The Radiant Road by Katherine Catmull Read Free Book Online

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 animalsand 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 becomethis 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 itshooves, 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