The Radiant Road (8 page)

And to Finn. She remembered sitting with him in their in-between, that was only theirs: how new but how familiar it was, to be in private with such a friend, a friend of her heart, the loveliness of it. The pressure of his arm against hers, the woody scent of him. A secret jewel.

Along the sea, the moonlight spills

A kind of path

For one with feet, not fins.

Bare feet and cold

Splash this radiant road.

On water and light she runs

Toward stone and tree,

Toward home.

After some thought, she added two lines:

The finless girl flies to her Finn

Tucked deep in the roots of the in-between.

Later, she lay in bed, one hand against the bark of her tree. She tried to feel how the yew sent green tendrils up through the ceiling and roots down to the sea. The wind howled outside, howled, howled, first one side of the hill-home, then the other. Then it took a breath and howled its howling, fearful song again. It sang with its mouth pressed against the walls, it shivered its voice through the tree.

But it never came in Clare's little stone window to shake her. So she felt safe under her comforter, and she fell asleep. She dreamed she sat in the lap of the moon, cool and soft, her legs dangling over a luminous green sea that washed up to shore and back, up and back. Above was a constellation she had never seen before, a horned thing, half man, half beast, and she felt afraid. Far below, a wolf stood on the shore and howled up at the moon, and where one of the wolf's eyes should be was a swirl of sparks like fireflies.

Her of the Cliffs

The next morning, breakfast hardly touched, Clare half ran to the castle, carrying an umbrella her father had thrust into her hands as she dashed out. The sky was cloudy and the air was moist and kind. This time she did push through the doorway of vines, abandoning the umbrella outside. “Finn?” she called. But there was no answer.

The old castle was roofless, open to the somber sky, its gray stone overrun with flowering vines and sweet-smelling grasses. A few inner walls and stairs remained as well, roughly marking the shapes of rooms and courtyards where people had worked and cooked and slept.

A delicate Strangeness ran through the space. It felt so old and so innocent, both at once, that Clare pulled out her commonplace book and wrote:
children playing on their grandfather's grave.

In one crumbling, sun-warmed corner, Clare found a sprawling patch of wild strawberries, and made them her happy second breakfast, staining her mouth and hands. She trailed her hand in a creek that ran through the center of the castle, touched careful tongue to a wet finger. The taste was sweet.

Idea (as Finn would say): she'd see if she could guess the key before he even got here. Pleased to get a jump on him, she walked around peering at the crumbling walls, the soft-edged stones, looking for cracks or holes or something in-between-ish. No luck; but nothing could weigh on her light heart. She felt her way up narrow, edgeless stairs to the top of a rampart and looked around. Still no likely crack.

Instead of going down, she walked the edge of the wall, arms out for balance, a small figure making her way through vast ruins: a girl pretending to be a queen. Moving along the uncertain stone, she glanced around quickly for Finn, saw no one, then called, “I'm your queen! I command you!” to the cows and sheep. Her laughter floated over the wandering flowers, through the empty air.

She played on, alone, as she so often had when she was a much smaller girl, as she thought she had forgotten how to do. She balanced on the high stone wall with no idea of the danger she was in, and not only from the crumbling stone beneath her feet.

“Unfair, to start without me,” said a voice behind her. She turned, almost lost her balance, laughed. He was sitting astride the wall, flute dangling from one hand. “Ready for your lesson?”

Clare straddled the wall facing him, a few feet away, and folded her hands in a parody of a good student. “I am indeed,” she said. “Or no, but wait, a question. How do we do it in dreams, though? I keep
thinking that. How do people go through gates in their dreams, if it's so hard, and you have to figure out the key?”

Finn swung a leg over and kicked at the stones with his heels. “Oh, in dreams, it's different. You people are all but fairies in your dreams—like fairy babies, if fairies had babies. Blind and deaf and dumb you wander, not knowing your powers, opening gates, making and unmaking recklessly, at the mercy of every emotion. You make cities rise and fall, monsters and murderers, much else. It's mad, watching what you do in dreams. You are a strange people,” he added, “making with your eyes closed.”

Clare wondered what she knew how to do in dreams, that she did not know she knew. But Finn had moved on to the lesson.

“To open a gate that is not your own, first you must know that gates exist, and that this is one. You are ahead of most humans in that, for you sense the drifting fairy-magic—”

“Oh my god. Can we just call it Strange?”

Finn half closed his eyes as if to restrain himself. “Strange, then. The drifting Strange around it. All humans can sense the Strange, but most pretend they don't. Why is that?”

So other people don't make fun of them. Or send them to a psychiatrist.
“Because we don't think it's real, I guess. Same with magic, I mean,
fairy
-magic.”

“Which for us is making,” said Finn, “that looks like magic in
your world. We make using the stuff of your world for our material.”

“Still. I don't know if I believe in magic,” said stubborn Clare. “I mean—yeah, it would be so cool. It would be amazing, if it were true. But it's not. Is it?”

Finn smiled his curious half-human, half-Strange smile. “That is exactly what the fairies say about love,” he said. “And yet you call us the Strange.” On his flute he blew three delicate notes and one mocking squeak. “But no matter magic now, for this is a lesson, and what have you learned? You gather that it is a gate, then you gather the
spirit
of the gate. Yes?”

Clare hesitated. “Maybe?”
Children playing on their grandfather's grave
, was that the spirit of this place?

“And then you make!” said Finn, pleased. “You make the key.”

“Make . . . with, like, my hands?”

