The Radiant Road (32 page)

The dark packets trembled. The wind had stopped, but they trembled still. They rocked back and forth, moved from the inside.

And then a sound rippled across the meadow, a tiny splitting or tearing sound, catching and repeating from flower to flower. Each dark packet split open, each dusky egg cracked, and from each one, a white wet thing pushed its way out.

Now, on the stem of each flower, each white creature stood, tremulous, waiting. And as the creatures dried in the deepening cold, each one blossomed billowing white wings.

Clare shivered, watching them, and pulled her arms more tightly around herself.

The wind silent, the water silent, the cold dropping deeper. Each white butterfly shook its wings and spread them to dry in the cold, heavy air. The meadow was a field of wavering white about to take wing: and then they did, the white butterflies did rise up, and it was as if the field of white flowers were ascending into the white sky.

And just at that moment, it began to snow. The snow fell in gentle flakes, like white petals falling from the sky. The butterflies rose to meet the snow, like white flowers fluttering upward. The air was a mass of snow and white wings like white petals.

Clare's face was wet, not only from the snow, and her head felt full of space and light. “But no one will see this,” she whispered, almost no more than breath.

“I see it,” said Finn, just as soft. “And you see it. This is my making, that I have meant so long to show you. My making that I made a little for you to see.”

He faced her, took one of her hands, and put the other about her waist. Her red hair was spangled with white crystals; his face was dusted with snow. In the white, fluttering silence, they danced to a melody they heard not with their ears, but somewhere deep inside.

“We started in all colors,” said Clare, as they swayed together among the snowflakes and white wings. It was a silly thing to say, but she didn't think of that at all, because she no longer thought
that, with Finn. “We started in all the colors, in the earth rainbow. And now we've come out in whiteness.”

“Ah,” said Finn, “but have you never seen a prism? White is the work of all the colors. Our colors made this white.”

Clare thought of a line in her commonplace book—she could see it in her mind, in her mother's looping blue: “Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,/Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” Maybe it was something about human and Timeless? Maybe that poet had known.

She felt a familiar pang for that lost book; and then she let it go, let the pages of the book flutter away with the butterflies.

The unheard melody rose as the snowflakes fell. And the boy with the moon in his eye and the girl with the star at her throat danced and danced and danced.

That night, when Clare returned home and climbed up to her loft to go to bed, she noticed something dark and square tucked among the branches of the tree. Turning on her bedside lamp, she plucked it out.

It was a small book, its cover thickly overlaid with lovely, eccentric drawings—tangled green vines, roots writhing among one another, and tall trees with entwining branches.

When Clare opened the book, she said, “Oh,” aloud, with gratitude and awe, and sat down on the bed. It was her own commonplace
book. But every page had been illuminated with gorgeous drawings: dark green needle-fronds, and winding vines, and tangling roots the color of cinnamon sticks. Every line in the book bore some decoration, including her own poems.

She held it to her chest. She put her hand to the tree beside her. She said, “Thank you, thank you. It's beautiful.”

A month or so later, when her father's hands were their strong steady selves again, and his sunken cheeks had filled back up from the food he cooked for them both, they stood on their rocky beach with the box of Clare's mother's ashes.

Clare had never told her father the end of the story, with Balor buried beneath the ocean, so she could not ask him if it wasn't strange to send the ashes out onto the same water beneath which Balor lay buried. But it didn't feel wrong somehow. Because she knew that the ocean was the grandmother of the whole world—even of Balor, just the same as of her mother—and was big enough to contain it all.

The color of the sea that day was a brilliant blue, with only a bit of gray beneath, and the water cast a million bits of brightness back to the sun. The air was windless and waiting.

Clare and her father each took a handful of those lovely ashes.

“To your home, your home, back to your home, my dearest love,” said her father, and flung his handful as hard and far as he could.

“To the arms of the kindest grandma,” said Clare, and threw hers, too.

And the ashes were caught on an upsweep of air, like a surge of joy, and they spread and dissolved on the sudden breeze, and Clare felt a familiar scent of wild orchid and roses and joy sweep past her along with them. “Oh,” she said, and turned to her father to see if he had felt it too, and he was smiling, and his eyes were full and wet.

Clare and her father lived together for years in their stone egg, tucked under the earth by the side of the sea. When she grew up, her father moved not far away, and her mother's and her grandmothers' house became her own home. She lived there all her life, though she often left to travel in Timeless and other places. But she always came back, because the sea is always both home and destination, the root and the flower, the source and the endpoint of every road, if you travel long enough, even fairy roads, as Jo had said
.
And although she grew tall enough to take the bed downstairs, and had a daughter who took her old loft room, Clare somehow never grew too tall to slip inside her yew tree. Or perhaps it grew along with her. At any rate, she never left her home and its in-between for long.

All her life, Clare felt the Strange. But now she no longer drew back from it—she ran to it, because she knew it was a friend, a friend who was making, or dreaming awake. And more often than
not, it was Finn's making, Finn who stayed her best and truest companion all her life.

Clare never stopped making: in the poems she wrote—and she became known for her poems—but also in her garden, in the meals she made, in drawing and singing and stories, all those ways of dreaming awake. And whenever she made, she tried to make true: as true as Finn's butterfly snow; as true as the endless conversation of the trees; as true and as changing as the
moon.

Acknowledgments

If you want to see what I think fairy-makings look like, look for the art of Andy Goldsworthy, whose work greatly inspired this book.

My other inspiration was something my niece Emma told me about her dreams when she was eight or nine. But I'm not going to tell someone else's dreams, so you'll have to ask her.

The character Jo was based in part on my aunt Jolene, who died while this book was in edits. I miss her.

Two borrowings I must acknowledge:

When Jo says, “Those that are away among them never return. Or if they do, they are not the same as they were before”—that's something a woman of the Irish Burren once told the poet W. B. Yeats, as quoted in the excellent book
Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness.

Also: as a child I loved an old book called
Maida's Little Shop.
At one point late in that book, someone tells a story in which a lady in the moon throws a golden carpet across the ocean for a girl to walk on. Only quite recently, just before I began writing these acknowledgments, did I remember that story; and just like Clare, I said, “Oh,
that's
where I got that moonlight path.” The girl in the story's name is Klara, too. It's funny how the stories you read in childhood become part of you.

And now my many thanks:

Thanks times a billion to my sister and brother-in-law Nancy and Gene Matocha, whose generosity in letting me stay at their gorgeous mountain cabin gave a huge boost to both the writing and revising of this book.

Thanks to my yoga teacher Steven Ross for teaching the practice called “the moon in your mouth,” and for being Scottish, so that I got that accent stuck in my head.

Thanks to Jeanne Frontain, my brilliant first reader, whose thoughtful comments helped more than I can say. I'm also grateful to her for pointing me at the wonderful book
Meeting the Other Crowd
, a collection of modern reports of Irish fairies.

Thanks to my excellent agent, Dave Dunton; I still feel lucky he signed me.

Thanks beyond measure to my superb editor, Julie Strauss-Gabel, whose story edits made this book so much better, and me so much happier with it. Thanks also to Andrew Karre for his super-smart and insightful line edits, and to all the generous talents at Penguin Young Readers who made this book more precise and more beautiful.

And mainly thank you to Ken, whom I love, and who teaches me how to be
brave.

KATHERINE CATMULL
is a writer and actor in Austin, Texas. Her first book,
Summer and Bird
, was named one of
Booklist's
Top Ten First Novels for Youth and was both an IndieBound New Voices Pick and an Amazon Editors' Pick.

Visit her online at
katherinecatmull.com

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