The Radiant Road (12 page)

Clare shook her head, jaw still set, eyes on her mother's book splayed on the ground. A few fat drops of rain fell, spattering the notebook, dripping cold down her face. The wind rose and whined, lifting her hair.

Balor was close to her now. He leaned down, his breath hot and oily against her ear, and said low: “My totem is preparing. I could have it kill you, and then wait until your father comes home, and persuade him to let me in. Or I could simply wait and have it kill your father. Do not mistake me, Clare. You and I are not playing a game here. I have already won.”

Blood throbbed in Clare's throat; she thought she might faint. The wind was high and wild now, and the rain was a storm. Water slid down her face and under her sweater.

Balor pulled away, but his black eyes held hers. “Or you can give me the key, now,” he said. “You don't even have to hand it to me, you know. You could simply drop it on the ground and walk away, as simple as that.”

Without warning, the wind and rain stopped. In the sudden silence, Clare heard an odd noise, a dry noise, like a rattle or a scratching. Something scratching in the silence, just above and behind her. She wanted to look, but she held her head steady.

Balor did not look, because he knew the sound; he knew it well.

The scratching came again, louder, followed by a rattle like a snake's. The dry sound echoed off the stone walls until it seemed to come from everywhere. Clare held the obsidian tighter in one fist.

Gray, anxious light filtered down through the looming clouds. By now Clare's heart pounded like a stampede. She didn't want to look up to see what made the rattling, scratching sound. She was afraid that she knew what it was.

She was right. Above them, hovering in the air, was the openmouthed, mad-eyed totem. Clare couldn't see what was holding it up.
Something must be, it must be
, she said to herself, though she knew nothing was.

The totem dragged itself and its silent scream along the stone wall across from Clare, then back a little, then toward it again. That was the rattle—the stick dragging itself along the stones, back and forth. Its hideous face frowned down on her, its slashing, open mouth, painted with a hand of rage. The gray sky glowed around it.

Wind and rain had begun again, stirring the air like a frantic sea.

The totem's mouth yawned open. Clare was as frozen as a mouse watching a snake. Why not give up the key? Why protect the tree—to make sure people could have
dreams
at night, and make up stories, and draw stupid pictures? How was that worth her life, or her father's life? How could a rock and a piece of fruit protect her
from that thing? As the rain and wind battered her from all sides, hopelessness and despair washed through her. What did it matter, what did anything?
Fairies
, god.

In her right hand she still held the obsidian tight. Her left hand slipped down to her pocket, where the key lay heavy and cold.

And at that moment, a low voice, warm and clear as a clarinet, cut through the rain and wind.

“Clare!” Jo called. “Clare, it's all right, I'm here.”

Down the Fairy Road

Relief swept through Clare like a clean wind: it was Jo, it was Jo, everything would be all right now. Jo crossed to face Balor, who stood with his back to the totem. She murmured, “Move clear, child.”

Defending me. I have a protector
. She walked a few yards from Jo, but not too far.

Jo raised her voice. “I know you for what you are, old Balor.”

Clare closed her hand around the obsidian.

“And you're not welcome here, or anywhere near here,” she continued. “I've protected that house all my life, and I'll protect it now, and you'll never see the inside of it. And this girl is my girl, and I am taking her out of your wicked grasp.” She pulled her phone out and dialed three quick numbers.

“Oh, Jo,” he said. “Oh, Jo, we are enemies, then. But I have been expecting someone to come for this girl, and I am well prepared.”

As the storm receded, the totem's ratcheting against the stone walls was loud, loud. Jo was talking into the phone, but Clare couldn't hear what she said.

Then the totem stopped.

“Clare, run,” said Jo. Her voice was steady, but somehow Clare felt afraid.

“Yes, Clare,” said the man, mocking. “Run, run, run, as fast as you can!”

Jo and Balor stood facing each other, only yards apart. He seemed twice Jo's size, though that couldn't be right.

“The summoning is complete.” Balor's voice was intense, galvanized, but he stood relaxed beneath the totem and its widening jaws. He did not look up. He looked only at Jo.

Clare stayed.

A wind arose. Winds start from far away; but this one seemed to come from within the ruined castle itself. It started low and slow, but within a minute it howled and spun inside the castle walls, and the light grew grayer still, almost black. Clare could hardly see. The winds whipped so wildly it was hard to stay upright.

