The Radiant Road (6 page)

Jo watched her with a funny expression. “Poison,” she said carefully.

“I know.” Clare felt compelled to add, “Also, but just: I don't eat
leaves
anymore, actually.”

Jo laughed her deep-bubble laugh.

Clare wondered if she could climb higher, and tested one branch by hanging from it.

“Some of the branches are hollow,” said Jo, “the tree is as old as that. So be careful.”

Clare pulled herself up the branch. Hidden in the leaves above Jo, she spoke. “Jo. Why do people here call fairies ‘the Good People'? My father called them that once, too.”

“Ah well,” came Jo's voice, soft. Clare could just see her, leaning against the yew, looking out through the branches toward the sea. “We say it the same way that if you see a great dog, a large and powerful one, whose tail is not necessarily wagging—then you say, ‘Good dog, good dog.'”

When Jo left, and after she had finished washing the breakfast dishes, Clare went outside to see what she could see. Her father said, “Be careful, and take your phone.”

“I don't have one that works here yet,” she said.

“Oh yes,” said her father. “Well, still, then, be careful.” He smiled in a crinkly way that he hadn't for a long time. “It's like my own childhood, your running all over the countryside phonelessly.”

“Not that I'm a
child
anymore, actually,” said Clare,

“Not that you're a child anymore,” her father agreed. “Almost a woman, Miss Almost-Fifteen.”

Clare made a face. “Not a child. Almost a woman. I really think you have to pick one.”

Her father threw back his head and laughed. “Be back for dinner, my bullheaded girl. And stay safe.”

The world was green with the new June. Jo had called it “lovely warm,” but to Clare it was lovely, lovely cool. She wore jeans and boots, which in Midland meant January. She was going to explore her home.

At the foot of the hill she paused, looking down the twisty one-lane road lined with low stone walls, stone piled on stone, with no mortar in between, like her home. Cars come fast in Ireland and on the wrong side, and there was no sidewalk or shoulder, so she did not want to walk along that road for long. But down toward her left, she spotted a break in the wall she could squeeze through to enter the pasture.

Green hills rose up behind her, hiding the sea, and clouds were crowding around the sun. Clare stood facing the pasture in the changing light. To her left was the woods, and down the pasture a half mile or so was the castle. She set out in that direction. War and knights, battle and blood.

Gradually the castle turned from distant lumps of rock into itself, and she stood before what had once, perhaps, been a door of thickest wood and bound with iron. This cool afternoon it was only a curtain of vines that looked easily pushed through. From within, a faint tingling of Strange drifted through the curtained door.

Clare turned around. Yes: this vine-covered door exactly faced the stone window in the side of her hill. So this was the first landmark—according to some ridiculous kid's story, which of course it was.

Suddenly, the whole thing irritated her in ways she couldn't say. Her mother's silver necklace was scratching her neck, so she unhooked it and balled it up inside her fist, pressing the points of the star painfully into her palm. There were no fairies, and Strange or no Strange, this was just an old castle that belonged to some, no doubt, warmongering king who was long and deservedly dead. This fairy thing was going to ruin the whole country. Forget it. She turned to walk back to the twisting, wrong-sided Irish road.

And then, from the forest to the north, she heard music.

No, a wren's song
, she thought. At least, perhaps it was a wren;
it had the shape of a wren song, complicated, wreathing up, down, and around.

But the longer Clare stood listening, the less it sounded like birdsong at all, and the more it seemed a song made on the thinnest flute. Still, it was not quite like human music, either. It seemed both human and made, but also not-made, as complicated and inhuman as birdsong or falling water.

She ran toward the woods, following the music. And a pathway opened up, and welcomed her in.

When she stepped out of the sun, everything changed. The light grew complicated and shifty, the air cooled, the colors deepened. It seemed as if the sweet music bubbled more clearly, the wind sighed more loudly, and the leaves along the path rustled as loud as papers dropped in a church.

Or maybe in the woods, Clare was a better listener. She thought of a line from the commonplace book: “The poetry of the earth is never dead.”

