The Shadow Behind the Stars (18 page)

We knew that she was happy. It should have been enough to send us back to our island. We should have left her there to her happiness, and we should never have bothered her again.

It was what the thread wanted of us.

When we worked, it tingled against our palms. It was growing impatient, the darkness that we served. We had left
shelves of threads to grow lonely on our island; we had thrown ourselves into the path of this girl, when we were not the type who walked mortal paths. It had been a pulling sort of path, so it had made some sense for us to watch it for a time. But now things were settling and Aglaia's steps were slowing. There was nothing for us here anymore.

On windy nights, when we sat before our window and listened to the prayers sweeping through, we felt our magic, like a current, tugging us back to the sea. Especially in those dense summer days, the thought of our cool sea breeze prickled beneath my skin. When I closed my eyes, I could feel it dusting my cheeks with salt, whipping my hair to life, filling me with the deep, unending power of rolling waves. It missed me, and I missed it as a lonely man misses the touch of a hand on his. Remembering was loss; it was bitter pain.

Ah, but that was why we could not leave. Aglaia had come to her destiny; she had avenged her village and she was to lead her people. They would follow her. The men who had followed Endymion would follow her for his sake; and they would not betray her, for Aglaia and Endymion were more than mortal to these people. They were heroes; they charted their course through the stars.

But though Aglaia's steps were slowing, though she was settling, we could not quite believe her struggles were at an end. She was still beautiful. She still saw her world with bright, clear eyes.

And she was happy. Where was the pain?

We told ourselves it would only be until the baby was born. Six more months, and some weeks. We'd wait through the autumn and the rainy winter; when spring came, Aglaia would have the child, and we would leave.

We paid Hesper for our room, so we couldn't waver anymore. She counted the coins and wriggled her nose at them. “This isn't a pregnancy,” she said, squinting at us. “This is a half year only.”

Xinot shrugged; Serena smiled. I looked away from her, out the window.

Hesper counted the coins again. “Is it not his?” she said excitedly. “Is there some other lover, someone she deserves, who'll come and marry her soon enough?”

Serena said gently, “You know we can't tell you that.”

“Can't?” said Hesper. “Or won't?”

Serena only shook her head.

“Ah, well. Life's more fun that way.” Now that Endymion was dead, now that Aglaia was happy, even Hesper thought our world a fairer place.

It was a long winter, or so it seemed to us. We worked more than we had in many ages, to keep from thinking, to keep from screaming great earth-shattering screams at our confinement.

We took shifts at the window in turn, depending on whose moon it was. There was so little space to lean out and breathe the darkness, and we each wanted it all to ourselves. So we split it into thirds: my turn was from the new moon until it
was two-thirds full; Serena's went through the full moon until it was one-third waned; and Xinot came back to the empty sky again. It was difficult, those other two-thirds of the month, not to see the stars, only to hear the prayers that managed to sneak in on a draft. But the joy of having the sky to myself for the other third nearly made up for it. To see my moon, glittering and fresh, soft with her potential—it reminded me of who I was, of what I loved.

We also got into the habit, as the months drew on, of tossing Xinot's fish bones when we grew especially bored.

We'd sit in a circle near the fire, as we had when we'd tossed the bones for Aglaia. It didn't matter the time of day: a pause in our work, an empty moment in the middle of the night, after a meal. One of us would move to the floor, and the others would follow, and Xinot would reach into her pocket for the clattering things.

She'd toss them, and we'd lean over to watch as they scattered. We'd wait. The darkness always came; it rushed through us, and we knew the words we spoke were true fortunes.

Snow of ash.

Earth of wind.

Silent screams and a shrieking silence.

They weren't anything we could understand—not even us, not even Xinot, with her whirling eyes, her knowing fingers.

The tangling comes undone,
one of us would say. Or else,
It is an end. The world stops spinning. The stars go out.

And then, always together, with one voice,
We will be to blame.

You may wonder why we kept tossing the things, when
they gave us such a prophecy. We drew no joy from it. We shivered with the horror, and the guilt at this unknown blame pinched us with cold fingers.

Part of it was the truth of it—we couldn't deny the power in those bones. And part was that there was nothing else we could do. Even as we knew that every prophecy would be the same, each time we tossed them we couldn't help hoping that the bones would tell us something new about Aglaia, some reason to believe that her
pain
was gone for good.

