The Radiant Road (20 page)

When Clare opened her eyes, she saw Finn standing, watching her. There was a bird on his shoulder, a small brown one, but
red-stained from the top of its head all the way down its front, like it had fallen into a glass of cranberry juice.

But Clare hardly saw the bird—she only saw Finn's face, which was looking at her in a new way, with a new interest, and new respect. “Well made, Clare Macleod,” he said. “That was a fine making, a poem indeed.”

The bird sang a long trill into Finn's ear, and flew away. “My thanks,” called Finn, “to you and your flock”—then, looking at Clare, he called again: “Our thanks, that is: our thanks.”

“How do we get there?” asked Clare, standing up. She jumped up to grab a low birch branch and pulled her feet up, hanging free for just a moment to stretch her back and arms. “I mean I know it will be that thing of, We're
here
, then we're suddenly we're
there
—but how does that work? Could I learn how?”

Finn laughed. “You know how. It's only the way you move in dreams every night of your life. It's easy—it's just . . . you see where you are, and then you see that you should be somewhere else: and then you are. I don't know why you can do it asleep and not awake. But come here, girl, and I'll take you.”

And he did.

They were standing in a rainstorm, in a black night. The darkness was a shock to Clare after all those hours that hovered between light
and dark. But the darkness was a relief, too: like switching off her bedroom lights after a long, anxious day.

The darkness was a relief. But the rainstorm was wild around them, and thunder rolled across the flickering sky, and that was dreadful. When the lightning came, it flashed against a wide black plain, where a lonely, mud-covered man dug frantically into the ground. His breath was coming in deep pants and sobs, and the wind around them seemed to gust and blow in tune.

Finn spoke. “When you visit the dream of one who dreams asleep, you have some power over their minds. You may feel you can control or divert him, make him feel this or desire that; and you may be right. But even if you only wish to help him, or ease his pain—don't use that power, Clare. You can help him with your hands, but do not try to change what he feels or thinks. Let him dream his own dream. Nothing else is right.”

Clare nodded, but did not respond. The muddy man horrified her. She had never seen her father so undone. She was shocked, and embarrassed, and afraid. It was not what she had imagined at all. She wanted to run to him, and she wanted to run away.

Finn said—more gently than usual, and the gentleness frightened her—“He will likely not see you for what you are, Clare. He is dreaming. He may not be able to hear you at all. Some people, in a dream, they only listen to themselves, only see what they create
in their minds. Don't be hurt if he does not know you. We can try again tomorrow night.”

The rain was hard and cold against her face and throat, and her hair clung wetly around her face. As she walked, lightning lit up the roiling sky again and again, making the muddy man vivid against the wet black ground, as his shovel plunged and lifted, plunged again. At each crack of thunder, he startled as if struck.

Clare drew closer and, in the next flash of light, saw his face was wet with rain. Rain had drenched his hair and clothes, his face was spattered with wet mud, and his eyes were swollen and wild.

“Dad,” she said.

He turned wildly in the black, roaring night, his eyes unfocused. “Áine?” he said.

Turning and turning in the rain, his face desperate, shouting, “Áine?”

Then he thrust his spade in the ground again and roared with fury and grief. Clare stumbled backward at the sound, for it contained more pain than she knew how to bear. She saw that in someone else's dream, their mind is clear as a picture book to you.
How much he misses her, so much more than I knew.

But something else was also driving this grief—there was something in this picture she couldn't quite see.

He bent to the earth, knotted muscles in outline under his wet shirt; he dug and dug and dug. “I lost it,” he cried, as his spade cut
the earth, flung the dirt, cut again. “I lost the watch you gave me, I must have lost it out here, but I don't know where it is, I can't find it, I've been digging all night, I'm so sorry, Áine, I'm so sorry, love, I will find it, I will find it, I'm so sorry.”

Clare thought:
It's me.
He misses me, but also, he is afraid for me.

(And yet still, something else as well—what was the part of the picture she was missing?)

