The Radiant Road (11 page)

“I don't have it,” Clare lied. It was cold in her pocket. “My father took it with him.”

Balor said, “Leaving you locked out of the house all day and into the night. An unusual decision.”

Clare tried again. “It's hidden, and I won't tell you where, I never will.”

Balor walked toward her. “Possibly it's hidden,” he said. “Or, much more possibly, you have it with you.” She backed up until she was pressed against a wall. He stood close. “Clare, stubborn Clare,” he said, soft and cold. “Do not disobey me. I don't like disobedient girls.” He towered above her, a black mountain she couldn't see around.

“Let me explain something, Clare,” he continued. His coat was actually touching her arms, which were crossed against her torso. “I intend to protect myself. That means I must get into your house, to destroy something there. And I know that you have the key. It's tiresome, but one of the protections of that house is that only the guardian can let me in, and no one else. And I cannot take the key from you by force. So give me the key, which is in—this?—pocket.” He touched the pocket, lightly.

Clare slid away into the open space and took big breaths of air, as if she had been holding her breath. “Well, I never will give it to you,” she said. “And you can never make me.” She felt a wild bravery, like a bird caught in a room, smashing against walls, intent on getting out.

“Can't I, though?” said Balor. His fixed eye bored into her shifting, frightened ones. “That's an interesting question. Let's test it. Do you know where your father is?”

“Yes, I do,” said Clare. “And I'm not telling you.” If she could make a run for it, get a little farther away, she could pull out her cell
phone and call . . . who? Her father? Too far away to help. Did 911 work in Ireland? Wasn't it some other number? She glanced at the vine-draped doorway.

Balor, seeing that glance, walked toward the doorway, setting himself between Clare and it. He was smiling. “You should know there is no help for you,” he said. “I have friends everywhere that matters, powerful friends, who owe me a great deal, in the guard—the police, you would say—in the schools, in hospitals. Everywhere. No safety for you, there is none, understand that. There is no stranger you can trust.”

The hard little rectangle of cell phone in her back pocket.

“No safety for your father, either. I know where he is, Clare. I know, because I put him there. I own that mine. I bought it. And I buried those men alive, because I knew it would bring him to me. If I've already done all that, Clare, what do you think I will do to your father to get you to give me the key?”

How that made her feel: he might as well have sliced open one of her veins and let her blood drain to the ground. “You're lying,” she whispered. But she knew he was not.
Not only you are in danger. So is anyone who loves or helps you. So is your own father, who in hazard soon will leave you.

Balor stared at her, as if waiting for her to say more. “All right,” he said finally. “Let's try another way.” He turned toward the castle
entrance, then paused. “I'm just fetching something from my car. Don't go anywhere.”

That false and sickening smile.

The moment he left, Clare pulled out her phone, fumbling at the unfamiliarity of it, her heart pounding. She pressed 9, stopped.
You should know there is no help for you.
Instead, hands shaking, she found the contact labeled “Dad” and pressed call.

But the phone just zweed and beeped until a woman's voice said something about “out of range.” It wouldn't even let her leave a message.

Grief swelled up in her throat.
There is no stranger you can trust.

But there was Jo. She found the entry, called. It rang into voice mail. In wild agitation, Clare walked toward the castle wall and bent low to block her voice.

“I'm at the castle, Jo,” she whispered. “It's Clare, at the castle, and there's a man here, he—” She hesitated, knowing she might be cut off at any moment. “Please come fast,” she said. “I'm afraid.”

A brutally strong hand wrenched hers from her ear, slapped the phone to the ground, where it was ground to pieces under a large, shiny black shoe. A growl in her ear: “I have something just for you, something I've been waiting to show you.”

With the loping, purposeful gait of a hungry dog, Balor returned to the castle entrance. Watching him, Clare felt more and more like
a small animal in a large trap. He picked up something he'd left leaning near the door—something tall and wrapped up in brown paper, shaped like a broom or a shovel, only Balor held it carefully, as if it might break or escape. As he unwrapped it, his big body in his black suit blocked it, so that Clare couldn't see it until he moved away.

When she did see it, she almost laughed. Almost laughed, but almost screamed. Her mouth stayed open, not knowing which to do.

The thing—the creature, she almost thought—was just a painted board on a stick: an ancient-looking rectangular board, maybe one foot wide and three feet tall, on a weathered three-foot stick. On the board was a face—at least, a sort of face, painted in faded reds and yellows and blacks, the colors of blood and infection and nightmares. It had one eye, as black as Balor's. But where the other eye should have been was a sort of explosion, a chaos. Above the eye and the explosion were two frowning brows. The thing, the creature, had a mouth, too: an angular mouth, open wide, as if to scream.

Or to swallow.

It's just a stupid painted board, painted to scare you
, Clare thought. And it did scare her; it scared every nerve, scared her to the ground. It was the firefly face made real. It felt ugly, and bad, and strong.

“So what is that thing?” Clare said. She meant her voice to sound tough and unimpressed, but it sounded very small.

“It is a totem,” said the man. His voice resonated against the crumbling stone. “The way that quartz pulls the sun down into your house—yes, I know about that, I know quite a lot—this totem pulls down a great power to me.” His smile bared yellow teeth. “A power you won't like, not at all.”

“I don't want to be near that thing, and I won't stay if it's here.” The words came out fast, all on their own. Without planning it, she tried to run past him, then angled sharply to dart past him on the other side.

With one arm, Balor knocked her to the ground. She lay there gasping in pain and shock.