That spring, as Aglaia's belly grew round, full as Serena's moon, we tossed the bones every day, and then twice a day, though nothing changed. We did not speak to one another anymore; the tune we hummed as we worked was thin and sharp. We stood by our window, watching Aglaia's city waking up to the year, stirring with happy anticipation of her baby. We were not of them. We never are, of course, but that spring we felt as far away as if we'd never left our island, as if a breaking sea and hours of empty land separated us from the crowd, and not only some slim blue curtains and a row of wooden shutters.

Hesper had been swept up in it as much as anyone. She smiled as she came to bring us food or take our dishes. She even whistled, though she couldn't get much sound through her wrinkled lips. “Won't be long now!” she said, winking at us. “Not by the measure of your coin!” She still held out hope that some long-lost beau was about to come riding into the city any day, to claim Aglaia as his own and take her away with him.

Even Serena had stopped chatting much with our innkeeper. She smiled back, but weakly, and once Hesper had gone we returned to peering out the window or working at our thread or reading our bones for the fourth, the fifth time that day. Or Xinot watched the fire dance. Or Serena knit away at some useless project, with colorful yarn she'd bought from Hesper. Or I closed my eyes and listened.

I didn't tell my sisters, but I'd begun to read Aglaia's thread in the dark space behind my eyelids. Not her future; only to find out what she was doing right at this moment, whether she was well. I'd shut my eyes and reach for it, the bright swirl that was her. It would twist and turn, and I would see her, sitting in some city council; I would hear her, discussing nursery plans for the baby with the women of her house. She was still happy. She hadn't forgotten her village or her family, but she looked to the future. She would live her life for this child.

One night, after winter had gone for good, when the wheat was tall and the narcissus were flowering and beckoning the city's young and pretty out beyond its walls, Aglaia left Endymion's house to go out into the fields.

I was spinning, and I almost didn't notice that she'd gone. But I'd gotten into the habit of checking on her, even while I was busy with something else, and when there was a pause in our humming, when I was reaching for the next strand, as I blinked, I saw her slipping out a gate to the west. I smelled the wind along her hair, and I tasted the tears along her cheeks.

I finished the thread I'd started, but when Serena had measured it, when Xinot had
sliced
, I pulled the beginning of the next one out of my sisters' hands and tucked it into my basket along with my spindle.

“What is it?” Serena asked.

I shook my head at her. “Nothing to worry about. I'm going out.”

“Out?” she said.

“Yes.”

I stood from my place by the window. The moon had only just begun to wax; it was an icing of white on an invisible cake.

“You might be seen,” said Serena.

“No one will see me,” I said. I took my cloak from where it draped along our bed. “There's something I need to do.”

“Alone?” said Serena.

“Yes,” I said.

“Chloe,” Xinot said. I turned to her, tying the cloak around my neck. “You can tell us. We aren't going to stop you.”

“No?” I considered her.

“You may be the youngest,” she said, “but if you say that you need to go, then we will let you go.”

“Of course we will let you go,” said Serena. “Chloe, what is it?”

I said, “Aglaia has left the city. I don't know if there will be another chance to see her, and I need to tell her something. One more time, I need to talk to her.”

I tugged my hood up; I pulled my cloak snug around me. I'd forgotten
that I liked this; I liked the mysteriousness of it, the shadows it threw upon my face.

Serena touched my shoulder; she had come over next to me. When I looked at her, she handed me a soft, squishy thing. It was a hat, small as a cat's head. “For the baby,” my sister said. “Will you give it to her?”

I nodded.

“You could tell her we've tossed the bones,” said Xinot.

I had to laugh. “
A sharpened wine
,” I said. “
A watery knife
. It will do her good to hear our discoveries.”

Xinot's small grin showed one jagged tooth. “Go safe, Chloe.”

I pulled Serena's gift beneath my cloak. I nodded once again, and left.

I found her at the top of a hill, standing before the empty stretch of land where they had burned Endymion last summer. The farmer had not sown his wheat here. All around us, grains bobbed, silver in the faint moonlight. Here the earth was black and bare. I thought there was maybe still a whiff of ash in the dust.