The Shadow Behind the Stars (11 page)

We were singing as we went. It was a journeying song, one to sing when your destination is unknown. It was jaunty, though it had a melancholy sort of twist. It weaved round the breeze and rolled with the surge. We were very soon wet.

Ours is not an easy island to reach; it took us much of the afternoon to cross the rocks, traveling at Xinot's pace. The final clouds were peeling back and the sky was showing its open face, a deep, glorious blue, by the time we'd come to the end and had climbed the tall sandy slope that hides us from the world. We shook out our hair; we wrung out our skirts. The sun would do the rest.

Xinot lifted her nose to the sparking breeze, and then she pointed into it, to the north and the west. Humans do not live on the land closest to our island. Shepherds graze their animals in the grasses there at times, but mostly it is empty, a wide stretch of rocky hills. In the direction that Xinot pointed, though, there had been several villages in our time.

Serena checked her bag of coins; I checked the ties on my packs. Xinot reached a hand into her left pocket, and something clattered there. I shot her a look. Her blades didn't sound like that.

But she was ignoring me; she sniffed again and started off ahead, leaving us hurrying to catch up.

It was like hearing a childhood tale again years after you have grown. The wind was warm, without the sting and freshness of the sea. The birds were loud, even deafening. I had forgotten how many birds there were, where there were so many leafy trees. Every sight was bright and soft. Every sound rang round and clear.

The smells, though, were the most overwhelming. Flowers—crocuses and heliotrope, lotuses and cherry blossoms—with
such sweet and tangy scents as to set my mind abuzz. Green things were everywhere, and everywhere smelling of life and rain. We could even smell the dirt, dark and bitter, healthy, full.

The first time we came upon a shepherdess, walking toward us with her flock, we drew together and pulled the hoods of our dull gray cloaks down low. We did not want to frighten this girl, and we did not want to be recognized. We didn't know how you mortals would react to our presence after so many centuries apart.

But we needn't have worried. The girl called out a cheery “Good day” as she passed by. She smiled, and there was no smidge of anxiety in it. Three cloaked women headed toward the road—that's all we were to her. We didn't dare answer her back; we only nodded, but she saw nothing strange in that, either, and she and her flock were soon far away.

We looked at one another, surprised. We had not thought it would be that easy. When we had used to walk the human paths, we were always known. You would lower your eyes, knowing what dark mystery we took with us. You would speak if we spoke to you, not otherwise.

But it happened again and again. Once we'd reached the road, we passed a farmer going to his fields, and another came by in a wagon, on his way to sell beets in a village square. They lifted their hats to us; they nodded. The one with the wagon offered Xinot a ride, and she could only blink while Serena assured him there was no need.

“Am I that ordinary, Chloe? Could you mistake me for
some weak mortal who needs a ride in a bumpy wagon?” Xinot asked when the man had gone.

I grinned at her. “Oh, grandmother, won't you take my arm? The road is rough for your old feet. Or maybe I should carry your things for you. You don't need such heavy burdens.”

I reached out a hand toward her and was startled at how quickly she twisted, dropping her cane to hold her left pocket closed with both hands.

She shot me such a glare as would have withered that poor farmer where he sat. Even I backed away a step.

“I wouldn't dare,” I said, and the teasing had gone from my voice. “You know that.”

“Yes, don't be ridiculous, Xinot,” Serena put in. “We're not going to look in your priceless pockets.”

Xinot's scowl eased, and she picked up her cane. But I noticed she kept a few paces away from me after that.

We reached the first of the villages that evening, just as the stars were peeking out their heads. We had been following the scent of Aglaia's thread, and we could tell that she had passed through this village early this morning. We were far behind her, and we were moving slower, too; Xinot may not have needed a ride, but nor did she walk as quickly as a strong young girl.

When we stopped at a house marked as an inn at the edge of town, the man sitting in a chair out in the yard gave us a room readily enough, and once he was gone I shed my packs with relief.

I squinted through the cracks of our shuttered window out over a barley field.

“They've a fire going out there,” I said. “A big one. I wonder if it's a festival day.”

Serena slid in next to me. She popped the latch and pulled the shutter wide, leaning out into the breeze. “I don't know what it is,” she said. “I'm going out to fetch some food. I'll ask the keeper what's going on.”

As Xinot settled onto our hearth to watch the dust dance, I took up Serena's place and narrowed my eyes at the fire in the field. There was a dark figure at the front; if I concentrated, I could just see it waving its little arms and moving to and fro. And there were others standing and sitting in clumps all about the field near the fire. They were watching the figure, unmoving. They were as mesmerized by it as Xinot was by the corners of our fireplace.

“Someone's telling a story,” I said when Serena came back with some bread and a slab of goat cheese.

