The Cerulean

by Amy Ewing

  Dedication

  For Molly and Kristen,

  my McLellan cousins and sisters in spirit

  Family Trees

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Family Trees

  Part One: The City Above the Sky

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two: Old Port City, Kaolin

  Chapter 7: Leo

  Chapter 8: Agnes

  Chapter 9: Leo

  Chapter 10: Agnes

  Chapter 11: Leo

  Part Three: The Knottle Plains and Old Port City, Kaolin

  Chapter 12: Sera

  Chapter 13: Agnes

  Chapter 14: Leo

  Chapter 15: Agnes

  Chapter 16: Sera

  Chapter 17: Agnes

  Chapter 18: Leo

  Chapter 19: Agnes

  Chapter 20: Sera

  Chapter 21: Agnes

  Chapter 22: Leo

  Part Four: The City Above the Sky

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part Five: Old Port City, Kaolin

  Chapter 29: Agnes

  Chapter 30: Sera

  Chapter 31: Leo

  Chapter 32: Agnes

  Chapter 33: Leo

  Chapter 34: Sera

  Chapter 35: Agnes

  Chapter 36: Sera

  Part Six: The City Above the Sky and Old Port City, Kaolin

  Chapter 37: Leela

  Chapter 38: Agnes

  Chapter 39: Leo

  Chapter 40: Agnes

  Chapter 41: Sera

  Chapter 42: Leo

  Chapter 43: Leela

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Amy Ewing

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  The City Above the Sky

  1

  WE ARE THE CERULEAN. OUR BLOOD IS MAGIC.

  Sera’s mothers had told her this since the day she was born, before she could speak or think or understand what it meant. Every Cerulean child knew there was magic in their blood; it had healing powers, for one, and it could form the most intimate connection of the blood bond.

  None of that magic was helping Sera today, though.

  The cloudspinners’ grove was cold, the only place in the City Above the Sky that wasn’t perfectly temperate. Grass crunched under her bare feet as she reached to grab a fistful of clouds from where they clung, delicate as a spider’s web, to the black leaves of the nebula tree. The thin strands were slippery and floated up to a higher leaf, out of Sera’s reach.

  “Drat,” she cursed, and a couple of girls closest to her gasped. Koreen shot her a discerning look, then tossed her bright blue hair over one shoulder, spinning her cloud into the most delicate thread, as if to show Sera how it was really done. Sera looked down at her own cloudspun dress, the one her green mother had made for her, and knew she would never be able to spin enough clouds to make one herself.

  “Don’t try to catch them,” Leela said, getting up from her wheel, where she already had a thick spool of spun thread ready to be woven into fabric. “Let them come to you.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Sera said. “We’ve been working in the grove for three weeks, and I’m no better at cloudspinning now than I was then.”

  “We’ll be moving on to the stargem mines soon,” Leela said. “Perhaps you’ll find your calling there.”

  Leela was Sera’s best friend. Her only friend, really. She didn’t seem to mind Sera’s outbursts or endless questions or the way Sera liked to laugh so big and loud she could scare the birds in the Aviary.

  She was looking so hopeful now that Sera couldn’t bring herself to say that she didn’t think she was meant to hunt for precious jewels in the mines either. She wasn’t sure what her purpose in the City was supposed to be. And she was turning eighteen soon, an adult. She feared the High Priestess might simply assign her to the temple to be a novice because she wouldn’t know what else to do with her, and Sera couldn’t think of anything she’d rather do less. She loved Mother Sun, of course, but she didn’t see the need to sing songs about her and clean the temple all day just to prove that.

  But it had been a year since her lessons with her green mother had ended and she and the other young Cerulean had begun learning the various trades of the City Above the Sky. She knew her green mother had been hoping she’d take to cloudspinning—it had been her occupation before Sera was born, and she had spun all of Sera’s dresses. Her orange mother would love if she became a novice, but Sera had a suspicion that she knew better than to hope for that, based on Sera’s consistent tardiness to evening prayers. Her purple mother played the most beautiful music on the miniature harp—she was always asked to play at festivals and celebrations—but Sera had no musical talent whatsoever, and her purple mother had understood this early on and never pressed her. She was too boisterous for the Aviary; she got bored and distracted while overseeing the seresheep in the Meadow; she was too impatient to tend to the bees in the Apiary.

