by Amy Ewing
After a week, the devotions finally ended, and all the novices seemed quite happy. There was something that felt forced about these prayers for fertility, something that did not sit well.
But still, no purple mother had been blessed with a child except Plenna.
Leela and Elorin did not need to speak to one another to agree to return to the Sky Gardens that night. The two girls waited until nearly the hour of the dark before slipping out of the dormitory.
The Moon Gardens were blissfully silent. Fireflies dotted the rosebushes as Leela and Elorin made their way to Faesa’s statue—Leela making sure to move the statue over the opening to cover their tracks—and down the cold stairs to the City’s underbelly. When they arrived at Estelle’s circle, they both stopped and gazed down at her—the memory of putting her inside this stalactite was crystal clear in Leela’s mind, and she sensed Elorin was thinking of it too.
“Do you think she will be all right if you take her out?” Elorin asked in a hushed voice.
“Yes,” Leela said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. “The High Priestess does not want to kill them. Besides, Estelle escaped once, years ago, and Kandra saw her—the High Priestess simply erased her memory of the meeting.” She looked at the cone of moonstone, and its pulsing red heart seemed dim to her. “The stalactites absorb Cerulean magic,” she said. “Which feeds the pool, which strengthens the tether.” She turned her eyes upward to the boughs of vines. “The moonstone uses the magic of the tether to make the fruit, which she feeds to the Cerulean, replenishing the magic the tether is taking from them. Until it can’t anymore and then she needs to make new stalactites and imprison fresh Cerulean.”
“I wonder how she even thought to do it in the first place,” Elorin said. “What could have caused her to make such a drastic choice?”
Leela felt that if she’d kept the circlet on longer, she might have found out. All she could do now was try to help those imprisoned. She knelt at the edge of Estelle’s stalactite and recalled the movements the High Priestess had made when she’d first trapped her here.
She ran one hand in a clockwise circle over the ice. “For devotion,” she said, her voice trembling. She passed her other hand counterclockwise. “For wisdom.” Then she passed both hands in a long line down the center of the circle. “For love,” she whispered.
Leela waited, hardly daring to even breathe. Suddenly, Elorin gasped and Leela saw cracks appear in the surface of the ice. Liquid began to weep from them, spilling across the ground and soaking the knees of Leela’s robe. And then the ice was gone. Leela reached out and touched the inside of the stalactite—the liquid was clear as water but much more viscous.
“Estelle?” she called, unsure of exactly what to do.
For one agonizingly long moment, nothing happened. Then Estelle’s whole body lurched, limbs flailing through the thick fluid, until she burst from the stalactite, coughing and choking and heaving up water onto the cold ground.
We should have brought an extra robe, Leela thought as she and Elorin helped pull her out. She realized how much she had doubted that this would actually work.
“I’ll get her a robe from the dormitories,” Elorin said, as if reading Leela’s mind.
Leela nodded and Elorin quickly left. It was only after she’d gone that Leela remembered she’d sealed up Faesa’s statue and Elorin would not be able to get out.
But Estelle had stopped coughing and now turned her eyes to Leela. They were flat black, no trace of blue at all.
“Who are you?” she croaked.
“M-my name is Leela Starcatcher,” Leela stammered. “I—”
Estelle grabbed her arm so tight it hurt. “Are you working with her?”
Leela didn’t need to ask who she meant. “No,” she said. “I’m trying to stop her. I only found this place a few weeks ago, no one in the City knows about it.”
“She lies,” Estelle said, her grip tightening. “You could be lying too.”
“Please,” Leela said. “You’re hurting me.”
“How long has it been?” Estelle demanded. “How long have I been . . .” She shuddered and released Leela, slumping over and holding her head in her hands. “Is this real? I have had the freedom dreams before.” She looked up and her black eyes sent a shudder deep into Leela’s heart. “Am I dead?”
Leela knelt before her. “You are not dead,” she said gently. “And this is no dream.”
Estelle looked around, wild and frantic. “What do you want with me? Where are the others?”
