The Radiant Road (30 page)

“She is a maker, I know her for a maker,” said Finn; but his voice sounded anxious. Then, to Clare: “Are you willing to try? It is try or give up our quest, and lose the bridges between our worlds forever. If you fail, the worst that can happen . . .”

“ . . . is that I fail, in front of you all,” said Clare. She said it with Finn-like irony, but her stomach felt sick. “Of course I'll try. I won't just try, I'll do it,” she amended.

“I believe you can make this making, Clare Macleod,” said Finn. “But you must work quickly, do you understand? This is the shortest night of all. The sunrise comes soon, and when it comes, if we cannot ride it through the stone window and into your home, we lose our chance.”

“I understand,” said Clare. “Don't worry. I will make my making.”

Finn gave a strange sort of half bow from his stag. “Thank you, Clare. We all thank you.”

There was a pause.

“So,” asked Clare in a small voice, “how will I get down?”

In answer, Asterion moved closer to Finn, and gently slipped Clare off his back until she sat upon the back of the stag. She felt unmoored without her beast; the starry night felt colder, and she herself much smaller.

For a moment, the four of them hung against the stars like strange new constellations—a great bull-headed beast, a boy and a girl on a white stag, and a woman wrapped in flame. Behind them glowed a frozen river of curious, silent creatures.

Asterion removed the great silver chain from around his neck, the one that matched her small and delicate one, and wound it around her waist. He held his end—the end with the star—and looked down.

“But I don't think it's long enough,” said Clare.

Asterion looked up at her, but his eyes were too dark to read in the dark night.

Finn leaned over to put his own brown hands on the chain beside Asterion's. “We have you, girl,” he said.

So holding her breath, clinging to the chain, she slipped off the stag. For a moment she dangled there. Then, hand over hand, they slipped her down. Somehow the chain was long enough, or it got longer, somehow (the
somehow
of dreams, again, always the somehow of dreams among the Strange), gently twirling Clare down through the dark. As she lowered, more hands appeared to
hold the chain: pale ones and dark, silver-blue, dimpled-fat or withered claws, lizard-skinned, long-taloned—all these hands held on as Clare spun down, down, down on Asterion's chain.

On the grass, she stepped out of the chain, and watched it fly back up into the night. Now she saw what the white-faced woman had seen: a great host of people and creatures, all colors and sizes, roiling the sky like silent thunder.

This is the shortest night of all.
No time to waste. In the starlight she ran toward the grove of trees where the fairy thorn had stood, boots in the grass loud in the night-silence. The closer she came, the stronger the familiar sense of Strange.

But the Strange had altered. There was still a sense of
springtime
—but now it was also piercing
grief
. The lovely white-blossomed tree had been maimed. She put her hand against one stump, felt sap drip like sticky blood.

Time to begin.

But in the predawn silence, the Strange eyes watching her from the sky felt . . . loud. They would all be watching, and most likely they would watch her fail. Her stomach knotted. “Just
try
,” she muttered to herself. “Just shut up and
try
.”

But it was hard not to imagine Finn's face, turning away in embarrassment at the ugly awkwardness of what she
tried
. Hard not to imagine him seeing her for what she was, not a maker but
a pathetic faker. For a moment she had a mad impulse to run, run somewhere, run where?

Then a cool, firm voice inside her, a voice that sounded something like Her of the Cliffs, but also like her own voice, said,
Clare. Stop it. Think.

She thought.

It's just like making in a dream.
Just know what you truly want, and use the desire to make.

“But Asterion always begins it for me, in dreams,” Clare murmured to the mutilated tree. “I don't know how to begin on my own.”

You must find your beast in yourself and work that way.

Clare put her hand to the star at her throat. All right. How do you find your beast?

Well: how did she find him in the first place?

Close your eyes. No cheating.

Clare closed her eyes. The chilly, humid air clung to her face. The night was a perfect silence.

Asterion, how are you?
she asked in her mind. And she thought she could see, inside herself, near her heart, Asterion's black and glistening eye.
A beast can only speak in pain or pleasure or making.
She noticed that her shoulders were hunched in, and thought—
Oh: that's Asterion, protecting himself from my fear.
She let them relax.