“Make in any way the key wants to be made.
Make
. Dream awake. Make a making to please the gate.”

As she thought about this, Clare stood up on the wall again, stepping one foot in front of the other, careful with the balancing. She tried to turn to face Finn again without moving her feet, just turning on the balls. As she completed the turn, with a bit of arm-waving to balance, Finn's amused expression provoked a flash of memory. She saw another grinning Finn, smaller and softer, swinging his legs on that wall. “Finn! We played here once. Did we? When we were little? I think we did.”

He looked unutterably pleased.

Another thought. “But you said there were no fairy babies.”

A half smile.

“And you said there was no
change
where you're from, everything stays the same.”

A nod, smile fading.

“But what about you? You were a baby, with me. And you changed, since then, you've grown up, like me.”

His face closed up. “I'm different,” he said. “I'm not—Clare, that's a tale too long for telling now. No, don't make such a face, it is no matter.” Finn swung himself off the wall, hung precariously by his fingers, dropped to his feet. She couldn't see his face till he turned, but then it was clear again. “Let's do what we came for. Are you ready to begin?”

Surprisingly, Clare thought she was. “Though if I'm supposed to . . . I mean I didn't bring anything—drawing pencils or paints or anything.”

“Not necessary,” he said. He sat on a low stone and looked at her expectantly. “Make, my girl.”

Clare flushed. “Uh, right. Not in front of you.”

Finn opened his hands. “But, Clare, that's madness, don't you know I've seen—”

“Don't care what you've seen. Go to another part of the castle, go behind some walls until I call you. And
don't listen.
Say you won't.”

He threw his hands in the air and walked through a crumbling aperture in the wall.

“SAY YOU WON'T!” called Clare.

“As you wish, mad Clare,” said a faint voice, followed by a little flute trill.

Clare stood for a moment, as if listening—perhaps to see that Finn was really gone, perhaps for something else.
Children playing.
Well, it had been a while, but she would try.

She put out one leg, long and straight, drawing a toe in the dirt, then dropped lightly onto that foot; did the same with the other, then again: point-step; point-step. In this idle, half-dancing way she progressed around the perimeter of this large castle room. She stopped to pick a strawberry, but made the rule that she had to continue her point-step dance while balancing the strawberry on her tongue.

Part of her watched in astonishment, that she could remember so well, after all these years, how to play. Perhaps that fresh memory of small Clare playing here with small Finn had brought childhood close again. Or perhaps it was part of the magic of this place, to make it easy.

She made it halfway around the walls before the strawberry tipped so dangerously that she had to eat it. At that place, following her rule, she stopped and sat down. She was within arm's length of
a crumbling gray wall with a low, shallow indentation, as if a small statue had once stood there.

Cross-legged Clare thought for a moment, and then began.

“The other day, day, day,” she began. As she chanted, she lightly slapped her knees, then clapped her hands, then pressed her hands against the wall.

“The other day, day, day

I met a fae, fae, fae” (she
thought
you could call them that)

“It ran away, way, way

I cried all day, day, day.”

Now she speeded up, and added some tricky every-other-time crossed-arm movements.

“But it came back back back back back,

And brought a sack sack sack sack sack—”

(Clare had no idea where this rhyme was going. And wait, was it a trick of her eye—it was hard to look closely and keep up the movements—or was the nook she sat before beginning to shimmer? She sped up.)

“And from inside side side side side,

It pulled its bride bride bride bride bride”

(The stone definitely seemed to be thinning and softening, becoming more mist than stone, and beyond the mist, Clare could almost see . . .)

“We danced a ring ring ring ring ring ring

Till we could—”

Clare stopped. In a blink, the stone had become stone again, and the air had gone ice-cold, and the Strange of the place had turned dark and poisonous. She spun around, rising to her knees.

Just inside the vine-curtained doorway stood a man in a black suit. To Clare on her knees, he seemed enormously tall—tall and broad, with shaggy black eyebrows and eyes beneath them like wet black ink. He was smiling, but not a nice smile: it was the smile of a cat who sees a bird with a broken wing. Or it was a smile painted on like a mask, like a clown's face, and if you peeled it off, the sight would be hideous and unbearable.

One of his deep black eyes was staring and fixed, and that eye gleamed with something like fire.

Her umbrella dangled from his curled finger.

Clare screamed.

Finn came running, of course, flute put away in his pocket now. But by the time he arrived, the man had vanished. Clare, furious with herself, kept saying, “It's nothing, only he startled me, I'm being an idiot, whatever, he's gone.” But “Describe him,” said Finn, and when Clare got to the part about the fixed, unmoving eye, he looked distressed.

“I fear a thing,” he said, “and I must go home to say. Ah, it is a shame, I was going to show you a beautiful making I made in your changing world, I did want you to see it. Another day, soon, we will.”

“I think I almost had it,” said Clare. “The key, I mean. I could see a sort of door opening, it went all misty and . . . anyway I think I found the key, I really do.”

“This surprises me not at all,” said Finn. “I only wish I could have seen the making, Clare.” He hesitated. “Listen: this needs not, I am sure, but I want to give you something.”

He held her hand, palm up, and Clare felt herself go perfectly still at the touch. Into her palm he placed a flat black rock, square and glossy as a mirror. His hand was cool, and the rock was cool. “Keep this by you,” he said. “It's a bit of shield. Not a big bit, but a bit enough. You may need it.”

“Why—”

“Meet me in-between, just before twilight. I will take you to meet one you must meet.”