The Radiant Road

Also by Katherine Catmull:

Summer and Bird

DUTTON BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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New York, NY 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Katherine Catmull.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eBook ISBN 978-1-101-60028-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Catmull, Katherine, author.

The radiant road : a novel / by Katherine Catmull.

pages cm

Summary: After nine years Clare Macleod and her father are finally returning to their old home in Ireland, a house by the sea, with a yew tree growing inside it, a tree with its roots in both the human and fairy world—and soon Clare, who has always been able to sense the “Strange,” meets the boy Finn, and discovers that she must battle against the forces of evil in to restore order to both worlds.

ISBN 978-0-525-95347-0 (hardcover)

1. Fairies—Juvenile fiction. 2. Magic—Juvenile fiction. 3. Identity (Psychology)—Juvenile fiction. 4. Good and evil—Juvenile fiction. [1. Fairies—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Identity—Fiction. 4. Good and evil—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.C2697Rad 2016 [Fic]—dc23 2015020678

Jacket illustration © 2016 Scott McKowen

Jacket design by Tony Sahara

For Ken, my best and truest companion, and for Emma and her interesting
dreams

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

—WILLIAM BLAKE

I too will something make 

And joy in the making; 

Altho' to-morrow it seem 

Like the empty words of a dream 

Remembered on waking. 

—ROBERT
BRIDGES

Not My Home, No Place Is

Clare was a strange girl, solitary and shy. She was a stranger to the place she lived, and a stranger to the place she was born. And sometimes the Strange came to visit Clare, and dreams walked through her waking life.

You know the Strange, too. It comes to everyone in different ways and times and flavors.

It's that feeling when you're alone at twilight, and the birds go suddenly silent, and a wind lifts up the leaves and drops them, and you listen, but you don't know what for.

Or that odd sense, when the light shifts a certain way, and you say, “Oh, this feels like a dream, I feel like I'm dreaming”—that's the Strange.

Or the Halloween feeling—you must know that one—the feeling of dead leaves and chill and early dark, when a burning orange mask, freshly cut, bars the way to a familiar door. The breath of the Strange slips under your own mask as you walk down the dark street, carrying your trick-or-treat bag, pretending it's only fun and not scary at all. The Strange swells and sighs beside you, almost close enough to touch.

Clare passed through patches of Strange often, much more than just at Halloween. She passed through them the way you swim through patches of surprising cold in a summer lake: with a shiver, but swimming on. It was her mother who had taught her that word, when Clare was small, that word for it among others.
“
The Strange has been here—do you feel it?” she would say.

Or “The Other Crowd is passing through.”

Or “Throw a pebble in that whirlwind for the fairies.”

Fairies. Obviously, the world and time had ruined that word for Clare, to the point where she felt herself flush to hear it. But even at almost-fifteen—when she no longer believed in fairies (in the Strange, the Other Crowd:
whatever
)—even now, when she caught sight of something extraordinary, and Strange, she would hear her mother's words:
Ah, look—a fairy-making.

It was the only name she knew, for what no one seemed to notice, but her.

For example, one day, not long before this story begins, as Clare sat alone in the living room, a book fell from a shelf all on its own. Its pages fluttered for a moment, like a butterfly balancing on a flower. Then the book settled open.

From a vase on a shelf above the book, one pink rose petal drifted down and landed on the open page.

Clare bent to look. The petal had fallen on a line of poetry: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” it read.

“Ah, look,” she said softly. “Ah, look, a fairy-making.”

The breath of the Strange cooled the air around her
.

The night this story begins was not Halloween, but late spring. Clare was in her backyard, swinging on a rough board hung by two knotted ropes from a high cottonwood tree. Her bare feet swept up high, straining toward the silhouette of a dead limb that, for no special reason, she was trying to knock down. After a while, the pull and push of the swing lulled her. She forgot the dead branch and dropped her head back into the dark. Her hair, red as a leaf, not quite curly, fell back, then fell around her face, then fell back, over and over. Her body in white shorts and T-shirt made a ghostly diagonal trail in the night, back and forth, back and forth.

This would be her last time on this swing. Today had been the last day of school. Tomorrow, she and her father were moving to Ireland to live in a house with a tree inside it.

Clare had been born in that tree-inside house, fourteen years, eleven months, and ten and eleven days earlier. She had two birthdays, because her head emerged just before midnight on June 20, and her feet right after midnight on June 21. On birthdays, her mother used to make her two cakes, give her two presents, two birthday kisses, and so on.

When Clare was almost six, when the family still lived in that peculiar Irish house, Clare's mother died. It was the worst thing that
had ever happened, or ever could happen. For a long time after, the pain was like a fire that never went out, and sometimes flared up hot and raging.

That was too much pain for such a small girl. So Clare smothered her blazing grief, and she did it little by little, by forgetting her mother and their life together. That flower of pain wouldn't stop blooming, and she was only little, and knew no other way. She built brick walls of other thoughts, other memories, between herself and her mother and their life.

