The Radiant Road (13 page)

She turned again on her side. This wasn't the key. Her body did not wish to lie still, which might have to do with the key—or might just be the totem rising again and again in her mind. How were you supposed to tell? How do you figure out a key when you're too desperate to take your time? She didn't have
time
for this.

Awkwardly, she pulled the commonplace book and pencil stub from her pocket and smoothed a page. Sometimes it helped to write her thoughts, to see what she was thinking. Her left cheek propped on her left arm, she wrote what she knew:

Finn's father's gate. He went through and found a woman and fell in love. They had a baby, which was . . .

Clare's face colored, and she closed up the notebook, pencil inside.
He found a woman and fell in love. They had a baby.
So maybe something about love, and kissing, and . . . all that.

Clare, a strange and solitary girl who knew little of boys, knew less of . . . all that, except the clear, clinical, and uninformative facts that everyone knew. Certainly she had never been, for example, kissed.

She opened the commonplace book again and flipped through it, nervously and absently.

“That Pygmean race / Beyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves, / Whose midnight revels by a forest side . . .” Whatever. “Her antique race and lineage ancient, / As I have found it register'd of old / In Faery Land 'mongst records permanent.” Blah. She had never liked that one.

She turned the page, and stopped. This had been one of her favorites for years, but now she looked at it in a new way.

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And mothlike stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

“I will find out where he has gone,” said Clare softly to herself, not noticing that she had changed the pronoun, and why not? Pronouns are made for changing. “And kiss his lips and take his hands.” In the room of her mind, she allowed herself, just for a moment, to look through the crack in a certain door at a vast night sky. In that cool and starry dark, she remembered the feel of his arm against hers. She remembered the private joy and laughter of their own impenetrable world, in between all other worlds.

Her heart billowed up like a sail. “‘Who called me by my name and ran / And faded through the brightening air,'” said Clare, soft. Her body felt warm and glad, remembering Finn, in a way it had never felt for any other friend.

Could he be more than just a friend?

Was it this feeling? Was this the key? But what did it ask her to
do
with the feeling? She did not feel any sort of opening in the gate. Her legs twitched, wanting to move with the feeling, wanting to—what? There was something she had to give herself to, but she didn't know what it was.

A voice inside her—a lying voice, or maybe better to say a frightened voice, but Clare did not know—told her this was stupid. What if Finn knew her thoughts right now? At that she blushed hard and closed the notebook, shoved it back in her pocket. She should be thinking of the tree, and how to protect it. Balor could come any minute.

The rain, which had abated, came lashing down again. Like someone stepping off a cliff, Clare gave herself to the despair. It came over her like sleep: and then, quite oddly, it
was
sleep—a strange sleep, perhaps, in fact, a Strange sleep, a sleep that was a gift from Finn's Cap.

As she slept, rain swirled protectively around this gate, and the stones cradled her close to the earth. She never knew that the portentous wind had said “your enemy comes” or that the rushing rain had saved her. She never knew how less than a thousand yards away, Balor had stood in the muddy field, rain pouring down the back of his neck, cursing; how he had turned back. Clare was pursued, but the world bent itself to foil her pursuer.

In a dream, Clare wandered down a forest path, holding a Houston Astros baseball cap, dark blue with a bright orange star. The light was the half-light before dusk, when colors are rich and wet, and the air smells clean and cool. The trees were tall and shut out the light, and Clare felt as if she were in a dark tunnel, and no light to show the end of it. Behind her she heard the deep, soft groan of some beast, and she imagined it coming from the totem's mouth.

“Finn!” she called. “Are you here?” The feelings she had tidied away in waking life came rushing back. His arm. Their private place, the place that was only theirs. How after a whole long life alone, she was suddenly lonely without him.

From behind a screen of rough dark trunks came a familiar voice. “Girl, you're noisy as flock of birds,” he replied.

“Where are you?” asked Clare. Relief made her warm; the groaning beast and the totem's face vanished from her thoughts. “Where
are
you? I've been looking and looking.”

“I'm right here,” said Finn, and his voice was smiling. “It's your looking that's not so good.”

“I found this cap,” said Clare. “I think it's yours?”

The voice laughed, a free, full laugh. “It is mine indeed, Clare Macleod,” he said. “And it was my father's before me. You're a clever girl in your sleep.”

