But perhaps not. Perhaps a grieving sister’s tears are just the stuff of magic.
Luna jogged to the schoolhouse and to Uncle Tin’s, to Benny’s, and finally to the front door of her own hut. She let fall a drop in front of each. She whispered the strange words as the droplets met the water, the hairs rising at the back of her neck and sending shivers down her spine.
Luna tiptoed inside, tipped the vial, and let the last drop fall onto Willow’s brow and slide back into her hair.
“Luminis salveo lucis,” she whispered.
23
Luna
Luna woke to the sound of shouting. The late night laced with panic had weighed her eyelids down and seemed to glue them together. If she didn’t pry them apart, she wouldn’t have to leave the space where magic felt like the stuff of moonlight wishes and desperate tears. She opened her eyes to let the morning in, and the night came flooding back to her—the herbal, the bat lilies, her scabbed and sore skin.
Luna began to tremble, her thoughts flitting like a pair of spiraling birds, rising into the sky. She turned slowly around.
Willow lay in a tangle of sheets, her forehead slick with sweat and her cheeks sallow and pale. Her leg twitched, as if it wished to turn over onto her side but couldn’t find the energy. Luna scooped her arms under her sister’s bony shoulders and settled her onto her side as gently as she could.
“Willow,” Luna whispered.
Willow’s eyelids fluttered open.
Luna lifted a mug of cooled tea to her sister’s lips, and Willow’s watery eyes latched onto hers. She swallowed once and turned her head away.
“I need you to try.” Luna’s voice broke. “You have to try to get better. I’ve tried everything, and I can’t help you. You have to try, Willow.”
Willow’s eyes slid shut again. The mug rattled against the table as Luna set it aside.
“Please,” Luna whispered. She laid her hand on Willow’s skin and felt for the faint heartbeat. Willow’s breath scraped in and out, in and out. Luna stumbled to the window.
People were strung like beads on a necklace along the walkways, leaning out over the swamp, pointing and calling out in wonder.
The swamp was green.
Not black, not silty and dark, but covered with a carpet of green so bright it seemed to glow. Benny and his poppa poled through the water. In their wake, the bits of green, growing things swirled and separated. The water below was clear as a mountain stream, laying bare the creatures swimming and slithering beneath.
What good was any of it? What good was magic if it couldn’t save Willow?
It should have been me.
The thought came in on every breath and banged against her insides until it echoed each beat of her aching heart.
It should have been me.
Luna’s hands dragged as she passed Benny’s and the school, where she could hear the excited chatter as garlands of orchids were strung and vats of roasting nuts crackled on the coals, preparing for the Perigee feast that night.
The planks rattled beneath her as she swayed over the bright swamp bursting with new life. The walkway tipped upward and she leaned into the slope, her hands gripping the rails and pulling her toward the chapel.
Set apart from the rest of the village and anchored in the branches of a pulai tree, the chapel was quiet, and more often than not, empty. The roof sloped like the ears of a scolded dog, and the door creaked as she pried it open.
Luna blinked, her eyes adjusting to the dim light inside. Sure enough, there was Mama, kneeling on the bare floorboards in front of the altar and worrying the prayer beads between her fingers.
“Mama?” Luna whispered.
Mama’s shoulder twitched, but she did not turn around. She did not stop her murmured prayers. She did not answer.
“Mama, I’m sorry about the dam. I didn’t mean to scare you.” The beads clacked together as they moved through Mama’s fingers.
“I know you didn’t. I just can’t—” Mama rubbed her forehead. She didn’t look up. She didn’t reach out to clasp her daughter’s hand. “Go home, Luna.”
Luna swallowed, and spoke even though she knew her voice would dip and flail. “Did you see the swamp, Mama? Did you see the water—clean and clear?”
Luna’s mother made a noise that might almost have been a sob. “What does any of it matter? We’re going to lose our Willow. And then what will we do?” The prayer beads clattered to the floor and Mama pressed her face against the wooden planks, a groan sliding past her lips.
Sometimes grief can make a person blind. Sometimes a person can’t see through her own hurt to the hurt she deals out to others. Surely Mama did not know, could not know how her words sank like barbed hooks into her daughter’s skin. How they snagged, catching on thoughts no child should think.
Luna sucked in a ragged breath and ran down the aisle, banging out the chapel doors. It would be better this way, she told herself, breaking into a run before she could change her mind. The family just didn’t work without Willow.
Maybe she couldn’t find a cure. Maybe she couldn’t wash the curse downriver. Maybe she couldn’t string up the creature and make it answer for all the hurt it had caused.
But just maybe, it would take her instead. Take her and let Willow go.
Luna scrambled down the ladder, knelt in the belly of her boat, and shoved away from the stilts, away from her home. She hefted her pole and stuck it into the shallow water, lowering hand over hand, then raising it up again, hefting it forward and pushing down into the mud.
Mama had three rules:
Don’t go past the bend in the river.
Don’t go below the dam.
Steer far away from the slick.
