The Shadow Behind the Stars Page 4

  One night, about a week after she’d arrived, I watched from an opposite corner of our house as Aglaia was drifting off to sleep.

  We do not sleep, so we do not dream, but we have heard of the things that you mortals dream. Illusions, wrapped in longings and fears—your dreamland is a wide, dark everywhere. You do not know the things we know or taste magic on the wind. You dream, though, that you are all-powerful; that you fly; that your lives are as important as the gods’.

  Mortal dreams lie on the surface, but they tell deeper truths. As Aglaia breathed slow and slower, I watched the empty blankness that smoothed her face melt away. I saw the dreams begin to flicker across her eyes, down to twitch her mouth. She smiled, not with the perfect sweet smile she had in the daylight. She smiled small and knowingly. She frowned, as though she was thinking and as though the thinking caused her worry. She remembered.

  The thoughts drained from her face, and her eyebrows drew up, her mouth opened. She did not cry out or move; the memories froze her. She wept as she dreamed; one silent, glistening tear slipped across her nose.

  She knew. Even if she did not know her own name during the day, when she dreamed, she somehow knew again the horrors hidden away.

  Serena was there, a shadow between me and the girl. I looked up, and she was frowning. “You mustn’t watch her so, Chloe,” she said. “A human’s dreams are private. We’ve no right to see the things she dreams.”

  “You are right, sister,” I said at once. I held out a hand, and she helped me to my feet. “We should not pry into the girl’s mind. We should leave her alone.”

  I followed her out to the wind, and I let it tease my hair, but I did not hear the prayers it delivered; I did not feel our darkness flowing beneath my skin. There was another sound itching: it was Aglaia’s soft singing, echoing here and there through my mind. I breathed in deep; my hair twisted back and my dress blew forward. But all that night I could not relax; I could not lose myself as I was used to do.

  The next day, when I took Aglaia out in our skiff, I did not even try to tie her wrists. It was a brilliant blue-and-green morning; it seemed the very fish were dancing and the birds were singing paeans in the heavens. Aglaia was humming again. I sat silently, scowling.

  I could hear now, even better than before, the anguished slant of her melody. It was a gentle tune, on the surface. It trilled and it soothed as did the soft-breaking sea. And she was so contented, humming it. Her hands were folded loosely, and even her hair fell gracefully down her arms and back.

  But it grated against my teeth: the undercurrent, the hidden lining that glimmered if you twisted her song in just the right direction, so the light caught the thing that almost wasn’t there. It was an aspen on a still day. All green, all calm—then a sudden breeze blew, and the leaves flipped, just once and then back again, but your breath had already caught at the sharp flash of silver.

  With a sudden sweep of my hand near her face, I woke her. The song stopped; I could breathe.

  For a few moments, we sat in silence. I had poured more strength into this untangling spell than the first one. She would remain with me for some minutes, at least. I closed my eyes, reveling in the quiet, but then I squinted them open at the girl.

  She wasn’t shuddering this time. The pain was there; I could see it in the jutting of her jaw, the clenching of her hands on her knees. But she was calm, and she was giving me look for look, as if waiting for some sign from me.

  Oh, and I should have stayed silent. How many stories are there? About the cat who cannot help but taste the cream he knows is poisoned. The woman who cannot keep from opening the box, though she knows it will destroy the world.

  You would think, after all the time we have been alive, we would have gotten over it, the wish to know, the yearning for some clue to the workings of the world. We spin it. We stretch it. We stop it short at its end—the mass of pure, dark questions at the heart of everything.

  But no. The more you know, the less you understand. Questions beget questions; mysteries unfold into greater mysteries.

  And curiosity never killed any immortal cat.

  “Well?” I said, and she raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Well?” she said.

  “What is it you want? Obviously there is something.”

  She smiled, slightly. It was so different from the wide smile of the thoughtless girl that I went still as she started to speak.

  “They all thought me so beautiful, Chloe.”

  “Who did?” Beyond everyone, that is.

  “My parents, naturally. And everybody else’s parents, and all the other girls of the village, and the boys. There used to be wagers—they’d bet real money—on who was going to win my heart. Nobody asked for my opinion; I’d have told them to save their coin for a few years yet. But nobody asked.”

  She let out her breath and looked away, toward the horizon. “There were tales about me. Can you believe that? Rumors, I mean, things people would tell travelers passing through.”

  She stopped. She was so quiet, still turned away, that I began to think Serena’s spell might have taken her. I inched toward her, only a bit. I reached out a hand; I started, “Aglaia—?”

  “Hold on,” she said, almost a snarl. I saw her face then; it wasn’t a spell that had frozen her. The tears were sliding silently in tracks all down her cheeks.

  When she spoke again, there was nothing calm left in her ragged voice. “The rumors must have been interesting,” she said. “Because one day this great hero came all the way to our village, just to see me for himself.

  “And oh, we knew of him. We knew how many monsters he had killed, how the very gods relied on him to fight their battles. There were tales of him visiting the world of the dead and coming back alive, with a bag of strange coin to prove he’d been there.

  “But he seemed—to me he seemed only just another man. Handsome, yes. More in love with himself than most men. More certain that he would get his way.” She paused to rub her face against her cloak.

  I heard myself saying, “He wanted . . . what, to marry you?”

  She nodded, and she swallowed. “That’s what he said. I guess it would have been another great tale for him to win me. I didn’t accept him. He wasn’t kind. He didn’t love me or even much care what sort of person I was.”

  I murmured, almost to myself, “He would not have liked that you told him no.”

  She replied at once, not looking at me, “Yes.”

  “And he came with some men to attack your village?”

  “They weren’t dressed as soldiers. They wore black masks and rags, and their eyes were angry.”

  “But you knew it was them.”

