“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. . . .”