“It seems Kristiñe hid more than the path,” Agosto says. “She hid the entire mountain.”
28
The Deos don’t act for us.
The Deos act through us.
—Patricio Mortiz, Book of Cantos
“How do you move a mountain?” Nova asks.
“You know how they say if the mountain won’t go to you,” Rishi says, “then you go to the mountain? Maybe the mountain really did go this time.”
I smile, and Nova gives her a long look.
The wind whips around us, like it’s pushing us back to where we came from. My stomach is in a thousand tangled knots. I wet my dry lips, savoring the crisp air. The earth is dry in patches and bright green in others. Stone paths cut across the land, creating a patchwork quilt. As much as I want to laugh at Rishi’s joke, I have to wonder: Where is this mountain?
“When I was little,” I say, “my dad used to say, if he ever lost me, he’d just follow the starlight we leave behind.”
Rishi turns to me with sad eyes. “You never talk about your dad.”
“I don’t know where that came from. He was talking about us running around the supermarket or the mall. Still. I just remembered.”
Rishi takes my hand in hers but lets go when Nova wedges himself between us. “Well, Captain, it’s not dark enough for starlight.”
I purse my lips. “Says the boy made of light.”
“I’m not made of light,” he counters. “I conjure it.”
I roll my eyes and step closer to the edge of the cliff. The way down is steep and rocky but not unmanageable. It’s quiet here except for the rush of wind and Agosto’s heartbeat in my ears. I can still feel his essence from healing him, a side effect of touching someone with my power. Like when I tried to hurt Nova back home. It makes me think of what the Devourer said to me, that she could hear me because of the fear in my heart. Why can’t I feel a trace of her power?
“It’s strange,” I say.
“Which part?” Rishi asks.
I point to the horizon. “It’s not hot here, but the air on the horizon ripples like there’s a heat wave.”
“Wouldn’t that be the Bone Valle?” She squints and holds her hand like a sun visor over her eyes. “If I didn’t want someone to come into my lair and I was this powerful bruja, I’d make sure no one would see it.”
Look twice. Nothing in Los Lagos is what it seems. The land is fluid, yes, but even if the Devourer destroyed the mountains of Las Peñas the way she’s destroyed so many other things, we’d still be able to see the labyrinth.
I raise my hands and feel for the glamour on the land. I remember Mayi from Lula’s circle uses her powers to change her eye color and straighten her nose all the time. But sometimes, when I look at her from the corner of my eye, or between blinks, the glamour reveals itself. That’s small magic. Magic used for vanity doesn’t end well, my mom would say.
Even from miles away, I can feel the ripple of magic across the land. I relax my eyes, and for a fraction of second, the ghost of a mountain ridge appears. Then a force pushes against me, like a punch to the gut. I gasp for air and stumble back.
“What is it?” Agosto asks, rushing to my side.
“What do your bruja eyes see?” Rishi asks dramatically. Then she gives Nova the finger when he snickers at her. So much for their truce.
“It’s there. It’s hidden behind a glamour.” I take Agosto’s outstretched hand and pull myself up.
“What should we do?” Nova says. “We could walk straight for it. When we get closer, you can pull the glamour.”
I shake my head, unsure. If I can feel its strength from here, I don’t know if it’ll get any better. “What if I can’t?”
“I beg your pardon,” Agosto says, “but pulling the glamour won’t be enough. This is what the Devourer wants. Walk straight to the mountain and be unable to pass. Walk around it and end up in the Bone Valle. Disrupt her magic, and she’ll come right at you, and I fear she’ll take greater precautions now that she knows she underestimated you. You should make for the Hidden Path.”
“Um,” Rishi says, raising her hand as if we’re in the middle of class. “Okay, but how do we make it the Un-Hidden Path?”
“Before our rebellion, Kristiñe created the path through the mountain to let other tribes pass. Their plan was to attack unseen. But their own people betrayed them, and as they crossed, the Devourer ambushed them from both sides. The Alta Bruja, leader of the tribe, used the last of her power to curse her traitors with immortal life. Gouged out their eyes and buried them beneath the earth. The Devourer found them and dug them up. She healed their bodies by linking their life force to the earth. She called them her ‘blind giants,’ guards of the labyrinth.”
“How can they guard anything if they can’t see?” Rishi asks.
“They don’t need eyes to find you,” Agosto says darkly. “Sight is the most easily fooled of all our senses.”
I look at Nova, who stares at the horizon. I wonder what’s going through his head right now. He looks more worried than I’ve ever seen him before.
I follow the twisting trails down below with my eyes. We could get lost no matter what. Los Lagos is as much a labyrinth as the Devourer’s maze. As the sun and moon start to reach their peaks in the sky, nudging closer to eclipse, their light bounces off the henge below.
“Head for the temple. Alta Bruja Kristiñe erected the circle of stones and called it the Heart of the Deos.”
“Why’s it always the heart or the eye of something?” Rishi asks. “You notice that? There are so many body parts that don’t get enough love, like earlobes and belly buttons.”
“Rishi.”
She shrugs in her I’m-only-just-saying kind of way.
