“Perhaps,” Elorin said. “I am only wondering what life was like in this City nine hundred years ago. How much has been lost or changed. How much has been forgotten.”
Leela had been wondering that too. She wished there were someone else to ask, but only the High Priestess was left from that time.
She did not know how long they sat for, but she was just about to suggest that they leave, her thighs growing numb with cold, when she felt another heart beating in her chest.
“Sera?” she gasped. Elorin turned, pushing herself up onto her knees.
“Do you see her?”
Leela shook her head. “I can feel her heart.”
“Does it speak to you? Like a blood bond?”
“No. It is . . . calm. Slow and steady. Almost as if . . .”
She looked at the cone of moonstone and the vision came and she welcomed it with joy. The room was small and dark, with a square bed and a single round window, like the one in the chamber of penitence but not so high up. The floor beneath her tilted and swayed gently. Leela saw the shapes of two figures beneath the covers, both sleeping. Suddenly, a girl sat up—it was not the same girl she had seen before, the tall one with curly hair and turquoise eyes. This girl had brown skin and brown hair, disheveled from sleep, and though her face was half in shadow, Leela sensed a keenness in her gaze.
“Sera?” she whispered, but Sera slept on peacefully. Leela saw the glint of gold around her friend’s neck, the pendant clutched tight in one silver hand. The girl was looking at the necklace too, and Leela wondered if she knew about the moonstone, what it was and where it had come from. They were sharing a bed together, so Leela imagined they must be friends at the very least, if not perhaps something more. Leela found herself glad that Sera had found someone who cared for her on the planet. She wanted to get a better look at the girl, she wanted to move, but she did not know how, when suddenly, Elorin was shaking her arm and the vision dissolved and Leela’s heart ached at the loss of Sera’s steady beat.
“What?” she asked.
“Someone’s coming,” Elorin whispered.
12
“HIDE!” LEELA HISSED AS THE UNMISTAKABLE SOUND OF footsteps came closer.
She and Elorin hurried as quickly and quietly as they could, pressing themselves against the cold surface of a column only moments before the High Priestess emerged into the clearing. They crouched low and peered out to watch her as she circled the main pool, muttering to herself, to the tether, to the moonstone. . . . Leela could not be certain which and she could not make out what she was saying.
At last, the High Priestess stopped and Leela saw her mask fall away, the ancientness showing on her face in hard, deep lines around her mouth and eyes, her irises darkening, her shoulders hunching as if she carried the weight of the entire City on her back.
“I have resisted for so long,” she said, and it sounded like a confession. “But I must give in again. They need me. It is not enough. Not enough.”
She held out a hand and a golden fruit fell into her open palm as if she had called it down from the vines. Her whole body seemed to tremble as she brought it to her mouth and took the first bite. The moonstone heart contracted, then pounded even more frantically, turning a furious crimson. The High Priestess moaned and Leela could not tell if it was ecstasy or agony or both. She took another bite and then another, until the fruit was gone and only a shimmering blue pit left. That she let fall through the pool and it flashed bright as a newborn star before burning out into nothing. The pool rippled, strange shapes and shadows passing over its once-clear surface, but Leela could not make them out from her vantage point.
The High Priestess watched them with an unreadable expression, her eyes darting this way and that. Then she clutched her head as if in pain and her skin began to glow, silver at first, then blue, then as red as the heart of the moonstone. Elorin’s fingers were painfully tight around Leela’s arm and Leela herself clutched at the novice’s hand in terror.
Leela could feel the heat emanating from the High Priestess’s tall frame, hotter than anything she’d ever felt before, a heat that writhed, that commanded, that consumed. One by one, the ice-covered circles containing Cerulean began to shine, a light so vividly white both girls had to shield their eyes, as the underground gardens were filled with their brilliance.
Then the light and the heat were gone, snuffed out as quickly as a candle flame; when Leela looked, the High Priestess was herself again, her face young and smooth and beautiful, her skin silver as the moon. She gave a great gasp, pulling in air as if surfacing after a long time underwater, and lifted her eyes to the vines.
“Thank you,” she murmured. She knelt by the pool and spoke to the tether like an old friend. “This was not how I meant it to be,” she said, her voice full of regret. “Perhaps it should have been me. Perhaps I would have been the better choice.”
Then she stood and shuddered, and her gown rippled; she seemed to grow even taller. Without another word, she strode off down one of the luminous green paths and disappeared. Leela and Elorin waited, not daring to move or speak or breathe. When at last they felt it safe, they crept forward from behind the column and approached the pool. It looked the same as it had, crystal clear and still as glass.
“Did you see those shapes that rose on its surface?” Elorin whispered.
Leela nodded. “I couldn’t make them out, though.”
“Nor I.” Elorin shivered. “And then all those lights and that . . . that heat . . .”
“Who do you think she was talking about?” Leela asked. “When she said she would have been the better choice?”
“Sera, maybe?” Elorin bit her lip.
That didn’t make any sense, though. Something nagged at Leela, something she could not quite put her finger on. “We must go,” she said. “We cannot be caught out of bed.”
“Yes,” Elorin agreed solemnly. Then she threw her arms around Leela. “Thank you for trusting me with this,” she whispered, her breath tickling Leela’s ear. “It is scary and sad and worrying and so many other things, but . . . I would rather know the truth and be frightened than remain ignorant and live a life wrapped up in a lie.”
Elorin’s arms were hot in this cold place, her skin soft where it touched Leela’s, and she smelled of nutmeg and cedar. Leela felt a faint stirring inside her. It was so nice to be held.
They hurried back up the stairs, and Leela found herself once again startled by the normalcy of her world. Elorin stood beside her, steadying her, giving her courage.
And more important, giving her hope.
The next day, as the sun set and Leela continued her work polishing the temple doors, the bells began to ring out, calling the City to gather.
Leela climbed down from her ladder, putting it away before joining the other novices in laying out the cushions for the Cerulean to kneel on.
“What is happening?” she asked Novice Cresha as they worked near the Altar of the Lost.
“You will hear along with everyone else,” Cresha said. She was one of the novices who most resented Leela’s presence among them.
“The High Priestess visited the birthing houses this morning at dawn,” Novice Loonir whispered when Cresha left to gather more cushions. “I think one of the purple mothers is pregnant at last.”