A Nearer Moon

by Melanie Crowder

  But it is one thing to cast one’s will over a leaf or a bug; it is another to compel a creature with a mind of her own. What Gia needed was something even stronger, a magic powerful enough to carry her sister back to her. She cast around herself for the things of this world that she knew. She settled on the reeds that grew in the shallows of the river, that grew tall despite the freshwater crabs that tunneled between their roots and the fickle winds that flattened them at will. She stripped the reeds of their brittle husks and wove a belt to cinch around Perdy’s waist, whispering her words of binding and holding and calling home as she worked.

  “Do I have to wear this all day long?” Perdy complained when Gia knotted the belt. “The reeds prickle my skin. I’m going to get a rash, you know.”

  But wear it she did. And when that didn’t work, she wore an eye mask made of spider silk. And when that didn’t work, she wore anklets of braided leaf veins.

  Gia’s many tries and many failures sent her looking in places that would have alarmed the door makers and worried her mother. But her unusual methods produced unusual results. She discovered that not all of the humans’ metal was a drain.

  One kind, at least, fed her will.

  Silver burned the tips of her fingers where she touched it, an icy burn that sent a chill rippling along her skin. Gold rattled the bones at the back of her neck like a teacup in a timid hand. Iron she couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with. Not if she didn’t want her head split apart with an ache that lasted three days, at least, and left her feeling drained as a tidal marsh emptied by the sea.

  She felt like a thief, wandering unseen through the humans’ huts and rifling through their things. But her need to find an answer was stronger than her remorse. As she scrambled to the porch of a hut planted squarely in the center of the meadow, she was nearly trampled when a young girl ran out the door. Gia pressed herself against the railing, shrinking out of the way and out of sight.

  The girl spun in the meadow to face the hut again, hands on her hips. “Hurry up, Tin!” she shouted.

  A boy with pudgy legs stumbled onto the porch. “Wait for me!” When the girl only turned away from him, running straight for the river, he called out again, wailing this time. “Tu, Mama said I get to come!”

  Once the human children had gone, Gia stepped cautiously over the lintel, peering around the simple home in case anyone else came barreling through the door. Humans were so . . . big. And clumsy. And loud.

  Gia moved around the hut, peering into baskets and digging through drawers. Finally, on a nightstand beside a lumpy mattress, her hands hovered over a pewter dish in the shape of a leaf, and they did not ache. She touched the metal with the tip of her finger and it did not burn. Gia emptied the dish of its trinkets and hefted it in both hands. A strange sort of power thrummed though her, and all at once she felt that creating this thing she had dreamed up, this thing she so wanted, wasn’t impossible, after all.

  Gia tiptoed as she carried the pewter dish away, for she was truly a thief now. Before long, her arms were sore from their heavy load. A dish small enough to hold human trinkets was a giant platter in Gia’s hands.

  She took it from the humans’ village and down to the riverbank to a bare patch of dirt between the trees. Gia needed only a flake from its side, so she whispered words of breaking and drew her finger across the tip of the leaf, slicing it cleanly off. She laid the piece down in the hollow of a grinding rock and whispered words, not of breaking this time, but of fire and change. The pewter melted from a shard of metal into a small circle with a shallow dip at its center. Gia lifted the little disc out with a pair of tongs and lowered it into the river. A cloud of steam rose with an angry hiss. Three more metal flakes melted and were formed into three more discs. To each pair, she attached a hinge and a clasp.

  The circles fit together, and they clicked as one half met the other. A pair of lockets, but not with portraits inside or wisps of cherished hair; these, when opened, would be like doors of their own. Private doors through which to call a lost thing home.

  And not exactly a lost thing, either.

  The lockets, if the words Gia spoke over them worked as they should, would have the power to call Perdy back to her.

  Perdy waited for her sister, the coronets tucked out of sight behind her back. Minnows swam in frenzied circles around her legs, flashing and scattering the light off their silvery backs. Gia waded out to meet her in the shallows. She too held a gift for her sister in her hand. She too wore a smile brimming with secrets.

