The Radiant Road (16 page)

The power of her command was like a wave rocking the room. And yet the silence that followed felt uneasy.

“If Balor has the key,” ventured a voice, “if he blocks the yew gate, then, what then?”

“The key is already—” Finn cut himself off. He began again: “If Balor blocks the tree, well, Clare is its guardian. She will find a way to open it.”

Clare stared at him, shocked. The table's silence seemed equally skeptical.

“You say she will find a way,” said a new voice, low and gruff, “but she is no maker.”

“She is,” said Finn, hotly. “And I was teaching her our making ways, only—”

“To open a gate, you must be a true maker, as we are makers. And you're no true maker till you know your beast,” said the gruff voice.

Clare felt a chill. “What does that mean?” she murmured.

Something like fear crossed Finn's face. “No matter,” he said. “He is wrong, I'm sure he is. A human maker need never confront the beast. Still. I have much to teach you in the next four days, and—”

“I can't wait here
four days
,” she protested. “My dad would go
nuts
.” A thought surfaced. “He's not home, but can I go to him where he is, at the mine or wherever he is?” She thought of the roots of the yew tree and how Finn knew how to follow those paths all over the world. Hope colored her heart.

“No,” said Finn. “That is far too dangerous.” Clare opened her mouth to argue. “Dangerous for him,” he added. “It is playing into Balor's hand, do you see?”

Her of the Cliffs nodded. “Balor means to use your father to lure you out so he can kill you both. To keep your father alive, you
must stay away. That is nothing like safety, but it is all your father has.”

Clare flushed with frustration and anger, from the top of her head down to her feet. “All right,” she said bitterly. “I didn't think of that.” Her voice rose as the heat rose. “But I'm not staying here, where no one cares about my tree or my dad but me. I don't care.” She surveyed the table, not sure whom to address, so raising her voice to address them all. “I'll protect them on my own. I don't know what I'll do, but I'll do
something
, and I won't need your help to do it. I'll go back through the island gate and find the key before Balor does. I will.”

And as if that heat were all she had had inside her, and now that it was expelled, she had nothing left, Clare fainted.

When Clare swam up from the dark water of unconsciousness, the noise of the banquet had resumed around her. But all she could see was Finn's dark face and worried eyes above hers, his long black elflocks making a curtain around his face and hers. Inside that dark curtain, just her face and his, all her anger and hurt disappeared. She felt secret and alone with him, as in the in-between, their breath tangling together like roots
.

“Finn,” she whispered. Perhaps because she was only half conscious, all her heart was in his name, and what she most wanted to
say was ready to be said. “Finn. I'm really sorry I said about him being your grandfather.”

His eyes clouded up like a wet morning, but the cloud passed. “You're right and well,” he said. “It's all of it right as rain, and there's nothing more right than rain. I myself am sorry for my harsh words. I was only afraid.” He smiled. “And I'm sorry, mad Clare, not to have shown you yet my making, my making I want you to see. But soon we will and soon enough.” It was the soothing tone you use with a sick child.

“Oh, but the key!” Clare cried. She struggled to sit, pushing her hair from her face. “Will you show me how to go back to the island so I can find the key and—”

Finn's smile faded. “Ah, no,” he said softly. “She has been to the island already and back, Her of the Cliffs has. The gate's been poisoned, by Balor no doubt, and the key is gone.”

Clare put a hand to the floor to keep herself sitting upright. “Then there was no point?” she asked. She felt shaken. “Everything I did, all the running, the keys I found, no point at all? I might as well have handed him the key as soon as he asked.”

“Every point, every point in the world,” said Finn. He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. “By coming here you've helped protect your father, is that no point? And you've kept yourself alive as well. And we don't know that Balor has the key, although . . .” He
paused, and Clare felt the hot flush of despair. Finn must have seen, because he tried to smile. “But even if it's the worst, girl, your yew has protections craftier than an iron lock. Some we've given it, some of its own. There's hope he cannot use it yet.”

A little comforted, Clare couldn't bear Finn's kind gaze. Her eyes drifted around the room until she frowned, remembering. “The people here,” she said. “Is it just a trick of the light? I see, I keep almost seeing—”

“Maybe something of a trick of the flames,” he interrupted her, as if he knew the question. “And a bit of something else as well. As we breathe, we make, and so . . . But, ah, don't worry about that now. You need to eat, I think.”

Clare felt her face go anxious and tight.

“It must be the stories again,” Finn said, now truly smiling his old sly smile. “Oh, the
fairy stories.
Have they ever been better than half wrong? Forget the stories; you've forgotten greater things. Here.”

He held out a goblet made of a gray metal and a silvery metal, woven together in long lines like the high horns of her white stag.

Finn's smile grew dryer. “Fear to drink from my own cup? Clare, listen: you're a changeling, and our food has fed you many times before. It will change nothing. Or perhaps,” he said, considering: “perhaps truer to say that any way it would change you, changeling, it changed you long ago.”

It was all she needed to hear. She drank a sweet and herby liquid from the cup, and it ran warmth through her veins. Finn helped her back to her chair and leaned against the table beside her. Chatter ran up and down the flickering forest-room, no one looking her way at all. Clare pulled apart the still-steaming bread, smeared it with butter, ate, drank the cool milk. From beside her, Finn laughed. She looked up. “No, then, hungry, don't stop for me. Eat.”

Clare scooped up puddles of butter with the fast-diminishing bread. The woman who sat beside her said to Finn, “You are taller, Finn, than when I saw you last. And is that a gray hair?”

