Alba was not unused to sleepless nights. In the days and months and then even years following her vision of the mountain-abandoned babes, she had never been able to relinquish her worry. Sometimes, it was fear at what had befallen the infants that sent her searching for signs; other times, it was the guilt of her own words to the boy-king that kept her tossing with grief. She stared at the pool, trying to see anything, but the water shimmered with moonlight and starlight that was no more than moonlight and starlight reflected—no sign, no vision, no augury.

“I’ll tell the priests!” The voice on the bank grew sharper. The boy-priest was lifting a bell. “I’ll ring this bell. They’ll hear it—even from here.”

How troublesome this boy had turned out to be. Despite all his loneliness and pent-up words, he’d never been helpful; he threatened to alert the priests whenever he saw her near the chamber he guarded. And if she climbed past him all the way to where the waters entered their underground course, he followed and stood complaining on the bank that she would drown. How could she think with his prattling? She would never learn what had happened to the children.

Sighing, Alba clambered out of the pool. She stood at the edge, wringing the water from her nightclothes.

The boy sat nearby, lantern beside him, studiously not looking at her, his face taut with anger and worry.

“I told you not to follow,” Alba said.

The boy shook his head but did not look up. He kept his gaze pinned to some pale, flat thing he had spread across his lap. “They’d blame me,” he muttered at last. “If you drowned, it’d be me who let the apprentice sneak past the chamber in the middle of the night. Me who’d be abandoned in the wilderness for letting you die.”

“If you left me alone—” she began, but, seeing the boy still upset, she fell silent. She could hardly blame him for wishing to avoid the priests’ wrath.

“You should listen to me,” he groused. “I’m older than you.”

“You’re not!”

“I am. Look at you! You can’t be more than eleven or twelve.”

“No, I—” Alba began, but fell silent. She glanced at her drenched shift—it was the same one she’d worn since the day the priests had brought her here. Its fit had not changed. She’d not needed longer sleeves or a new hem or any new material added at all. She’d been nearly ten then. Had she grown or changed at all since that time?

And the boy-priest… He was still a boy, but—she peered closer—perhaps not so young now. He’d definitely grown. He was lanky, all angles, with none of the softness she’d seen when she’d first met him. His nose had grown even longer, more slender and delicate, and he had a sharp chin to match. She ran her hand over her own face, feeling her cheeks. She was not sure she’d grown even a fingertip since the days when her father had called her a pip. She recalled the oracle’s odd comments about being hidden from the sun and years and hours and grains of sand: Was this what awaited her? Watching the people around her age while she was left a child?