  “Perhaps Sera will be the first Cerulean with no true calling at all,” Koreen said in a tone that was at once honey-sweet and laced with tartness.

  Treena and Daina exchanged a glance. Daina had already found her calling, to help care for the orchards, and had received a blessing from the High Priestess. She would begin her work there soon. Sera was fairly certain Treena would be asking for a blessing to work with the midwives any day now.

  “Of course she will find a calling,” Leela said brusquely.

  “She hasn’t yet,” Daina pointed out.

  “Neither have I,” Leela shot back.

  “Yes but—”

  “I would like to tend to the tether,” Sera said. She didn’t know where the words came from, but once they were out, she knew they were true. The other girls stared at her as though she had just sprouted an extra head.

  “The tether?” Elorin gasped.

  “No one tends to the tether,” Koreen scoffed. “It hasn’t needed tending in years and years. That was the whole point of attaching our City to that planet down there in the first place.”

  The City Above the Sky wasn’t like the many planets of the universe—it was not a planet at all. It wasn’t round like a ball, but flat, a floating oval disk with a temple in its center and two sprawling gardens at either end. A fine membrane of magic protected its outer rim and encased it like an egg, securing its edges so no mindless Cerulean would wander off it and fall into space. Since it had no rain, or snow, or any discernible weather, the City must attach itself to a planet by means of a tether, a tangible, finely wrought chain of magic in links of gold and silver and blue, invisible to the human eye, but perfectly visible to every Cerulean. This tether gave the City life—it drew nutrients up from the planet, minerals and molecules of all kinds, the way grass draws water up from soil. It kept the Great Estuary full and the orchards watered. It kept the air pure and the animals healthy.

  Sera’s green mother had told her of how dangerous the journey to this planet had been, nearly nine hundred years ago, after the Great Sadness had happened and Cerulean life had changed irrevocably. It had taken so long to find the green-blue-brown orb below, the Estuary had nearly dried up and the moonflower fields had withered and blown away and the seresheep had begun to die.

  “How can we be sure the tether is still healthy?” Sera said to Koreen. “My green mother told me that there used to be Cerulean who would loo
k after it and warn the High Priestess when it was time for the City to move again. Our City used to move all the time, didn’t it? And now we’ve been stuck here for almost a millennium.”

  “Because Mother Sun gave us a great gift,” Elorin said piously. Elorin would definitely end up as a novice. “This planet has so many resources to share, we need not move at all.”

  “But we’re meant to move, aren’t we?” Sera said. “In all the oldest stories, the Cerulean would move from planet to planet, sometimes even twice in one year!”

  “I don’t know what your green mother has been teaching you,” Koreen said. “But mine has never said anything about any Cerulean tending to the tether.”

  All green mothers were educators, imparting to their daughters the history and stories of the Cerulean people, passed down from generation to generation. The Cerulean had no books or written language, just the symbols on the temple doors, the language of Mother Sun that only the High Priestess could read.

  “Maybe that’s because you never asked,” Sera muttered.

  “Not to mention the fact that we are safe here,” Koreen continued. “What if we go searching for another planet and can’t find one? What if we move and there is another Great Sadness? Is that what you want, Sera?”

  She felt stung. “Of course not.”

  The Great Sadness had happened on the last planet the City had been attached to. It was the single worst tragedy in Cerulean history—two hundred Cerulean had been murdered by the humans who lived on the planet, and the City had been forced to move before its time.