The music sang her down the path, and the cool air touched her face like the breath of a ghost. A long-forgotten woods-walk popped into her mind: herself short and worried, holding tight to her mother's hand, and her mother saying, “No fear, girl. We have friends in every woods we walk through, though we walk through them not knowing.” Small Clare had thought she meant animals
and birds; but older Clare was not so sure. Oh, that Strange song drew her deeper in. She loved its made-and-unmade tune, so sweet and high and wild.

The song began to fade, so Clare walked faster, listening to find it again, her heart beating hard.

And off to her right, she heard something: but not a song.

A snort.

When you are listening to silence to find a flute like a bird, then the snort of an animal, a big animal—well,
snort
is a small word. It doesn't say how a sound can make you cold, make your stomach turn over once, twice. A large animal was very close, and Clare felt very small.

She stood still. She heard a confusion of leaves up ahead, which gathered into a great stamping: one, two, three.

And then, on the path ahead, in the dappled, slanting morning light, she saw the snorting creature. It was an enormous deer, a buck—
a stag, they call it here
—almost the size of a moose, with a thick shaggy throat and muscled chest.

More than the creature's size made Clare's breath catch and stop. This stag was white: all white, every inch, like a ghost or a snowstorm, except only for gray-blue eyes. Its white antlers rose up twining and tangled, as twining and tangled as the high, wild, lovely song that Clare had followed, as if somehow the music had become
this other thing, this complicated whiteness twisting and rising into the air.

The white stag held still across the path, looking off to the left. He raised his head and roared or groaned. To Clare, it sounded like both. And she was frightened, truly frightened, especially when he turned to look at her with his rain-cloud eyes.

Silence.

The white stag lifted his head again, gave his terrible, groaning roar, and turned to her again.

Should I say something back?

But Clare didn't know what to say.

One more time the white stag roared, tossing his head, and Clare felt the proud sound inside her, filling all her cells.

And now Clare saw, dangling from one of the stag's white horns, flashing in the sun, her own silver chain, with its silver star.

She looked in her hand; the chain was gone. She must have dropped it as she ran.

The stag turned on his pale, slender legs and galloped away down the path.

Clare ran after.

For the next hour, Clare saw the stag and lost the stag, over and over, in the changing light of the changing trees. She heard its
hooves, sometimes, and she heard the music, others. She was tiring fast; if it hadn't been for the silver necklace, she might have given up. But that chain had been her mother's, and her grandmother's, so she listened for hooves or music and ran on.

But in the end, Clare lost the sound of the hooves and the music both; she lost her ghostly stag. In frustration, she stopped, to catch her breath, to look behind her, to be sure she knew the way home, to be safe. Necklace or not, she almost put her feet back on the path home. But she heard a few more notes from the flute—or maybe it was a wren this time, after all. Either way, it was enough to make her turn around again and take a few steps toward a small, stony brook that ran across the path.

Across the brook, behind the trees, she could see that the forest drew back to make an open space of canopied light.

Clare backed up, took her longest running steps, and leaped across the brook. The momentum carried her stumbling forward through the trees and into the open meadow on the other side.

What she saw in the meadow could not be right; made her blink, and blink again.

It was a vast rainbow, curled in on itself, asleep on the ground.

A third blink, but the vivid coil of color remained, a many-colored labyrinth, paths of color turning in and around and back on themselves, filling up the whole wide meadow.

Then Clare said, “Oh,” out loud. Now she saw: the twisting, spiraling colors were not a grounded rainbow. They were mushrooms—
mushrooms
, how strange, how Strange—thousands of them, sprouting in every color. The mushrooms of the outer rings were bright and brilliant red, but as the circle spiraled inward, the red softened to brick, then rust, then heart-of-sun orange, then sunshine yellow, lemon yellow, goldy-green, lime—and spiraling closer and closer to the center, the mushrooms were mint, then morning sky, then evening sky, almost night, and a deeper and deeper violet.

And in the center of the mushroom rainbow-labyrinth stood a boy, all in black and gray with long, wild black hair. He was looking straight at Clare, holding a thin silver flute.

And from the end of the flute dangled Clare's silver chain.

A Sky Holding Snow

The boy standing in the earth-rainbow radiated Strange like an electrical storm. Oh, but the sight of him felt dark and sweet and familiar to Clare, a cup of hot chocolate inside that storm.