I find myself touching my necklace to feel the familiar weight of knowing I was connected to someone—the way I used to when I missed my dad. I’m starting to get that feeling back.
“I take it you’re not coming with us,” Nova says to Agosto.
The Faun King shakes his head. “I must return to my people. Take them to safety. I fear Xara will retaliate soon.”
He takes my hand and presses it to his lips, then his forehead. “I hope to see you again, encantrix.”
I don’t wait to watch him go. I take off, running down the hill.
• • •
The temple is bigger than anything it seemed from up the hill. The stones are great pillars weathered by wind and rain. I press my hand against the groves and dips in the stone, the carvings of different moon phases and constellations. Sparks flare between my fingers.
Night falls as the moon and sun pass each other across the sky and set. Stars emerge behind thinning clouds.
“This is incredible,” Rishi says, standing in the center of the temple with her hands stretched toward the sky. “My parents do all the ceremonies in the world, but I never thought I believed in anything. After this, I might have to reconsider.”
“You’re going to start believing in the Deos?”
Rishi grins. “Or I could just put all my faith in you.”
I get closer to her. Her brown skin is bathed in the starlight. Her long, dark hair is windblown and wild around her shoulders. Something in the pit of my stomach falls, and when she smiles at me, it just keeps on falling.
“You can believe in anything you want,” I say, “as long as it feels right. Even seeing the things I grew up with, I wanted to pretend they weren’t real. I have all the proof in the world, while some people go lifetimes hoping to see a miracle. It was easier to think I was living the wrong life. It’s easier to want to be someone else.”
“I would never want you to be someone else.” She coils my hair around her finger. The ends have started to curl on their own. Magic transforms you. “I want you to be you. You’re magic, Alex. I always thought so, even before I knew your secrets.”
> Her smile is full, and hearing these things, my heart feels so full it might burst. I exhale hard, look up at the circle of stones that surround us.
Then, a bright light explodes, like the flash of a camera. Nova stands just outside the temple. The worry mark on his brow is gone. His hands glow with light.
“Find anything interesting?” he asks.
“If you think ancient witch carvings are interesting, then sure,” Rishi says. She walks toward him and leans on a stone pillar.
“Well?” Nova asks me. “Was Agosto pulling our chain?”
“Not funny,” I say.
“Too soon?” He shrugs a shoulder.
I ignore him and continue tracing my fingers along the stone. The magic here is strange. It isn’t the dull pulse of the earth I’ve felt during this journey. It’s like a sigh of relief.
There’s a carving above eye level of a crescent moon lying sideways. The symbol of El Papa. I touch the necklace my father gave me. The next pillar has the mark of El Terroz, a square stone. A feather for El Cielo, an eight-pointed star for La Estrella, an arrow for El Corazon. I walk in a full circle, looking at all thirteen pillars—each one is for the High Deos—until I reach the sun, for La Mama. Here, the grass is wild and overgrown. I try to imagine what this place would have looked like in its prime. The grass would be green, not yellow. The stones would be newly etched, not fading. Brujas and brujos would stand in this circle.
“It feels so forgotten,” I say.
“I don’t get it,” Rishi says. “If the Devourer or Xena or whatever her name is was also a bruja like the tribes who built this, why would she kill them all?”
“What do you do with an obstacle?” Nova asks.
I don’t like where he’s going with this. “You go around it.”
“What if it keeps moving in your way?”
“You get rid of it.” If I shut my eyes, the wind sounds like the ghosts of brujas and brujos screaming for their lives. “My mom believes in the balance of all things. She says La Mama and El Papa are a symbol of that.”
“The Deos don’t create the balance,” Nova says. “We do. Their power is in us.”
“Maybe they should be more careful in giving power to people in the first place,” Rishi says.
“Then why did they choose me?” I wonder aloud.
“Don’t go down that rabbit hole, Alex,” Nova says.
“I mean, no one should have this much power. No one. But here we are.”
“It could be worse,” Rishi says. “Your spell could have worked, and then who would be here to fight the Devourer?”
“I would.”
“But you stand a better chance having this great bruja power.”
I reach down for the earth and push my magic into it. The land’s weak pulse answers back in greeting. I remember you. It doesn’t speak it, but the thought pops up in my head. The land aches, as if waking from a deep slumber. I pull at the dead patches of grass. Right where my magic met the land, a tiny, green bulb appears.
I place my hands on another patch of earth. The dry, yellow grass comes away with a snap. It reminds me of Mama Juanita plucking the feathers off a chicken. It reminds me of pulling at my hair in an angry fit, alone in my bedroom with the lights turned off while I listened to my mother crying for my dad.
I remember you, says the earth.
Green sprouts twist from the ground like newborn fingers stretching. My heart races with the boost of my magic. Instinct, as old as this place, grips me. I take a step toward the center of the temple, pulling away the dead plants from the dirt. My fingers touch something hard. A worn stone tile buried and forgotten. I jolt as sparks burn my fingertips.
I need light. I raise my hands to the overcast sky.
“La Estrella,” I say, “bless me with your light.”
