow her and then she is gone as if she had never been, a willowy flicker in the snow-light. Suddenly he is aware that the man and horse have come upon the windfall, the horse’s hooves silenced in the needle carpet beneath the snow. It is the horse’s eye upon him that alerts him.

  The great clouds of the horse’s breath fill the space between himself and the stars, and its eye, lit with the blue light of the moon, gazes at him with neither violence nor tenderness. He can feel the man’s instincts roving out, probing the night for him, for the prickling flesh of the prey. He tilts his head slightly, afraid to set off another shower of needles, so that he might see his enemy more clearly.

  The man is faceless, his black hood obliterating so much as even an outline of his features. Upon his chest is a strange insignia, that of a severed dog’s head and a broom. He is an oprichnik, a man apart, an instrument of terror set loose upon the country to scour out betrayers. He rides the night winds and with him, as his constant companion, rides Death.

  There is a knotted cord around the man’s neck, made of saints know what, and strung on it is what he would swear is a child’s jawbone. He closes his eyes and hopes that Death will be swift about his duties.

  But Death is always a chancy fellow. Suddenly the horse whinnies, a high-pitched noise almost like a woman’s scream, and lunges off through the snow away from the windfall. He is safe, for the moment.

  He lies under the trees for a long time, or it might be no time at all. One can never tell in these in-between landscapes, populated as they are with demons from bygone times and snow-walking mermaids. But even this suspended time cannot last, for he is cold and knows he must move if he is not to freeze and be found there someday, perfectly preserved in the frost.

  He leaves his shelter reluctantly, for the cold out in the open is much worse. It bites into his skin like a thousand needles but he walks forward, for he knows numbness is worse. It is the sleeping dwarf that heralds death.

  He keeps on through the forest, under the heavy boughs, ears alert for any movement, for the stealth of a spray of snow, a branch that shouldn’t be moving, a noise that does not belong to night in the forest. He comes out into the open so suddenly that it is a little like falling and he has to stop to get his bearings.

  In the open field, the snow blushes silver and a silence like the moment before the world began hangs there, holding him fast. Across the field, skimming its edges, there is a ripple, sinuous as water, in and out of the shadows, cream against the snow, a creature that belongs to moonlight, to cold blue taiga, to trees that bleed gold upon the ground. A tiger, one that could kill a man with
a single swipe, and it is as if he can already smell his own blood upon the snow, spilling hot, scenting the field with chilling copper. The blood, which in its heat and movement under fragile skin, sings to the tiger the oldest siren song of all.

  And then he sees them as they move out from under the dark branches that ring the field, upon their black horses, swathed in their black cloaks with their severed dog heads and icy brooms. He is surrounded, and there is no way out. The tiger has melted into the shadows as though it never existed.

  The black horses step forward in unison. He can hear the cloaks snap upon the rising wind and knows himself trapped more surely than a winter hare in a hunter’s cruel-jawed trap.

  Later, when there was time for thought, he would wonder if he had sensed them coming in his dream. Those men in the long coats moving even then through the darkness toward the low-eaved dacha in the woods.

  From the Journals of James Kirkpatrick

  May____, 1955

  The past rises up in layers, slowly surrounding me until I feel that if I were to slip down that side street, enter that house, I would come face to face with the men we have followed down through these hundred years and more. When we first arrived, they were mere shadows, ink-stained angels or demons, depending upon the day’s view, but now they have acquired form and shape. They slip in and out of the sides of my vision. Ah, there, that auburn-haired fellow, slim as a wraith wading into the sea—certainly that must be Shelley. Shelley who foresaw his death, who felt the sea rise and overwhelm his house, his family, and his very soul.

  But it is Byron I came to seek more than any other and find the man as elusive here as he is in his own writings. Just when one thinks one has caught a handful of his coat tails and will be able to ride the starry trails of his imaginings with him, one realizes he is away laughing, off in the distance, eluding understanding. He hid so much of himself from public view in life, even leaving his own country so that he might live less in subterfuge.