Without warning, the ground collapsed beneath her father's feet. He was drowning in the muddy black ground, only his head and one arm visible as he struggled and writhed in the dirt. “Dad!” Clare screamed—
it's only a dream, Clare,
but she was in the dream herself now, and could not control it—and she was beside the hole, digging at the dirt with her fingers, freeing his other arm, pushing the mud off his face and mouth. Her father stared at her, bewildered, not seeing
her
, she could tell, but seeing
something
, as he choked and coughed. “Dad!” said Clare, sobbing. “Dad, please, Dad!” as she pulled the mud from his mouth. “Dad, look at me! It's me Clare, it's
Clare
.”

His face changed. “This isn't real,” he said under his breath. “This is a dream.” His eyes focused on her eyes, and in that moment, Clare knew, he saw. He saw her for who she was.

The rain had stopped somehow—the somehow of dreams; and the clouds had dissolved, somehow, and the moon made a murky light. Somehow, Clare was no longer kneeling over a muddy hole,
but sitting on the ground before a campfire. On the other side of the flames she saw her father.

“Clare,” he said. “How are you here? Are you—” His face twisted for a moment. “Please, are you—” He could not finish the sentence.

With a flash, Clare saw that he feared she was dead, a ghost-daughter visiting his dream. “I'm fine, I'm fine, Dad, I'm alive and—and I'm fine,” she finished awkwardly.

The fire crackled in the silence. He gave a short laugh, and Clare wished she could see his face, to see if the laugh were real or sad; from the sound, she couldn't tell. Across the blue and yellow flames, he hummed a small fragment of song to himself, one she had never heard before. He looked smaller, younger, almost like a boy. She saw how private a dream is, what a secret place her presence violated.

“Dad,” she said softly. “I came to ask you something.”

Silence.

“Are you listening?”

“I am,” said his dreamy, sleepy, boyish voice.

“Oh, okay. Good. So, well, one thing, I just wanted to tell you that I was all right, in case you were worried. I'm so sorry, but I had to leave the house. I'm really sorry. But this bad man came, Dad, and he wanted me to give him the key, and he hurt Jo, he might have—” She stopped. “And I was scared.”

“I'm so sorry, sweet,” he said. His voice was low and rough on
the other side of the flames, and she could not make out the expression on his face.

“But, so,” Clare said—she had not given much thought to how she would explain all this to her father, only knowing he must be worried, she had wanted to ease his mind—“but, so, I went down the fairy road, because . . .” Bad start: she took a deep breath. “Because, well . . .”

“The people of the tree,” said her father. He seemed hazy, and smaller still, almost like a small boy.

“What?” she said.

“When you were a baby. The people of the tree,” said a sleepy, distant boy.

“Wait,” said Clare. “Do you mean—are you talking about . . .” But he interrupted her with a hoarse laugh, a man's laugh now. Although he was more the right size again, now he seemed old, an old man.

“You're like your mother,” he said. “Your mother used to visit me in dreams.”

My mother knew how to walk in dreams.
A thought to turn over and look at carefully: but save it for later.

“Well, so—so now I'm with them,” said Clare, “with . . . those people, and they're protecting me. And I'm safe. You keep changing in the flames,” she added anxiously.

“Do I,” said the voice of a drowsy old man.

“Dad. Listen, please. Here's what I wanted to ask. Where do you keep the fairy flag? I need it for something. I'll bring it back,” she added, hoping this was true.

The old man with her father's eyes smiled. “That flag,” he said. He was silent for a while.

“Yes, that flag,” Clare prompted him. “The fairy flag. Where do you keep it?”

“I keep it in the sky,” said her father.

“In the sky . . . ? But no, wait,” said Clare, anxiety rising. “I don't know what you mean. Tell me in different words, please.”

“It's one of the stories in the sky,” said the old man, dreamily, soft, almost asleep. “So I keep it there.”

“Dad, please.” And at that moment the ground shook once, hard. Clare toppled over almost into the flames. When she righted herself, her father was himself again, and staring at her in horror.

“Clare, get out. It's not safe here. Get out. Get out. GET OUT.”

Once again, Clare had that sense of the world draining away: the darkness drained, and the fire, and the mud, and her father. They became paler and grainier, blurred sketches of themselves. The world was gone; and her father was a dissolving ghost, a Polaroid going backward; and then he was gone.

“He's waked.” Finn was pulling on her arm. “And so must we be gone.”

