Chapter Thirteen
Sleep would not release her from her misery.
She gave up after an hour of desperately trying to control her breath.
Lunelle swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pulled on a dense pair of wool leggings and a black sweater to ward off the slight chill settling over the courts.
Before she left her room, she plucked a ripe pomegranate off the top of the fruit basket on the desk, tucking it into her cloak.
If she was going to beg a goddess for relief, she might as well bring her an offering.
She was a silent breeze as she quickly cut through the halls, searching for the door Yallara had taken them through. She pushed gently along the walls, waiting for that raised edge she knew would fall into the stairs.
It took three hallways before she finally recognized a painting of a centuries-old Plutonian queen, her gaze fixed on her shoulders as she disappeared into the wall.
It was colder than just a week ago, though Lunelle realized she wasn’t tucked into the middle of a cantering crowd. There was no body heat to buzz against her as she skipped through the near-empty catacombs beneath the city. The occasional creature skittered away from her as she approached, but it was as if she had the entire city to herself at this hour.
Her footsteps echoed against the crystalline cavern, bouncing off bones and glittering stibnite as she wandered down the same route they’d taken before. She hadn’t noticed just how high the ceilings were when she’d been consumed by the crowd, or how hollow the eye sockets of the ever-watching guardians in the walls had been.
When she began her climb to the top of the stairs beyond the city, the echo of the wind whipping outside inspired a quiet dread in her chest.
Maybe this had been a ridiculous idea.
But as she closed her eyes and was met with two floating green orbs, she was reassured that if she didn’t do something—beg someone for relief—she was going to make a mess the likes of which might never be untangled.
She was not a silly girl, she reminded herself as she stepped out onto the rocky cliffs, now desolate after teeming with so much life and so much death.
She was not in denial. She knew what was happening.
She was falling for a man who was not available to her, and she saw and felt it as clearly as a full Moon.
She’d felt it the moment they arrived, really, that he was not just another courtier to fool into believing she knew what she was doing here. He was smart, but perhaps not smart enough to realize the precarious position they were in.
Her sister did not deserve her betrayal, and neither did Arcas or Mirquios.
As she settled on the edge of the cliffs and rooted herself into the blue-gray dust, she forced herself to lean forward, for just a moment. The black sea churned below—not all that different from the one she’d grown up over in the Lunar Court—but everything felt unknown here.
She felt unknown here.
Her entire life, she’d been so certain of who she was and the role she played in her court, in her family, in her relationship with her mother, her sister, her father.
Her people.
But a single dance, a few compliments, and now she was slipping under those black waves, unable to keep her head up.
It was pathetic.
Worse than pathetic.
Lunelle lay back, letting her bones settle in the Plutonian dust like so many who came before her, staring at the sky above. The infinite swirl of stars and Moons, the winking pastels of the Rift—it all stared back.
Watching.
Judging.
She closed her eyes, if only to escape their criticisms, and perhaps to gain the courage to do as the divers had done at the festival—but there it was again.
That slip-sliding feeling at the base of her neck, the temptation to let her entire mind drain within her and tumble into another universe.
Had she not been so disturbed, she would have ignored it. But its insistence took her along—another distraction she couldn’t deny.
Lunelle fell into her soul, spinning and whirring amongst a Rift of her own doing, landing with a harsh jolt on a soft bed of moss and moonblossoms, unfurling in a delicate Spring rainstorm. She could taste the sea on the raindrops as they landed on her rose-petal lips. She sat up, pushing against the damp moss and shaking off the mist clinging to her.
“Princess,”
a velvet tone hummed.
Her eyes searched for the harmonic sound but found only a deep forest to peer into.
“Hello?”
Lunelle whispered.
“What a heavy heart,”
the voice cooed. Lunelle could feel it then, the weight of the words, coming from behind her. She spun on the moss, raising to her knees.
The goddess before her was no one she recognized, but pieces of them seemed to be acquainted.
Her hair fell in delicate pink curls, the shade of strawberries when they first popped from their leaves, unripened but full of promise. Her hazy eyes were wide set, seeing everything around them at once, the kind of eyes that had seen everything. She was long and curved, a strength running in her thighs as she gazed upon Lunelle’s hands.
She kneeled just a short distance from Lunelle, her long hair falling over bare breasts and pooling into her lap. Her arms were adorned with strange tattoos, rippling in navy ink, Plutonian runes running the length of her olive skin.
“You brought me a gift,”
she said, her voice singular but laced with the wisdom of a million women. Lunelle looked at her hands, fitted gently around the swollen red fruit she’d nabbed before leaving the palace.
