A Nearer Moon (4 page)

Gia giggled at the sound every time, and Perdy brightened every time Gia laughed.

“Why do we have to go?” Perdy asked her mother, abandoning her post at the bow of the boat to lay her head on the pillow of Gia's arm. “The humans leave us alone. The river is lovely. The fish and the birds and the bugs are as friendly as could be.”

Mother clucked her tongue. “You know the answer to that, Perdita. Whether they will it or not, as the humans grow, we ebb. There was a time when we were friends with the humans, when we did not hide ourselves from them and we shared our magic with them. Before they dug down in the earth and brought the deepest, darkest metals out to taste the air, to poison everything they touched.

“Now this world cannot hold us both. If we wait too long, we may not have enough strength to make a door at all. We may not ever be able to leave. As it is, we can only make the one door, and hold the space between worlds open for a few minutes.”

Perdy's lips pursed together. Gia took a knot of her hair, unwound it, and wound it back up with a sprig of flowering vine tucked between the plaits.

“You'll see,” Mother assured her. “The fish will be just as friendly, and the waves just as fresh in the new world the door makers find for us.”

“And we'll be together,” Gia said. “That's all that
matters. When we get to this new place, I'll help you map our new stream. I'll go with you to learn the rhythm of the new rapids and the taste of the new lake. It will be an adventure—just what you love best. You'll see.”

But still Perdy was uneasy. So she decided to craft a thing to take with them so they never really had to leave this place behind. One for her, and one for Gia.

Perdy wove a pair of coronets out of burnished fig roots. Into the wood she set crystals from the mountain streams, agates from the salty mudflats, and iridescent snail shells that glowed with the memory of the deepest depths of the lake. Every night, while they listened to the chanting of the door makers, Perdy wound a new treasure into the coronets. Every morning she emptied her pockets and set out again to search for that one last piece.

“Perdy, will you stop this wandering?” Gia pleaded. “You heard Mother. The door will open and
close
any day now. You have to be here when it does.”

“I can skate all the way from the lake and back faster than you can blink. There's no way I'll miss it.”

“Quit being so stubborn!”

“Quit being such a worrier!”

Gia stomped away. She didn't understand what it
was that called her sister away again and again, farther and farther from home. But there was no stopping Perdy, so Gia set out to find a way to bring her back again if she ever went too far.

She studied, and she listened, and she worked at the curious tangle of sprite magic. Gia watched the hands of the door makers and counted the phrases that passed through their lips as they fashioned the door in the air and probed the worlds beyond.

Perdy had no interest in such a still task; she had no discipline to work at a tangle that did not easily come loose in her fingers. But Gia was a patient soul. She wasn't looking for the same kind of magic the door makers worked. What she needed to know, what she wanted to master, was the coming home, the calling to the nest kind of magic.

The door makers were too busy at their task to teach what they knew—there would be time for that in the next world, they said. So Gia had to work it out on her own. First, she spelled a leaf so she could drop it anywhere in the stream and it would find its way back to the sandy spot where she waited. Next, she magicked a beetle to come whenever she called from wherever she called.

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 of 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.