Clare frowned. “I'm not
asleep
,” she said with dignity—but as soon as she said it she was sleepy after all, so sleepy, and she sat on the ground, then laid her head on a carpet of pine needles.

“Listen,” said the voice, and it was warm, it lulled her like a bedtime story. “Look for the mirror.”

She turned and sighed.

“Look for the mirror,” he repeated. “When you find the mirror, you've found the way. Now follow on, Clare. Now. Now. Now.”

Clare woke up wrapped in love like a warm cloak.
Not love
, she thought confusedly.
Just liking a lot.
(Not poems, just notes for poems.) Her face was pressed against the dirt, and there was a taste of dirt in her mouth, and she was smiling. She wondered if, in the dream that was slipping just out of her memory, she had been flying.

When she opened her eyes, for a moment it seemed she was in her home, face right up to the stone window. How had she got so close to it? Then she remembered.

The rain had stopped, and through the stone frame Clare, blinking with sleep, watched mists rise up from the warm, wet fields in the gray cloud-light. And what was that coming, through the mists? She rubbed her eyes, the smile still on her face. But what was that, so tall and broad and dark, its heavy gait and wet, deep, wheezing breaths so familiar from nightmares?

The smile was gone, all her joy turned to terror in a moment. The creature stretched a hand out, a thick, enormous hand matted with black hair, as if it meant to seize her. As its head bent toward her through the mist, she saw two curving, sharp-pointed horns protruding from its head.

Like a terrified animal, which is what she was, Clare struggled and shoved her way backward, out the other side of the Cap, and ran, ran, ran. Her thoughts stumbled along with her frantic feet: Balor in some horrible new form? But how could it be, when she knew that thing from her worst dreams, had seen it so many times, skulking in dark basements, breaking through doors, facing her at the bottom of long staircases.

How had it escaped her dreams?

Over the sound of her own pelting feet and thundering heart, she listened for lumbering tread behind her. She heard nothing, and ran on.

She heard nothing because what she ran from did not pursue her. Instead, laboriously, with snuffling breath, it bent over the ancient stones. From the ground it lifted something that, in her scramble to escape, Clare had left behind: her mother's silver chain and star, which she had wrenched from her neck under the totem's hateful glare and shoved into her pocket.

A thick hand closed around the necklace. The star glinted in the sliver of sun.

Her lungs aching, her throat raw from panting breaths, Clare finally slowed to a walk. Looking over her shoulder, she saw nothing, but that did not ease her terror of that creature and of Balor—unless they were one and the same.

In another quarter mile, she saw ahead a small grove of trees, separated from the woods to her left, as if six or seven trees had slipped out of the forest to catch more sun. At their center was a small tree in full, white-flowered glory, its blossom-heavy branches curved down to the grass, giving it an Easter-egg shape.

Clare checked: yes, the tree stood in a direct line with Finn's Cap and the distant outline of the ruined castle.
Fully dressed in flowers still, even though we're past May
, just as Jo had said.

So this must be the hawthorn, the fairy thorn. And though she had reached her goal, the fourth gate in the fairy road, Clare felt a surge of angry despair. Now what? She did not have time for finding the way in.

She walked beneath the hawthorn boughs. Flowers brushed her face, and she brushed them away furiously. The flower-scent wrapped delicately around her—not a sweet scent, but an earthy one, rich and complicated. It turned her stomach.

Along with the scent, as if part of the scent, came the Strange. Clare tried to breathe it in, but her adrenaline was too high, and both
the scent and the Strange were too rich, too muddled—something about blossoming, maybe? But how did that help her? And she was too afraid.

“I don't know,” she said out loud to the white blossoms that swam and bowed around her. Her frowning face was flower-shadowed. “I don't KNOW what you WANT. Why can't you just
tell
me?” She felt herself close to tears, but fury dried them before they fell. “Why can't someone just tell me? Why is it all guessing games?” She pushed the branches roughly apart and thrust herself into the open air, away from the suffocating scent.

“I can't,” she said, to someone, to no one, to the Strange themselves. She grabbed a fistful of flowers, crushing them in her hand, dashing them to the ground. “It's
your
stupid yew I'm trying to save. Why don't you just let me in?” She swatted at the tree in rage. “I have to get in! Let me in, let me in,
let me in
!”