The Alcazar

by Amy Ewing

  Wyllin’s eyes turned sad. “No,” she said. “I imagine not.”

  “But why has the High Priestess left you here all alone?” Sera asked. Wyllin gazed up at the tether with tenderness, almost the way a mother looks at a child.

  “I am the tether and the tether is me,” she said. “After the Great Sadness, Elysse changed. We all did. She wanted to protect the City. She was so afraid, so . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Sorry, the Great what?”

  Leela had hardly noticed the humans, she had been so focused on Sera.

  “The Great Sadness was the biggest tragedy in Cerulean history,” Sera explained. “When two hundred Cerulean were massacred on the last planet the City was tethered to.”

  “How horrible,” the human girl said as Sera made hasty introductions.

  “Leela, this is Leo and his sister, Agnes,” she said. “They are the ones I told you about.”

  “Thank you for helping my friend,” Leela said.

  “You’re—wait a second, we can understand you,” Leo said, looking confused.

  “Cerulean can always speak the language of the planets,” Wyllin said.

  “I could not, when I first fell,” Sera said. “It was not until I arrived in Pelago that I was able to speak the human languages.”

  Wyllin frowned. “Perhaps such a long attachment with no contact with the planet had crippled this ability.”

  “No,” Leela said, her face darkening. “It is because the High Priestess has been siphoning magic from her people. To keep herself young and strong. She has somehow bent the circlet to her will, twisted its purpose to steal from us.”

  Wyllin slumped against the fountain. “Moonstone is connective. It links our City to the planets and the Cerulean to each other. In days past, the stone was used by Cerulean to communicate, whether between City and planet or while on the planet itself. Like an external blood bond. We can read each other’s hearts, speak to each other by calling on our moonstone.”

  “Like how I called on it to let me speak to you in the Sky Gardens,” Leela said to Sera.

  “And how I could see my purple mother at the birthing houses,” Sera said.

  “But the moonstone in the circlet is even more powerful,” Wyllin said. “It connects to all Cerulean. Imagine a blood bond so strong it can actually pull magic to it, absorb the power that lives within our blood. Instead of sharing, it only takes. That moonstone must be thrumming with Cerulean magic.” She looked at Sera. “But you were out of her grasp. Your magic must have replenished, grown strong like it is supposed to be while you were here on the planet.”

  Sera looked down at her hands. “Errol was first because he was the easiest,” she said to herself. “And then Boris. And the humans last. When I was at my strongest. When I arrived in Pelago.”

  “I beg your pardon, Ms. . . . Ms. Wyllin,” Agnes said timidly. “But what exactly is this place? The, um, the humans all seem to think it contains wealth or powers.”

  Wyllin looked startled, but she spoke to Agnes with kindness.

  “It is called the Alcazar,” she said. “Wherever the tether plants itself, it creates an Alcazar to protect it, to enclose it. Each one looks different, depending on the planet. This one was very large and very beautiful at first. But it has crumbled into ruin.” Wyllin’s eyes grew sad and distant. “There is power here, yes, but not the way humans expect. The tether cannot be claimed by anyone, not even a Cerulean. But it has the power of connection and the wealth of life. Are there no more important things than that?” She looked again at the fine chain. “How I would love to return to the City Above the Sky. To walk the shores of the Great Estuary, to wander the moonflower fields and eat honeycombs fresh from the Apiary.” Her expression turned so mournful Leela felt her own heart ache. “And yet I cannot go back. Everything I have to give I have given to this planet and to the tether. I am the tether and the tether is me.”

  “But—sorry,” Agnes said, “if the moonstone is connective and it was the way Cerulean used to travel between the city and the planet, then why hasn’t Sera just been able to go home already?”

  “She was not strong enough,” Wyllin said. “Not if her magic had been weakened.” She half smiled. “It is easier to fall than to fly.” She and Sera exchanged a look, then Wyllin turned back to Agnes. “It takes great intention to travel. And who is to say Sera was not meant to come here to learn this? That there was not some deeper meaning to your journey?”