  Perdy couldn’t wait. She pulled out one of the coronets and set it on Gia’s head. The circlet was the rich brown of burnished wood, and it sparkled with the weight of hundreds of tiny treasures.

  “There,” Perdy said. “The best of every place I have ever been.” She settled her own coronet on her brow. “Now we can go. Now we can step through the door to the next world without leaving this one behind.”

  Gia kissed her sister’s cheek. “It’s perfect, Perdy.”

  She fastened her own gift, a feather-light chain, around Perdy’s neck. At the end of the chain, a locket rested against Perdy’s skin, as if it was always meant to be just there.

  “Is this magicked too?” Perdy asked as she lifted the locket to study the markings etched into its surface. “Much better than that scratchy reed belt.”

  “Much better,” Gia said as she fastened a matching locket around her own neck. “Open it.”

  Perdy clicked open the clasp and peered inside. Where dull metal should have been, her sister’s face swam in a swirl of white clouds. Perdy looked up in wonder. Inside the locket, and there right in front of her, were mirrored images of the same rising eyebrows, the same upward curving grin, framed by a dense jungle backdrop.

  “It’s really you in there?”

  “It’s really me,” Gia answered. “Wherever you are, no matter how far you wander, now I can always call you back to me.”

  “Gia,” Perdy breathed. She closed the locket and cupped it between her hands. She darted forward and kissed her sister, once on each cheek.

  “At full noon, when the sun is at its highest, open your locket. I’ll open mine at the same time.”

  Perdy eyed her twin. “And just what is going to happen then?”

  “You’ll see,” said Gia with a sparkle in her eye and a pinch more confidence than she actually felt.

  So the sisters went their own ways, as they always did in the afternoons. Gia watched the door makers. The intensity of their search had picked up in the past few weeks—maybe at last they had found someplace to hold them all, a place that was still green and free and untainted.

  Perdy wandered upriver this time. She’d heard whispers of a new spring—an undiscovered spring—in the jungle beyond the lake. She’d heard that the water bubbling out of that stream was pale as a newborn cloud and silky as duckling down. And she had a hunch that she knew just where this secret spring might be. So she skated up the river, around the crimped ribbon bends, and over the shimmering surface of Dindili Lake. She dodged the humans’ floating city, the film that clung to the edges of their barges and weighed down their bristling lengths of rope with iridescent poison.

  She followed the streams down to the rocky bottom of the lake where ice-cold water floated up to the surface. She followed them as they narrowed and crept uphill to the bubbling holes in the rock, where they squeezed through to kiss the air, to greet the bugs and the twigs and the dusting of seed pods they claimed as passengers.

  Perdy touched her fingers to the locket that lay against her skin and tilted her head up. It would be an hour at least before the sun rose to the middle of the sky. She darted a look to the left, and to the right, and pulled herself, with prying arms, through the crevice in the rock.

  The light winked out as she tunneled through the water, through the tight space the spring had carved into the stone, and down into the ground. She swam through the dark until a shiver shook through her, from the crown of her head to the tips o
f her toes.

  All at once, the darkness didn’t feel like an adventure. It seemed to press in on her from all sides, squeezing the breath from her chest. She laid a hand on her heart.

  Thump thump.

  (Thump thump.)

  Thump thump.

  (Thump thump.)

  It was faint, but the sound of her sister’s heartbeat, echoing from far, far up the stream, rippled through her. The feeling of dread, of darkness consuming her and never letting go, ebbed.

  Perdy pushed forward. It was only around another few bends in the tunnel that a crack in the bedrock split the stream of water in two. The first channel dove down, where it fed, far below the ground, into the lake. Perdy veered upward, following the second channel toward a distant hint of light. She paddled and kicked, steadily rising until at last she broke through the water into the sunlight again.

  She gulped the air and blinked, drinking in the daylight, reveling in the feeling of the air against her skin. The spring bubbled up, but only for a few feet before it sank below, then rose to the surface again a few feet farther down the slope, like a sea serpent’s spine rising and disappearing again from view.

