The Radiant Road (29 page)

“Oh, but
no
,” she moaned without thinking.

He looked up, startled, maybe even hurt. In the second or two
of silence between them, Clare remembered both Balor's awful mockery, and the yew-girl's sigh of pleasure. She made two fists to hide her trembling fingers and said, “I'm sorry. I'm just shy. Look all you want. Wait, actually”—and with a deep breath, she flipped through the pages to find the moonlight-road poem—“look at this one.”

As he read, Finn and Clare made a spot of stillness among the swishing silks and flashing colors of the Hunt preparations. She felt that her heart lay open in his palm.

But she also felt that whether he liked the poem or not, her heart would be all right.

When he raised his eyes, one blue-gray, one pearl-white, his expression was a curious mixture of pleasure, admiration, and some kind of happy sadness she could not quite identify. “I knew you for a maker, Clare, from long ago,” he said. “I knew that, indeed, and I was right. This is well made.”

Clare smiled stupidly, unable to think of what to say. Finn smiled. “I have a making for you, as well. I mean,” he added, a little anxiously, “I don't say I believe you made this for me—”

“A little I did, and a little I didn't,” said Clare.

Finn grinned. “Same as I. A little I made a making for you, and little for myself, and—well. Afterward. There will be an afterward, there must be, for that's a making you must see. But, sadly”—his
odd, ironic smile crinkling his odd eyes—“for all I have tried, all my life, to think of other ways, I find the only way to win this battle is to fight it.”

He handed her the book, and carefully folded the flag into his pocket. He leaned toward her, and she felt a single breath held between them, as if they might never breathe again. He kissed her on the cheek, and walked away.

The spot he had kissed glowed and glowed with the memory of it.

The Wild Hunt

Clare had a plan.

With Finn gone, she made her way into the crowd of bustling Strange. She had not said her plan to Finn, for fear of a fight, but she meant to make it real.

“I want to go on the Hunt,” she said to the woman with ice-threaded eyes, who hurried along with her arms full of bridles in leather and silk. The woman did not so much as turn her head.

“I could help,” she said to the dark man with the bright white hair, who led an enormous, snorting red stallion by a piece of black thread tied around its neck. He hurried on.

“It's my house we're protecting, and my tree,” she said to the crowds who rushed past her. “It's my house, and I have a steed, there has to be some way I can help.”

No one noticed her, and no one replied.

She followed them anyway, defiantly, listening hard, to find out the plan.

She learned that it was called the Wild Hunt both by humans and the people of Timeless. They hunted at the two solstices, Yule and Midsummer.

To the people of Time who noticed, the Hunt was pounding hooves and barking dogs that screamed across the night sky like claps of thunder—some people said it
was
claps of thunder, but others had seen the fairy host with their own eyes.

Clare gathered that the whole host would ride the fairy road, and reach her house just at sunrise. But Finn alone would ride the shaft of Midsummer sunlight through the window at dawn. He would have a single shot (“a single shot, with a single eye,” muttered one), one chance to pin Balor down. If he hit, the rest of the fairies would follow, sweep Balor alive into the depths of the cold sea, and bind him there forever.

If he missed, Balor would surely turn and attack.

Clare pushed on until she found Her of the Cliffs, who sat in a carved wooden chair, adjusting the strap on her quiver to fit Finn's broader chest.

“I am coming on the Hunt,” said Clare defiantly.

Her of the Cliffs did not look up. “So I thought you might,” she said.

Feeling as if she had burst headfirst through an open door, Clare said, “Oh! Oh . . . well, good. But then . . . I mean, do I need to do something to get ready?”

Her of the Cliffs said, rather pointedly, “It is likely you need to sleep. You have a few hours.” She tugged at a piece of leather, trying to free it from a wooden clasp.

Clare realized she was, in fact, exhausted.

“Not here,” said Her of the Cliffs, through an awl in her mouth. “No dreaming-awake-making in the midst of our hall.” She looked up, and Clare thought there was almost amusement on her face. She removed the awl. “What are you waiting for? Go. We'll fetch you if you sleep too late.” At Clare's hesitation, the amusement vanished. “Do you doubt my word?”

