The Shadow Behind the Stars (22 page)

The earth settled, this time for good. The mighty clouds rolled themselves away, and the fires in the sky winked out.

In the city, the nightmare was only beginning; dust drifted from the piles of rubble, and injured children wailed. I went over to the bed, and Hesper let me lift the boy into my arms. He laid his head on my shoulder, drifting into a sleep. Our innkeeper said tiredly, “You cannot play with the world in this way.”

“First you accuse us of not having any power,” I said, with almost no waver at all. “And then when we show our teeth, you tell us we must cover them up again.”

“You are right,” she said. “And I was wrong.”

“No,” said Xinot. She was pulling herself to her feet, hobbling over next to me and Tad. “You were right before, old one. We haven't real power, none that we can use.”

Hesper laughed shortly. She gestured at Tad. “What do you call this?”

“An anomaly,” Xinot said. “A once-in-a-universe thing.”

There were shouts now out in the street; the soldiers who had been waiting for Aglaia had picked themselves up and begun to wonder about her, how she and her baby had come through the storm.

“We must go,” Xinot said to Serena and me, “and at once.”

Hesper shook her head. “There will be chaos. Not like
that
.” She nodded toward the window, where the sky was now warm and purple; we could hear evening birds beginning to sing. “But still, chaos of a sort, when they find that she has died, when their new prince goes missing.”

We weren't listening to her. I handed the child to Serena in order to pack our things away. My sisters were donning their cloaks; I slung our bags around my shoulders, and Xinot
grabbed her cane. We had to keep our side of the bargain, or the end would still come.

We were at the door when Hesper stepped in front of us. “Her soldiers will never let you go,” she said. “Even if you manage to leave the inn, they will be searching for you all through the streets.”

“We'll risk it,” said Xinot.

“If they catch you, if you can't get the boy out of the city—”

“We will,” I said.

Hesper shook her head. “You think it will be so simple. You think you can just walk away and everything will be fine.”

Serena said, “No one notices us. No one noticed us the whole way here. Please, you must let us—”

“You think it will be easy to keep that boy away from life? Did you not see the fire of his new thread? Did you not hear the tales of his mother, of his father? Yet you think to keep their son shut away, to cage him as a dangerous bird. And you think it will be easy, and you think he will not hate you for it, in the end.”

Xinot said in an undertone, “What else are we to do?”

Hesper was silent for a moment. There was a knocking now at the front door of the inn; they would be forcing it open next. “I wish,” she said.

“What?” said Xinot.

“That you were different than you are.”

They were yelling for her—for our girl. They didn't know yet. They would soon. Hesper flicked her filmy eyes toward the noise.

“Please,” Serena said again.

Our innkeeper hesitated, and then she sighed. “Very well,” she said. She reached behind to open the door for us. “I'll take you down through the kitchen. My lad knows all the secret ways. He'll bring you out of the city.”

Xinot peered at her. “Will they blame you for it?”

Hesper shrugged. “Probably.” She tugged the door open as the knocking turned into banging, and then crashing. She looked over her shoulder at us, as she had the first time we had met her, with that small smile, that dry voice. “But what else am I to do?”

She led us through the doorway, and my sisters slipped after her.

I paused, the last across the threshold. I turned back toward Aglaia; she lay so still, her face so calm. I hesitated, then ran quickly to her side. She smiled sweetly, as she had used to do out on our island. I passed my hand across her face, once, twice.

Of course she did not open her eyes.

So I just stood and looked at her this one last time, my friend. I wanted to remember every detail of her face. I wanted to remember how she had laughed and how her eyes had flashed and the way her voice had sounded, saying my name.

This was not her anymore; I knew that. But as long as I did not leave her, I could pretend that there was still hope. I could pretend that she would sit up and smile truly, remembering what I had done.

She had died for him, and he was alive. He was still alive.

I laid my hand on her beautiful hair, and I made her a promise.

Then somehow I managed to pull together enough of my shattered, breaking pieces to turn and leave her there alone. I didn't look back again as I followed my sisters from the room.

Hesper's kitchen lad looked at us askance when she told him to take us from the city, but he didn't argue with her. I don't suppose you would argue much with Hesper, if you were her kitchen lad. At least if the soldiers asked him if he'd seen an infant boy kidnapped, he would be able to say no, and truthfully.

He led us out the back door of the inn and through a maze of alleyways. Even in the darkest corners of this city, people were gathering, pointing up into the sky and telling one another what they had seen. Midwives were going around with bandages, and strong men were sifting through the rubble. They took no notice of us; compared to what had just happened, we were nothing to stare at.

When we reached the eastern wall, just after twilight, the lad showed us the entrance to a clever tunnel, hidden behind a broken wagon. “It's a short walk,” he said, shifting a large wheel out of the way. “Just under the city wall. When you reach the end, there's a small wooden door, about the height of the boy. Wait before you open it; listen for voices, footsteps, those sorts of things. There aren't any usually, not after the sun has set. Once you're through, close the door tight and get the city behind you as quickly as you can.”

Thank you,
we said.