Jo stumbled, then straightened, her hair blown hard around her face. The phone dropped from her hand.

Balor stood still. The wind did not touch him at all. He opened his mouth, as if to scream, but he didn't scream. His mouth made the shape of the mouth of the totem hanging above him. Balor made his mouth as if to scream: but the scream itself, a shattering howl of rage, came not from him, but from the totem.

As the totem screamed, three things happened at once. The first was a realization: Clare said to herself, in astonishment,
Oh, it was my mother's eye, that was the eye in the stone.

The second was that, as the scream began, Clare threw the obsidian in her hand to Jo. She threw as if her body had chosen for her—the stone was flying from her hand before she thought. And although Clare had always had a good eye and good aim, this time her arm and hand knew before her eye, and threw with speed and surety.

It's a bit of shield—not a big bit, but a bit enough.

But a third thing happened, too, as the totem screamed. It was as if that howl of rage were a taut line, pulling some dreadful fish from the depths of the totem. But this fish was a bolt of lightning. For a split second, the ruined castle lit up in a bright white light. The flash was so bright that Clare could see every crumbling detail, even on the highest stones. She threw her hand in front of her eyes.

But she had seen, she had already seen, that the bolt had come through the totem's mouth, as if it were part of the scream, or the same as the scream.

And she had seen that the bolt was headed straight for Jo.

An enormous cracking sound, as if the air itself had cracked in half, as if the thunder were in the castle with them. Clare stumbled to keep from falling backward.

In a moment, the light was rain-dim again, and Clare's eyes, still adjusting from the flash, couldn't find Jo at all. But in the crackling
silence, she thought she had heard Balor give a bark of anger and pain.

As her eyes refocused, Clare saw Jo was stretched across the ground, too still, too still.
Is she dead?
Clare's feet flew toward her.

The top of Jo's shirt was burnt and blackened, and beneath it, on the skin above her heart, was a rough, wide triangle, boiling red, in the shape of the totem's open mouth.

But in the center of the red triangle was a square of healthy skin, untouched by the totem's electric scream—a square exactly the size of Finn's black stone.

Was she alive? Clare didn't know how to tell. As she reached a shaking hand toward Jo's face, she grew aware, suddenly, of the silence behind her. She turned.

Balor's good eye burned at her. On the flesh of his throat was a fresh brand, boiling red, in the shape of that same square stone. It must have reflected the lightning bolt back at Balor himself.

“I don't know where you got that stone,” he rasped. “But you'll pay for that, little girl. And if there's anyone else you want to call, I'll do the same to them. Remember that, when you think of calling anyone else.”

My father, he means.

“Unless, of course,” said Balor, his living and his dead eye both fixed upon her now, “unless, Clare, you want to let all this go, stop
the pain and death you're causing with your stubbornness, and simply hand me that key.”

Clare looked into Balor's face, then into the totem's gasping, silent scream above him. She looked at Jo's limp hand in her own hand.

She felt her other hand move toward the key in her pocket.

Outside the castle, the alien whine of an Irish police car, the thumping of car wheels over the field. But
I have friends everywhere that matters, powerful friends, who owe me a great deal.

She saw Finn's face. She smelled the licorice wood-scent of the in-between.

Shouting voices. The cool iron of the key. Balor's eye.

Clare saw what she had to do.

As the police poured into the castle, Clare slipped away, snatching her notebook off the ground as she left, because it was her mother's, and because she could not bear to leave it in Balor's disgusting hands.

Outside the castle, Clare hesitated.
Home
was her first impulse, but even if she could reach it before Balor ran her down, wouldn't that only draw him there, with his police friends?

She heard his furious voice from the castle: “Yes, yes—call your captain, he can explain—get out of my way.” That decided her. She ran for the closest woods. In these woods she had once followed
Finn's flute, but this time she followed no path at all, but crashed through underbrush looking for a place to hide.

Under a mass of vines draped around a fallen log, she stopped, breathing hard. Through brush and branches she could just see the castle and yes, now, Balor emerged and spoke to a policeman loitering outside, who shrugged. He looked around sharply as if deciding—woods, field, road?—then strode decisively toward Clare's home.