“I want to help you. I want to help them too but I don’t know how. I don’t . . .” Leela felt ashamed. She stared at her hands and said, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“There are so many of us,” Estelle murmured. “Can you hear them? I hear them in my dreams, when I wake, voices that whisper, that beg, that cry . . . some of them are so very old.” She gazed up at Leela. “Does the City know of her treachery? Is the nightmare over?”
“Not yet,” Leela said, and Estelle crumpled. “But I know of her lies and so does my friend Elorin.” She took a breath. “And so does Kandra Sunkeeper.”
“Kandra?” Estelle became at once alert, scrambling to her knees. “Kandra is still alive?”
“Yes,” Leela said, grateful to be able to impart some good news. “She has a daughter. Sera. She is eighteen, like me.”
Tears filled Estelle’s unnervingly black eyes. “A daughter.”
“The High Priestess made her forget about you,” Leela said. “But when Sera was sacrificed, it all came back to her.”
“Sacrificed?” Estelle gripped her head with her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Leela said. “There is so much to tell and I fear I do not know where to begin.”
Suddenly Estelle was pulling at Leela’s robe, her face desperate.
“You must take me to Kandra,” she said. “I need to see her. Please. I don’t have much time.”
23
“KANDRA IS AT THE BIRTHING HOUSES,” LEELA SAID. “IT is a long way from here and dangerous.”
“Please,” Estelle said again. “I can’t—none of this seems real.” She released her hold on Leela and slumped to the ground. “I wish to see my friend again. And the stars. I have not seen the stars in years. I wonder if they look the same as I remember . . .”
Leela’s heart spasmed with pain, at the thought of so many long years in darkness.
Just then, Elorin returned with a robe in her hands. “The moonstone moved for me!” she cried. “I realized as I was climbing the stairs that you had sealed the entrance, but then Faesa’s statue just . . . slid aside.” She caught sight of Estelle’s flat black eyes and fell silent.
“She wants me to take her to Kandra,” Leela said.
Elorin gasped. “Surely you cannot. It is too far, and too dangerous. What if someone sees her?”
Leela grasped Elorin’s shoulders. “She has been in darkness for so long,” she said. “Without light, without hope. How can I deny her the opportunity to see her friend? What if we fail and this was her one chance?”
Elorin looked to Estelle, then back to Leela. “You are right.”
Estelle suddenly fell to her knees, clutching her chest. “The fruit,” she croaked. “Please . . . I need the fruit. . . .”
Without allowing herself a moment to think, Leela stretched out a hand and a fat golden fruit plopped into it, as if she had called it down from the vines. Elorin gave an impressed half gasp half squeak and Leela felt a stirring of pride, but Estelle was already grabbing it, devouring it swiftly and discarding the pit. Then she lurched forward, her palms slapping against the cold ground, her skin beginning to glow, until there was a sudden flash. She rose to her feet slowly, straight and strong.
She stretched her arms out and flexed her fingers. “I feel . . . almost myself again.” Then she looked at Leela. “Oh, thank you. It has been so long since I’ve felt my legs beneath me. It’s been so long since I’ve moved of my own accord, or spoken, o
r seen anyone besides the High Priestess.”
Leela helped her into the robe. “We must go quickly,” she said. “It will take us time to reach the birthing houses.”
Estelle grabbed her wrist. “What is your name again?”
“Leela,” Leela said. “And this is Elorin.”
Elorin gave a little cough by way of greeting. They climbed up the stairs beneath Faesa’s statue and as soon as they emerged into the Moon Gardens, Estelle collapsed onto the earth, sobbing and pulling up giant fistfuls of grass.
“Stop,” Leela whispered. “Oh, please, Estelle, stop, we cannot be seen or heard.”
Estelle took a deep, shuddering breath. “I am sorry,” she said. “The feel of grass, the fragrance of roses, the whisper of the wind . . . how precious these things are, that I once took for granted. How painfully beautiful the world is.” She turned her eyes upward to the stars. “They do look as I remember.” Then she rose to her feet, her legs unsteady beneath her.
