The Radiant Road (28 page)

Through the blackness they flew, Clare clinging hand and arm and leg, watching the night roar past from between Asterion's horns. They passed a flock of night geese whose bodies were one long, bent muscle. “Hello, birds,” she shouted, a little crazily.
“
Isn't it weird, isn't it so strange, that one minute you're safe in your egg and the next minute you're flying.”

They flew into deeper dark and saw creatures made of light, even stranger than the light-beings who haunted the in-between.

The single silver star grew larger as they approached. Soon it was not a star at all, but something more complicated: a thing with silver fingers reaching up, and silver fingers reaching down, like two hands,
like my beast and I, when we were joined
.

It was a tree, a tremendous, glittering silver tree, set like silver
filigree against the velvet black of space. Each branch forked into new branches, and each of those branches forked, and over and over again, until the crown of the tree was a mass of forking silver twigs, each twig a miniature of the tree itself, a tree that replicated itself over and over.

And each of the roots divided, and each of those root-pieces divided, so that the roots of the tree were a mass of glittering, gleaming forking, too.

And between the roots and the branches was a gleaming silver trunk, veined with color.

“It's the Night Tree,” said Clare, not knowing why she called it that, but knowing that was its name. The closer they flew, the vaster the tree, and the more detail she could see: that from every limb and twig hung, delicate as a Christmas ornament, a tiny glowing orb. The bigger orbs hung from the bigger branches, glowing fiery diamond-white, or yellow-gold, or tangerine fire, or flame blue. From the smaller branches hung dimmer orbs, red or misty gray, burnt black or dirt-brown or ocean-green.

And from the smallest twigs hung the smallest orbs, in stony colors, gray and moss, like gems before they're polished.

In these billion twigs and orbs, how would they find their own moon?

“It's there somewhere,” Clare told her beast.

But as they sailed among the branches of the dazzling tree,
Clare's eyes were confused by the wild brightness, and she began to feel sick. “I'm closing my eyes,” she said to her beast. “It's up to you. Please find it.” Asterion continued, fluid and sure, his great legs swimming beneath them. With her eyes closed, it was harder to keep her balance, so Clare reached her arms farther around his neck, pressing her face close. She felt the muscles of his shoulders move in time with his legs. She set her breathing to breathe in time with the muscles, just as she had in their dance.

Eyes closed, she recalled with shame the pretty white horse of her hunting dream, her Balor-infected dream, how its heart beat under her calves, just as Asterion's heart beat strong beneath her.
But that horse was not my true steed, and how could I ever have thought it was?
She buried her face more deeply in Asterion's midnight shoulder, and sensed the heat or ice of each orb as they passed it.

The kicks slowed, and Clare opened her eyes. They were deep into the midst of Night Tree now. Her eyes dazzled at the spinning, glimmering, cool-or-fiery orbs.

Asterion hesitated, hovering in the air.

“I'm here now,” said Clare. “I'll help. You're not alone.”

Kicking his legs slowly, the beast she rode rose slowly up, sank slowly down, like a boat on the waves, like a horse on a merry-go-round. Clare squinted at the thousand orbs dangling around her. “Moon, moon,” she sang softly to herself.

And then she saw—lit by a nearby sunflower-blaze, in the
shadow of a small, languorously turning orb that glowed sea-blue, pine-green, snow-white—she saw what she had come for: a tiny pearl of a moon. But it was far up on a slender branch, and many more tangled branches were between them, too tangled for her beast to move through.

“Wait for me,” Clare said. She raised herself up with all the strength in her thighs, and seized a branch above. She locked one leg around the branch—a hundred glowing blue and silver balls spun dizzily around her—then pulled herself up to standing. She stepped up to another branch, then another, until, on tiptoe, reaching as far as she could, Clare plucked that little pearl of a moon till she held it cool in her hand.

To keep it safe, she placed the moon carefully in her mouth. Its cold radiance filled her bones. As she climbed back down among the thousand starry, spinning orbs, she held the moon in her mouth with reverence and stillness. Even when she slipped, once, and lost her grip, and almost fell: even then she kept the moon safe and cool.

When she was again clinging to Asterion's back, she said, “Let's go find him.” Knowing it might be too late, she would still bring Finn the moon.

She wasn't too late; she arrived before noon—if Timeless had a noon—on Midsummer Eve. She leaped from the back of her beast, still careful of the moon in her mouth, and ran through the great,
leafy hall. A crowd of unsmiling smilers followed behind, peering over her shoulder.

Finn sat on a chair, frowning, his flute on the floor beside his chair, as if he had dropped it there in weariness or impatience. Clare could only see the untouched side of his face, but as she approached he turned to face her. The bloody patch across one eye and the look of utter relief in the other made her catch her breath.

Her of the Cliffs stood beside Finn. Her face remained a mask, though a less terrible one, her mouth a flat line. She pulsed with tangible energy, like a bonfire. “The flag?” she said.

Carefully, Clare took the moon from her mouth. “This first,” she said. “It's for his eye. It has to go in before it heals. It might—I don't know . . .” She looked at Finn now, his uncomprehending expression beginning to shift toward hope. “I don't
know
if it will work, for his eye, but it might. I think it might,” she ended awkwardly.

Her of the Cliffs looked at the moon in her hand, then looked at Clare with an expression hard to read. She took the moon and washed it in rainwater. Then she planted it like a seed where Finn's left eye had been.

Today is my birthday
, Clare thought:
the first of my two birthdays. And for this to work is the only present I want.

But Finn's own blue-gray laughing eye did not return. The moon remained a faintly glowing white orb in his brown face. He was still half blind.

