The Radiant Road (15 page)

The wind swelled and breathed. The angry noise of the boat came closer.

A third time Clare dipped into the water to drink, then knelt back on the ground, wiping her dripping face with her sleeve.

And just then, as a thought began to dawn—
Oh, “when you find the mirror,” so this is the gate, this pool is the gate, but then what is the key
—
just then the motorboat sound grew louder, then stopped.

Footsteps.

Clare looked around in desperation. Up a tree? Out into the lake? But he would find her, she knew that he would. She had
not the least protection, not even her black stone; all she had was—

She still had the red fruit.

When the wolf's jaws are closing on you.

He was a wolf, and she needed Her of the Cliffs's protection now.

Now came men's voices, one deep and dark, arguing over the sound of tramping, tearing boots in the brush.

Standing, ready to run if it didn't work, Clare closed her eyes and popped the fruit in her mouth.

Instantly, running was just what she couldn't do. She was as pinned to the spot as if she had roots there. In terror, she managed to raise her arms, but then she stood, arms flung above her head, her trunk unprotected and vulnerable to the enemy as he approached.

Rooted to the ground, arms flung up into the sky, fear roared and raged and ran in Clare's mind.
A trick. It was a trick. That terrible woman gave me a paralyzing poison, she must work for Balor, did Finn know?

The tramping feet came closer.

Now Clare's eyes clouded over; now her skin began to stiffen; now the flesh beneath her skin stiffened, too. Soon, she knew, when her tender lungs were stiff and hard, when her throbbing heart was still as a carving—then she would die. Wouldn't she? Wasn't she about to die? The questions roared and screamed within her: but on
the outside, she stood still and blind as stone. The stiffening crept into her ears, and there was silence.

And somehow, with the silence came a peculiar peace. Clare stood, arms raised to the sky, stiff as wood, blind and deaf, as the waves of rage and fear crashed over her for the last time, swept across the ground, receded.

It was not a poison; it was something much Stranger than poison. Her feet had grown long, much longer, and her toes more numerous. Her long feet, her many toes, plunged into the dirt beneath her. Her arms and hands had grown longer, too; her long and numerous fingers reached up into the air—yes, they
reached
up, so she was moving after all.

Was she moving? Or was she growing?

Or when you stand so perfectly still, is growing a kind of moving?

Her many toes dug through the earth, seeking water and food; her fingers grew long and delicate, seeking air and light. The air found and swayed her fingers, those tender shoots, and her fingers drank the light like water. The sunlight ran down every nerve and down into her toes. She stole the sun's fire to make green.

Clare's toes—Clare's roots, let's call them, because that's what they were, now—her roots like veins branched into capillaries, and found other reaching, questioning tree-roots, the circulatory system of the earth. Each thrill or pain that ran through one ran
through all the trees of the island, all the feet of this forest tangled together.

She felt the devastation of a nearby sapling who was mutilated and dying (slashed, though she did not know this, by the machetes of Balor and his man). That sapling's death was felt by every tree as its own death; just as the birth of a new tree, a green shoot somewhere deep in the island, was felt by every tree as its own birth.

She knew now, because her roots knew, the key to the pool-of-water gate, and knowing it, if Clare could have laughed, she would have laughed out loud at how easy it was.

Clare's blood was sap, slow and rich. She became part of the unending, wordless, subterranean conversation of the trees, the ceaseless story they tell. For the first time in her life, she did not feel lonely. For the first time, she knew that she was not alone and never could be.

And perhaps because she stood in the heart of the Strange, Clare's roots spread even under the lake, to the field, to the fairy thorn (
oh
, she thought,
I see, of course, the tree said
blossoming
but for us that's
singing,
that's how we blossom,
that was the key
), and finally to the yew tree itself.

And touching her yew—even her slenderest, farthest finger of root, touching the yew's own far and slender finger—even that bare
touch split her heart with love and tenderness. The soul of her yew, at once ancient and innocent, broke through the shell around her heart. She wanted to stay with the yew, hand in hand with it, fingers knotted from tree to tree, underground, forever.

Deaf and blind, lost in that slow, slow dance of communion, Clare never thought of her enemy: who stood beneath her reaching arms; who put his hand on her bark, breathing hard; who cursed his luck, finding no cowering girl on this island.

Who in anger turned his back on the tree and, returning to his angry boat, sailed angrily away.

In time, Clare's arms began to shrink and lower; her roots withdrew from the earth, shrunk back from the tangled communion of trees.
Oh no, no
, said her still, woody heart, as her root-fingers pulled away from the touch of the yew.