“How long will the fruit sustain you?” Leela asked.
“I’m not sure. It lasts longer when I am . . .” She swallowed, and Leela knew she could not bring herself to name her prison. “A few hours, perhaps.”
Leela turned to Elorin. “Wait inside. No sense in both of us getting caught.”
Elorin nodded, then turned and headed back to the dormitory. Leela beckoned for Estelle to follow her. They crossed Faesa’s Bridge in silence and headed past the stargem mines, down the lesser used paths that Leela had become familiar with over the course of her late-night visits with Kandra. Only when they reached the forest and slipped in among the trees, where no Cerulean could hear, did she begin to tell her tale to Estelle. She listened with surprising calm, Leela thought, though perhaps she was just grateful to be listening to anyone at all again. Occasionally she would pause to touch the wrinkled bark of a tree trunk, or cock her head at the chirp of a cricket as if there were no more beautiful sound in the world.
They had nearly reached the birthing houses by the time Leela had gotten to the part about the High Priestess’s circlet. Estelle placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Never have I met a Cerulean as brave as you,” she said.
Leela’s cheeks warmed. “Sera is braver. And I could not have done half of what I have without Elorin. But we must be quiet now. Kandra is in the last house, farthest from the path.”
Leela paid no mind to the sacred circle of white and blue pebbles, crossing over them without a second thought. The birthing houses were deathly silent. The garlands of flowers strung among them were leeched of color in the moonlight and the obelisk was a mere ghost in the darkness. Leela and Estelle crept forward, quiet and alert. They reached the last house and Leela gripped the knob, gave Estelle a bracing look, and turned it.
This birthing house was much the same as the one Kandra had shown her the first time they had met here—a single room, round and domed, with a bed, a table with a pitcher and basin, and a bassinet to one side. Kandra was lying on the bed and Leela assumed she was sleeping until she sat up abruptly.
“Who’s there?” she called. But her voice was small and sad and flat, as if she did not really care that strangers were coming into her room in the middle of the night.
Estelle let out a strangled sob and stumbled forward. “Kandra,” she said. “Kandra, it’s me.”
There was the sound of a match striking and then a flame glowed inside a glass lantern. For several long moments Kandra and Estelle stared at each other. Leela did not dare to move for fear she would break the moment.
Very slowly, Kandra stood. “Are you real?”
Tears were falling thick down Estelle’s cheeks. “Yes,” she said. “I’m real.”
Then the two women fell into each other’s arms, and Leela felt tears well in her own eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” Kandra said over and over as Estelle murmured the same thing.
“I ran away,” Kandra said, pulling back and wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I should never have left you. I didn’t believe it was really you but it was. Oh, Estelle, I’m so sorry.”
“Shhhh,” Estelle said. “It is all right. You have nothing to be sorry for. You thought I was dead. I’m sorry that I did not tend to our friendship as I should have. You got married and I felt like I had no place in your life. I drifted away out of fear and in doing so, I lost my best friend.”
But Kandra was shaking her head. “That was not your fault. I should have been more attentive to all my relationships, not just my wives. You never lost me, not for one moment.”
And then they were embracing again.
“How is this possible?” Kandra asked as they broke apart. “How are you here? How did you escape?”
“Leela,” Estelle said simply. Kandra gasped and turned to Leela as if only just noticing she was there.
“But how?” she asked.
“You may want to sit down,” Leela said. “It is a rather long story.”
Kandra sank down onto the bed, her eyes growing wider and wider as Leela explained everything.
“The High Priestess made up the sleeping sickness?” she gasped. “To steal Cerulean magic for the tether?”
Leela nodded. “But the tether is dying—the City needs to move. I’m not sure if she knows what to do now since the sacrifice failed. Sera didn’t break the tether. We may see another bout of sleeping sickness run through the City.”
