the City’s belly.
Koreen smiled smugly and changed the subject. “Anyway, my orange mother told me something in confidence last night. . . .”
The other girls leaned in, eager to hear what Koreen had to say. Leela rolled her eyes and Sera suppressed a giggle.
“There will be a wedding season soon!”
There were squeals of delight and clapping of hands at this proclamation, and Sera couldn’t help joining in—she had not yet lived through a wedding season and had always wanted to see one.
“When?”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, this is so exciting!”
“The High Priestess mentioned it at her prayer group,” Koreen said, pushing her hair back again. Every Cerulean had skin as silvery as moonlight and blue hair and blue eyes that matched the color of their blood, but for some reason it all looked better on Koreen than on Sera. Sera didn’t like looking at herself in the one mirror in her house. She felt like her skin was a lie, hiding a secret even Leela didn’t know.
“I’ve been waiting for a wedding season my whole life,” Treena said. “Imagine the dresses!”
“Imagine the food,” Sera said with a grin that Treena returned.
“How many triads will be married, do you think?” Elorin asked.
“How many do you think will form in advance of the season?” Daina said with a mischievous look.
“Come now,” Leela said. “Marriage is sacred. Mother Sun would not allow a triad to marry if they were not truly in love.”
Daina shrugged but did not look convinced.
The girls chattered on about who would be marrying and which in the newly formed triads would be the purple or green or orange mother and what flowers they would use to make garlands for their hair and whether they would finally get their first taste of sweetnectar and feel its heady effects.
As the conversation wore on, Sera turned to her spinning wheel and picked up a clump of unusable thread. “I’m not going to tell Green Mother about this,” she said with a sigh. “She’ll only be disappointed.”
“Your green mother wants you to be happy,” Leela said. “She just has more time on her hands now that you are not pelting her with questions from morning until night.”
Sera laughed. “I was a difficult pupil, wasn’t I?”
“Your green mother is a very patient woman.”
Sera dropped the clump of cloud onto the frosty grass. The oldest stories said the nebula trees had come from one of the first planets the City Above the Sky had tethered itself to, long before Sera or her mothers or her mothers’ mothers were born, someplace cold and dark and full of mystery. That was another part of the magic of the tether—it could grow little pieces of whatever planet it was connected to in the City Above the Sky, be it a flower or a beetle or a type of stone. “Planetary gifts,” the High Priestess called them. There were fish in the Estuary whose scales could light up in all sorts of colors, with long glassy filaments that hung over their eyes—they had come from the last planet, the one that changed everything, where the Great Sadness occurred. Most Cerulean avoided these fish, but Sera thought they were lovely. She liked to sit very still with her hand under the water until they would come and nibble at her fingers.
The gifts from their current planet were rather boring—short, scrubby olive trees and soft white shells from Pelago; gray birds with bright red chests and a bronze-colored metal from Kaolin that could be dug up in the stargem mines.
Leela put a hand on her wrist, and Sera was startled out of her thoughts.
“You will find your purpose in time,” she said. “I know it. Besides, you’re good at plenty of things, not just at asking more questions in two days than Koreen asks in a year.” Sera’s lips twitched as Leela ticked things off on her fingers. “You’re the fastest runner in the City. You can eat more squash blossoms in one sitting than any twelve Cerulean combined. You climb everything with limbs and many without—I know you still sneak up to the top of the temple.”
Sera felt grateful for the millionth time that she had Leela in her life. But the truth was, the only things Sera seemed to be good at besides running and climbing were loving her mothers and being friends with Leela.
She blew on her hands to warm them, thinking she would bathe in the Estuary this evening after dinner. She hoped her green mother would be cooking