  Perdy had found the secret spring—but her triumph was tainted by the taste lingering on her tongue of that close darkness swallowing her up. She didn’t dive back down, didn’t revel in her discovery. She cupped her hand, dipped it into the cool, clean water, and lifted it to her lips for a long drink.

  Perdy turned her back on the spring and hopped down the serpentine stream back to the open lake, where the sun’s brightness gilded everything in sight. She floated on top of the water, soaking in the not-a-cloud-in-the-sky warmth. She opened the locket and looked inside. Nothing. She checked the angle of the sun. It was almost full noon.

  She didn’t really believe this charm would work any better than the anklet or the eye mask or the scratchy reed belt. But still, Perdy waited.

  The ripples of lake water cradled and rocked her. Curious fish nibbled at her toes and leaped out of the water, arcing over her, one after another, until the last twinges of that cold, dark place drained out of her and she laughed outright, trailing her fingers along the smooth scales and gossamer fins of her friends.

  A flash of white called her attention away and she lifted the locket up to her eyes. Wisps of clouds began to form inside, whirling and twisting within that small space. Gia’s face appeared out of the mist. She smiled, and that same smile, in the space of a single breath, spread over Perdy’s own lips.

  Gia spoke a word Perdy did not recognize. Perdy listened, and with a bang she was pulled into the swirling clouds. The lake faded behind her and for a single, suffocating breath, she was enveloped in whiteness. Then with a second bang she was herself again, and staring into the swirling white clouds in her locket.

  Only she wasn’t on the lake anymore. She was standing on the rounded root of a seraya tree, shoulder to shoulder with her sister, who jumped up and down and crowed with glee.

  “It worked! It worked!”

  Perdy darted a look around her. There was the river, and the meadow dotted with the humans’ huts. At the edge of the jungle, the door makers were bent over their work. Perdy closed her locket with a resonant click. “You called me here—with a single word—through this locket?”

  Gia nodded, and her smile was brighter than any sunlight Perdy had ever seen. Gia gathered her sister’s hands into her own. “Now you can never wander so far that I can’t bring you back to me.”

  7

  Luna

  When the sun rose straight overhead, the river grew fat and lazy as a pig in a pen, and Luna slid her boat onto the wide waters of Dindili Lake.

  All around the edges of the lake, traveling camps hugged the shoreline. Boats zigged and zagged out to the middle to the floating market where a dozen barges were lashed together, connected by bamboo walkways and patchwork docks. People who lived on the lake tied their boats to the sides of the barges like cattle birds hitching a ride through the marshland on a cow’s flank.

  “I’ve never seen so many people!” Benny cried.

  “I’ve never seen so many boats!” As the bottom of the lake sank out of reach beneath her, Luna gripped her pole and carefully stowed it between her feet.

  “Your turn,” she said, handing a paddle flat as a porpoise’s tail to Benny and casting her eyes around the lake. There were flat-bottomed skiffs like hers, stubby punts dragging fishing nets, and ships built with steep keels, rigged with sails rising from the decks like fanned wings about to take flight.

  Benny dipped the paddle in and out of the water, first on one side, then on the other. Clear, ice-cold lake water dripped onto his knees and ran down his shins, puddling around his feet. The farther he paddled from the shoreline, the bigger the swells of water grew. The wind picked up, and the waves crashed into one another, setting the little boat to rocking and pitching. Luna grabbed the other paddle and held it like a rudder, pushing against the water to keep the boat upright when it listed too far to one side.

  When at last they reached the docks, Luna and Benny were both shivering and wide-eyed, goose bumps standing the hair straight up on their arms and legs. Benny jumped out first. He carried the bowline with him and knotted it tight to one of the cleats lining the dock. Then he knelt down, steadying the side while Luna handed their bundles up and hopped out after him.

