The Cerulean (Untitled Duology, #1)(97)
The garden had flourished since Boris had shown Sera her sprites, and the man with the two-pronged face hair named Martin was extremely excited by all the new flowers. There were ones with red and gold stripes that would bite you if you came too close to them, ones that sparkled when the sun began to set, and some that changed colors from day to day. He and a few other males kept talking about Sera, and she got the impression they expected her to have a role in the story of James versus the evil Pelagan woman. Leo hadn’t returned with Leela’s moonstone, nor had Agnes come, and the seed of hope she’d planted in her heart was beginning to wilt.
The fifth day after her evening talk with Leo, she discovered her role in the play.
“So, what’s the verdict, Martin?” James asked. “To what use are we putting our special silver friend?”
“I heard she’s a witch,” Gwendivere whispered to the man with the hairy lip named Grayson.
“I heard she’s a sort of healer,” he replied.
The woman scoffed, “Not likely! No, I heard she can cut men just by looking at them. I heard she cut Xavier’s own son.”
“Attention, please!” Martin clapped his hands. “As you all know, some adjustments have been made to the last scene. My darling Gwendivere, in the final confrontation between you and James, you will stab him with a poisoned blade. James, you will fall to your knees, cursing the Pelagan goddesses and such. William has written some very nice lines for you, and then we will bring, um, um . . . what are we calling her?”
“Azure,” James said.
“Yes, then we bring Azure down from the ceiling, lights will flash, and James will be healed and declare it a miracle from the One True God. Then the show will end as it always has. Gwendivere is defeated, James brings Errol and Boris—and now Azure as well—back to Kaolin, the famines and droughts are ended, and all is well.” Martin beamed around the room. “Satisfactory? Everyone on the same page? Excellent, we will practice this new ending without Azure for now. They are still working on her setup.”
Sera wondered how she was meant to be brought down from the ceiling. But the answer came later in the day, when Francis arrived to take her out of her crate.
Sera did not try to run—there were too many people around; she would not get far if she did. She had to believe that Agnes would help her, and Leo too, as strange as that felt. She had seen into his memories, and what she’d seen had only inspired pity. She found she could not hate him, now that she understood him.
She could hate his father, though.
James sauntered up as Francis was letting her out; he smiled and offered her a hand that she took only because she had longed to know what his skin felt like. Warm and rough, as it turned out. His hands were large, his fingers strong, and they inspired a flood of other sensations all over her body. Mother Sun, being attracted to someone could be quite befuddling and downright irritating when you were trying to focus your mind on other matters. Sera wondered how her mothers were not distracted by each other all the time.
It felt good to be free of the crate. She stood and stretched as the swing was slowly lowered from the ceiling. There were circles of iron on the chains and Sera quickly learned that they were for her, to keep her attached. Francis helped her onto the wooden platform, locking the iron around her wrists. He looked miserable, and when their eyes met, he muttered, “I’m sorry.”
He stepped back and the swing began to move. The initial lurch was frightening, but then she was rising up and up, away from all the staring faces, away from the horrid crate, and she felt a whoosh of freedom, like she was back at the top of the temple. The glass ceiling came closer, but she was lifted higher until she was behind the curtain that ran along the top of the stage, and the red seats disappeared.
She looked around—perhaps there was some window or vent up here she could crawl through. But the scaffold she was attached to was sunk into flat wall on either side. There were no windows or doors or other visible means of escape. And she couldn’t get out of these irons anyway.
“She seems awfully calm up there,” Martin said.
“Guess her kind isn’t afraid of heights,” James replied.
Afraid of heights? Sera wanted to laugh. She wondered how long they would keep her up here—she certainly preferred it to the crate and all the staring.
As it turned out, they kept her there the whole afternoon. The performers repeated the same part of the story over and over, and Sera would be lowered down so that she hovered at a level with Boris’s topmost branches, then raised back up again.
It was maddeningly repetitive. Sera could not help but feel that every second that passed was a second she was not on her way to the tether, and though she knew it was not an easy task to accomplish, she still wished she could have the sense that something was happening. Surely Agnes or Leo had to come to this place sometime. Unless they had been found out, or sent away. Sera had not considered that possibility, and it stunned her into stone as she was brought back down to the stage and shuttled to her crate.
“Excellent work, everyone, excellent work today,” Martin said, clapping his hands. “It’s all coming together. I’m confident we’ll be ready to go by opening night. And in the nick of time too, it’s only days away!”
The performers began putting on hats or shawls and leaving the theater in twos and threes. When only Martin and James were left, the theater doors opened and the red-haired man called Kiernan entered, followed by Leo. Sera’s heart leaped with hope, an odd reaction to seeing the person she had so recently despised. She watched them through a break between two of Boris’s saplings.