“No, no,” said Clare humbly. “I'm sorry. Thank you. Can I ask one question?”

Her of the Cliffs nodded, as she bored into the leather.

“At my house, I smashed Balor's totem against the floor.”

Her of the Cliffs looked up.

“But I don't know if—do you think, do you think I might have killed it?” Her voice sounded foolishly hopeful to her own ears.

Her of the Cliffs smiled. “That is unlikely. But it was brave, Clare Macleod, to do that. It could not have been easy.” She bent her head over the leather and wood. “It was well done,” she added, “worthy of the Hunter's many-greats-granddaughter.”

Clare left the hall as light as a leaf. Her father was out of the mine. Her of the Cliffs had said
well done
, had called her worthy.

Finn, too, Finn had said
well made.
And the spot on her cheek that he had kissed, it glowed warm and sweet as a Strange.

Tired as she was, she ran the last yards to Asterion, who lay
under a tree, but not yet asleep, waiting. She took his hand, and curled beside him, and together they dreamed.

In the dream, they stood in howling storm, before a flood-destroyed bridge, which they had to cross.

“It's my dream,” shouted Clare, into the howl of the storm. “I'll make a bridge.” And she threw herself long, long across the raging flood, lengthening as she flew, until with feet still on one side and hands on the other, she was the bridge herself, and a group of schoolchildren—some of them blind, oh, it was a school for the blind—walked across her. She felt their shoes like little hooves across her back, and set her jaw against the storm.

Clare woke on her own in time. She and Asterion ran to the hall hand in hand, Clare half skipping to keep up with his hooved, thundering strides. She left him outside and slipped in, hovering at the edge of the crowd in hopes Finn would not see her.

He stood at the center of a great mass of fairies, more than Clare had seen altogether before. When he raised his hand, holding the flag, the hall fell silent.

A strong wind came up, a wind inside the hall, and blew out all the candle flames. The wind blew Clare's hair straight back, made her eyes water. The trees must have been thick around the leafy hall, because it was dark here without the candles.

In fact—and Clare felt a catch of joy when she realized it—it was night. They were no longer in fairy. It was night, a night permeated by a pale, cool light, a light that reminded her of the quartz light of her home.
What
was that light?

Oh: now she knew; now she saw. It was starlight. The new moon of Midsummer was a black disk against the black sky, and all around it the stars shone thousands-bright on their fairy host.

But how was it that the stars were not above her, but
beside
her?

And then she saw: she was in the sky. She and the crowd of laughers and smilers around her were in the sky, in the dark air, a hundred feet above the earth, perfectly still—at least it seemed that way—as the wind rushed past them, and the world rushed beneath them.

At least, that was how it felt to Clare: that she and the host had never moved from the leafy hall, only everything had rushed and changed around them; that it was the wind and the world that were moving.

The wind carried a cry back to her: “Host!” a fierce and familiar voice shouted. “My host! Mount your steeds!”

Instantly Clare felt herself lifted by strong arms, felt muscles pulsing beneath her. “Asterion!” she cried. Not clinging to his back this time, she straddled his shoulders. With one hand, she steadied herself on one of his horns; with the other, she leaned down to caress his face.

Far below, a woman rushed backward, carrying a bag of groceries. At least, it seemed that her feet moved forward, but the world carried her back, as the world itself sped backward beneath the fairy host.

Clare felt an ecstasy, a tightrope walker's ecstasy, poised so perfectly on the line between two worlds. Her blood surged with a Strange joy. She put her head back to the sky and stars. She saw that the whole host had their heads back, hair streaming, as they stood balanced on the edge of the flying world.

She felt the air pass through her, and the light pass through her.

“I love this,” she cried out loud to the night. And all around her, she heard the fairy host, baying and howling and roaring their own cries of joy, the joy of the Hunt.

As the cry went up, the woman beneath them whipped her head up, and saw them. Terror swam across her face. Clare smiled down, remembering a poem in her mother's commonplace book:

The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,

Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,

Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam,

Our arms are waving, our lips are apart,

And if any gaze on our rushing band,

We come between him and the deed of his hand,

We come between him and the hope of his heart.