Clare rose unsteadily. The vanishing of her father's dream had left nothing behind but ice. Clare and Finn stood in a blue-and-white, frozen world. Her breath came white. Her hands were frosting over. “Finn,” she said into the white air. Her voice to her own ears sounded small and shocked. “What happened? Did you make this icy place?”

“No, I did not.” Finn's hands were thrust deep in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, his face a misery.

“Can you change it back? I'm freezing.” Clare took a lungful of spiky air. “I mean, I'm actually freezing, I think.” The new ice-world was flat and blue-white and still, as far as she could see. In this landscape, the clear half-light of the eternal magic hour was blue and cold.

“Clare,” said Finn, his words pushed out against the cold. “Listen to me.”

“At least he knows I'm safe now,” she said. “And I know he's safe.”

“But you don't know that.” Seeing Clare's uncomprehending look, Finn pulled his hands from his pockets in a gesture of despair. “Were you not paying attention? Did you not see all his dream was saying?”

“I saw that he misses my mother,” said Clare. She shook her head to clear it. “I saw that he misses me, and was afraid for me, but I fixed that, I told him—Finn, please, would you change this place, it's so cold!”

“Why change it?” said Finn, all frost and thundering gray eyes. “Why change it, when this is truth, this is the ice that lies beneath our world. Did you not see in his dream what was plain to see? The mine where he was working has collapsed. He is alive, he dreams, but he is buried beneath twelve tons of earth. He dreams, but he is buried deep, deep.”

“It's not true,” shouted Clare. A wind arose, blowing Finn's hair forward and Clare's hair back; it stiffened, became a staggering gale. “Change it,” she shouted, not knowing whether she meant this cold landscape or what Finn had read in her father's dream. “Please change it, please!”

The wind felt somehow hot and cold at once, a checkerboard wind, freezing and burning, until Clare could not tell freezing from burning, because they seemed to be one thing.

“Clare, you need to see this.” Finn carved each word into the frozen air—and as he spoke, Clare did not know, still, whether he was talking about the cold or her father's peril. “This is what is real.”

“It isn't,” Clare insisted. Her ears hurt so badly, and pressure was building inside them. The thought of her father in danger—near
death?—had punched her in the stomach, had cut away all the ground she stood upon.

“This is our world. This is our real world. This is Timeless, what lies beneath our makings,” he said, adding, more gently, “and that is real, what your father's dream said.”

“I will change it,” she shouted. And now she knew exactly what she was talking about. “I will change it, Finn, I'll figure out a way!” She brushed furiously at stinging ice-drop tears. “I want to see Her of the Cliffs. Take me there.”

At their departure, the ice sighed a long ghost sigh.

It Works Through Plumbing and Words

Clare and Finn stood in a wide clearing surrounded by evergreens on three sides, and on the fourth by a golden river. Her of the Cliffs stood with bow raised, as if aiming at the curving remnant of moon.

Clare ran toward her, stumbling and furious. “You knew.”

Her of the Cliffs lowered her bow, but did not turn. “I did.”

“You let me think my father was safe.”

“I did not say that.”

“You lied to keep me from leaving.”

Her of the Cliffs was silent. Wind rushed soft through the tops of the trees, a steady, unchanging wind, like traffic. Not real wind, more fake-magic-making. “I
hate
this place,” said Clare.

“Balor buried your father to blackmail you,” said Her of the Cliffs. Finally, now, she turned. “He caused the collapse. Now he keeps your father and the miners caught with him like insects in a bottle, to kill when he likes.”

When Her of the Cliffs said that, her voice was so cold that Clare thought she must have no heart at all. She had heard, but not really understood, that these people left their best and truest selves in their fairy-makings, which lie outside them, radiant and Strange
all over our world, like abandoned shells, like exoskeletons. So to Clare, as to many other humans over the centuries, the Timeless ones themselves seemed soulless and frightening and cold.

But then, to the people of Timeless, humans seemed inward, self-obsessed, unlovely, and unseeing.

Her of the Cliffs continued. “Although the mountain hangs over your father's head, it is your head Balor heeds. It's you he would frighten. And if Balor wishes to frighten you, perhaps it means he has not found that key.” Her bow beside her like a staff, arrow in the other hand, she rolled one shoulder back to loosen the muscle. “So in that sense, your father's peril is good news.”