“Proserpina,”
Lunelle breathed, her heart stopping as the goddess stretched her hand toward her. She reached forward, placing the offering in her iridescent palm.
“Thank you for this,”
the goddess said.
“But what did you hope to receive in exchange for it?”
Lunelle shook her head, her silver waves glistening in the misting rain.
“Nothing. I just… I thought maybe it was lonely, in the days following your celebration. That everyone moved on and thinks one night was enough.”
The slightest glint of admiration warmed Proserpina’s eyes.
“You were not one of the divers,”
she observed.
“You did not seek a blessing from me, yet you still thought of me in your hour of need.”
“Is it my hour of need?”
Lunelle asked, her hands so empty now, she was unsure what to do with them.
“You’re here, no?”
Lunelle nodded.
“I came to the cliffs to confess something, I think. To purge myself of it.”
Proserpina grinned.
“Shall I leave you to it, then? Shouting your sins to the crests of the sea?”
“I’m sure you have better things to do than to listen to pathetic whims of the heart.”
Proserpina shrugged, her eyes raking over Lunelle.
“You know, people offer the gods all sorts of strange things, but rarely gossip.”
Lunelle could not stop herself. She laughed. Because it was trite gossip in the end. People were dying, wars were starting—and here she was, seeking the ear of a goddess to tell her to get her head out of the clouds.
“I fear I’m losing myself to a man I can never claim.”
Proserpina nodded, forcing her thumbs between the skin and tissue of the pomegranate.
“A woman can never lose herself to a man, she merely loans him her splendor.”
Lunelle huffed a shallow sigh, staring at her fingertips.
“What if it’s his splendor I’m after?”
The goddess pursed her lips.
“What stops a Lunar queen from taking what’s hers?”
“He is engaged to my sister.”
Proserpina considered this.
“And you like her?”
Lunelle giggled.
“I love her very much.”
Proserpina dug a few seeds from the flesh of the pomegranate, popping them into her mouth and staining her lips a deep red.
“No man is in possession of enough splendor to come between sisters, dear girl. But you know that.”
Lunelle nodded.
“You know,”
the goddess sank back onto her heels, loosening her divine posture.
“They tell a story about me—that Pluto ripped me away from the arms of my mother, that he dragged me to the edge of the universe, that I sought Descent rather than spend eternity in his hold.”
Lunelle moved her hair from one side of her neck to the other, shaking the rain from the ends.
“Is that not so?”
“No,”
Proserpina said, a sorrow seeping into her words.
“It’s not so.”
Her eyes drifted into the deep black of the fathomless forest behind Lunelle.
“I went willingly, but my mother did not want to give me up. She did not think I was ready to be a wife, and perhaps I wasn’t. My life was not a happy affair, Princess. It was rife with suffering. I prayed to Pluto, to the God of Death himself and asked him to take me. It was the shame of getting what I wanted that allowed the rumors to spread.”
“I don’t understand?—”
“Pluto granted me exactly what I begged for, what I knew my heart craved, and I let my mother, my sisters, and the rest of the gods believe he’d done it out of selfishness to save face. But I was born yearning for death—not of my body, but his. Our Souls… they were crafted from the same speckled light, never pure enough for the day. It took centuries to admit it—eons of wasted time.”
Proserpina cast her eyes toward the forest once more, and Lunelle wondered where he was—where death lurked when no one needed his escort services.
“What about Mercury?”
Proserpina scoffed.
“Mercury did not know what he did not know. He thought he was saving me. He thought he was protecting me. But all he did was delay the inevitable.”
She offered half her pomegranate to Lunelle.
“How did you know what to ask for?”
Lunelle took a handful of seeds and let them rest on her tongue, enjoying the tart juice as it burst along her lips.
“The most important things in life you can never know for certain.”
Proserpina’s eyes wandered back from the trees to Lunelle’s face, the depth of her stare sending a shiver over Lunelle’s body.
“So there is no fighting it then? Fate?”
Proserpina’s lashes fluttered against her tan skin, an easy smile closing over her lips.
“Has it worked for you so far?”
The goddess leaned toward her, pressing her pomegranate-stained lips to Lunelle’s forehead, sending her catapulting back through herself and into the dust of the cliffs, the sea crashing below her. Her eyes shot open, and she scrambled back from the cliff’s edge, climbing to her feet as she shook the strange hypnosis she’d fallen into.
It took until she was back in the catacombs, outside of the palace passageway, to get the taste of pomegranate out of her mouth.