The Radiant Road by Katherine Catmull Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

4
    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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œYou sent those birds?”
    â€œNot ‘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?
    â€œAnd no, it is not,” he added. “But I did help the mushrooms make it, I did that.”
    â€œHow did you—” Clare didn’t even know how to start this question. “Did you, did you dig up this clearing and then spread—”
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œWell, I’m sorry,” said Clare, stubborn. “But—”
    â€œWe 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