“I don’t understand it,” her wolf told her. “I can only feel it.”
“Do you trust it?”
“If you mean, do I trust the feeling? Then certainly. Do I feel it will be returned…” He shook his head. “I have no idea. Do you seek it?”
“Everyone looks for love,” she said. “But I have learned not to make my happiness depend upon it. My abuela would say that even in a relationship, one must be happy with oneself as an individual, or what do you have to offer the other?”
“I would have liked to have met your grandmother. You still miss her, don’t you?”
“Sí,” Bettina said. “I think of her every day.”
She gave him a wan smile and they walked on in silence for a time. The forest remained unchanged, the tall trees rearing skyward to their impossible heights, the footing even, mostly moss and a carpet of autumn leaves with little undergrowth to impede their way. It was not a forest they could have found in the world they’d left behind.
“I thought we would have come across some sign of the creature by now,” el lobo said finally. “Or at least heard about its passage. But the trees are silent to my ears and the gossips are most noticeable by their absence.”
Bettina nodded. This aspect of la epoca del mito was completely unfamiliar to her, so she had been following her wolfs lead. Now she glanced at him.
“You were going to show me how to call up los cadefos,” she said.
The thought of their return filled her with mixed emotions. She’d realized ever since her dream and Adelita’s gift the other morning just how much she missed them. She was anxious as well. How would they react to her contact after such a long silence?
“I was,” el lobo said. “I will. But I was hoping to find the creature’s trail before we needed to do so.”
So he was nervous, too. That didn’t bode well. What wasn’t he telling her now?
“Why was that?” she asked, striving to sound calmer than she felt.
He shrugged. “Because there is always a danger in coming to the attention of old powerful spirits.”
He left so much unsaid, Bettina thought, but she understood exactly what he meant, his reservations obviously mirroring her own. She stopped and turned to him.
“Even if we didn’t need their help,” she said, “this is something I must do. I have not treated them fairly. I must make amends for my broken promise.”
El lobo nodded.
“Y así,”Bettina said. “So how do we do this?”
El lobo shook his head. “Not we, but you. You must welcome them back to you. But we must do it in some place that is familiar and dear to you both or else they might choose not to hear you.”
“The desert is too far from here,” Bettina said. “We don’t have the time to make such a trip.”
El lobo gave her that maddening smile of his. “Surely your grandmother taught you that the spiritworld can be whatever you need it to be?”
“No,” she replied. “We ran out of time before she could tell me so many things.”
“Most clothe it in a landscape with which they’re familiar, or one that they expect to find, as we did when we crossed over. We were in the eastern woodlands when we left your world, so that is how we see the spiritworld now, or at least an idealized version of those forests. But it doesn’t have to be so. The spiritworld can be anywhere we need it to be.”
“I see… I think. But that doesn’t explain how we can change where we are now into the desert.”
“That’s somewhat more complicated,” el lobo admitted. “It would be easier if your croi baile was in the desert.”
As had happened the first time she and her wolf had met in la epoca del mito, not all the Gaelic words he used were automatically translated by the spiritworld’s enchantment.
“My what?” she asked.
“The home of your heart. That one place where you feel truly and completely at home. Each of us has one, though not everyone cherishes it as they should. We carry an echo of it with us. Here.” He laid a hand on his chest. “It comes with us wherever we go—no matter how far we travel from the physical location.”
Bettina nodded. “I have heard of that. Abuela called it el bosque del corazon. The forest we carry with us in our heart.”
“When you are here, in the spiritworld, you are always but one step away from that place. The actual location, I mean.”
Bettina’s eyes lit up. “So that’s why she called it el bosque del corazon.”
“What do you mean?”
“Abuela would often make these pronouncements, but before you could ask her what she meant, she had already gone on to something else. It never made sense to me that she would call it a forest, but now with what you’ve told me, I understand.”
“I still don’t follow you,” her wolf said.
“You know the story of the First Forest—how all forests are an echo of it and reach back to it?”
“Of course.”
“Then don’t you see? This is our own version of it—we connect to our heart home just as all forests echo back to the First Forest.”
El lobo smiled. “Good. So you understand. And does the forest in your heart echo back to the desert?”
“I have never considered it. But it must. That’s the only place I am ever truly happy.”
“Then that is where you must bring us,” he said.
For a long moment Bettina could only look at him. Everything he said made perfect sense, but it still left her feeling dizzy. She had never looked inside herself for her own basque del corazon, so how could she bring them to the place it echoed? And never having attempted such a task before, who was to say where they might end up? She was not exactly the most focused individual when it came to journeying through la epoca del mito. As easily distracted as she could be in myth time, anything could happen to them.
“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Look inside yourself,” el lobo told her. “Call that place up in your mind, clearly and truly.”
“And then?” Bettina asked, unable to keep the doubt from her voice.
“Hold it in your mind like a waking dream and will us to be there. Your father’ s blood will ensure that we will journey true.”
“My father’s blood.”
El lobo smiled. “Have you studied your grandmother’s teachings so diligently that you’ve forgotten your father’s lineage? You have the blood of shapeshifters and shaman running in your veins—the oldest and truest geasan.”
“I...” She hesitated, then knew she had to admit it to him. “I’m not the most assured of travelers in la epoca del mito.”
“I say again, your father’s blood will see us through. Tell me, have you ever been harmed in the spiritworld?”
She shook her head.
“I would wager that your father’s blood keeps you safe. Any you meet here would recognize that old blood of his that you carry. I wouldn’t doubt it’s what first called los cadejos to you.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“It is simple. Especially here, in the spiritworld. We are the ones who make such things complicated.”
“Now you sound like Abuela.”
“Just try,” he said, his voice gentle.