She thought of the word
elflocks
. “Ach, you've got elflocks,” her mother would say when her hair tangled, when she had to tug the comb through hard. Clare remembered that word as she looked at the dark, silent boy, with his long dark face under long, tangled black hair. Elflocks. Not even tangled, more than tangled, and all different lengths, some twisted into ropy strands that hung lightly around his face.

He was about her age. His clothes were dark, old-fashioned, and coarse, like someone in a black-and-white movie, and his eyes were cool blues and grays.

“I know you,” said the boy.

His accent was not Irish or Scottish but thicker and older than them, like the root of the tree that bore them. Clare recognized that way of talking, but she could not think from where.

“I don't know you,” she replied; though she did, she knew she did.

He smiled a smile that was warm July to his December eyes. “Four for a boy,” he said. “Did you see the message?”

“You sent those birds?”

“Not ‘sent,' no, I am no king to
send
,” he said. “I asked in the proper way.”

Clare tried again. “Did you make—did you make, this, this—” A question rose to her tongue; seemed unbelievably stupid; was asked anyway. “Is it a fairy ring?” She had read about those, and weren't they made of mushrooms?

He smiled one half of a smile. “They say we make the rings for dancing in,” he said. “But it isn't your idea of dancing we're doing.”

We make the rings
. We?

“And no, it is not,” he added. “But I did help the mushrooms make it, I did that.”

“How did you—” Clare didn't even know how to start this question. “Did you, did you dig up this clearing and then spread—”

“We don't make with tools,” he said. “You know that, you know it, oh, Clare. All you've known you've lost. Gone too long, too long.” A shadow slipped across the boy's eyes, a cloud across the winter sun.

“Well, I'm sorry,” said Clare, stubborn. “But—”

“We made it together, for you, the mushrooms and I,” said the boy. “Just as the birds and I made your morning message. That is how we make.”

“Well, it's . . . incredibly beautiful,” she said, flushing at the weakness of the words.
Lame
.

He smiled down at the colored rings rippling away from his feet. Clare broke the silence, speaking in a rush. “I don't know you. Only I do.”

“You do,” the boy agreed. His voice was low for a boy; not like a man's, but deeper and richer than a boy's should be. “You know me, Clare. You've only forgotten. Girl,” he said. “Un-forget.”

And saying that, he reached out as if to touch her. He was too far away to touch her—he at the center of the hundred colored rings, she at the edge—but then he wasn't, suddenly, he was quite near, and Clare stumbled back.

But he caught her, he steadied her, and into her hand, he placed her own silver chain.

With the boy's touch, with the green, woody scent of him, Clare's heart startled, as wild as a bird. She did remember. She saw two babies, once, and then two toddlers, and now the same two in this meadow, nearly grown, and all of them superimposed, all layered against each other.
That's me
, thought Clare.
That's me,
once, then, now,
all orange-red and warm and autumn.
That's him, now, once, then, all cold and winter branches and eyes like a sky holding snow. That's us, facing each other on this path. I know this boy, oh, I know him.

And she knew with certainty that this boy was winter to her autumn, and that as winter and autumn go hand in hand together, she and this boy had always gone. She knew that, she knew that, how could she have forgotten? “But what—” she began.

“Tonight,” he said. “For greater talk we'll meet tonight, in the in-between. Tonight I'll begin to tell you all your mother should have told, except she died. You're home, ah, you're home at last. Clare, come tonight.”

“Wait, in between what? Where do I go?” Clare asked.

“You know. Come just as you always did.” He was somehow back in the center of the mushroom circle now. The flute hung from one hand. “I thought you'd come the day you came, and you almost did, until you didn't.”

In the center of a wheel of ravishing color, he was a shadow or a rain cloud, and then he was gone.

Clare sat down hard on the forest floor. Meet him in between? “You almost did the day you came”—she ran over yesterday in her mind: how she brought her suitcase in, saw the stars on the ceiling, touched the spiral on the wall, and wrote, and slept, and slipped downstairs to put her hand in the—oh.

“Is it the tree?” she called into the empty air. But she knew it was. As she asked the question aloud, her mind was flooded by memory.

