Birdie's Book - Andrea Burden [16]
“Then my guess is that the fairies know what you need to do,” said Kerka. She stood and started pacing. “My mother told us that Aventurine is filled with fairies, so we just have to go find some!”
The river maidens started splashing a lot, so Kerka and I looked over at them. They were leaping in and out of the water like dolphins, hair flying and all five tails shimmering.
“Okay,” I said. “So how do we find the fairies?”
“I don’t know everything,” said Kerka quietly. She suddenly brightened and held up a finger. “The voice said something about looking in my backpack when I met you.” (How could she have forgotten that?, I wondered, but decided that I really didn’t know her well enough to ask her.)
Kerka set her backpack on the ground and rummaged through it. Eventually she pulled out a large rolled-up piece of paper, tied with a red string. She untied the string and then unrolled the paper.
We knelt and spread it out on the ground, each holding an edge as we examined the paper. The paper itself was parchmenty, that kind of yellowed color that old paper gets. On it was a colored-pencil drawing of a girl sitting at a table. The girl was about the same age as Kerka and me, with dark golden skin and curly black hair. It appeared that she was looking at a map. No, she was making the map!
“How’s that supposed to help?” said Kerka.
The maidens hummed a little tune. We looked over at them again. They were slumped on the pool’s edge, their heads cupped in their hands in what looked like disappointment.
Just as I was about to say something, the drawing faded.
“What do we do now?” I wondered, trying not to be too discouraged.
“Wait, look,” Kerka said. And we watched as another drawing slowly surfaced, just as if it were coming up from a pool of brown water.
The words “Zally’s Map” began to appear, letter by letter, across the top of the paper. I shook my head. This magic stuff was mind-boggling!
“Do you think that girl was Zally?” I asked.
“Maybe,” said Kerka. “Probably. But more importantly, this is definitely a map, and maps are always helpful.” She leaned in closer, then pulled back quickly as a silent shower of red-gold sparks suddenly flew from the center of the map.
“Yikes!” yelled Kerka as I jumped back, too.
The sparks gathered together over the map and formed words:
Sister dreamers,
This is the only map of Aventurine. I hope it helps you on your
quest. Aventurine’s geography can change for each dream or
dreamer, so this map is not the kind of map you are used to.
Zally
As soon as we had read it, the spark words disbanded and fell back into the map as silently as they had come. Kerka and I carefully leaned back in to look at the map. It was clearer now.
“Look!” Kerka pointed out a tiny drawing of three river maidens in a pool beside the waterfall. “That’s where we are now.”
Silent sparks flew up from the map once more, and we leapt backward again. This time the sparks were different hues of pink. Instead of making words, they gathered over the map to form a magnificent pink flower, almost as clear as a photograph.
“It’s an Agminium,” I told Kerka. “It’s an extinct species that lived in Califa … uh … California a thousand years ago.”
The pink sparks exploded over the map like a small silent firework and disappeared.
Kerka frowned. “Very nice and pretty, but what does it mean? How will it get us to the fairies?”
Suddenly I was aware of a lot of splashing. The three maidens were clearly still trying to get our attention. They kept diving underwater, and each time they surfaced, all three had changed the colors of their hair (again!). I waved my hand at them, and they gathered