  Leela felt a tingle run up her spine as Wyllin addressed her and Sera. “I must show you the truth before you go, before I die. For I feel my death coming now, as certain as sunrise.”

  “The truth?” Sera asked.

  “About the Great Sadness. About what really happened on that planet so many centuries ago.”

  Leela and Sera looked at each other and Leela felt a sinking dread creep all the way down to her toes. Perhaps the biggest of all the High Priestess’s lies was about to be revealed.

  Wyllin extended a hand to Sera. “I will need my moonstone. My magic is too weak. The moonstone contains my heart, my memories, faint remnants of my magic. As it will contain yours now.”

  Sera quickly removed the necklace and gave it to her.

  “What’s going on?” Leo asked.

  “I am going to show these Cerulean a piece of their history,” Wyllin said.

  “Is that like the memory sharing?” Agnes asked.

  “I have blood bonded with both of these humans,” Sera explained. “They have my magic in their veins.”

  Wyllin’s lips parted in surprise, but Leela already knew this. “Blood bonded with humans?” Wyllin gasped. Sera nodded, unashamed.

  “They see what I see,” she said.

  Wyllin hesitated.

  “You are very brave,” she said. She looked first at Agnes, then at Leo, as if silently commanding them to respect what they were about to witness.

  Leo gave a serious nod and Agnes straightened her shoulders.

  Wyllin’s mouth twitched, then she gripped the moonstone and bent over it with closed eyes. Leela thought she saw her lips move as if speaking to the stone, and when Wyllin looked up, her pale irises had turned brilliant blue like a light had been switched on inside her. Leela felt the same disorienting sensation she had experienced when she put the High Priestess’s circlet on, as if she was being pulled very quickly through a narrow tunnel.

  The courtyard they were in blurred and disappeared, and then Leela was in the Sky Gardens, but they were bright and cheery, with vibrant flowers and verdant trees growing overhead, not the dead, withered bramble she was used to. The vines that surrounded the moonstone were sea green and rose-gold and no fruit grew among them. The air was cool, but not cold, and the columns glowed pleasantly blue, the paths like ribbons of pure white. There was nothing eerie about the place at all.

  “I want to go back,” a young woman was saying. “Just one last time, before we leave. I want to see him again, to say goodbye.”

  Leela’s shock at seeing the young High Priestess registered somewhere, but her mouth was moving, words unbidden coming out, and she knew she was Wyllin in this memory, as she had been the High Priestess in the circlet before.

  “There are so many already down on the planet,” Wyllin said. “To replenish it before we leave.”

  “Exactly,” the High Priestess said, though in Wyllin’s mind she was Elysse, and only Elysse. She was not the High Priestess yet, though Leela knew (because Wyllin did) that she had already been chosen to succeed Luille, the current High Priestess. “No one will notice a few more additions.”

  The fragment of Leela’s mind registered with shock that she was seeing a memory from over nine hundred years ago.

  Elysse’s face turned pleading, making sad eyes that Wyllin knew would win her the argument. They always did.

  “You are certain it is just to say goodbye?” Wyllin asked. “You could stay with him, if you wished, as others have done before. Remember Ebereen, who stayed behind on the pl
anet of roses and ice?”

  “I am not a planet-keeper,” Elysse insisted, though Wyllin felt skeptical.

  “But you care for this male,” she said.

  “I do,” Elysse admitted. She looked forlorn as she stared through the large, clear pool, down to the planet below. “But I care for my City more. And I have been chosen. I must accept the role Mother Sun has assigned for me.”

  Wyllin put her hand on Elysse’s arm. “It is such a weight for one so young,” she said. “Mother Sun must see greatness in you.”

  Elysse smiled at her, but there was doubt in her eyes. “I am glad I have you to keep my counsel,” she said.

  “Always,” Wyllin promised. Then she sighed. “Very well. Go. Say your goodbye.”

  Their moonstones were almost identical, perfect circles of pure white, except Elysse’s was larger than Wyllin’s. They had both had them fashioned into rings—Elysse wore hers on the middle finger of her right hand, Wyllin on the ring finger of her left. They chose pools that were next to each other, and Wyllin gazed down at the planet, at the familiar sprawling brown-green continent. Then they both jumped.