But the hawfruit spell had finished its work. Clare softened, and shrank back, and pulled back into her lonely, only self. She was alone on a silent island, looking into a pool like a mirror—the paler blue of the sky in late afternoon, and the blacker tangle of branches. But she had not forgotten the tree-knowledge of this pool's, this gate's, true nature: it was not a mirror after all; it was a window. Perhaps a window in the sky, or a window in the water, but certainly a window into the Strange.

And what she saw through it—the sky, the branches, the girl with dirty hair and stubborn eyes—that was what lay on the other side.

She put her face closer. Even for Clare, to dive through a window that may be in the sky or may be in the water, a window on an island that floats at the heart of the Strange, was not an easy thing to do. Where would it take her? Would she ever come back? All the stories she had heard of fairy seemed to end with “And she thought she was there one short night—but when she returned, seven years had passed.” Or “She ate just one bite of the fairy cake—but because of that, she was never able to return again.”

Clare thought,
In the Strange place, I can protect the tree
. Her heart ached with love, remembering the sweetness of the touch from the yew's small finger. She straightened
.
She told herself that maybe the Strange people would know about her father, why he hadn't come home last night, how she could protect him. And she told herself Finn would be there.
So it will be a little bit home.

She took a breath. She looked at the face in the window at her feet. “So, hi,” she said softly.

She did not so much dive in, as let herself fall.

Clare climbed into a window in the water, but she climbed out of a window in the earth.

At first, as she stood brushing dirt from her clothes and hair, it seemed as if she had never left the island. Only back there, the afternoon sun had been high. Here, a curious luminosity hung in the air that seemed to have no particular source. When the light was like that, Clare's father used to say, “This is the magic hour,” and pull out his camera. But he only meant the light just after dawn or before dusk, the long, slanting light that makes ordinary colors look miraculous. He didn't mean real magic.

But wherever she was, it was the magic hour here. The world glistened as if it were wet.

Damp and dirt smeared, Clare walked through the forest that hovered between day and night, light and dark, down a wide path, among dark trees. It was terribly quiet, no sound of water or insect. Every color vibrated. This place was dense with Strange, so much denser than even the island. It was as if she had walked into the kitchen where the Strange was made.

So I guess I'm where I meant to go
, Clare thought. But where exactly was she going?

And then she heard the singing: high voices, like singing in church, but not any church she knew. The voices wreathed together in many parts and harmonies, just down the path . . . no, just a little farther down . . . and then just a
bit
farther, they must be down around that bend . . .

It was something Clare would learn one day—that when the people of Timeless were together, even their conversation felt like a song, a symphony, a
making
, since making was breath and life to them. But she did not know that yet. Now, she was only song-led again, tugged along until the singing transformed into a high, crowded weaving of voices that seemed half song, half conversation.

Magic Hour

Song-led, Clare found herself in a clearing where the trees bent toward one another to make a sort of roof, like the rib cage of a whale, if a whale's bones were tree boughs. Beneath this leafy shelter was a long table, crowded with elegant people in brilliant colors, in clothes trimmed with feathers and fur. Candles ran up and down the table, and candles hung from branches of the trees, so that the foliage and the silver and crystal of the table flickered in insubstantial red and orange. The table was so long that its other end disappeared into flickering shadow.

For what felt like a long time, Clare stood near the table, muddy and disheveled, vulnerable and yew-touched. But no one seemed to notice her. Uncertain, exhausted, and a little annoyed—
am I invisible?
—in the end Clare took the empty chair at her end of the table, which was the only empty chair she saw. She scanned in the dim, shifting light for Finn's face, or for Hers.

But the table was a confusion of beautiful, smiling men and women, leaning in toward one another, or leaning back to laugh. The flames flickered and shadowed their faces, so that they seemed as substantial-insubstantial as flames themselves. None of them looked familiar.

In front of each person, as in front of Clare, sat a dish covered in a silver dome. The silver domes reflected the flames, and reflected the faces of the handsome, smiling people, then reflected those reflections again, doubling and doubling each flickering presence. Their clothes, like Finn's, and Hers of the Cliffs, were a little old-fashioned.

Exclamations of surprise and laughter ran up and down the table. “Well made! Well made,” several voices cried. Clare looked down: the silver cover over each plate had vanished, and before each diner sat a different meal.

One diner's silver dish bore a glass bowl in which a pale gold fish, about the size of Clare's palm, flicked its tail in nervous circles. Another held a small, perfect cherry tree, covered in tiny ripe fruit. One man dug into a little garden of leaves and herbs, still rooted in black dirt. A woman trailed one delicate, hungry finger down the back of a trembling gray bird.

