A Nearer Moon (5 page)

(
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.”

W
hen 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.

“And let me guess,” the doctor continued, “it's a wasting sickness, come on suddenly, lasting three weeks to the day. And none of the normal remedies will help?”

Luna nodded again, a wiggle of unease moving through her belly.

“Child,” the woman said through a deep sigh, “do you really think you are the first soul to come to me to fix what clearly has not a thing to do with medicine?”

Luna swallowed. What was she saying? That she couldn't help? That Luna had come all this way for nothing? “But the sign in front of your door says ‘first-rate.' It says ‘medicine maker.' Make me a medicine!”

“Medicine is no good where magic has been worked.”

“But I have money.” Luna's voice climbed high as the cobwebs dangling from the rafters.

The doctor only shook her head.

“You're a liar, that's what you are!” Luna yelled, and her face flamed with heat. The ground seemed to sway and buckle beneath her feet, though she knew that so many barges lashed together were steady as a plot of land. “You're nothing but a liar!”

The doctor closed Luna's fingers over her coins and stood, waving the girl through the clattering curtain. “I can't help you or anyone else within reach of that cursed swamp. I am sorry, child. But that's that. You'd best get home and spend what time you have left with your sister.”

The doctor backed her out of the shop, but Luna held the old woman's eyes until the weathered door closed in her face.

“I don't believe in curses.”