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?”