“I'm afraid I can't let you go,” he said. “There is nowhere for you to go, anyway. Where are you safe? Nowhere at all.”

Clare's hand slipped down to feel the outline of the fruit and the stone in her pocket: her protections. They felt small and still and useless.

At dawn the next morning, Clare sat in a far corner of the castle, as far as she could get from the totem, which was not far enough. The sky to the east was red as a rash. Measles red, inflamed red. A-wound-that-isn't-healing red. The sky around the sunrise glowed its usual radiant blue, but this morning the sunrise was an inflammation running along the edge of the world.

It had been a long and terrible night. Balor left her alone, but the totem hovered near, and Clare slept almost not at all. The few times a car came down the road she stood up, knowing it was her father, it had to be.

But her father, who had said he'd be home after dinner, still hadn't come, and neither had Jo.

Clare watched some birds a few feet from her, pecking at the June grass. They hopped from spot to spot, their eyes like tiny black beads shifting and rolling to find the food. They looked like little aliens. She pulled at her mother's silver necklace, which felt too tight around her neck, as if it were choking her. “I
hate
this thing,” she said out loud, and yanked it so hard that it snapped.

One hand over her mouth, the broken chain hanging limp in the other, Clare sat still and shocked.
It's that board, that horrible thing
, she thought.
It's making the sunrise ugly, it's making birds ugly, it's making me hate what I love.

She put the chain in her pocket next to the flat black stone Finn had given her. Where was the protection it promised? She pulled the stone out, saw part of her face reflected in its glossy black. That eye—was it her eye? It was her face, it was, but the eye seemed not hers, although it seemed loving, and sad, and familiar. Clare looked into the eye, trying to remember.

Ah, she could not bear being near that hideous totem.

She remembered Her of the Cliffs saying:
In your house, there is some protection. Outside, there is none.
If she could just get back to her house, and turn the key before Balor could reach the door. Balor sat by the entrance, cleaning his nails, and the totem blocked that way. Was there another? Obsidian tight in her right hand, she stood and moved carefully, slowly, trying to see with her peripheral vision a wall low enough to climb and jump from.

A flash of dirty yellow and red. Clare jerked around.

It was the totem, leaning against the wall inches away, watching her.

Clare almost screamed; she tried to scream, but her breath was gone and she couldn't find it. Only the smallest sound came out, like the cry of a small, lost animal. How did he get the totem here so fast?

Drained, despairing, almost ready to throw up, she thought: This thing will always be here, now. I will never, ever be free of it.
Dad, don't go. I changed my mind.
But he was gone. Was he even—but if she thought that thought, everything was over.

She closed her fists till the nails bit in. A way out. After all, the castle was supposedly a gate.

As if she could find it in herself to feel
playful
, with this totem here, with Balor here.

And even if she could—the wild-strawberry, childlike Strange she had sensed the first day was gone. This totem had poisoned the
gate, she was sure, warped and bent it past use, perhaps forever. She knelt on the ground and put her face to the grass in despair. A shadow fell over her.

“You might make it,” he said. “I don't think you would, for I am quick, and the totem is quicker; but you might. And then you'd be safe inside your home, at least for a while. But your father, now—would he be safe? That's another question altogether. Life is very precarious in a mine.”

God, how could she not have thought of that?

What was there, then, except to give up the tree? Was it worth her life? Maybe. But her father's life? Would she sacrifice—?

A hand seized her arm, jerked her up painfully. “Enough self-pity for now,” said Balor. “Let's have some culture, shall we? Let's have some serious art, while we wait for you to understand your position. Because look what I've found!” He waved her mother's commonplace book, upside down. “I've found some very, very serious po-e-try.”

“Ah,
don't
,” mumbled Clare, and it was a cry from her heart. But Balor sat her down, and sat down beside her, the wool of his black pants brushing her leg, and began to read.

The wind picked up and changed, felt like rain. In a mock-stentorian tone, like an old Shakespearian actor, Balor began to read, raising his voice above the rising wind: “‘In a belly of earth
and stone, two eggs . . .' Why, that's poetic, Clare. Not poetry, of course. But poet-
ic.
Poet-
ish
, you might say.” He continued in his mock-actor voice: “‘The color of winter, / The color of autumn—' Is it ‘white and brown' you're trying to say?”

Clare stared at the ground, fists tucked under her arms. She felt as if he were throwing rocks at her unprotected heart.

“‘Held in the root-claw nest / Of a brooding tree.' ‘The root-claw nest'—well, that's hopeless, root
and
claw
and
nest? That's a dog's breakfast. Ah, wait, and there's a note below: ‘I was born the same day as the prophesied boy. . . .'”

Balor stopped reading. His good eye lifted, looked at Clare, who looked back with her jaw set and her face hot. Balor returned to the notebook, reading now in his own deep voice: “‘Am I part of the prophecy?'” He began to leaf backward.

Stop it, stop it, stop TOUCHING it
, thought Clare, frantically and uselessly.

“‘Along the sea, the moonlight spills / A kind of path' . . . juvenile,” Balor muttered. He was skimming through as if looking for something. “‘For one with feet, not fins . . . Toward stone and tree, / Toward home. / The finless girl flies to her Finn . . .'”

His voice died away to almost nothing. “‘Tucked deep in the roots . . .' I knew it,” he said. He flung the book to the ground and began to pace in a strange fire, at once exultant and afraid. “I knew
the boy was alive. I sensed him, I have done for years.” He turned on Clare. “Where is he? No messing now. No more disobedience. Tell me where he is.”