Luna gripped her pole in shaking hands and steered directly toward the slick. When she was close, when the bow of her boat was inches away, she dragged the pole, slowing her speed so that she crept, bit by bit onto the still water. The slick seemed to tug at the underside of her boat, seemed to want to draw it under. Luna anchored her pole in the mud and gathered into herself a deep, quavering breath.
It was quiet, the kind of quiet that has ears to listen.
“Take me,” Luna whispered into the quiet. “Let my sister go and take me instead.”
The words fell on the water, licked the ripples that fanned out from the sides of her boat, and sank down in the watery way that sound travels in the beneath. Sank into a cave where a bubble of air was trapped against musty rock—a dark cave where a creature waited, so miserable she couldn’t bear the sunlight, couldn’t bear the sound of laughter or trilling birds or the hum of dragonfly wings.
The creature cocked her tiny head and listened. Even that little movement made her ache. But the sound of the words that floated down through the swamp pushed at her, nudged at her. So she rose to the surface, though every movement was a pain in her chest. She clawed her way slowly up to the source of the sound.
Luna waited in her little boat so long that her whole body sagged, drained of all that had kept her fighting for those fleeting few weeks. She rested her forehead against her hands that gripped the top of her steering pole, the ends of her hair dangling lifelessly at the edge of her vision.
She had asked, and nothing had happened.
She had offered, and hadn’t been taken.
She had believed.
She had done everything she could to make Willow better, and none of it had worked. Maybe there was no such thing as the creature after all. Maybe there was no reason for her sister’s illness. Maybe it was just one of those things where no one and nothing is to blame, it just is, and all that can be done is to try to live through it.
Luna lifted her pole free of the muck. If she hurried home, she could slip back inside before anyone noticed she had been gone. She could wiggle under the covers beside Willow and hug her sister tight. They would have one last Perigee together.
Just as she began to push her pole down into the mud to steer her boat back home, a tiny hand reached
up out of the swamp, grabbed hold of the bow of her boat, and pulled. Luna gasped as the water foamed up, spilling over the edges, over the charm that glinted for the last time in the light of the sun.
Luna squirmed back until she was pressed against the bony stern; she gripped the sides as the bow sank beneath the water. It covered her ankles, then her knees, her hips, then her ribs, her shoulders—she took a last, long breath of air and the swamp closed over her head.
24
Perdita
Perdy pulled and pulled, down through the swamp water, down through the tangle of slimy weeds. She pulled the boat, though it was twenty times her size, pulled the human with it into her lair. She dragged the boat up into the bubble of trapped air and onto the rocky beach.
The human was coughing, sputtering as she clung to the sides of her boat, sludge sliding off her hair and splattering at her feet.
Perdy sank into the pile of upturned turtle shells that propped her up like a queen in her underwater court and righted the coronet on her brow.
Perdy was tired. So tired. Pain shook through her tiny body and clattered her very bones. Something about this human rattled her insides, rattled loose the oldest, sharpest hurt inside her.
“Why have you called me?” she asked, the words scraping like stones sliding past one another. “Why couldn’t you just leave me alone?”
The human licked her lips and spat out the grit she found there. “It’s my sister,” she croaked. “She’s sick. Your curse has made her sick. Please take it away—please!” The human began to shake, skinny elbows bumping against pumping ribs.
“You can keep me.” The girl looked around her at the wet darkness. “You can keep me here forever, if you just make Willow better.”
“What would I want with a giant human stomping around the place and sucking up all the air? My curse,” Perdy muttered. “Pffft.”
The human’s chin began to wobble and water leaked out of her eyes, rolling down her cheeks and splashing against the rocks. Perdy raised a weary hand to her brow. It was all too much. “Just go,” she said. “Go and take your tears with you. Go and leave me to my misery.”
The human was blubbering now, sunk to her knees on the sharp rocks that dug into her flesh and scraped the skin raw. Even on her knees, she towered over the little sprite. “Please,” she begged. “Please take your curse away.”
“My curse,” Perdy echoed, swatting at the air as if she could squash the idea as easily as a bug. She slid off her falling-down throne and approached the human. “A curse needs passion to feed on—love or hate, either will do. What do I have inside me? Nothing. I have nothing, no one left.”
The human eyed the water lapping at the edge of the rocky beach and the crabs skittering into the shadows. She looked at the dripping ceiling of the cave above her and at the miserable creature before her. She stood and walked to her boat half in, half out of the black swamp water. But instead of shoving off, instead of drawing a deep breath to carry her all the way to the surface, the human spoke again.
“What do I have to offer, if you won’t take me?” Her voice trembled with the weariness of spent tears. “You want our hut? Take it. You want our garden? You can have it. Here, take my boat. Take it. Take whatever you want, just give me my sister back!”
Perdy stomped across the rocky beach and kicked the wooden hull. “Why would I want your stu—” The boat rocked the tiniest bit, not enough to send it back into the water, but just enough so the charm tacked to the bow gleamed for a second as it caught the dim light bouncing off the cave ceiling.
Perdy’s eyes grew wide and she crawled up the side and into the boat, scrambling over the slippery wood to the narrow bow. She reached out. Her hand trembled as she pried the charm away from the wood. Her fingers skittered over the gleaming pewter as if they knew the shape of the thing they touched. Her mouth fell open and a sigh, full of the bleak, lonely decades, left her lungs.