After a while, instead of a blazing bonfire, her grief was like the evening sun behind the trees when you ride your bicycle west: sometimes you get a glimpse between the branches, or you hit a bump in the road, and the sudden blaze of sun in your eyes hurts so much, it blinds you. But mostly you're just riding quietly along in the dusk.

She always wore a little silver star on a silver chain around her neck, which her mother had given her, which had been her mother's necklace when she was small, and her grandmother's before that, and back and back. But by now, by this night in the swing, she hardly remembered her mother at all. She remembered a hand on her hair; and she recalled a scent of wild orchids and roses, a scent that meant kindness and joy, a scent that was there, and then was gone.

Clare also hardly remembered that Irish house she was born in—except that it was by the sea, under a green hill, with a tree running up one wall like a spine. She did remember the tree; she remembered her surprise when other people's houses did not have trees inside them. And she remembered walking up to the hill-roof to visit the top of the tree, where it lived with its face to the sky.

After her mother died, Clare and her father rattled around the empty house like two dried beans, and the sound they made was all wrong. She remembered that. The sound was wrong, and that was why they had to move away. Or that was how it felt to Clare, when she was not quite six years old.

So one day they packed their clothes, locked the door of the Irish house, and moved far away. They left Clare's mother's ashes in a wooden box over the fireplace, because her father could not bear to release them to wind or earth or water, and could not bear to keep them near. They moved, and then they moved again and again, as he tried to escape the grief that chased him on. He was too old to build walls to hide his pain behind, and so he ran.

Although he was born in a place called Skye, his work took him deep beneath the earth; he was a geologist, an excellent one, a genius of all that lies hot and still beneath the world we walk on. Rich men in dark suits digging for gold or coal or oil wanted that genius and would pay for it. So the two sad beans could move whenever they
liked; there was always a new place to go, a new job to do. They never stayed anywhere more than a year. After a while, they got used to the new sound they made, rattling together alone.

But now, after nine years, her father had given up running. Tomorrow, they would move back to the house where Clare was born, where her mother was born, where her grandmother and great-grandmother were born, and back and back, before there were photographs, before people remember.

“And I've even found work, before our plane lands,” her father had said just this morning. He pointed to a contract on the kitchen counter. “There's been a partial collapse of a mine I once worked on—thank God, no one was hurt—and the new owner has asked me in to consult.” Clare had squinted at a thick, black, antique-looking signature next to her father's familiar scribble, and smiled to herself.
Maybe that's how they write in Ireland.

Ireland was tomorrow. This was tonight. Clare let the swing slow, leaped off, misjudged the leap, fell to her knees. She lay back on the grass in the warm night. The streetlight was out, and the moon was low, and the stars' small lights shone clear. The grass itched.

Watching the stars, she thought how they wheeled above her like a flock of birds.
But the sky wheels slowly, slow and slow
, she thought,
too slow for me to see.

She thought:
I'll write that down, about the slow wheel of the stars.
But she didn't move. Instead she watched the brightest star, closest to the moon, and murmured a soft “Star light, star bright.”

When she got to “wish tonight,” she paused, searching her heart, then found and said her wish: “A friend.”

Then Clare stopped thinking and watched the constellations, her mind as wordless as the night.

That's when a fairy-making slipped in. The Strange often waits until words have died away.

Clare frowned. There was an extra star on Orion's knife.

All her hair pricked up. That fast, Clare was alert as a cat, eyes wide, fingers tense against the grass. More stars, now, blinked off, then on, then off.

But then she saw, and almost laughed: they were not stars—the blinking lights were fireflies.

So . . . was it nothing Strange, then? But it was, for still her skin prickled cold in the warm night as she watched the fireflies blinking among the stars.

The blinking became more regular.

Then it became perfectly regular. The fireflies were blinking off and on together in unison. Each time the fireflies blinked back on, they were closer together. They positioned themselves precisely against the distant, steady stars. It was as if the fireflies meant to
complete a picture that the stars had only begun; to make a new, blinking constellation of fireflies and stars.

It felt like a dream.
Ah
, thought Clare—though less in wonder, this time, than fear—
a fairy-making.
Her legs on the grass were damp with cold sweat.

Off, on, off.

A picture.

Off, on, off.

A picture like a face—a terrible face. A glowing fright mask, blinking
off, on, off
above her.

The face was long and narrow.

Off, on, off.

It had one eye, and a huge mouth, gaping wide, as if to swallow or scream.

Off, on, off.

And where the other eye should be (
off, on, off
)—where the other eye should be, instead of an eye, was a swirling chaos.

Clare's heart was beating fast, fast, fast. One arm flew up defensively to shield her face.

The mask lowered itself toward her, and the glowing mouth hovered closer: visible, invisible, visible again. Invisible was worse.
It's insects and stars, that's all it is
, she said to her thundering heart. But her heart did not believe her.

The picture vanished. Clare waited, arm still flung over her face,
too frightened to blink or breathe. But the mask and the fireflies were gone. Only the stars in their familiar shapes remained.

The dark was darker now, and the stars were farther away. Clare stood, brushed off her clothes with trembling hands, and ran inside to write it down, as she always did with fairy-makings, just in case.