The Radiant Road by Katherine Catmull

Author:Katherine Catmull
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2015-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Clare dreamed she was in a tunnel. She dreamed it awake, although she could not remember making the tunnel, and feared it, a little.

She feared the tunnel because it was alive. It throbbed delicately around her.

But I don’t have to feel afraid. It’s my dream. A little surge of wicked freedom, in that feeling.

She touched a hand to the wall of the tunnel. The wall was wood, but living wood, not carved and dry. Immediately, with a flood of pleasure, she knew where she was: inside the root of a tree, the same tree she had become on the island.

In that case, if she ran all the way to the end of the root, she would find her yew again.

Now her feet flew down the wooden path, her fingers brushing the sides of the root, sometimes brushing empty darkness where the root branched off in new directions. She did not remember the way, but her body and blood recalled her hours as a tree, and they flew on. In this crazy maze of passages, her body knew each twist and turn as if she had ridden them on her bike to school every morning. Heart wide-open, almost laughing, she ran on, until she reached the branching she knew, that her feet and blood and heart knew, would take her to the yew.

But the darkness of this last passage felt very dark. She stopped.

Something was in there: something large, taking long, harsh breaths, grunting and snuffling to itself, as it waited for her.

A flush of fear. Then Clare remembered: I decide. “No monster,” she said. “There is no monster there, the path is clear and easy, I can run through and be free.”

But the low, hoarse breath continued, slow and deep.

It’s my dream, thought stubborn Clare. She knotted up her fists and walked toward the grunting, monstrous sound. For a while she walked, blind in the blackness, her skin twitching at the most delicate caress of air. The wet, rasping breath seemed to come from all around her.

My dream, Clare thought. And I want light. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to see what breathed like that. So she called up just a glimmer, just enough to see, far down the root-passage.

“Be my yew,” she whispered to the light, putting into those three words all her longing, and sending them out like a message in a bottle to this dream-world. And yes, yes: now someone was walking toward her out of the darkness, as the breathing still echoed around her, someone no taller than she, someone whose fists were clenched, whose hair was red, whose face was pale and strained.

Clare came face-to-face with the mirror and stopped.

But the figure in the mirror kept walking toward her, closer and closer, until only a single eye filled the glass. Clare put her hand to the reflected eye, as gently as she could, in case it hurt. And at that touch, she was flooded once more with a thrill of joy and release and relief, the joy she’d felt when her roots touched the roots of the yew.

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