The Radiant Road (10 page)

“Finn is that boy,” said Clare. “He's half human. That's why he was a baby, and grew up.”

“Yes.”

“And I am the girl,” said Clare, wondering to find her own story coming in at the end of such a long, strange one. “And my house was built to hide and protect him.”

“Yes,” said Her of the Cliffs. “But the story is not over. Now I must give you your warning.”

Clare straightened as well as she could against the raging wind.

“Did Finn tell you that in the past year, the destruction of the gates has increased? All over your world, gates have been demolished, chopped down, poisoned.”

“He did say something like that, but that you don't know why?”

“Now we know,” said Her of the Cliffs. “Balor has come to suspect that the baby, the grandson prophesied to destroy him, did not die that day. He has been destroying the gates to preserve his own safety, as he believes—in order to keep the boy from entering the human world to destroy him. He will separate our two worlds entirely and forever, to keep that from happening.”

“Is Finn going to destroy him?”

Her of the Cliffs shrugged. “It is the prophecy. Prophecies come true in their own ways. Balor knows for certain that Finn survived. But he must sense something of the importance of the yew tree and the home we built around it, and now he sniffs about it like a wild dog.”

Her of the Cliffs paused, and a swell of her Strange power swept through Clare like a wave. “Clare the guardian,” she said, with something like gentleness: “that was Balor of the Evil Eye who found you at the castle. Understand: the wolf comes for you now—not just for
the roads, but for you, because you are the guardian of the tree. He comes to your door. At all costs, Clare—at all costs—protect the tree. Do not let him in. And keep my gift and Finn's gift with you at all times, especially outside your home. In your home, there is some protection. Out of your home, there is none, except those gifts.”

Clare closed her fingers more securely around the fruit, or whatever it was, in her left hand.

“And not only you are in danger,” the woman continued. The wind had tugged strands of hair from its clip, so that threads of red-gold danced around her head like little flames. “So is anyone who loves or helps you. So is your own father, who in hazard soon will leave you.”

“He would never do that!” Clare shouted into the wind.

But he did, he did, he did.

Deep Voice and Dark Eye

That night, Clare sat with ankles locked around her chair, writing in her notebook. Notes for a new one. After many crossed-out words and lines, she had

In a belly of earth and stone, two eggs—

The color of winter,

The color of autumn—

Held in the root-claw nest

Of a brooding tree.

It was not satisfying.
Brooding
was good because it meant two things, but she didn't know if the tree actually
was
very brooding. It felt happier than that. Also, she liked a poem to do something or other with rhythm or rhyme, and this one just sort of sat there.

So what: just a note for a poem. She went to bed, thinking:
Making is hard. I hope it gets easier.

As she slept, Clare dreamed she was deep underground, in a black, hot place. Across from her lay a great round dish or pool, but the pool was full of fire, not water. Above the pool, hung on the wall by
a looping black thread, was a mask, like a comedy mask, a laughing mask. In one of the eyeholes sat a perfect white egg.

Behind her, an animal groaned. Clare whirled, somehow certain that someone had fallen in the fire. And yes: the flames roared higher now, as if they had been fed. But she could see nothing inside them.

When she turned back, the mask's face had become tragedy, and its mouth was open in grief or horror. Its eye-egg had broken, and was a scramble of blood and yellow flesh and light.

Clare woke up sweating, her heart drumming hard. Thin gray light filtered through the quartz. Her left hand was closed tight around something—the woman's gift. She saw that it
was
a fruit of some kind, she had been right about that: oval and dark red.

“Clare?” her father called. It sounded like he'd been calling for a while. “I know it's early, but I need you down here.”

“Coming!” she called back. The previous evening flooded back: the woman of the cliffs (the woman, whom she had been so eager to leave, but whom she now somehow longed to return to); the warning about Balor, and about the wolf (did they have wolves in Ireland?); the story of Finn.

As she dressed, she put the fruit in her pocket next to the obsidian. It was strangely silent below.

“Dad!” she called. No answer.

She climbed quickly down—nothing—and out the door, where with weird relief, she found him. He was looking at his phone with a worried expression, holding his hair up with one hand. So she returned inside and sat near the yew, pushing at the trunk with her feet. She was thinking hard. She wondered if she could talk to her father about any of this, which seemed like a crazy idea, but sometimes he surprised her.

But when he came back in and sat down at the edge of the couch with an absent, worried look, all those thoughts dropped away.

“I'd hoped to put this off while we settled in, but I've dawdled too long—there's been a second cave-in at the mine, and now some men are trapped. If I don't go, they could die.” He ran his hand through his hair unhappily. “They could die anyway. So we have to leave this morning, right away. Get dressed, my girl, and pop some breakfast in you?”

Clare hesitated, and glanced at the yew. It didn't feel right to leave it after what she'd heard yesterday. “Do I have to go?” she asked. “How long will you be gone?”

Her father looked surprised. “I hadn't thought of leaving you here,” he said. “But it's true: Ireland not being Texas, the mine is only a two-hour drive from here. I could be back after dinner tonight. Still, we're so new here . . .” He paused.

Clare saw his indecision. “I'll stay. It's no big deal. If anything goes wrong, which it won't, I can find Jo, right?”

“Oh!” he said, jumping up. “I'd completely forgotten this.” He dug through a nest of shopping bags, then triumphantly held up a phone—just a small flip phone, but still, Clare was glad to see it.