The boy blinked, then nodded warily. He gestured to Serena. “You first, with the child.”

On her way past the lad, she stopped and said, “If we've a chance, we will repay you.”

He swallowed. “There's no need.”

We went into the dark, the four of us, and out the small door at the other end, and soon we had left Endymion's city far behind us.

We did not stop that night. We went south and east along the road we had taken as we'd followed Aglaia. Serena held Tad tight. Xinot fled with her awkward step, forcing herself fast and faster. I carried our threads, our basket, and my spindle.

As we hurried, I thought of the people we were leaving behind, not only of Hesper and the boy who had helped us, but also of the thousand hopes that would fracture because of this night. What would they do without their heroes to guide them? Endymion was dead; Aglaia was dead; their new prince, their Taddeo, was taken by the sisters of darkness, and they would never see him again.

It was a harsh fate, for a people to be leaderless. They might be torn apart by armies that Endymion's strength had kept away. They might starve without a just hand to distribute bread and dates.

We ran from them; we did not look back. But I wondered, and I hoped their threads were kinder than I feared.

Very late that night, or early the next morning, we reached the crossroads to Aglaia's old village, and the oracle was waiting.
We saw her eyes first, glittering in the dark. There was no moon that night; we would not have seen it if there had been, so many clouds had gathered as the sun fell.

We stopped several feet before the woman; she stood in the center of the road, and she held her arms straight at her sides, her head tall.

Serena had just passed me the child to rest her arms, and I shifted the lad more securely in my hold, stepping out in front of my sisters.

“Let us pass,” I said.

The oracle wore the same dress she had when I'd visited her—it swept, long and black, merging with the night as it had with her cave's dusk. She seemed a certain thing, a thing that would not move for horse or thunder. I shuddered, seeing her. She looked as I would have, standing out on our rocks. She loved what I had loved, and I shuddered because it thrilled me still to see her with the darkness billowing around her. It thrilled, and it twisted, sharp.

She said, low, as if she could read my mind, “Mistress, what have you done?”

I turned my face from her. I said, “We did what we must.”

The oracle said, “Our power is roiling with it—betrayal. Mistress, if I had known, I would not have given you that word. If I had known, I would have held you in my cave, though you could have killed me with a touch.”

I gritted my teeth against it, her purity, her absolute devotion.

“Mistress,” she said, “I thought that you were mine. I thought
your power and the power that I serve were the same.”

There was a pause. I did not look, so I did not know if she was done.

At my back, Serena murmured, “Chloe, what is it?”

Xinot said, “We must keep going. Send her away.”

I said, again, and I mustered all the authority I could find; I let my voice ring dark and deep,
Let us pass.

The oracle did not move, but she held her palms out to the sides and said, “There is room enough for all of us.”

“Come on,” I muttered to my sisters.

We approached the oracle, and she stood tall, watching us. There was something I did not like in her face, some clever, knowing thing. I held Tad close, and as we moved to walk around her, I turned my face away again so as not to see her anger or the darkness or that knowing thing. So I did not see her reaching for the sheath at her back; I did not see her spinning toward us, silent, or the blade flashing dull gray in the night. I only heard a slight hiss as it came free, and a thump on the road behind me, and a sharp, surprised breath.

When I looked, the oracle's arm was raised high, pointing a knife as long and crooked as our memory toward the sky. She could not move it up or down, forward or back; her wrist was clamped tight in Xinot's hand, and my eldest sister stood, firm and gnarled as an ancient tree, staring her down.

Xinot said, “You will not do that.”

The oracle was gasping, trying to wring her arm free. “I must set it right,” she said, in between breaths. “I must set it right, or everything will fall.”

Xinot said, “We
have made our deal. It has nothing to do with you.”

The oracle stopped writhing to glare at my sister. “Do you think I have not felt it?”

“It has not happened yet.”

“It will.” There was a pleading in her voice now. “I have felt it, old one, as well as you have with your bones. The weaving will come unwound; the sun will sink into the sea.”

“No,” I said. I was shaking my head. She was wrong. It had been close, but she was wrong. “We stopped that.”

She turned her eyes toward me, and they were black wells in the gray of her face. “You stopped nothing. The prophecy lives. Something terrible is coming, and you will be to blame.” I saw her gaze shift to the boy in my arms. “You must end it before it has begun.”

Serena had frozen a few feet back on the road when the oracle drew her knife. Now she came up closer to the woman and said, “If you think we will let you kill a helpless child, you are mistaken.”

The oracle said, with anger, with a passion that spat and clawed, “He is only one mortal. Have you forgotten who you are? Have you forgotten your own glory, the scent of your own power, the whisper of its dark tongue against your skin? You have known it a million, a billion more years than I have. I am only a speck in your shadow, and still I would do anything to keep it safe. Still I would die for it—I would kill a thousand such boys for it.”

I was shuddering again; I did not want the oracle to know
it. I did not want her to know how it felt to look into her face, to see her rage, her surety, and to think that it didn't belong to another creature, but another time. “Let's go,” I said to my sisters. “There is no way to make her understand.”