On her own silver plate was food far more appetizing: a loaf of hot, steaming brown bread, split down the middle, with a fat plop of butter melting into it. Next to the loaf was creamy milk in a blue china cup. Clare had never wanted any food more than she wanted that loaf, that butter, that milk. She was famished—had not eaten since breakfast the morning her father left, a day and a half ago—and yet she hesitated. She remembered a line of poetry from her
mother's commonplace book: “The bread and the wine had a doom, / For these were the host of the air.” In the margin, her mother had written “??”

Still, she felt like crying from hunger at the scent of fresh-baked bread. To distract herself, she looked at those around her.

The man to her right, with the fishbowl on his plate, now held that pale fish lightly between his teeth. The fish waved its tail in slow, languorous fear, once, twice; was still for a few seconds; waved its tail again, slow, hopeless. The man waited patiently, the fish between his precise teeth. At first, Clare could not tear her eyes away; then she couldn't watch.

The silver dish to the man's right held an entire honeycomb, white-gold and dripping. The diner dipped one small, furry paw into the comb, brought it out dripping, licked it with long tongue from smiling lips.

Furry
paw
?

Clare looked up and down the table. Was it the shifting, flickering light, was it the distorted reflections in silver? But some of the diners no longer looked like human beings. To Clare's left, a woman whose hair had been piled high on her head was, for a moment, a tall-eared brown rabbit in a ruby silk dress. Then she turned her face against the light, and was a woman again.

With rising panic, Clare looked around the table: A pale green
hand—a green hand?—hovered over a plate that bore only a round, glowing yellow mass, like a small sun. A man's fingers, pulling something like a long worm from the pile of dirt on his plate, were no longer fingers but a lizard's scaly, five-toed claw emerging from the black sleeve of a suit. A candle flickered, and it was after all only the thin, crooked fingers of a thin, handsome man. A woman's face was thrown back in laughter, her small, curving nose suddenly more than finchlike, but an actual finch's beak, a baby finch with its mouth open to be fed. A wide sleeve, stretched toward a dish of trumpeting pink flowers, became the wings of a butterfly. And at the far end of the table, a shadowy figure bent his head, and Clare saw, was sure she saw, long, twining white horns on his head.

The man who had held the fish in his mouth was now dabbing at his lips with a napkin. When he dropped the cloth to his plate, his teeth looked as spiked as a shark's.

Clare looked down, and her own left hand was large and thick and ink-black, just beginning to sprout coarse black hair. She jumped back from the table, knocking her chair over backward. The room went silent, and everyone sitting along the table—only men and women again—stared at her. Her hand was only her hand again.

She felt Finn beside her before she saw the gray and black clothes, the long, tangled hair, the questioning eyes. Comfort warmed her bones like a bath.

“Finn.” Her relief poured out in a flood of words. “He came back, and he wanted the key, and he had this terrible, this thing with him. And he hurt a woman I know, he might have even killed her. And I ran away, so that he couldn't . . .” She hesitated. “Take the key” wasn't right, or even “make me give it to him.”
So that I didn't hand it over.

“I was afraid something was wrong,” he said. “When I saw your dream, I wanted to—but Her of the Cliffs forbade me.”

“And he's going to hurt my dad,” Clare continued. It was pouring out faster now. “I'm afraid he is, so that I'll give him the key. Or maybe he already has. Dad didn't come home last night when he was supposed to.” She heard her voice growing more agitated, couldn't stop. “So we have to go to the in-between, to see if Dad's home, so I can warn him about Balor. Or find him where he is and tell him. We have to hurry!”

She had not realized until she let that fear out of its cage how powerful it was, how afraid she was for her father.

Finn, brows pulled together, was just opening his mouth to reply when Her of the Cliffs appeared beside him, her hair flickering in the candlelight like fire. “Your father will not return to your home this night or the next,” she said.

Relief ran through her like warm water. “So he's still at the mine site?”

“Yes,” said Her of the Cliffs.

“He must be really worried about me, is there some way—”

Her of the Cliffs interrupted her. “Balor deceived him. Said the woman Jo was caring for you.”

A comfort to set that worry aside for now. But something in her tone made Clare ask, “He's safe there, though, right?”

“There is no safety,” said Her of the Cliffs. Heat seemed to come off her: she was copper and gold with cold-hot blue at the core. “Not here. Not anywhere. And—listen to me, girl:
looking for safety is wrong looking
. You should not have left the tree undefended.”

Incredulous, Clare saw:
she is angry with me
. Her face flushed as she thought of her yew, of that delicate, unbearably sweet root-to-root connection. “I did not leave it undefended,” she said in a voice both shaking and stubborn. “I ran to keep the key away from Balor, because he had this thing that made me feel . . . that made me feel like nothing was any good and everything was dirty, and nothing mattered, and I was afraid I'd—but anyway I didn't. So the key is safe!”