“I meant to give you this after dinner, only you had an early night.” Clare nodded, self-conscious and a bit guilty. “It's only temporary until I can get you a proper one with data and so forth that works here. Look, I've put in my number, and Jo's as well.”

“So really, if I have a phone, there's no reason to worry, right?”

“Well,” he said. “Still I hate to leave you alone a whole day in a new country.”

“I was born here,” said Clare.

Her father smiled. “So you were.”

A few minutes later—minutes crammed with paternal admonitions about staying safe, eating sensibly, and not hesitating to call—her father had packed up his laptop and they were standing by the car. “Ach, I almost forgot—take the key, so you're not trapped inside all day. Don't lose it, as it's the only one I know of.”

He gave her a quick kiss and a long hug and climbed in the car. Just as he was turning the key, Clare had a thought. She ran to the car window. “Mom's ashes,” she said. “We were going to decide this morning.”

Her father put his hand on her face. His eyes were sad. “I know, sweet,” he said. “But they have waited, and they will wait a little longer. I promise it won't be long. At least you're here with those lovely ashes now.” He pulled back to look at her. “I'm sorry to leave you, Clare,” he said. “But I will come back tonight. Tell me now: is it okay? Do you feel all right, staying alone?”

All the worry in his voice.

“Sure, of course,” Clare said, though her heart said suddenly:
I don't know.

Her father kissed her face and smiled. “Stay safe,” he said. The tires crunched the rocks, and he was gone.

Who in hazard soon will leave you.

She felt in her pocket for the black stone Finn had given her and held it so tight her hand warmed around it.

Clare slipped through the small passageway and into the empty house, trailing fingers on the stone. She made toast and washed the plate. She sat for a while in the in-between, and felt safe there, and a little lonely. She and Finn had not spoken much after the cliffs yesterday. She wondered what it was like, to grow up with such a prophecy around you. It must feel a little heavy, and a little sad.

She wondered what it was like in Timeless and thought of trying the way Finn had shown her, holding the root and imagining.
But after what she had heard from Her of the Cliffs, she didn't want to go so far from her tree.

Idea: the gate at the castle. She had almost had its key, almost learned to unlock it. She would go back to see if she could finish the job. From the castle, she could keep her hill always in sight.

She ran upstairs to get her commonplace book and pen, in case that made it easier. She felt in her bones that she could not simply repeat the game from yesterday—it would have to be some new kind of playing. Carefully she locked the old door behind her and slipped the long iron key into her pocket.

But at the castle Clare found it was hard to get in the mood to play, for what Her of the Cliffs had said haunted her. She took her notebook up to the top of the castle wall, in order to keep an eye on her tree, though she knew it was silly. Straddling the wall, she opened the notebook to the frustrating poem from last night. After a dozen scratches out and false starts, she finally jotted a note underneath it:

I was born the same day as the prophesied boy. Am I part of the prophecy
?

Adding, after some thought:

The one-eyed man.

Unable even to pretend these were notes for poems, she shut the notebook and lay back along the wall, watching the clouds gather
and darken. “Rain, rain,” she sang idly. “Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day, I think this gate wants me to play, rain, rain, go away.” She laughed to herself and swung down inside the castle, began her point-step walk again, arms out like a ballet dancer, notebook still in one elegantly cocked hand. “Rain, rain, go away,” she sang, point-stepping beside the wall, “come again some other day,” stepping balletically past the vine-covered door; “I think this gate wants me to—”

And the notebook was snatched from her hand. As she whirled around, her angry thought was
Finn, DON'T
.

But it wasn't Finn, and her anger turned to terror, and she backed away. Her mother's green, cloth-covered notebook looked small in the large hand of black-haired, one-eyed Balor.

To make it worse, he was smiling his masklike smile, as if nothing were wrong at all. “I thought I might find you here again,” he said. “I have your umbrella. And it would seem that we share an interest in ancient history.” Clare must have looked blank, because he gestured around the castle. “I'm so sorry to have interrupted your . . . performance.” The smile became a smirk.

Clare flushed as red as she ever had. “Give me that, please,” she said, holding out her hand. “It's mine.” Her stupid voice was shaking.

“Oh, it's yours, then, is it?” said Balor. His voice was deep as a
lake, and every word a rippling black wave. “Are you”—he squinted at the notebook with his right eye, while his left remained open and staring—“‘Áine Quinn, Fifth, no,
Sixth
Class'?” He glanced at her. “You look a bit old for it.”

“It was my mother's,” said Clare. “And now it's mine.” Panicky anguish rose in her chest as he continued to thumb through it.

“Ah, I see. Yes, the handwriting changes, from good schoolgirl to sloppy mess. And the taste in poetry goes from simperingly pretentious to merely bad.” He snapped the book shut and put it in his pocket.

“It's mine,” Clare repeated. Her voice sounded absurdly small and petulant. Or worse, as if she might cry. The fruit and the stone in her pocket felt small.

Suddenly Balor was standing quite close to her, too close. “Clare,” he said, low and near her ear, “give me the key.”

She stumbled back several steps and did not reply. He neither followed nor took his eye from her. “Give me the key to your house,” he repeated. “I have tried to get in without it, but that house has deep and very old protections around its lock. So give me the key.”