She felt her feet pigeon-toed, all her weight on the right, and how that pushed Asterion off balance. She righted herself, and felt his presence steadier inside.

A bird chirped, two small tweets, somewhere in the distance.

A
bird
? Clare's eyes flew open. At the edge of the sky, just the beginning, only the beginning, of gray. Only enough to catch the notice of a bird, or of a girl whose world depended on her completing a making before dawn.

Something, do something, and now. Well: she only had the one way, really. She spoke to the dying tree.

“I know the key to this hawthorn was singing,” she said. “And I am not a singer really. But I am”—the words were so hard to say, especially under the thousand cool eyes, but she said them—“I am a poet. I will make a poem. A sort of prose-poem. A poem that calls a tree to me, or calls me to a tree.”

Then in one reckless leap, she began.

“A tree is a girl who is not cheating. A tree keeps her eyes closed.” She closed her eyes.

“Trees are the first makers. We turn sun and breath into blue-green life.” She lifted her face, eyes still shut, to the just-graying sky, feeling the damp air caress her skin.

“Whatever the world gives me, I bring it deep into my secret roots to make with. Then I bring what I have made out again. In this way, I make a world.

“So I am both,” said Clare, eyes closed, her face up, understanding this for the first time as she spoke, “I am both root and branch, earth and light”—
and human and fairy
, she thought,
and dreamer-asleep and maker-awake, and girl and beast, all of them
—“I am rooted where I stand, and I face the changing sky, and I make.”

She felt how close she was, how she almost had the last ingredient, so she reached out with her deepest desire, and found it.

“And I don't make alone,” she said. “Trees speak through knotted fingers, knitting the world together beneath its skin. We never pause for breath or silence, and our conversation is unending.”

Thinking, as she spoke, with curious clarity:
humans, too, we make in conversation. Every song or invention or dance is secretly knitted together in one great making.

The beast inside her glowed like a black sun. Clare stopped talking, rooted her feet, and threw up her arms. She did not care that she looked like a child playing “tree.” She gave the gesture her whole desire. Her feet planted strong in the earth, and her arms raised up to the sky.

And now it was happening. Wood grew across her eyes and ears, and Clare exulted inside. Just before the silence came, she heard above her a wild cry, carried over a thousand voices:
We hunt! We hunt! We hunt!

Then she did not see; she did not hear. But she felt, and she saw
with some inner eye, as the fairy host rushed through her, one by one, every strange creature, as if she herself were an open gate.

Of all the strange things Clare saw and did on that strange night, the strangest of all was this: that when the fairy host flew through her, it didn't feel strange at all. It was like a memory, or a dream. With each strange creature that passed through, she thought,
Oh yes, oh yes, I remember, I remember now, that's me, that was me, I did that
—the way you remember in dreams.

She remembered, somehow, that she herself was a young black man with bright white hair and an impatient smile, riding a snorting red horse.

And she herself was a woman with ice-threaded eyes, sitting lightly on a flower-covered hawthorn branch that sailed through the air as she threw back her head and laughed.

And she herself was the fierce, pale girl, teeth sharpened to points, who rode a snake and screamed in a wild and alien tongue.

And she herself was the fat, thin-haired man with cold gray eyes, holding a handful of playing cards, whose steed was a gray mule.

And she knew herself in the violet-haired man in the shabby jacket, and in the naked woman who leaned over a winged gargoyle, urging it on. She knew herself in the three dark women bound together by a silk scarf at their waists, riding a dragonfly—she
knew them, she was them, just as she was the white dog with bright green eyes leaping behind them. They all passed through her, and she found herself in them, and she found herself in the black-eyed man who sat cross-legged on a roaring, crashing green wave, and in the one-eyed, molting cat, and the slender young ankle-tufted buffalo, and the woman holding an old brass lamp, and the blind child standing on top of an elephant, and the great golden-furred pig.

Then she felt afraid, and said:
But if I am all of these, then who am I? Where am I, where is the I, if I am all of these?

The other trees entwined their fingers in hers below the ground, they held her fingers close, and said,
You are yourself, you are also yourself, unlike any other, your own unique self contains all these others safely.