  The scene dissolved and suddenly Wyllin was watching from afar as Elysse embraced a male with alabaster skin and hair the color of moss. She was whispering something to him and he shook his head, and then she was crying, and he talked softly in her ear. She nodded. He asked her something else and she nodded again. When he held her close against his chest, Wyllin saw a gleam she did not like in his fire-red eyes. She had always found the eyes of the people who inhabited this planet to be unnerving, but this was different.

  “The others are in the forest,” Wyllin said, when Elysse left the male behind and joined her. “I spoke to Gailen through my moonstone while I was waiting for you. We have almost finished giving back what we took from this planet. It is time to go. Let’s join them and return with the rest, and no one will ever know why you and I came.”

  She didn’t like that Elysse kept this male a secret. But her friend had always been so reserved in her feelings. At first Wyllin had just been happy to see Elysse in love. But something had changed in her over the course of the City’s time attached to this planet. Orial, it was called, and while some of its people were dangerous and fierce, there were others who were kind and curious. Not everyone on the planet was the same. Elysse had spent more and more time on its surface, and yet still insisted she did not want to stay behind when the City moved on. Wyllin sensed her friend was torn. She wanted both, her male and her City, and that was simply not possible.

  The scene dissolved again, and Wyllin was in a grove of enormous trees with thorny trunks and dark purple leaves. Cerulean wandered through them, leaving behind wispy trails of magic that caused flowers to spring up in their wake, and the grass to grow thicker, and the air to become more fragrant. Wyllin loved this part, when they would come to the planet in large numbers to give back what they had taken using the gift of their magic. The City did not steal—it only borrowed from the planets. There were so many Cerulean this time, easily two hundred. Elysse was not the only one who had enjoyed being attached to Orial. Its weather was pleasant, its people fascinating, its waters and woods teeming with life. Wyllin’s favorite were the fish that had appeared in the Estuary once they had tethered here, one of the planetary gifts from Orial. The fish had fine filaments that hung over their eyes and they would light up in spectacular colors.

  She wondered where Luille was among the Cerulean gathered—it was tradition for the High Priestess to be present for the replenishing. Then she caught sight of her, several yards away, her magic like a cloak streaming out behind her.

  Wyllin spread her palms and called on her magic and it flowed through her like a river, faint trails emanating out from her as she walked, blessing the ground with fertile richness. She passed an elderly Cerulean named Meranne, who called out a greeting, the orange ribbon around her neck shining against her skin.

  “Last day on Orial, Wyllin,” she said. “Are you sad to be leaving?”

  “Yes and no,” Wyllin replied. “It will be nice to see a new planet.”

  Meranne smiled and patted her moonstone, a brooch fashioned in the shape of a bumblebee. “I have just seen my green wife leaving offerings at Aila’s statue for a safe journey. She is eager for a new planet as well.”

  “I will leave an offering myself when we return,” Wyllin said. “Perhaps—”

  The rest of her words died on her lips as there was a whizzing sound by her ear, and then the back of Meranne’s head exploded in a burst of bright blue, her body crumpling to the ground.

  Wyllin did not make the conscious decision to drop to her knees, but suddenly she was lying in the grass and there was whizzing all around her, and the Cerulean were running and screaming and falling.

  Bullets, Wyllin thought, her mind clumsy as another whiz pierced the skull of a Cerulean running for shelter among the trees. Bullets, they are called. From a gun.

  Cerulean magic had healing power, but there was no cure for a piece of metal that pierced the brain. Her vision grew black around the edges and Wyllin could feel her lungs shrinking inside her chest; there was not enough air, and she knew she should do something but she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t remember, there were bodies everywhere.

  And then she saw him. The male her friend loved so much. With a long, cruel piece of metal in his hand. A rifle, she remembered. That’s what it was called.

  “The head or else they’ll heal!” he was shouting. “We need the blood, it’s the blood that has the power!”

  She told him, Wyllin thought in a daze. And now he wants it for himself.