At this final callous sentence, a fury mounted in Clare that was also, as furies often are, a wild and climbing terror. “You people have to help him,” she said. “We have to make sure he's all right.”

“But we know he's well and right,” said a miserable voice, a few yards away. Finn opened his hands as if pleading. “You just talked with him in his dream. He is good at dreaming, almost as good as a fairy.”

“He is far away, and not our trouble to take in hand,” said Her.

It was a slap to the heart. “My father is ALL I HAVE,” Clare cried. “And I won't let him die for you. If you want my help, you'll save him.”

That made Her of the Cliffs pause, but only for a moment. She
slid the copper-tipped arrow back into her quiver. “Far more is at stake than your father,” she said. “Dreaming is at stake. And making is at stake, yours and ours.”

“As if making's all that matters,” Clare snapped. “I have to go to him. Now. Not in dreams. In reality, my reality, in the human world. Now.”

The sound of a boy kicking a fallen log in frustration. “That's what he wants, don't you see, you stupid girl!”

Clare flew around, her face hot. “Don't call me stupid.
Ever
.”

Finn blinked, and his voice changed. “I didn't mean—you're not stupid, but—Balor wants you to come out in the open. The mine collapse is his design to drive you out where he can see you and kill you.”

“I don't care,” said Clare, who didn't. “I have to go to the mine and tell someone so that they can protect him, until they get him out.” Not
if they get him out.
When, when, when.

“And what will you tell them?” called Her of the Cliffs. She had walked to the wide, roaring river, was leaning her bow against a boulder.

That question stopped Clare. What
would
she say? She heard herself explaining to some tall, important, frantically busy person:
My dad left me alone, and a bad man came, the guy who owns this mine, he's a fairy really, and he's trying to close the fairy roads. And he made this mine collapse, to scare me into letting him in our house.

Even if someone believed that, which no one ever, ever would, what were they supposed to do? Her hands were fists. She kicked the grass in frustration. She felt sick with the adrenaline spinning useless in her blood.

Finn walked down the riverbank.
Walking away from me and my stupidity
, thought Clare. He began picking up stones, turning them over, dropping some, keeping others.

“Clare, come here,” called Her of the Cliffs. She was sitting, now, on the end of a fallen log that stretched out over the rushing river, wide and overfull, bronzy-gold in the fairy light. She raised her voice again. “I believe your father is protected. Even when you are not in it, your mother's house still offers you both some protection.”

“You believe, but you don't know,” said Clare. Reluctantly she moved toward the river. Finn was a dark figure against the half-light, skipping his stones, one at a time, with a low sidearm toss toward the water.

“I have to do something,” Clare said to Her of the Cliffs. Her own voice sounded pleading and desperate to her ears. “There has to be a thing I can do.” She felt the bitterness of it, that she had been so brave, had escaped Balor, had protected the tree, had found her way through the last gate, had even learned to dream awake—and it would all mean nothing, if her father was to die for it.
I won't ride this wind, not this one. I'll push against it as hard as I can.

Finn tossed a stone. It hopped over the cascading water three, four, five times. Clare found herself counting as he tossed again. She had stood on the beach with him, learning to dream—when? Hours ago? Half a day ago? She had lost all sense of time here.

Finn tossed another stone. Three, four, five. Her father's face in the wild dream-rain, how she could see his grief and the source of his grief, and how Finn had said she could help him in the dream, if she wished.

Four, five, six. “Finn,” she said. She held perfectly still, so that the thought she had caught by one delicate wing did not get away. “Ma'am,” she added, shy, because she did not know what to call Her of the Cliffs, and because that was what she had been taught to call women in Texas.
In Texas
—it seemed like a stranger and more distant land than fairy now.

“There is a way to help my father without leaving Timeless,” Clare said. “I could visit one of Balor's dreams.”

Finn had flung the rest of his stones into the water in a furious splash. The word
stupid
had been used again, with even greater heat, on both sides. Finally, Finn had proclaimed, “Balor is a fairy, he does not dream.” He turned to Her of the Cliffs. “Is not that right?”

She hesitated, and Clare leaped upon the hesitation. “He does dream, doesn't he?”

“This plan is out of the question,” said Her of the Cliffs. She slipped off her log and walked closer to Clare. “You must not even consider it. But yes, he does sleep and dream,” she added reluctantly. “His thousand years in your changing world have reshaped him.”