Then she felt the touch of her own yew, the electric sweetness of that touch, and the joy and calm that came with her root-finger twining with hers. The twining continued, the yew-root seemed to grow and stretch, until it wrapped behind the Clare-hawthorn tree.

All at once, Clare had the distinct impression that her pocket—if a tree could have pockets—was being picked.
My commonplace book.

Clare felt rather than heard a familiar, musical laugh as the root of the yew pulled back again, and the commonplace book was gone.

Oh no, oh yew
, thought Clare the tree. But because she was a tree, knitted into the conversation that makes the world, she understood
that the book remained with her even while it was with the yew, and was not really lost at all.

Still, even her woody heart felt a stab of loss.

The last of the host passed through her just as the sun began to crest the edge of the earth. It was dawn at Midsummer. It was Clare's second birthday.

Tree-Clare waited. A tree is content to stay. Blind and deaf, she waited in the tree-hush of noiseless wind, with upstretched fingers, with tangled roots in rich, silent communion.

A scream ripped through the silence. Not a human scream—tree-Clare could not have heard a human scream. But her roots felt a pain as piercing as a scream would feel to human ears.

It was the scream of a tree.

It was the scream of a yew, her own yew, her own brown-and-green tree girl, ancient and new, who had given her back her making and her heart.

Her yew was being struck and sliced and torn.

All of Clare's true self—the human, and the filaments of fairy, the self born to be the guardian of the yew—came roaring forward.
Run
, she told herself.
Run to her now. Save her.

The girl-tree's roots withdrew from the other roots, her long branches withdrew from the air. Her single trunk became two strong legs, and she ran, and ran, and ran.

No Safety, There Is None

Something was wrong.

As Clare neared her hill-home, she saw that the fairy host was not inside. They circled the green mound, around and around, a flock of huge and many-shaped birds riding the wind from the ocean that crashed and surged just out of sight.

But Finn was not among the circling host. He must be inside alone. Why had the rest not followed? Why were they not inside?

In a few more stumbling yards, Clare saw what was wrong. Something was blocking her home's stone window from the inside; the new Midsummer sun couldn't get through. That was why the host was trapped outside.

At the same moment, she realized that the crashing, surging noise was not the ocean, or not only the ocean, but fairy calls and cries over and among the ocean sounds.

The Hunter missed his shot
, they cried.

His eye.

The one-eyed Hunter missed the shot.

When the host saw Clare, the clamor rose in pitch, became a sort of weird, singsong chant—
His eye, his eye, she took his eye
—as the crowd whirled and spun around the hill, looking for a way in.

Flushing in furious shame, Clare opened her mouth—to defend herself? to apologize? to ask how Finn had even got through the blocked window?—then stopped, mouth still open. Of course: the fairies could only enter by riding the Midsummer sunrise through the window. (Her mother's words in her ear:
That window must always stay open for the fairies to travel through.
)

But not Finn
, thought Clare.
He's half human. He can walk through the door, and he did.

With stubborn fury:
And so will I.

She ran up the hill straight through that keening, hateful cry—
there she is, she took his eye, she took his eye, the teeth of the wolf
—pushed open the heavy, silent door, and ran inside. Bursting out of the narrow passage and into the main room, she stumbled to a stop.

Before her was a tableau, like a photograph, like a stage picture after the curtain rises, but before the action begins.

In the center of the room: Finn on his knees, one hand on the floor, his bow on the ground beside him. His shirt was torn open, and a red triangle burnt on his skin, the mark of the totem. Though Finn was not unconscious, he seemed stunned: his moon-eye pale, his gray eye wet and furious and frightened, jerking in a way that reminded her of her lonely, frightened beast in the labyrinth.

To Clare's left: Balor, holding an axe, standing by the yew that bore the marks of his hacking and hewing.

To Clare's right, as she raised her eyes, was the final piece of the tableau. Blocking the window—
blocking the window
—as it switched its tail across the stones, recharging: the hideous, screaming face of the totem.