The air in my chest escapes in a gust. My magic pushes against the clouds, and they race away across the night sky until there is only the blazing light of a million stars. They shine down on the circle of stones.
One by one, the symbols etched at the top of the stone pillars glow, creating a circle of light that reaches down to the ground. The newborn grass bulbs spring up higher, alive and lush.
Something’s missing. I can feel my magic, taut like a guitar string, urging me to take another step. I place both feet on the stone tile. It gives under my weight, sinking into the earth, snapping into place. The light bounces off each pillar, then funnels into a single beam, crashing over me.
“I remember you,” I say as the light fills me. Every cell of my body snaps awake, and I wonder if this is what it feels like to be born once again. If this power is a good thing. If I can control it.
The skin at my throat burns where my necklace catches the light that shines down on the grass in front of me. Yellow grass breaks away, revealing another stone. The stones glow, and when I step on them, they sink. The dirt ahead clears, revealing the next step for me to take—then another and another, leading out of the circle and down a hill and then up another.
When I look up, I’m filled with so much color and joy and light. I walk ahead, lighting up the path for Rishi and Nova to follow. The path is dizzying, and just when I think I’m heading in the right direction, the stones change. I struggle for breath as the stones lead us up a new hill, then alongside patches of lavender, and then another stretch of dead earth.
After a while, I look over my shoulder. Nova’s face is full of awe. His eyes are wide and looking only at me. Rishi, my little magpie, urges me to keep going.
So I do. I keep going until my muscles ache and my tongue is parched. Until the incline is too steep and we struggle to breathe. Until I see the ripple of the glamour, and I know we’re closer. Until the clouds return, darker and stronger, and the light of my crescent moon disappears.
29
Take me to the glittering mountain
to find the riches of the world.
Take me to the glittering mountain
to mine its treasures untold.
—Folk song, Book of Cantos
When I fall down, hands grab me instantly to pick me back up. Nova turns me over on my back.
“I’m fine.” My body is screaming with pain, and my heart and mind are racing.
He holds my face in his hands. “You’re not fine. We’ve walked for miles. You’re exhausted.”
“Don’t tell me what I am.”
A smile creeps on his face. “Stubborn.”
“Jerk.”
“Do you see that?” Rishi shouts, running ahead.
“Wait!” I call after her, but when we make it around a steep hill, I can see what has her so excited. There’s a smattering of trees that grow so low to the ground they appear to be bowing. It’s a tiny oasis in the middle of a barren land.
Despite the ache in my bones and the sight-splintering headache that comes from recoil, hunger, and general exhaustion, I sprint to the perfectly round pond nestled in a valley between two hills. I cup the water in my hands and drink greedily until my belly is full and my head spins.
“Sweet, sweet nectar of life,” Rishi says.
I look up at the dark-purple sky, torn between the need to keep going and the toll the journey is taking on us.
“We need rest,” Rishi says. “We’re not going to be of much use if we crawl the rest of the way.”
Nova holds his hand out to me. “Give me your dagger. I’m going to find us something to eat.”
“Since when are you the hunting-and-gathering kind?” Rishi asks.
“Just thank your stars you’ve never been so hungry you hunted squirrels in Central Park at night.”
I can’t tell if he’s joking or not, but the idea of Nova alone and hungry in the dark makes my heart hurt. Then he breaks into that sly smile of his, the kind that makes you forget about all the worries you might have.
When Rishi and Nova leave, I fill our empty water bottles. I look at my reflection in the pond. My skin is bruised, and I look like I went a few rounds with a heavyweight champion. I take off my clothes. With Rishi and Nova gone, I let myself cry out in pain instead of keeping it in. I wade into the water and submerge myself until my chest burns for air. I let myself float on the surface, and the tepid water washes away the dirt on my skin and more. It fills me with a pleasant warmth that pulls me beneath the surface. I feel myself sink. I let myself sink.
I know I’m dreaming when I’m standing on top of the pond. I jump when I fear I’ll fall straight through the surface, but my feet only create small ripples. There’s a woman standing in front of me. When I recognize her, I want to fall on my knees and weep.
“You always fell asleep during your bath time,” Mama Juanita says. “Even as a baby. I told your mother she gave birth to a fish instead of a little girl.”
Suddenly I’m six years old again, and my sisters and I are running around the yard, pretending we’re part of our great-grandmother’s Circle. Mama Juanita, our favorite person in the world. She had a mean face, but she baked the best sweets and told the best stories—the kind my mom said we were too young to listen to.
“Mama Juanita?”
The glow of her soul is so bright against the violet of the day. She looks just as she did before she died—skin dark as coffee, and the same gray eyes as my dad and Lula. Long, white dress. A ring of orchids around her neck. A prex made of onyx. A thin cigar hanging between her red lips. Mama Juanita was our matriarch before her heart attack at ninety. Mama Juanita has this way about her, like the world should tremble when she walks. She could speak to the dead like Rose. She could recite all the blessings to the Deos, every canto in our family book. This is the woman who named me. She died before my sisters and I could grow up. Before my father left. Before my mother started going crazy from missing him. Before the greatest Circle of brujas and brujos dwindled to handfuls.
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