“Yes,” she said, discarding her cloak. “It's a storyteller, someone passing through. They have a tale most nights, though usually it's just a farmer or shopkeeper doing the telling. When I asked, the innkeeper looked as though he didn't know what to make of me, and I had to say we came from far away.”

“Did you?” I said. “Did he suspect, do you think?”

“Oh, no,” said Serena. She passed me a bit of cheese and I nearly forgot what we were talking about, the smell was so sharp, the taste was so crumbly and rich. “It's just that all the villages have storytelling after the sun goes down. It's a tradition in these parts, so he thought it strange that I needed to ask.”

“
Cheese
,” I
said, then shook my head, focusing. “It's useful that they don't see us, anyway. They don't seem to have the slightest idea of what we are.”

Xinot was toasting cheese and bread, balancing them on her stick over the coals. “They've forgotten,” she said.

“Yes,” said Serena. “I didn't think they would forget so soon.”

I shook my head again, this time at them. “It isn't soon for mortals. For them, it is many spools of thread.”

We ate in silence; the taste of such food soon overcame any thoughts we'd had of speaking. I convinced Xinot to melt some cheese for me, too, and when that gooey delight oozed into my mouth, I shut my eyes and didn't feel the darkness or see Aglaia's face or smell the salty spray of my far-off sea. I only chewed, and a very human sort of happiness slid down my throat, and I let it fill me.

Our days soon took up a new rhythm. That very next morning we rose early, paid our innkeeper, and set off down the road, smelling the wind, our backs to the rising sun. We walked at Xinot's pace all through the day, stopping now and again to rest beneath a shady tree or drink from a village well.

As we had the day before, we followed the scent of Aglaia's fate, and when the sun was setting, we found an inn for the night. We could not take out our glittering wool as we traveled, so we did our work in the dark of our rented room, where there were only the shadows in the hearth and the stars through the window to see. We dared not hum any songs, but
we opened our shutters to let in the wind's whispers, and we fell softly into our art. And the next day we rose early again, paid our innkeeper, and set off down the road.

We soon understood the surprise of our first innkeeper at Serena asking about the storytelling. It was the end-of-day tradition in every town we passed—there was a traveling bard, or an ordinary villager who had learned to tell tales, in each one. Where there was a large enough inn, the townsfolk gathered in the evening to hear the stories, and where there wasn't, they came together in the village square or in a designated barn or out in a field somewhere.

It became our signal to stop for the night. When we came upon a group of you, drinking mugs of cider or mead, children falling asleep in laps, rapt faces focused on the night's teller, we would join you before we searched out food and a room. We were never turned away from a story.

Oh, we heard so many, those days that we followed Aglaia. Stories of gods and heroes, filled with forbidden love, brave acts, strange discoveries.

There were even tales of us; these mortals knew of our power and our thread. There were none, though, of the time when we had lived among you. In all these tales, we were separate, distant as the stars or thunder. We spun apart; we looked down into your lives from afar, tossing your threads over our shoulders into a heap when we were done.

There was truth in these tales. We hadn't paid attention to the human realm for ages; we couldn't. Still, the stories irritated me, for some foolish reason. I wanted to tell you about Serena's children;
when I saw a woman stroking a cat in her front yard, I wanted to stop and tell her about Monster, to set you right.

But you did not know us; you did not sense the power dripping from us, and I knew that it was better this way, in any case. We kept our hoods up; we drifted nameless through your lands.

And while it was thrilling to see your mortal world again, we all missed our rocks and our waves, and our nights at the edge of the sea. Sometimes, as the sky was beginning to lighten and we were packing away our tools for another long day, I thought of giving it up, of running back to our island, with my sisters or without them. I felt so heavy on these mornings. There was grittiness under my eyelids; my hair hung dull and limp. I rallied soon enough, as the sun murmured a greeting, as the birds started to sing. But I missed our wild home, and I knew my sisters did too.

Some nights, in fact, Xinot called an end to our work early. She rose from her chair or her seat on our bed; I heard that clattering in her pocket as she shuffled over to our door and out through the sleeping inn. Once, I started to follow her, but Serena held me back, whispering, “Let her go. She's been complaining to me of how crowded she feels here, of how there isn't any space to breathe. You know she's the least tied to the mortal realm; she needs more time with mysterious things.”

So we let her go, and while Xinot wandered alone, Serena and I sat by our window, leaning out toward the stars. We didn't talk, but we
listened to whatever echoes we could snatch of our magic; we watched for whatever tracings of our pattern might gleam.

It was only a few days into our journey when we started to hear stories of Aglaia from the people we met along the road—merchants traveling with their wares, a farmer's lass who gave us a drink of milk from her pail, some washerwomen we met as we cooled our feet in a stream. They'd seen her pass this way; even without us asking, many were eager to tell her tale.