“Hello, Clare,” said Balor, low and calm. “I thought you might turn up. I forgot that this young Hunter”—gesturing to Finn, dazed on the ground—“could just walk through the door. An unfortunate lapse on my part, and it might have been very bad for me.” Balor smiled. “But the Hunter has only one eye. Must have been some terrible accident—I wonder how it happened?” He bared his yellow teeth. “So he missed his shot—didn't you, boy? And my totem did not miss his shot, not by any means. In a few moments, it will take another shot, and that will be enough to kill even a half fairy.” His wolfish smile broadened, as if he were recalling something from a favorite nightmare. “Your father's dead, you know. His corpse is already rotting.”

He turned back to the tree, the huge black bulk of him, swinging his axe deep into the tree, in horrible, thudding
chunks
.

My dream-making worked!
thought Clare. And perhaps that knowledge gave her the courage to see this new nightmare with clear eyes.

Finn on his knees, struggling to stand as the totem prepared to strike again.

Clickclickclick
, the totem along the wall. One of its upper corners was broken off; she must have done that the day before. If only she had done more.

Balor sweating in his dark suit, the power of his swing, the sickening, horrific
chunk
as the axe cut into the yew. Clare thought of her yew-girl, the axe sunk in her flesh.

She had no idea what to do. But she knew what she could
not
do: she could not overpower Balor; and she could not reach the totem.

Clickclickclick
, the totem faster and faster, dragging its long stick along the wall. Balor cursed to himself as he struggled to pull the axe from the tree.

Finn tried to push himself up to his feet, but his arm collapsed, and he fell again.

Clickclickclickclick—
and then, worse: the noise stopped. The totem that darkened the window was ready to strike Finn again. Balor's axe stopped, and from the corner of her eye Clare saw him straighten, as if waiting for the pounce.

All this in seconds, and in her rising desperation Clare still could not see what to do.

“The sun,” said Finn, and Clare's head snapped around. He was groping the floor around him, still on his knees. “The sun,” he said again. He looked up at Clare for the first time. He was
so dazed that she was not sure he even recognized her. “The sun,” he said a third time. And then, with difficulty: “It's almost too late.”

And now Clare knew. She ran to Finn, and almost without stopping, took up his bow from the ground, pulled an arrow from the quiver slung over his shoulder, and swept across the floor and up the ladder to her room.

Below her, a booming, cruel laugh. “She dreamed she hunted once, and now she believes she's the Hunter!” said Balor. At least the blows of the axe had paused.

Clare fit the arrow to her bow. It was true: she had only shot an arrow once before, in her dream.
But I can do it, I know I can
, she thought:
You made me the teeth of the wolf—you taught me how to bite.

She pulled the bowstring back behind her ear.

Balor had walked across the room for a better view. He leaned on the axe, smiling. Above him, the totem seemed to crackle with power near release.

“Only the Hunter can strike the wolf, stupid girl,” he called. “You are not the Hunter, no matter how many eyes you've put out.” He spread his arms out mockingly. “See how I fear you!”

Clare's face flushed. “No, I am not the Hunter,” she agreed. Finn had struggled to his feet. She looked at Balor, the bowstring drawn back and perfectly steady.

Then she raised her aim above Balor's head, and let the arrow fly.

And now Balor no longer laughed—now he roared, a roar of fear and rage. Because Clare's arrow flew true, straight through the swirling chaos-eye of the totem.

The totem dropped like a stone at Balor's feet.

A shaft of sunlight pierced the room, straight into her eyes, briefly blinding Clare—but through half-closed eyes, under the arm she had thrown across her face, Clare saw that much more than sunlight was streaming in. The fairy host poured through the gap.

Balor saw, too.
Only the Hunter can strike the wolf
—true, but he had lost his weapon, and Finn was on his feet now, and the host had power to bind.

Balor ran to the entranceway and out the door.

“Bring the bow!” shouted hoarse Finn, as he followed Balor, stumbling, catching himself, and stumbling forward again.

Clare slid down her ladder with the bow, right behind.

But even pushing open the heavy door was too much: Finn fell to his knees on the ground outside. He slammed his hand to the ground in frustration.

“It's just you're really hurt,” said Clare. “Let me help you.”

“The others cannot follow out the door,” he said. “They can travel the roots of the tree, now, but they can't come out the door.” He coughed—it was almost a laugh. “I'll live,” he rasped. “But I hear him on the shore. Go to the cliff and tell me. Tell me what he's doing.”