  “Wyllin!” Elysse was there then, shaking her. “We have to go!”

  “It was him,” Wyllin said, stumbling to her feet. “Elysse, it was him!”

  Elysse turned and saw the male. Their eyes met, and the flames in his seemed to extinguish for a fraction of a second. Then he raised the gun and pointed it at her head.

  “No!” Wyllin screamed, and her mind cleared, the thought of home vibrant within her; she gripped Elysse’s hand, calling on her moonstone to return them to the City. The ring on her finger flared up and then they were spinning, their feet leaving the ground, everything a blur of color, and they burst through the atmosphere into space, but the stars held no comfort. When at last they emerged up through the pool and back into the Sky Gardens, Wyllin still could not find her lungs.

  Elysse was shivering on the ground, sobs ripping out of her chest.

  “He betrayed me,” she gasped over and over. “I loved him and he betrayed me.” She turned up to Wyllin, her face etched with agony. “He killed them, Wyllin. He killed them, he killed them . . .”

  Wyllin held her but had no words to comfort. All she could see was Meranne’s body falling to the ground. All she could hear were the screams of the dying Cerulean they had left behind.

  The High Priestess, Wyllin thought with a sudden chill. Had she died on the planet as well?

  A Cerulean shot up through one of the other pools, her long wail echoing through the lush gardens.

  “Dead,” she moaned, “all dead . . .”

  Then a second appeared through a different pool, and then a third. They were crying and hugging each other the same as Wyllin and Elysse. Wyllin waited, holding her friend in her arms. And she waited. And waited.

  No other Cerulean returned.

  “Elysse,” Wyllin said in a daze. “I think you may be the High Priestess now.”

  That was perhaps the only thing in the world that could quiet her friend’s sobs. She sat up, rigid, and looked at the other three survivors, huddled together.

  “Don’t tell, Wyllin,” she whispered. “Please. Promise me. I will make this right, I will protect this City with every fiber and spark of magic contained within me. I will never let anything like this happen again, I swear it on Mother Sun and all her Moon Daughters. But please. Do not tell the others of my shame.”

  And Wyllin believed her, beca
use she knew Elysse loved the City Above the Sky—had she not forsaken her love on the planet, false as he was, for her devotion to it?

  “I promise,” she said.

  The scene dissolved again. Time had passed. Elysse looked older, and no longer wore the moonstone ring, but instead bore the circlet, its stone gleaming against her sapphire hair.

  “We will have to have a choosing ceremony soon,” she was saying. They were in Wyllin’s kitchen, a pretty room with brightly colored mugs hanging on the wall and a window box of basil giving off a fragrant aroma. Wyllin sat at the table while Elysse paced back and forth.

  “But Mother Sun—” Wyllin began.

  “She has abandoned us!” Elysse cried. “I told you. I have had no hint, no whisper, no dreams . . . even the doors have stopped speaking to me. We are on our own, Wyllin. We must protect this City ourselves.”

  “Why not share your fears with the others?” Wyllin said, as she had said so many times before.

  “They would not understand; they are still too frightened, too traumatized . . . I will not hurt them further. They are under my care now. I told you, Wyllin. I told you right after . . .” She cringed, as if she could not bear to recall that horrific day. “It is my duty to protect them. I failed once; I will not fail again. I will do whatever it takes, and if it means I must lie to give them hope, then I will. I will do anything necessary to make this City feel safe. We can never go down onto the planets again. Traveling through space is dangerous, as this journey showed us. They were going to die, the City was beginning to die and it was all my fault, my fault I can’t . . .”

  She fell forward, gripping the table as her body trembled, and Wyllin knew she was holding back the tears.

  “But the tether cannot survive forever,” Wyllin pointed out.

  “It can,” Elysse said, and when she looked up, her eyes had an unnerving glow. “If one Cerulean is willing to make a great sacrifice.”

  “Greater than giving up her life?”

  “Yes,” Elysse replied. “There is a way. I have seen it in the circlet—it has never been tried before but the idea is there, just waiting to be tested. The chosen one must be brave. She must be braver than any Cerulean in the history of our City.”