  Sera would never want that to happen again. She loved her City, she truly did. She just felt a bit . . . bored sometimes. She had become so familiar with the planet beneath them, the shapes of its two countries, Kaolin and Pelago, etched into her brain. She could probably draw them in her sleep—Kaolin was a hulking swath of land shaped like a lopsided star, Pelago a myriad of islands. Besides, she had already gleaned every scrap of information about them that she could from her green mother, who could only tell her what her green mother had taught her, and so on and so on. Sera always wondered what stories might have been lost or changed over the generations. For now, she felt there was nothing left to learn. As long as they were attached to this planet, the tether was the only mystery that remained to her. She could see it from the edges of the City, the fine bluish-silvery-gold line cutting through the darkness of space. She wondered what it looked like where it stuck into the underside of the City, if it attached like a spiderweb, or simply thrust out proudly from 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 tonight—now that Leela had mentioned squash blossoms, Sera found herself craving them. Her orange mother loved trying her hand in the kitchen, but she always overcooked everything, and her purple mother would joke that she should content herself with making only salads.

  Suddenly, from deep within the City, the clear, rich boom of the temple bells rang out. All the girls in the grove stopped what they were doing, every face turned toward the sound. It was not time for evening prayers. So why would the bells be ringing?

  “Perhaps they are announcing the wedding season today!” Daina exclaimed.

  There was a rustling sound and Baarha, one of the adult cloudspinners, appeared in the clearing, flushed and out of breath. “Come, girls, come! Leave the spinning wheels; we must get to the temple.”

  “What’s happening?” Leela asked.

  Baarha’s eyes were so wide Sera could see whites all around her brilliant blue irises, and they sparkled with fear. “Mother Sun has spoken,” she said. “A choosing ceremony is about to begin. The time has come for the City to move.”

  2

  THE BELLS WERE STILL RING
ING WHEN SERA, LEELA, AND the other girls ran, panting, over Faesa’s Bridge to the island in the middle of the Great Estuary, where the temple stood.

  They joined the throng of Cerulean pouring over all three of the bridges that connected the island to the rest of the City, and uncertainty hung like a cloud over the crowds, as black as the leaves of the nebula trees. Sera looked for her mothers but saw no sign of them. Perhaps they were already inside.

  “Who do you think will be chosen to break the tether?” Koreen whispered.

  “Someone strong, I imagine,” Daina whispered back. “Maybe Freeda?”

  Freeda ran the orchards and had broad shoulders and muscled arms. But Sera did not think Mother Sun would choose a Cerulean for her physical strength alone.

  “No, someone pious,” Elorin said. “Perhaps an acolyte.”

  Sera just hoped it wouldn’t be one of her mothers who was chosen. Some traditions may have been lost or forgotten over the hundreds of years attached to this planet, but the ceremony to make the tether and break the tether was not one of them. And what the ceremony required was blood—the sacrifice of a Cerulean.

  “Why now, do you think?” Sera said. “What happened to make the City need to move after all these years?”

  “Why don’t you ask your green mother? She seems to have all the answers,” Koreen said.

  Sera pressed her lips together. The fact was, her green mother’s answers to all of Sera’s most important questions were merely guesses. No one remembered if the Cerulean had actually tended to the tether in the past. No one remembered the name of the planet they had left, or how choosing ceremonies had come about; and no one could satisfactorily explain why Cerulean could not visit the planets anymore when it had been so long since the Great Sadness, and this planet was not the same as that one.

  Her green mother had taught her as much as she could about Kaolin and Pelago. Sera learned that parents in those countries consisted of one male and one female, and they could have as many children as they wished. Sera didn’t like the sound of that, to be honest—she enjoyed being her mothers’ only child. Her purple mother would be able to have another daughter only after Sera had left their dwelling to live on her own, and only when a new birthing season was announced. But there were no birthing seasons in Kaolin or Pelago. They could have children any time, in any year. Cerulean birthing seasons lasted anywhere from five to fifteen years—the season Sera had been born in lasted eight. Once the season was over, no children would be born until the next birthing season began, years and years later. Population had to be carefully controlled in the City Above the Sky. It had been eighteen years since the last birthing season.