She ran. Green waves crashed and frothed against the dark rocks of Clare's cliff. On the narrow, rocky beach below them, Balor was talking—almost as if he were talking to the waves themselves—but fast, too fast to understand, and moving his hands.

“He's talking to the ocean,” called Clare.

“Saying?” said Finn. He was standing now, wavering, stumbling toward her.

“I can't tell,” said Clare, “but he—”

She broke off. At Balor's feet, the sea was churning harder, and the dirty white froth swelled higher and higher. Clare had the odd sense that someone must have poured soap in the water, for the foam to bulge up so unnaturally. It rose so high above the green water that it was taller that Balor himself.

“The water . . . the foam is so high,” said Clare. “I'm sorry, I don't understand what's happening.”

“I do,” said Finn, stumbling toward her, unsteady, head down. “Give me my bow.”

Balor chanted faster, and the foam began to shape itself—a torso, a long neck, four legs, a tail—until the dirty foam had somehow become a creamy, foamy horse, snorting white froth and tossing its head wildly.

A split second later, Balor had leaped onto the back of his froth-horse and charged off to sea.

“Ah no!” cried Clare. Finn was aiming, but both of them could see that Balor was already too far. He lowered his bow. “If we had a boat, or . . .” She trailed off. After all this, Balor would escape, and it would be for nothing. “Where is he going?”

“Of that I'm not sure,” said Finn. “But I go there, too.”

“But how?” The wind blew Clare's hair into her mouth, and she pushed it aside.

“Ride the wind,” said Finn. He stood on the cliff edge, leaning into the wind, breathing hard at the effort to stand. “I did it once before.” His eyes were focused on Balor, not on the ground, but Clare glanced down to the jagged rocks below. They no longer looked like a ruined chocolate cake, but like death itself.

“Finn. Don't. Even if—I mean, can you even shoot straight?”

He winced. “In your house I could not. Better light outside. I have more arrows.”

“But, Finn—”

His unreadable blank white eye turned toward her. “I've no choice, and no time for choice.” A sardonic grin. “Which makes the moment easier.” He turned toward her swiftly, almost angrily, seized her wrist, and kissed it. “Clare Macleod, mad maker, never cease your madness and making.”

Then he turned to face the wind, and fell.

Clare watched, hands over her mouth in horror, because she
didn't want to frighten him with a scream. He plunged down ten feet, twenty—until an updraft caught him, and he flew.

He
flew
.

“
Finn
,” cried Clare, with wild admiration. Then a thought like a thrust knife:
But he'll never hit him, he can't, his aim is off, because of me.
She sank under the weight of remorse as Finn wafted up and out over the ocean.

Then her posture changed. Her head drew out of her shoulders, and her arms dropped to her sides. It was as if her body had realized something before she did. Finn couldn't shoot straight alone. But with help, with another eye to guide his aim . . .

Her thought was interrupted by the sound of a motor. She turned and saw, pulling slowly around by the door of her home, her father's car.

Her father's car! She took a couple of running steps toward the car before she stopped. Once she had almost sacrificed the whole world to run to her father. Once. Not twice. Finn needed another eye. She darted back to the cliff's edge.

Green spumes dashed up around the dark, jagged rocks below.

She thought:
I will fall, and I will die.

She thought of the fairies' Strange and exquisite makings, their true and radiant selves, scattered over our world like shells on a beach. If Finn failed, the tide would bring no new fairy-makings, and the old ones would be trampled and broken by the
years until they were dust, and the beach of the world was only sand again, and never again a lovely or terrible Strange to stumble across.

She thought:
But I don't know how.

She thought of never dreaming again. She thought of the great beauty of her own world—every flaming yellow autumn, every riot of green and yellow in spring, the changing blue of the sky behind it all—she thought of all that loveliness fading to the colorless gray of a filing cabinet under fluorescent lights: fading not just for her, but for everyone. A world without beauty, because without dreams or makings, all their eyes would forget how to see.

She thought of Finn, born too soon and parentless, whose mother had found love even when locked in a tower.

She thought of Finn caught in Timeless, never again to make his changeful, artful makings.

She thought of never seeing Finn again.

The yew-girl said:
There is no safety, and so we must touch and be touched, and we must fall and fly.