“The key is safe, you see!” said Finn. To Clare: “Where did you hide it?”

“I didn't hide it,” said Clare. “He could have found it, if I'd hid it. I kept it with me the whole—”

But the hand in her empty pocket told a different story. Frantically, Clare tried her other pockets, but the key was gone.

Her of the Cliffs swelled like a bonfire with new fuel. “The key was iron,” she said. “Iron cannot pass through into fairy, and you should have known that, how could you not? I tell you, this Balor knows iron cannot enter. He knows that wherever you entered Timeless is where the key will be. Does he know which gate you used?”

Clare had covered her open mouth with one dirty-nailed hand.

Her of the Cliffs blazed up as if about to speak or shout. Then she turned and strode out of the hall, straight into the relative dark of the twilight forest, her red-gold hair all but crackling.

Clare looked at Finn. He, too, turned stiffly away. There was a terrible pause. Then he knocked her chair to the ground and rounded on her. “What are you doing here?” His voice was high with anger and fear. “You left the key for anyone to find, for Balor to find! You left the tree unprotected!”

“I was, I was, I almost got
killed.
I was in danger in that castle, I spent the whole night there with him and his totem, it was the most disgusting—”

“I gave you the stone. You had the stone for protection.” His eyebrows bending furiously.

“I
used
the stone. I used it to protect someone else, and it might have—”

“That is not what the stone was for. It was to protect you, so that you could protect the tree.”

It was a hornet sting to her heart, and the cold poison spread.
So that you could protect the tree.
So that was her only reason for existence, to him, to these people. Guardian of the tree. It had made her feel so proud; and now it made her feel small and used.

She said, with all the hornet's poison in her voice: “I would never let a
friend
die
just to save the stone for your stupid tree” (her yew-touched heart turned over to hear her own ugly words) “and your stupid road. My friend might be dead anyway”—her voice cracked, which was infuriating—“or she might not, I don't know. But at least I tried.”

A look crossed Finn's face that might have been shame; or it might have just been pain. “If only you had stayed in the house,” he said, “there were protections for you there. With you gone, and with the key perhaps in his hand, or soon to be—ah, the yew is in terrible danger.”

“He's your enemy, not mine,” said Clare. “He's your
grandfather
, not mine.” Finn's face went blank with pain, and Clare felt a rush of shame, and raised her voice to drown it out. “So why don't you go
get
him? Why was it all on me? I'm just
one person
, and I don't have all your . . .
magic
or whatever. Why don't you all go STOP him?”

“At Midsummer, we will,” said Finn, struggling to recover his aloofness. “At Midsummer, we ride. Her will allow me to lead the Hunt. We ride as a host, at Midsummer and Yule, and we cannot
ride before. We must hope the tree can withstand Balor until then.”

“Midsummer is FOUR DAYS away. What do you mean you can't ride?” asked Clare (thinking:
my birthdays are that close. Dad, come home
). Now her voice was high and fearful. “Is it some stupid RULE or something? Just get on your, on your horses or whatever and RIDE, and KILL him.” She felt light-headed with anger.

“You're a fool.” Finn made no pretense of cool now. “You know so much less than you should know. He cannot be killed, for one, only caught and shackled where he can do no harm. And no, we cannot ride before the time, because of the way the sunlight travels on the . . . ach, it doesn't matter why! It's how it is!”

Silence rang between them, and Clare realized that the table was silent, too. Everyone had been listening. A cold voice rose up from somewhere along the mirroring, flickering table. “Why hunt this year, after all?” it said. “Why hunt ever again?”

The question dropped into the silence like a stone in a pool. A babble of voices arose around it. The conversation that had been sweet music was now a dissonant symphony.

“We hunt!” Finn's voice rose above the crowd. “We hunt, or Balor fells the fairy roads, wrecks every gate.”

“And so?” responded the first voice. Scattered laughter. “Leave the human world to suffer alone, without making or dreams.
We
will still have making.”

“But we will not have love,” said Finn, so softly that Clare thought perhaps the table had not heard him. But their silence said they had.

“Love is a child's fantasy,” said a different voice. “It is foolish play. We do not need love.”

“We do—” Finn began, with a note of desperation, then broke off.

Her of the Cliffs had emerged from the forest. Against the dark trees, she was made of light, snakes of gold and coppery fire writhing about her. As she walked back to the head of the table, she paused for a word in Finn's ear, and his whole body tensed. But when she reached her place and turned to face them all, Her of the Cliffs was calm. “I, too, wonder why we ride, when Clare cares so little as to leave her key lying on the ground unguarded, for anyone to find.” She cast a hard look down the table to Clare, who dropped her head. “But no matter the work of a witless girl. We are the host of the air. At Midsummer, we hunt.”