“No.” Estelle’s voice carried the chill of her underground prison. “We cannot let her . . . no one should be subjected to what she has put us through.” She took a seat beside Kandra. “We can hear her. Through the glass. Through the liquid that suspends and sustains us. Bits and pieces. Sometimes she talks to herself. Sometimes she talks to others.” Estelle grimaced as if in pain. “At least I think she does. The other voices, the ones who are trapped alongside me, they are very old, they know more than I do. . . .”
She fixed her black eyes on Leela. “They told me a secret. The circlet, Leela. That moonstone is connected to every Cerulean in this City. It has been the moonstone of the High Priestess since the forming of the City itself. It was meant as a way to keep the High Priestess connected with her people, so that she would best know how to guide them. But it has been twisted to a dark purpose.” Estelle clutched at her chest. “She has been using it to siphon magic from the City’s population, for centuries. She has been weakening us, been stealing the magic from every single Cerulean. That is how she has been able to survive for so long, why she looks so youthful after nine hundred years. That moonstone can draw out Cerulean magic like a moth to a flame, without us knowing or feeling it. The circlet may seem small but it contains more power than anything in this City.” She shook her head. “She was feasting on our magic, she still is, and we cannot feel a thing.”
Leela felt her face go blank with shock. Kandra had one hand covering her mouth, her expression frozen in disbelief.
“Our prison is like one massive spiderweb,” Estelle continued. “Where we are all interconnected and yet individual threads at once. I feel the sadness and longing and anger of the ancient ones, as if through a blood bond. The High Priestess knows us, knows each of our names. She speaks to us sometimes and asks for forgiveness. She tells us it is all for the greater good. I do not believe she knows we can hear her.”
“How did you escape the first time?” Kandra asked. “When I saw you here, by the obelisk . . .”
Estelle closed her eyes, remembering. “I was still new then, still strong. She was feeding so many of us she forgot to seal my tomb. I remember the feel of air in my lungs again, the cold ground beneath my hands. And then I was walking and I didn’t know where I was going until I found a staircase. I began to climb. I felt like I was in a dream.”
“How did you move the obelisk?” Leela asked.
Estelle blinked. “I don’t know. I didn’t realize I had. I remember feeling desperate. I remember thinking, I have to warn them, I have to tell them. I had bright new fruit running through my veins. T
hough my muscles felt weak, my magic was strong.”
Elorin had moved Faesa’s statue as well, Leela thought. Perhaps the brightness of Estelle’s magic had called on the obelisk to move. Perhaps all Cerulean were as capable of moving the moonstone as they were of reading the doors. They simply did not know it. Or the High Priestess had siphoned that power along with their magic.
Estelle turned to Kandra. “You told me I was dead.”
A tear slid down Kandra’s cheek. “And you said no, and then yes.”
“I am sorry I did not tell you truly what was happening,” Estelle said. “I spoke in riddles, but it felt like everything was one big riddle myself. I have had more time now, to see, to feel, to listen. When you ran away, I tried to follow you. But my legs were so clumsy, my mind muddled. And then I felt the fruit begin to fade from my veins and I could not walk any longer and my lungs began to shrink and my heart beat slower. And that’s when she found me. She put me back and locked me away.”
“That must have been when she sealed the stairs beneath the obelisk,” Leela said.
“The obelisk,” Kandra muttered, her eyes faraway. When she looked at Leela again, Leela saw a small spark of blue. “I think . . . I think I saw her name. Written on the obelisk.”
Leela frowned. “Whose name?”
“Sera,” Kandra whispered. “I was bringing water to one of the midwives and I walked past the obelisk and I—I felt her presence. I felt as if Sera was watching me. And then markings appeared on the moonstone and I swear on my love for Mother Sun, the symbols spelled Sera. Then they vanished so quickly I thought perhaps I made them up, that in my grief I was seeing things. But you told me she was alive. And for a moment I wondered if I should have believed you.”
Leela bit her lip. She had spent so much time feeling confused and overwhelmed, but now she was seeing that there was some purpose to all these events, these changes, and that she was a part of it, and if she could just embrace that, maybe she’d discover a side of herself she never knew existed.
