The Radiant Road (26 page)

With no music to move to, they found a music between them. The dance swung outward, wide, so that they barely touched; and
the dance swung in close, so that they danced heart to heart. They swung each other off their feet, into the air, and they didn't come down, but rose dancing into the evening sky, and danced there as night fell around them. Clare saw the stars come out behind Finn; she saw that his hand as it moved left a brilliant, curving trail of stars from each finger.

She saw that Finn was made of stars.

She looked at herself, and saw that she was made of stars, too.
Oh,
everyone
is made of stars
, thought Clare,
of course they are, how funny I never noticed.

They danced together, trailing stars.

Clare woke up, eyes still closed, still made of stars.

The stars drained away as the world returned. Labyrinth. Yew-tree girl. Beast.

The Hunt that could not go on without the fairy flag.

Her own gate, closed to her.

Finn, with her arrow in his eye.

All these things—her own poison arrows of remorse and fear—wrenched Clare from the sweetness of sleep. She pushed against the beast's sleek hide, pressed herself to sitting, and opened her eyes. Surprised, she lifted her right hand. It was no longer bound to the beast's. Instead, her mother's silver chain and star were back around
her neck. The beast slept on, but Clare saw heavy links of silver around his neck as well.

The yew-girl was hanging by her knees over the well again. “Your turn,” she said. Her long green hair dragged through the dusty dead leaves of the well.

“How long was I asleep?” said Clare. “Was it long, do you know?” She felt anxiety mounting again. Unbelievable that she had fallen asleep, with less than a day to save everything that mattered.

The yew gave an upside-down shrug. “I don't know. Come by me. Tell your story up here.” She stretched out delicate brown fingers. “Hold hands with me, Clare.”

Clare rose, feeling strange and light without the beast's warm hand in hers. She put her hand to her star, and watched how, in his sleep, the beast put his hand to his own great star. “I don't know if I have time . . . ,” she began, and saw the pain in the yew-girl's face. “All right, yes, all right,” she said. “Sorry, and I do want to hold hands with you. I really do. Only I'm just so worried.”

“It's harder to worry upside down,” said the girl.

At the rim of the well, Clare dipped her hand into the leaves, then a whole arm, to see how far down they went: much farther than she could reach, at least. She said, “It actually doesn't seem safe, hanging over this well.”

“Oh no, it isn't safe,” said the yew-girl reassuringly. “There is
no
safe
.” (And Clare remembered Her of the Cliffs saying those words, in a rather different tone.) “Outside the seed-husk, no safety at all. But that's good! You know how that old story says, ‘The seed does not like to leave its little home. It holds the shell around itself, crying, “No, no, no!”'” She laughed.

“Um, I don't know that story,” said Clare.

“Well, the point of the story is, that the seed is so glad, when the husk is gone, to find it must fall and fly, touch and be touched. Oh, Clare,” she added, with an extra dollop of delight. “Come
see
how not safe it is up here!”

Reluctantly, Clare climbed up the edge of the stone well, awkwardly hooking one knee, then the other, on the overhanging branch, her knees beside the girl's, holding tight with both hands. It had been a long time since she'd hung from monkey bars.

Carefully, slowly, she let go her grip, until she hung straight down. Her star hit her in the face, so she tucked it inside her shirt. Clare was taller than the yew-girl, but the girl's hair was longer, so their tips of their hair tangled together, red and green, in the dry and dusty well.

The girl reached over and took Clare's hand in her own small, fine-boned one. At the touch, Clare felt herself open and soften, so much that she had to consciously tighten her knees on the branch so as not to slip off. It was what she had felt when her tree-roots had touched the yew's: cracked open, flooded with light.

The yew-girl put her other hand tenderly to Clare's face and caressed it, more like a mother than a child. “Clare, we missed you,” she said. “Asterion did, and I did. You were gone so long, so long. You were gone a million years, I think.”

“I'm sorry,” said Clare, with her whole heart. “I'm really, really sorry. How can I make it up to you?”

“Tell me a story,” said the girl. “A very, very good story that is yours, that you have made. I know you are still a maker, for you would not be my guardian, if you were not. Trees were the first makers, the first of all.”

“Trees were?”

The blind eyes blinked twice, and the girl laughed. “Clare,” she said. “We made this
world
. We take air and light and bring it underground, and turn it into food and life. Then we give our making to the world. We painted this whole dead and rocky world in pretty blues and greens. This whole world is our painting, our making. And so . . . ,” she added, cleverly, “what is
your
making? What story will you tell?”

Clare went silent, trying to think of one.

“Your
own
story, that
you
made, or make for me now,” the girl reminded her.

“I don't know if I . . .” Clare trailed off. She felt a hot flush, or maybe it was just that she was hanging upside down. She'd never made a story.

“Have you no makings at all?”

Clare was cut by the disappointment in her voice. “No, I'm so sorry. I mean, yes, sort of, but not really, just these . . . these sort of poetry things . . .”

The brown-and-green girl ran a hopeful thumb across Clare's knuckles. “Say one?”

Clare gritted her teeth and reached into her pocket for the commonplace book. “They're not very good,” she said, trying to wiggle it out of the pocket one-handed. “There are lots better poems in here, by other people, if you want to hear a real poem.”

“I want to hear
your
poem,” said the yew-girl, adding rather sadly, “though really I want to hear your story. I wish you could think of one.”