When I was a baby, he was.

When they were babies, their fists closed together. Her head against his head. Their comfortable sighs in the night, breathing together the smell of living wood, and earth, and herbs. Their small, square, bare feet, tangled together, dark and pale.

And didn't she miss him when they were apart, and cry?

And didn't she cry and cry, and then stop and go silent, once they left for good?

They had lain inside that tree as babies, then as tiny children, tangled, playing. She remembered the taste of the wood in her mouth, chewing it for comfort as her small hard teeth came through.

(
But that wood is poison
, came the passing thought, though she didn't stay to question it.)

Red hair, black hair, pale hand, dark hand, brown eye, gray eye.

Inside the tree.

Inside the tree is full of lights, she remembered: a Christmas tree inside out.

Inside the tree it smells of resin and licorice herbs, and wood under it all, she remembered: the smell of living wood and stone.

Clare sat on the forest floor, slowly fastening the chain around her neck. The trees towered and breathed above her, coiled and knotted beneath her, a speaking tangle of water and stone and life.

She stood, turned, ran home. As she jumped across the brook, she thought it sang to her.

The brook did sing. It sang its warning song. But Clare does not yet have ears to hear when the world sings to her through brook or wind or bird.

This was the brook's song:
He comes closer, he comes closer, the destroyer comes closer to your nest.

“I met a boy today,” Clare told her father when she got home.

He seemed distracted, fiddling with the phone in his hand. “Oh, good,” he said. “And what's his name?”

Clare felt she should know this.
He knew mine.
Clare felt around her heart, looking for the name. She looked up to see if her father was waiting for her answer. But he was already ducking down the passage toward the door, frowning at his phone, going outside for better reception.

“Finn,” she said into the empty room. Now she remembered. “His name is Finn.”

Late that night, Clare slipped from her high bed, bare feet on the whitened wood. Her flannel pajamas were too thin for the cold, so she pulled the comforter around her and held it close with one hand as she climbed down the ladder. What she had been wild to do this afternoon now seemed a terrible idea.

I don't have to go all the way in tonight
, she told herself.
I could just look and be sure this is safe.

But she knew she'd go in. She was as curious as a cat—and as tense as a cat.

The blanket rasped softly along the floor, so she gathered it up. Her father's low, slow breaths behind the screen calmed her. She found the tree in the dark and knelt down beside it. Blind, feeling with her hands, she found the place where the tree split. Was it one tree that tore itself in two? Or two trees that grew together?

In went her arm, and her arm felt a change. The comforter slipped to the floor. She turned sideways. It was tight—she was no toddler now. But piece by piece, wriggling and stretching, Clare pulled herself inside the tree. The more of her made it in, the more her blood swirled with joy; all her body's cells hummed,
yes, yes, yes.

She was in. Her knee was pressed into her chest, her arm squeezed up above her. She felt like the drawing of Alice grown too big for the house.

But soon the tree relaxed around her; it allowed her in. Or was she shaping herself to fit the space? They shaped themselves to fit each other, the tree and Clare. This is called making a home.

Sitting comfortably now, arms around her knees, Clare waited
in the dark. Her blood vibrated like plucked strings. Where were the colored lights she remembered? For a moment she doubted, in the tunnel again: would the dark never end?

But at the end of the tunnel, as with all tunnels, a tiny light appeared. The light was warm and white, and hovered near. Other tiny, hovering lights joined it, swarmed beside it. The lights blinked off and on.

Fireflies.

Lovely: but Clare felt a clutch of fear, remembering the glowing horror-mask in the sky. The lights she remembered from the tree were
fireflies
? Did they even have those in Ireland?

But these fireflies danced around her head with tender attention, blinking a silent, delicate song. The skin of her arms and knees glowed in their creamy light.

Now at her feet came a wave of glimmering green, tiny green pinpricks of light that washed in and out, in and out, like a wave on the shore.

Now over her head a translucent scarf of indigo and spring green folded, unfolded, refolded. “Northern lights,” whispered Clare.

And still the blinking fireflies danced lightly around her, as the northern lights and the luminous green waves kept their own slow rhythms. These were the Christmas lights she remembered; the tree was full of living lights.