All around her, the host took a thousand forms, on all manner of beasts. To her right, Clare saw a slim figure, man or woman or child she couldn't tell, more like a ghost, only not white, but some insubstantial color, mounted on a flying fish.

Beyond, she saw an enormous blue whale driving through the sky, whose rider—Clare saw only short, tangled black hair whipped around a dark and laughing face—looked like a mouse on the back of a horse.

She saw a gaunt man who unraveled a skein of many-colored yarn that streamed behind him like a rainbow. He stood balanced on huge snake that twisted and writhed against the stars.

She saw a tiger, its color the yellow and black of WARNING, straddled by a tiny chestnut-colored girl in a white dress.

(And if one of these had looked toward her, they'd have seen a pale, wild girl with hair red as an autumn leaf, exultant on the shoulders of a midnight-colored minotaur.)

At the head of the host, well ahead of the others, was a whirling cyclone of brilliant orange flames, at whose center Clare could just make out, amid the flickering white and blue, Her of the Cliffs.

“Her beast is
fire
,” she said aloud, astonished.

“Is fire itself,” agreed a voice beside her. “Which—now, steady on, girl—which makes her dangerous beyond predicting and warm as a kettle on a stove, both at once. As you have seen.”

It was Finn, of course, with his pearly left eye, riding a white stag whose right eye was white as the moon. “Well, hi,” she said.

He smiled. “Trickster Clare. But I knew you would come, of course I knew, for I know you. And I know now better now than to try to ‘no' you. Who says no to she who smashed Balor's totem with her own hands?”

Clare rolled her eyes to hide the sunburst inside.

“Let's catch her up and lead them all,” said Finn, and charged ahead. Beneath Clare, Asterion gave a kick. Led by the stag, Clare and her beast galloped the air fast, fast, until they were far ahead of the rest of the host.

Now Clare saw flowing beneath them the lake island, her own lake island, the heart of the Strange. Ahead she knew they would find a blossoming hawthorn tree, and beyond that a pale, stony cap, alone in a field. Farther still, a ruined castle sugared with starlight and flowers. And then her home, her home and her yew, to free them from Balor and his wicked totem forever.

Clare looked behind her once more. She saw a moon-white horse with yellowy froth on its teeth; she saw a tall pale woman in a lake-blue dress, holding a sword above her head; she saw a small man, all in green, his jaw dropped low in a roar of joy.

Then: “STOP!” shouted the woman wrapped in flames. “STOP!” echoed Finn, whirling to face the host. “Stop! Wait!”

Clare looked down. Far below was the little grove of trees where she had hammered her fists against the fairy thorn. She craned her neck—she could see no blossom-covered tree among the others now. Had all the flowers fallen so quickly?

“Balor has chopped down the fairy thorn,” said Finn, his voice a shocked shadow of itself. “The road is broken.”

Clare looked up. “Broken?”

“Without the fairy thorn, one part of road cannot not reach the next. The connection is lost.”

Clare waited for Finn and Her of the Cliffs to begin to argue over a strategy, some way to meet this new crisis. But they didn't. There was only a terrible silence between them, and the murmurs of the fairy host behind.

In the end, because their silence was so painful, and because the glorious Hunt could not end this way, it was Clare who spoke, to ask what she was sure was a dumb question. “Why don't one of you just . . . make a making, and turn into a tree?”

Her of the Cliffs shook her head, and fire danced from her hair. “A good thought. But that tree would have no human in it, and it must have both, to be a gate. Were this another Hunt, then you might, Finn, you of all of us. But for this Hunt, you must lead.”

Another, bleaker silence.

“So what about me?” Again Clare's small, stubborn voice. “I was a tree before. So I know the trees. And I'm human. And I know the people of Timeless.” She looked uncertainly at Her of the Cliffs. “And I have at least some fairy in me, from you, ma'am,” (
ma'am!
she cursed herself) “and maybe from my mother, too, so maybe it's more than just that little. I could become the tree.”