“Hah!” one of the boys said triumphantly. “We can so play baseball in the house! Can you do Mrs Wilson’s windows, too?”
“Edith Wilson’s next on our list,” Denoux said, amused and indulgent, while the children’s mother pretended to be horrified.
“Use your back door now, not your front door,” Natividad told the woman before they left. “Every place behind you is safer now – not all the way safe, but better – but don’t go out the front, OK?”
The woman promised that everyone would remember, scowled fiercely at her children until they promised, too, and made a show of locking her front door after Natividad when she and her deputies left.
After Mrs Wilson’s house there was another house, and another after that, and then a shop, and a long curving driveway, and then more houses, and finally another cross to set, directly in front of somebody’s kitchen sink, which might be inconvenient for them but that’s where it needed to go. Then there were more houses and shops; and annoying fences; and a brush-tangled gulley to climb down into, which was hard, and then up out of, which was even harder; and then more houses and shops. And more after that.
“How much farther?” she asked, foggy with weariness and magic. She felt like she must have laid signs of protection and goodwill on every house in Lewis, not just the ones set in the planned mandala. Only after she’d spoken, with the sound of her words echoing in the air and Sheriff Pearson looking at her blankly, did she realize her words had been in Spanish. This must be like Alejandro, when his shadow closed around him: this struggle with language and memory and thought… The sheriff pointed, saying something she didn’t understand, and she walked that way, blindly, trusting it was the right way to go.
But alarm broke into her weariness when she saw one of the deputies – Harris – pick up the last of the crosses as though it weighed nothing. The young man started ahead, and she realized the cross needed to go right out in the middle of a field.
The cross was a good one, Natividad’s favorite of the four that the townspeople had provided. Taller than she was, this one had been made of some smooth polished wood riveted together with silver fittings. She’d thought at first they must really be steel, but no: they had the clean, bright feel of silver. Across the crossbar, letters spelled out “Christ Our Light,” and down the front, “Thanks Be To God.” The letters had not merely been painted on the cross, but carved into the wood before being highlighted with silver paint that had real silver in it.
So, the cross was fine. It wasn’t the cross that was the problem; it was the field: a measureless blind white space with snow underfoot and snow blowing in whirling curtains through the air.
The cold was horrible, much worse than when she and her brothers had walked those last miles through the forest toward Dimilioc. There had been no wind that day. Today the wind bit like a vampire: ferocious and draining. Worse, it was impossible to see through all that white, impossible to see a man who walked ten steps away. Anything could hide in the blinding snow just as easily as in the dark of night, and Natividad found herself certain that something was hiding out there in that field, something – someone – that knew where they were, where she was, by a strange kind of vision that used malice instead of light to find her.
She stopped, trying to look in every direction at once, as frightened of the blind field as she was pressed by the need to finish the magic. Behind her, a line of soft light arced out, visible despite the blowing snow. This should have made her feel better. Safer. But if she could see the light of her protective circle by using senses that didn’t exactly involve sight, didn’t that mean Vonhausel might see her the same way?
Sheriff Pearson touched her arm. His hood was back; snow caught and melted in his hair, on his face. He said something… Natividad stared at him, shook her head, took a step out into the open field. The sheriff said something else, more loudly, not to her, and the deputies all got serious expressions and checked their guns.
Nothing came at them except the wind. Natividad drew her circle across the field with every step, feeling it sink down into the frozen ground beneath the snow. She felt the shape of the mandala humming in the earth, slightly discordant, waiting to be completed with this last little arc and its anchoring cross. There was so little left to do, and still the only enemy they had to face was the savage wind…
They came to the right place. Natividad knew it was right. She was surprised she had to catch Sheriff Pearson’s arm to make him stop: it seemed to her that anybody ought to know that they had come to the exact eastern limit of the protective circle.