“I'm sorry, I'm so sorry,” said Clare, kneeling by his chair, facing the ground to hide the shame. “I thought—it was a stupid idea, but I thought—”

“Not stupid, never, we don't use that word, now, do we?” said Finn, the teasing in his voice masking his disappointment. “No, kind and brave and clever it was, and who knows what may be, for the moon turns in its own time, not ours. But, Clare—sit here beside me, Clare—you met your beast and tamed him. You are a mad and remarkable Clare.”

“I did,” said Clare, making herself look at him, and smile at him, as if his face didn't tear her heart in two. “I did, it was so strange, oh, I have so much to tell you. But we don't have time.”

“After the Hunt,” Finn agreed. His smile faded a little. “That's right.”

“Why hunt?” murmured a sulky voice from the crowd behind them. “Why ride to save a road we do not need?”

“We do have need,” said Finn quietly, not taking his eyes from Clare.

“Says the one-eyed hunter,” said another. “Who will not shoot straight even if we find Balor for him.”

Now Finn stood and faced them. “I will shoot straight.”

But the fairies ignored him and continued their conversation.

“We ride so the humans may make asleep and blind.”

“We ride so humans may weep and love.”

“No,” said Finn, raising his voice. “We ride to keep close to change and death, to make our makings greater.”

Bitterly, from the back of the hall: “We ride so that humans may walk past those makings, blind to their beauty.”

“And we ride at what cost?” asked another.

“Yes, for look how the human girl chose,” cried another. “At a choice between fairy and her father, she chose her father. And indeed she made him safe, but at what cost?”

Clare turned wildly to Her of the Cliffs. “Is that true?” she asked. “Tell me. Is my father safe?”

“He is safe,” she said, unsmiling. “He has been drawn from the hole where Balor buried him. He is safe, he and the miners. But because you chose him over us, Finn will miss his shot. So all you care for, and all we care for, is already lost. It is a fruitless Hunt.” Her voice had broken with disgust, and she turned to the crowd. “No Hunt!” she called.

They took up the chant. “No Hunt! No Hunt!”

The Strange young man with the starry hair was leaning against a nearby chair. “I hope you succeeded in your quest, Clare,” he said, pointed and mild.

She understood. She pulled the commonplace book from her pocket, opened it to the flag, and handed the book to Finn. He took the scrap of cloth in his hand.

The crowd went silent. Every one of them, even Her of the
Cliffs, turned to watch as Finn examined the flag, turning it over in his hand.

Finally, still gazing at the fragment of cloth, Finn broke the silence, speaking in a conversational, almost absent tone. “I find myself wondering, now I hold it in my hand,” he said: “Which of you was it?” He looked up at the crowd. “Which of you married the Macleod man of the changing world, and gave him this flag, and promised our protection when his family had need?”

Some shuffling of feet. Fairies glanced at one another, then back to the floor. The crowd began to shift, almost imperceptibly, some to one side, some to another, making a sort of narrow parting: and at the end of that corridor of color and feather and bone stood Her of the Cliffs.

“So I thought,” said Finn calmly. “For who else had the power to promise our protection, but the Hunter herself?” He walked until he faced her directly. His voice was still gentle, but with force behind it. “With your permission, may I tell you why you gave this flag? For I believe you have forgot.”

A murmur of shock at the boldness of this, but Her of the Cliffs's face did not change. She stood, silent, arms relaxed at her sides, like a gunfighter.

“You gave this flag for love,” said Finn. “Humans come to our world to dream. And we go there to love. I have wondered if our love seems as blind and willful to them, as their dreams seem to
us. The love that gave this flag, now: that was a wild and willful love.”

Silence hovered over the room like an enormous bird.

“But you can only love what you must lose,” said Finn, “and that is a hard knowing for Timeless creatures such as you.” Finn gestured to the whole crowd, and smiled his wryest smile. “Well I know I am lovable beyond reckoning; but you'd none of you love me half so much, if you would not lose me one day.”

A sound like a sigh of grief ran through them.

It was dawning on Clare, as slow as dawn itself, that she was descended—by how many dozens of generations, but still—from Her of the Cliffs. She looked at that fierce red hair, so close to the color reflected back to her by every mirror and still pool.

“This flag is a promise,” Finn continued, “and a promise is a kind of road itself, like the fairy road, across time and peoples. Just as I am that kind of road. If you abandon the road, you abandon me. You cut me off from one of my parents.

“You know I honor the makings of Timeless. They are my joy and my life. But our makings live best in the only place they can die, in the human world. Ah, I have seen the makings you make in the human world, all of you, how precious and strange they are, how fine, compared to the cold toys we make here.”

A murmur of assent from the crowd.

“We do not ride for humans,” said Finn. His voice was rising now. “We ride for fairy. We ride for our best, most fearless makings. And we ride for love. I know you scoff at love, and I know you long toward it.” Finn held the flag high above his head. “It is Midsummer Eve. We ride tonight.”

There was a half second's hesitation. Then—whether because of the power of the flag, or because the flag's power was to teach Finn to lead, Clare would never be sure—Her of the Cliffs herself called out, “Tonight we ride!”

It was as if she had touched off a charge. The crowd exploded in all directions. It was like nothing Clare had seen before in this languorous place: the fairies were
rushing
. The intrusion of time made the fairies brighter, more energized; but also fearful and anxious. The Wild Hunt was near.

Finn stood at the center of the whirling crowd, his eyes on the book in his hand.

Clare ran up to talk to him—to say how moving his speech had been, how astonished she was to find she was descended from Her herself—but stopped short, aghast.

He had turned the commonplace book upside down and was reading a page in the back.