Regretfully, Clare released the yew-girl's hand. “One second,” she said. She pulled the pencil stub and the commonplace book from her pocket. On one of the right-side-up pages she wrote, with some difficulty,
Know what roots know: there is only one tree.

“I didn't want to forget that,” she said. “From your song.”

The yew-girl smiled and arched her back with pleasure.

Clare turned the book the other way and flipped to the back, where she made another note, this time for a future poem:
The secret makings of trees: pulling air and light from the world into their laboratories below the ground, creating food and breath and color for the world.

“That was because you gave me an idea for a making,” said Clare.

The yew-girl smiled, but added, with a little impatience, “Your poem, though.”

Clare looked at the poem she had been working on in her loft—a few days ago, she supposed, but it seemed like three lifetimes ago. She penciled some quick changes, then shoved the stub back in her pocket, and took the yew-girl's hand again. Her face felt heavy and strange with the weight of the blood running into it, but her spine felt light and free.

“Read,” said the girl.

Holding the book upside down in front of her face, Clare read.

Along the sea, the moonlight spills

A kind of path

For one with feet, not fins.

Bare feet and cold

Splash along this radiant road.

On water and light she runs

Toward stone and tree,

Toward home.

The finless girl flies to her Finn

Wrapped in the roots of the in-between.

“Oh,” sighed the yew. “‘Wrapped in the roots' is just how he was for so long! I
like
that making. And, Clare,” she added, both shy and sly: “Do you think I could have this book? That has your makings? Would you leave it here?”

Clare hesitated. It was hard to say no—and what if this was somehow the key? But it was her book, it had been her mother's book, and she couldn't find a way to open her hand and let it go.

“I can't,” said Clare, holding the small brown hand tighter. “I'm so sorry, sweet.”

The yew-girl turned her face away so Clare could not see her expression. Anguished, Clare asked, “Isn't there something else I can give you instead?”

“Well,” said the yew slowly, face still turned away, “you could tell me a moonlight road story. Would you? It's been
forever
. Say yes.”

“A what?” said Clare. She had tucked the book back into her pocket, was now reaching for the yew's hand again. A few feet away, the beast groaned and turned in his sleep. “What's a moonlight . . . Oh,
wait
.” A little waterfall of memories. Her mother sitting at the edge of her bed—her bed! the same bed she had now—telling her bedtime stories.

“Oh,
that's
where I got that moonlight path,” Clare said, soft. “I knew it was familiar. My mother used to tell me that for a bedtime story. It was always different, all these crazy adventures, but it always started the same way, with this girl running down the moonlight road.”

“Yes, that story,” said the yew. She turned to Clare now, and her face glowed. “The story all the mothers and daughters and
granddaughters have always told, in your house. I haven't heard it in
so
long, Clare.”

“I haven't, either,” said Clare.

And she began the story.

“This is the story of the Moonlight Road. The moonlight road doesn't always come to your door, and when it does, it's not always at a convenient time. But the rule of the moonlight road is that when it comes, you must always take it.”

“What if you're scared to?” asked the yew-girl dreamily. Clare suddenly heard her own voice, asking that same question in that same dreamy way—it was part of how the story was told, a call-and-response. And it came to her, how her mother would answer.

“Then you take that fear, and you kiss its face, and say, ‘I'm so sorry you're scared, but I can't take you with me. You can tell me how scared you are when I get back.'”

“What if the journey just seems too hard and you don't want to try?”—and Clare remembered this question, too, and how the storyteller must answer.

“Then you take that feeling, and you kiss its face, and say, ‘I know how you feel! But, sorry, I can't take you with me on this trip. You stay home and relax!'”

“And what if you think you'll fail? That's the worst one,” added the yew, in a small voice, and Clare's heart was touched and torn at
the idea of her yew, afraid she might fail. She knew the right answer to this one, too.

“Then you take that feeling of doubt,” she said, holding the yew-girl's hand tighter, “and you kiss its face, and say, ‘I know you're worried, you sweet worrier. But I can't take you with me on this trip. Stay home and worry for me. See you soon!'”

“That's right!” cried the yew. Her face glowed like burnished wood. “That's what you have to do, isn't it, Clare? Run away without them, run away, run away, down the glorious, wonderful, UNsafe—”

“—moonlight road,” Clare said, finishing for her, and squeezing her hand back.

Clare spun the story on. She spun the girl onto a ship manned by tall, silent people the color of eggplants, whose eyes were sunflowers. She spun the girl onto an island where trees grew whole rainbows of fruit sweet as candy, but every night at dusk an enormous creature climbed out of the waves, its skin shiny and mottled as a fish, but with two legs and long blue horns and monstrous fangs. Every evening the creature ate fruit until it was sick, then slept on the beach, groaning. One night the girl crept up on the creature and pulled out its fangs, so that it woke up crying, with a bloody mouth. The girl gave the creature her handkerchief, and they became friends, and had adventures together.

Clare spun and spun. Some bits she remembered from her mother's soft Irish voice, but most of it she made up. She spun the
story out like a thread from her mother and grandmother and on and on, down to her and the yew.

And as she spun the story, she realized with certainty:
Oh, now I see. This is it. This is the key to this gate. This story is the key.

At the end of the story—when Clare had the girl running up her own stairway at dawn, her adventures over for now—Clare felt a small, rhythmic tugging on the tips of her hair.

She craned her neck to look down. The well was bubbling and full. It was water, gently sloshing water, that dragged the tips of her hair back and forth.