Perdy’s eyes narrowed even as her insides wrenched with unfamiliar hope. She whipped around to face the human. “H-How did you . . . ?” she stammered. “Where did you find this?”
“It’s just a good luck charm. My grandmother found it when she was a girl. That’s what you want? Take it. Please.” The human crouched beside the boat and raised her clasped hands to Perdy, begging. “Please, just let my sister go.”
With each breath, Perdy felt her limbs lightening, sloughing off the terrible weight that had held her down for so very long. She looked up. The human’s eyes blinked wide; a question perched on her lips.
Perdy flicked the locket open. Her eyes spilled over with black tears that ran like tar down her face, black as a lonely, shriveled heart, black as agony, black as a curse. They ran until the black faded to gray and then to clear, salty tears. She looked with eyes bright as the day they were born into the locket, where a gauzy, white space shimmered like a trapped cloud.
Perdy spoke, her voice thin and breaking on the single word. “Gia?”
A face appeared in the clouds, and the white space reached out, wrapped around Perdy, and pulled her into itself. She looked back once to where the human crouched, staring at the locket, her eyes shiny with some great thing that Perdy suddenly felt too, a thing that she had not felt in such a very long time.
The cave echoed with the sound of two hearts beating rapidly together.
Thump thump.
(Thump thump.)
Thump thump.
(Thump thump.)
25
Luna
With a bang that rattled every bone in Luna’s body, the creature was sucked into the locket. The bang blew Luna backward, out of the cave and into the water. It was loud enough to rumble the bed of the swamp and strong enough to rattle the logs that held the water captive.
Luna clawed through slime and sludge and the film of bright green growth at the top of the water. She gasped a great lungful of air as she broke the surface, sputtering and choking. A current whipped up and dragged at her legs, trying to pull her toward the groaning, bending dam. Sticks and logs and entire trees rushed past as, with a final, earth-shuddering crash, the dam burst loose.
Luna paddled and pulled, reaching for anything solid she could hang on to. But the water was too strong. With the pent-up fury of decades, it swept away everything it touched. In a last, desperate lunge, Luna stretched toward the leggy roots of a pulai tree. She kicked and she grabbed and her fingers closed around the sturdy wood. Her legs trailed in the water behind her, trying to drag her with it. But she fought back, not for Willow this time, or for Mama, not for Granny Tu or Benny or for anyone else. She fought for herself.
She had broken every one of Mama’s rules. Even if it hadn’t been enough to save Willow, she had done everything, tried everything she could. She still had Granny Tu, who loved her no matter what. She had Benny, the best friend anybody could ask for. Mama would come out of her grief someday. And they would figure out how to be a family again.
I did everything I could.
The thought gave her strength. She gripped the roots, wrapping her legs and arms around the tree, hugging tight as the water streamed past her, taking with it the last of her regret, the last of her guilt.
Inch by inch the water fell, inch by inch it pulled back from the flats, laying bare land where wildflowers had once grown, where mud now gurgled and spat, tasting the air for the first time in a very long time. The village trembled on its stilts, and the people clung to the railings as they watched the water roar past. It shook itself from its swampy, gritty dregs and drained into the dry riverbed, the water, at last, set free.
26
Luna
Luna clung to the pulai until the river settled on a channel between trees and stayed put. She shivered, as much from the chill of drenched clothes against her skin as from all that had happened. The creature was gone. The swamp was gone. Was it too much to hope that maybe even the sickness was gone?
In the time that it took for the sun to climb to the highest point in the sky, the r
iver had rid itself of the silt and the muck, and ran clean and clear as the headwaters that gave it life. Luna’s boat was lost. Maybe Granny Tu would show her how to make a new one, skinny with high sides instead of shallow and wide, and with paddles instead of a steering pole.
Luna looked around the bubbling mud that stretched as far as she could see. She slid down and touched her foot to the surface, pushed against it, trying to stand. With a slurp and a pop, her foot was sucked down into the muck. She yanked it back out again, and shimmied higher up the trunk.
She was stuck.
Out in the river a fish as long as her arm leaped from the water, snatching a mayfly out of the air and splashing gleefully back down. The huge Perigee moon had already risen a quarter of the way up, a pool of milk against a pale blue afternoon sky.
“Luna?”
The voice sounded far away and too high, too frantically high.
“Benny!” she shouted. “Benny, over here!”
Benny wove slowly between the pulai trees, his limbs splayed wide like a water skipper, shifting first an arm, then a leg, then another arm, and the other leg. His feet were strapped to a web of sticks that spread his weight out over the mud so they hardly sank in at all. He held two sticks like poles in his hands, with little webs at the end of those, too. Each time he moved, the web lifted out of the mud with a sound like a crab plopping into the water.
“Benny!” Luna cried. “I’ve never in my whole life been so happy to see you.”
Benny slurped closer. “What’d I tell you? Perigee hero. It was meant to be!”
Luna laughed and edged toward the mud as Benny sidled alongside her tree.
“You sure those things can hold us both? I don’t want to sink you.”
A Nearer Moon Page 8