Labyrinth Lost (Brooklyn Brujas #1)(56)
I press my palm to my chest. Feel my heart racing. If my family were with me, they’d say that this is my destiny. A few days ago, I would’ve brushed off the thought that fate weaves the strings of life together. Today, I’m one step closer to making amends for my betrayal. The Devourer wants to hurt me, but I can return that favor. It’s more than just the Tree of Souls. Her destruction reaches this meadow and the avianas. Where will she go when there’s nothing left to destroy?
I hold out my hand, and Agosto takes it. I hold his dark stare with my own, and for the first time since we arrived, I feel like I’m on the right path.
I walk with him to the center of the meadow, where the banquet tree table is now empty. Since I broke the glamour, the source of the chains is in plain sight. There’s a spike staked deep into the wood.
“I’ve tried, encantrix,” Agosto says, tugging on the metal. “I try every day.”
“But I haven’t.” I wave my hand over the wood. The traces of the Devourer’s power writhe against my own.
I rub my hands together, and a ball of blue energy burns between my palms. I pull power from the soles of my feet, the pit of my stomach, and my fast-beating heart. I picture the Devourer’s face, hidden under a mask of death, and I let my power go. The table splinters into a thousand bits, and blue flame rains down. A sharp pain stabs my heart, and for a moment, I can feel the Devourer’s wrath.
Agosto struggles to breathe. He looks down at his hands in wonder. The manacles come undone, and the chains fall to the ground. The adas weep from joy. They embrace each other. They kiss my hands and feet. They run past the circle of trees and shout at the top of their lungs.
“Now,” I tell Agosto, “show me the path to the labyrinth.”
27
I believe the Deos fight as fiercely as they love.
—Philomeno Constancio Cruz, Book of Cantos
Before we go, the adas surround me. They want to touch my hair and hands and feet. They cry and pinch themselves to make sure they aren’t dreaming.
“Bless you,” an older ada tells me. Her hair is silver as starlight and her dark skin is wrinkled like a raisin. “Bless you a thousand times, encantrix.”
“You are the visage of La Tormenta, wife of El Cielo,” another tells me.
I want to pull away, to tell them that I’m still far away from winning, that this is too much. But their hope is pure, and I’ve let myself go without it for too long.
Then it’s time to go, and I wave my final good-bye. I fight the exhaustion in my bones. Mama Juanita used to tell us the story of La Vieja Tollussa, who put herself in a hundred-year sleep to outlive her enemies. But when she woke, her body had kept aging and ached too much to move. She used the last of her power to turn herself into a caterpillar because her journey was still not complete. As we leave the Meadow del Sol and take a path east, I carry that thought with me.
Agosto leads the way, followed by Rishi and Nova. I bring up the rear in case we have any surprise attacks. Though from what Agosto says, this place is deserted. We cut through dry weeds and patches of scorched woods. It’s colder here than in the other places we’ve traveled. Thorny vines, like black barbwire, wrap around the base of trees. Agosto calls this place the Wastelands del Este, what once was the Forest of Lights. The ground here is dry ash littered with tiny, gray pebbles, every tree an unmarked grave.
“Why are we going east?” Nova asks. He’s been moody and suspicious of everything the Meadowkin have said since I freed them. Granted, he has his reasons. I ate fruit and drank the wine, but it wasn’t nearly as much as Nova and Rishi. It made me forget where I needed to be. It made Nova think that his marks were healing. He walks with a semipermanent frown to my left while Rishi is unusually quiet to my right.
Agosto looks over his shoulder at Nova. “Because Kristi?e hid the path to Las Pe?as. I do not have the power to find it, but I believe the encantrix can. I will take you to the Alta Bruja’s temple.”
“You’ve been in that meadow a long time,” Nova says. “Sure you remember which way to go?”
The faun doesn’t answer. As we walk by, he lets his hands touch the burned tree trunks until the palms of his hands are as black as Nova’s.
“Long ago,” Agosto says, “the trees were majestic and white as the moon. When the fires came, they consumed everything. It was a living flame, out for blood.”
“What are these symbols?” I ask, tracing a rune in the bark.
Agosto hobbles over to me. “It is the mark of the starlarks. They lived in the Forests of Lights before.”
“It’s hard to imagine anything living here,” Rishi says.
“All lands change for the worse when the people do not fight back. Now there is nothing left.”
“But if the Devourer drains the land dry,” Rishi says, “what’ll she do for power?”
“Move on to the next realm,” Agosto says.
A dark thought grips my heart. It is my turn to shape the galaxies. “If she had enough power, could the Devourer leave Los Lagos?”
Agosto nods.
From here, the scenery starts to take shape. The trees give way to a steep downward slope covered in tall, yellow grass. The land undulates in rolling, purple hills that stretch into the flat lands of the horizon. Polished stones jut out of the ground, like the crooked teeth of the earth. Off in the distance, there’s a ring of enormous pillars that remind me of Stonehenge. The Alta Bruja’s temple. There’s so much grass around the stone pillars that it looks as if the earth has begun to swallow it up.