  They could have rushed off straight from the boat and into the milling crowd, but instead they sat for a while, letting the sun warm their skin and the gentle bumping of the dock against the barge against the next dock shake loose the last of their jitters. Benny opened his pockets, and they ate smoked fish and honey cakes and took turns dipping their fingers into a jar of coconut pudding and sucking the gooey sweetness off their fingers. Their toes dangled into the lake and they kicked up arcs of clean, cool water, the sunlight dancing around the edges of each drop.

  “Luna, what if this doctor can’t help Willow?”

  “She has to,” Luna said. “She just has to.”

  A quarter of an hour later, they shook the stiffness out of their legs and the crackles out of their ankles, and started down the walkway to the first of the massive barges. Luna clamped her fist around her jangle of coins as they wove through aisles lined with food carts and flower sellers, woodworkers’ stalls and ironworkers’ forges, past leering clockwork puppets and chickens clucking in their crates.

  If she had come with Willow and Granny Tu, at any other time, for any other reason, she would have ducked into each stall and tasted the treats in every cart. Instead, she stopped only to ask directions, and to yank Benny away from the firecrackers cart and from a game of kick-the-can that had sprung up in a pair of abandoned stalls.

  At the north end of the third barge, the heady smell of poultices and dried herbs led them to a hut with a swinging sign over the doorframe. It read:

  DOCTOR AND MEDICINE MAKER:

  PURVEYOR OF FIRST-RATE TONICS, ELIXIRS, AND TINCTURES

  The trip upriver had seemed to take forever, had frayed the worn edges of her patience, but now that she had finally arrived, Luna was afraid to go inside. She stopped abruptly, and Benny sidestepped to keep from running into her.

  “Benny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What if you’re right? What if the doctor can’t help Willow?”

  Benny lifted the sack off Luna’s shoulder. “Then you’ll find another way. Go on,” he said, sliding down onto the wind-washed planks beside the door, his mouth opening into a wide yawn and his eyelids already beginning to sag. “I’ll wait right here for you.”

  Luna took a deep breath, and strode into the waiting room. Half a dozen people sat on cushions lining the walls, looking anywhere but into the faces of the other patients, as if even the knowledge of another’s sickness was catching. The walls were covered with anatomical drawings. Luna flinched away from the sketches of skin peeled from muscles and tacked back from bones and blood vessels.

  Luna sat in the corner on
a mound of cushions where, through a curtain of strung shells and polished bone, she could see the doctor in the back room leaning across her desk and speaking intently. Luna’s thoughts slid homeward. Was Willow awake and asking for her? Maybe she was feeling a little better. Did Mama guess by now where Luna had gone? Was she frantic? Was she furious?

  The waiting room was warm and the incense strong; before long, Luna’s head bobbed on her neck, her eyes drifting closed, and she slept. It was well into the afternoon when her turn came, and the doctor leaned over her, a chunky necklace dangling over Luna’s nose as the old woman shook her awake. “Quick now, girl,” the doctor said, and she brushed through the curtain. Luna followed, wiping the sleep out of her eyes and cringing away from the bone and shell curtain that swung in the doctor’s wake, clattering and scolding.

  The doctor settled herself behind a desk lined with jars and vials and a teeter-totter stack of musty books. She steepled her fingers, resting her elbows on the pocked wood. “Well,” she said, “how can I help you?”

  Luna sat opposite the doctor on a padded stool, the fabric worn bare around the edges and the cushion lumpy beneath her. She pulled her fist out of her pocket and thrust it toward the doctor, the coins spilling onto the desk.

  “Please,” she said. “My sister is sick.”

  The woman held up a hand that was gnarled and knobby as the roots of a waterlogged tree. She leaned back in her chair and fixed Luna with an exasperated stare.

  “Let me guess,” she began. “You live on the swamp downriver.”

  Luna nodded, her brows furrowing together. People came to the floating market from all over—how did the doctor know Luna lived in the swamp? She rubbed a hand against her cheek. Maybe she had swiped some mud off her pole and onto her face that morning. It wouldn’t be the first time.