Clare bulled ahead. “Finn said when you visit a dream you have power over their minds, you can make them feel certain things and want certain things. I could—”

“No. Out of the question. If you let your concentration lapse for a moment, he would see you for who you are. And that would be very bad for you, very bad indeed, and perhaps for us as well. It is far too dangerous, Clare, and if—”

“But my father . . . ,” Clare began. She stopped. Her of the Cliffs seemed to swell, power surging out from her in a single, swamping wave, like a blow to the chest. Clare looked for Finn, but he still stood on the riverbank, arms wrapped around himself, frowning at the water.

“All right,” said Clare, bitterly, looking at her boots on the grass. “Okay. I understand.”

But Clare did not understand, not at all, and she did not agree. She kept a secret resolve in her heart to wait for her chance.

Turning her fierce disapproval now to Finn, Her of the Cliffs asked: “And why did you take her to visit her father's dream?”

As Finn explained his plan to use the Macleod fairy flag, Clare
thought an odd expression flitted over Her of the Cliffs's face, something like tenderness. In any case, she subsided and softened. “It is a good plan,” she said. “And, Clare, while I cannot promise this, perhaps we will be able to help your father, not now, but when the host rides at Midsummer. But you must know that we cannot help him, whether we will or no, until we have that flag. Did you learn where it is?”

“Not exactly,” said Clare. She sat on the riverbank and dug at a smooth river rock. “Dad told me something, but it didn't make sense. The flag could be at home, or in some box on a boat on its way from Texas. I don't know.”
In the sky
—could it be on a plane? How was she supposed to know?

“She doesn't know how to read a dream,” said Finn. He was walking toward them, hands in his pockets. “She could not read her own father's dream-map, though knowing him as well as she does.”

“Well, you were there, too,” said Clare, ice in her voice, “and I guess you're this big expert on dream-talking, or reading dreams, or whatever. So where's the flag?”

“Clare,” said Her of the Cliffs, surprisingly gently. “Do you know what a dream-map is?”

It was hard to wear a false face with Her of the Cliffs. “No,” she admitted.

Unexpectedly, Her smiled a young and girlish smile. “Then I get to tell you,” she said, settling down beside Clare. Her power now
swirled around her as softly as a song. “When we dream—all of us, human or fairy, dreaming asleep or awake, which is making—when we dream, when we make, we make with ourselves. We make with what we are. We ourselves are the material. Do you understand?”

“Maybe I do,” said Clare. “Sort of.”

“Here is what that means: each piece of each dream or making is a version of ourselves. Each snapping dog, each scolding father; each new rose or blasted pine; each tumbled barn or dirty kitchen; each bicycle steering out of control down each steep hill—each of these things is some part of ourselves, or version of ourselves, some fear or joy or desire.”

“So how do you know which thing in the dream is the real person?”

“Ah, but you see,” said Her of the Cliffs with pleasure, “it's the
whole
dream, or the whole making, that is the person. The dream maps the person at that moment. Or you might say the dream is a sketch of the person, drawn on that night. The picture will change from night to night. A kitten will grow into a tiger; a dirty kitchen will become clean, or become a bathroom. If you go back to the same dreamer many nights, you can learn a great deal.

“But when you only see one dream, you must be a skilled map-reader to understand what you are seeing, even when you know the person well. Tell me about your father's dream, and let's talk about it.”

So Clare described her father's dream in the wild rain, digging and digging for the lost watch her mother had given him, and being swallowed by the earth. “But he doesn't have a watch like that,” she added. And then, shyly: “So I wonder if that might be me, the watch? But then,” she said, “you said everything in the dream is
him
, so . . .”

“It could be his connection to you,” Her of the Cliffs said. She was watching Clare closely. “The watch might stand for that. But why a watch, do you think?”

Clare thought, without success. She was feeling rather tired.

“What does a watch do?” the woman prompted her.

“Tells time,” said Clare. “Oh: time? Is it something to do with Timeless?” She frowned. “But Dad doesn't know about that—I don't think he does anyway. Does he?”

Her of the Cliffs did not respond directly. “What else about the watch? What about the word itself? Dreams like to pile meanings one on top of another. They are not so fussy about spreading their meanings out in a clear line.”