A Nearer Moon (12 page)

Luna clutched her pile of flowers to her belly and ran along the velvet path through the jungle. A woody vine seemed to reach out and smack against her shins, and she tripped, skinning her knees and elbows and bashing her
chin against the dirt. The petals flew from her shirt and fluttered to earth like the wings they had always meant to be.

It may have been Luna's fear of fanged and sharp-clawed creatures, or it may have been her fear for Willow that ripped the sobs from her lungs and spilled salty tears onto the cluster of petals as she gathered each one and tucked it again into her shirt.

She walked the rest of the way, shoving her panic down deep where it could not tear at her and carefully stepping around roots and liane vines snaking down from the trees. The jungle seemed calmer in return, letting her pass while it watched with hungry eyes.

Back in the garden shed, Luna closed the door behind her and leaned into it for a long moment. She lifted a stoppered vial off the shelf and wiped the grime out of a small mortar and pestle. She ground the petals one by one and carefully strained the liquid into the vial until it held a few drops of the bat lilies' essence. She pressed the stopper onto the vial and ran her finger over the words in the herbal, whispered them under her breath until they took up a solid, ready space in her mind.

The moon laid a trail of light out of the garden, down the hill, and onto the bridge that led to the web of walkways over the swamp. Clutching the vial in her fist,
Luna went first to the chapel. She leaned over the railing, lifted the stopper free, and let fall a single drop onto the water below.

“Luminis salveo lucis,”
she whispered.

She didn't know if this was magic. It was pleading. It was hoping. It was speaking the deepest wish of her soul and asking the air to hear her. The recipe didn't call for grit from the jungle path to taint the juice. It didn't call for tears to turn the flower essences salty. Maybe those things would ruin whatever magic might have been possible.

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.

L
una 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.