Finn grunted—amused? annoyed?—and the people around them laughed. “Because I change,” he said—as if to Clare, but clearly for all to hear—“they fear me most, and love me best.” Those near them laughed again, and there were a few claps. Finn stood. “I hope you will excuse me as I return to my own meal,” he said.

“Oh, but wait,” said Clare, swallowing hastily. “Could you just tell me really quickly, just a very short explanation, of this thing about making and . . . beasts?” At that word, she thought of the creature at Finn's Cap, and the bread dried in her mouth. “Also, I need to figure out if Dad is okay, and just . . . I need to talk to you.”

He hesitated. “I must return now, else offend Her of the Cliffs, which is easy to do and ever a mistake. But after this meal, we will talk.” He smiled. “And I will be glad to talk, Clare Macleod.”

Still rather hungry, Clare looked regretfully at her empty plate—and found it piled up with strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and several other berries she didn't recognize, all of it swirled with something like honey, but not honey, something sweet and tasting of flowers.

“Change-poisoned,” murmured a throaty voice beside her.

“I'm sorry?” said Clare, startled away from her fruit. It was the woman in the ruby dress, with the high-piled dark-and-silver hair, who had looked almost like a rabbit in the weaving flames. She looked human now, though—a little older than her father, Clare guessed, with large, wide-set eyes that were the dark blue of a mountain lake threaded with ice. Her mouth was wide and smiling. “What is ‘change-poisoned'?” Clare asked politely.

“He has change in him, Finn,” the woman said. “He is made of human and Timeless both, and he can age. And he will die one day. He killed his mother, with his change-poison,” she added, selecting a long fragment of greenery from her plate. “She was my friend.”

“That wasn't his fault,” said Clare.

“He is Finn the Change-Poisoned,” the woman continued, “despite which, and because of which, he leads our Hunt to ruin Balor. That is the prophecy.”

“Will I go on the Hunt, too?” This had been weighing on Clare's
mind. She wasn't sure what she wanted the answer to be. “I'm the guardian of the yew tree,” she added.

Those mountain-lake eyes turned down in amusement. “I know. But that question is foolish. How hunt, with no beast to ride?”

Chastened, Clare ate a spoonful of nectar-drizzled fruit in silence. Then she cleared her throat. “May I ask you something?”

The woman turned her ice-threaded eyes to Clare. Clare cleared her throat again. “Can they . . . can you . . .” She stopped, shy. Then she tried again. “I don't know if it's just a trick of the light, but sometimes tonight, some of you looked, looked different than you look now. You looked like”—she took a deep breath—“like animals. Or maybe beasts?”

“Ah,” said the woman softly. Her eyes seemed to change shape, a little, in the changing light. “Ah, well, we make. Making is what we are. We make with water and earth and air. The way a dancer lifts and drops a hand, we make; as we breathe, we make.”

“What does that have to do with beasts, though?”

The woman lifted a single shoulder in a shrug of liquid grace. “In the same way that you can only ride, when you ride your beast—in that same way, you can only make,
truly
make, fairy-make, when you make with the help of your beast. My people . . .” She hesitated. “My people have grown so close to our beasts, the difference between us . . .” She rubbed thumb and forefinger together, a gesture
that said “a tissue's worth of difference,” or perhaps: “no difference at all.”

“And my people don't have beasts,” said Clare. She popped another berry in her mouth, feeling both relieved and sad.

The woman laughed like tumbling water, like tiny bells. “Of course you have beasts. And you make with your beasts, when you truly make. In your dreams, or in your better art: then you make with your beasts. Only you do not
know
that you make with your beasts. When you meet them in your dreams, you flee.” She laughed again. “I have so often seen it in your dreams: blind and terrified riders, fleeing their own horses. You are blind to your beasts, you leave them lonely. Which is why you will never make as we do.”

Ideas bubbled up in Clare's mind as this information sank in. “Has any human ever met her own beast?”

“And survived?” asked the woman. “Oh, surely not. I think not.” She licked up one last bit of lettuce from her closed bud of a hand, then watched the candlelight flicker in her flame-confused silver plate. “But I do not know, to tell the truth,” she said, still gazing down. “I know it would be dangerous to try. Some here believe that Balor was somehow defeated by his beast, and that is why he . . .” She trailed off. There was silence.

“If a human wanted to,” said Clare, knowing she sounded awkward and obvious, but feeling stubborn, “if someone, some human
wanted to get to know, or understand, or whatever, their beast, how would you start?”

The woman looked up. Her mountain-lake eyes had deepened to near black. “You would listen, Clare the Guardian,” she said. “Listen carefully. And know a beast can only speak in pain, or in pleasure, or in making.”

Clare scooped up the last bit of sweetness with the last spoonful of berries, feeling full and thoughtful. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. A sweet, soft exhaustion swept through her. She gave a huge, unexpectedly noisy yawn.

In an instant, the room went silent. Clare blinked, sleepy, and looked around.

The tableful of smilers were staring, unsmiling.

“She's falling asleep,” said a high, complaining voice from one end of the table.

“She mustn't fall asleep,” said the man whose once-pointed, sharky teeth were normal now.

Clare was frozen in confusion. Eating was all right, but she mustn't
sleep
while she was in this place?

“Send her back,” said a soft, papery voice. “If she falls asleep, she could destroy us all.”

“Finn, if she falls asleep . . .” began a whole chorus of voices, high and low, rough and clear. But Finn's own voice, deep for a boy, interrupted them.

“She won't fall asleep,” Finn said, sharp and even. He was striding toward her end of the table. “She won't before I've taught her how to dream. Come, Clare.”

She felt a hand on her arm. She was standing now; the table and chairs were gone.