Outside, there is no protection
: but now there was no choice. She could not go home. She waited until Balor was out of sight; until the police and ambulance people were all inside the castle. Then she ran, not toward her home and tree, but away.

Running away meant abandoning the tree, but she could not trust herself. If she had stayed with Balor and his totem a minute longer, she might have handed him the key. She was that close to despair, at what had happened to Jo, at the danger to her father, at the sickening face of the totem.

Key safe in her pocket, she ran. But where?

No stranger you can trust.
I have friends everywhere that matters.

Except one place. There was one place Balor had no friends, where she could find help to protect the tree, protect her father, protect herself. She had to get into Timeless, into the dreaming place.

She could trust no human stranger, but she could trust Finn and
his people—anyway, she could trust Finn. She had to find another gate into Timeless, and where else but the fairy road itself?

Running, Clare kept the ruined castle and her own distant stone window in a line behind her. She hoped that Finn's Cap, whatever it was, would turn up before she lost sight of them. She felt exposed, a panicked fledgling again; and when she turned to look behind her, it was not only to keep the hill and tree in line. She was also watching for Balor, or worse, his terrible servant.

Black-faced sheep, pale wool marked with fluorescent stains of pink or green to show their owners, looked up as she stumbled past.

The thought that kept her moving, half running, half walking, through aching side and gasping breath, was that as long as she moved away from the tree, she kept the tree safe. Her father, too: it was safer for them to be apart.
If he is safe right now—but he is, he has to be. He must be so worried for me.

She did not know that her father was at that moment buried a thousand feet beneath the earth, too deep for any seed.

And she didn't know that she herself ran not like a hunter, stealthy and light, but heedless, leaving a wide trail, like prey.

The wind rose and rushed through the grass around her. It felt portentous to Clare, like the part of a story when you know the climax has to come, and the knowing is almost unbearable. With
the rising wind came a rising sense of Strange, and she knew she must be close.

Rain followed the wind, sweeping across the field behind her. And below a little rise, just as the rain was upon her, she saw Finn's Cap.

It was unmistakable: a huge stone, nearly the size of a small car, balanced on two smaller stones. And the top stone looked like a cap, high and rounded at one end, tapering gently down like an elongated bill at the other.

As she pelted toward it, shaking wet hair from her eyes, Clare almost laughed with relief. She had reached a gate into the Strange—where Finn lived, where Her of the Cliffs could offer her advice and protection, where the key would be safe. And they could help her make sure her father was all right.

But when she reached the Cap, she stopped, hands pressed against the wet rock. She'd almost forgotten that she still had to discover the key. With a deep breath, she tried to force her pounding heart to match the gentle patter of the rain.

There was Strange here, for sure. All the hairs on her arms were rising up. What was its flavor, though; what did it ask of those who would enter? Something light—a lightness? She tried, tentatively, laughing:
ha-ha-
ha
. She pushed her diaphragm harder:
hahahahahaha.

Stupid. She didn't feel like laughing. And it wasn't a jokey kind
of lightness she was feeling, anyway—more daring, more free, some sort of complicated joy. It was something about . . .
letting go of control
? No, there was controlling, but then also . . . not controlling? Giving control to something else?

This didn't help. Her heart began to work faster again, not from running now but from rising panic. She didn't have time to feel through this problem in the dark, to listen like a safecracker for the lock's clicking combination. Balor might not wait at her house for long—he could be on his way looking for her now.

Or he might have found some other way in. He might be with her tree. Her throat closed up.
I have already won.

All right. Try. If it's giving up control, then maybe if she just lay perfectly still . . . She scanned the field anxiously for watchers or walkers, then looked again at Finn's Cap. Of course: it seemed made for shelter.
Like to see Balor take this cap down
, she thought, as she slipped into the narrow space between the earth and the capstone,
after it's
stood for five thousand years with no protection at all.

Under the stone, the feeling of Strange was stronger. Clare looked out at the world through a frame of stones.
Like my window
, thought Clare, and the thought was calming. All right.
Try giving up control.
She lay on her back and closed her eyes.

Almost immediately, blood pounded in her head. Her fingers
twitched. The face of the totem rose up in her mind and her heart started up again, faster than ever. She lay still for a minute, nearly two. Then she noticed she was holding her breath and let it out in a rush of frustration.