  “Not then. I know now. I remember the color of his face, the sound of his voice. He was there. I refused him, so he destroyed me.”

  She sat there, knowing the truth of it, demanding that I know it too. I didn’t speak again. I didn’t look at her either; I turned my face to the sun and let him play with my hair. I had asked for this. I couldn’t blame the girl.

  She said, “You have to help me, Chloe.”

  “With what?” If I closed my eyes, I could pretend she wasn’t there.

  For a moment I wondered if she was going to ask me to throw her from the boat, to end her pain. If she had asked, I would have done it. Every time I learned something new about this girl, she became more and more dangerous. And anyway, I told myself, most of the time she was hardly alive. It would be like putting a wingless fly out of its misery—one small squish, and she would be gone.

  She didn’t ask it, though. Now I know better. She never would have asked for such a thing.

  She said, “You must help me find the man who did it.”

  “The one who led the others into your village and did those horrible things?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Will you help me?”

  She was looking at me so directly, and through her anger and her grief, I could see her hope, clear and bright. Mortals did not look at us like t
hat, as though we were just like them, as though we understood.

  Or, only one mortal had, and he was gone.

  “I know I haven’t given you much to go on,” Aglaia continued. “I haven’t even given you his name.”

  “That’s true,” I said, grasping at it. “I don’t see how I can help without a name.”

  “Oh!” she said, and the spell was starting to flicker now along her face. She scrunched up her eyes, concentrating: “But I do know it. . . .”

  I leaned in toward her; I couldn’t help myself. The whole sky was still; the whole sea was silent, waiting to see if she could dredge up the one word she thought might help.

  She grabbed my arm; she pulled me even closer.

  She gasped for breath, and then, her hold tightening, she had it. “Endymion,” she said, so close to me. She faded, her fingers loosening, murmuring as the spell took her, “His name was Endymion.”

  We do not usually pay much attention to the threads we have already spun. They sit glowing on their shelves until they fizzle and fade, and are no longer there. No one threatens them; they need no guards. We do not even take them down for entertainment. A life contains a thousand stories, but we know them all. And they always end the same way: snap.

  That evening, though, as Aglaia and Serena were boiling vegetable soup in our cauldron, I walked along our glittering shelves, and I looked for the one he belonged to.

  I found it easily. It was nearly singing my name as I passed, it was so beautiful. I reached for it.

  Endymion. Such a lovely name, full of promise. A name for a young man, on the brink of life. If I had come upon this youth when we had lived in the mortal world, I would have wanted him to look at me, to see my beauty and admire it.

  His thread was strong, and it shone as bright as Aglaia’s. They were well-matched for each other in that. He would have been drawn to her, not only for the rumors of her looks or for the fame he could earn by winning her. He would have felt he had been walking among shadows until he saw her face.

  Perhaps he mistook that brilliance for love. Or for destiny.

  I placed the thread back on its shelf, and I wiped my hands on my tunic. You could not tell just by looking, but there was something twisted hidden in this young man’s thread. I smelled it, a whiff of dank rot. I felt it too, prickling along my fingers.

  “Chloe?”

  Cold laced through me. It was Serena; I did not want her to see what was on my face.

  “Yes?” I said, not turning around.

  She said, “We’ve finished the soup. It’s ready to be eaten.”

  “Oh,” I said, and, steadying myself, “It smells divine.” I looked over my shoulder and smiled at her. She was stirring the pot with one hand and tucking away a strand of Aglaia’s hair with the other. She smiled back at me, my beautiful sister. There was only quiet in her eyes, only a warm contentment.

  Before I went over to join them, I turned to Endymion’s thread again, and I unfurled it from its coil. I measured its length, and I smiled. Then I tucked it away, against the wall at the back of the shelf. I piled several dimmer threads in front of it, though I was disappointed that his still managed to shine brightly through.

  I could not help it, after that. I brought Aglaia out in the boat every morning, and each time I took away my sister’s spell, watching as the girl shook away the veil, as she opened her eyes to me.

  She remembered me, every time I did it. She kept asking if I would help her, and I found it harder and harder to think of what to say.

  “He took everything from me, Chloe,” she said one morning, and there wasn’t anything hidden behind that angry voice. “All I did was tell him that I didn’t want him, and he came and took it all away.” She held my gaze, and I could not turn from her, could not stop her from speaking. Then she glanced out across the sea, and her face pulled in tight. It was a gloomy morning, and we were far enough out that there was no land to be seen, no rocky island or long pathway to shore. It was only us, in our little skiff, and the gray sky and the deep. She said, “I don’t know . . . I don’t know exactly where we are or what we are doing here. I don’t mind that, somehow. But I know you, and I think that you could help me. I think that there is a power in you, Chloe.”

  I leaned away from her; I let my hair fall forward.

  “Isn’t there?” said Aglaia.

  I shook my head, but somehow she knew that I wasn’t saying no to her, but to the whole thing: her pleas for help, her insistence that I could, her need for it.

  “Yes, there is,” she said. “I can see it in your face, even when you hide away like that. You’re looking at me out of the corners of your eyes, but it glints there, still. It’s a dark sort of thing that lives in you. I sometimes think that if you stepped out of this boat, you could walk across the waves, or you could step up into the sky.”

  I laughed, thinking of what the sun would say. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “But you could do something.”

  “No,” I insisted. “There is nothing I can do.”

  She sighed, and she wrinkled her nose, turning from me.

  After such conversations, I rowed us back to shore convinced that I would never talk to her again, though that did not last long. What did last was my certainty that I could not let my sisters see the Aglaia that I knew. Once or twice as I was spinning, I almost let it get to me. I’d think about the life that had been granted this girl, the path she’d been made to walk. We had given her that path—we and the mystery we served. We had led Aglaia to tragedy, to loss. My skin would prickle as I reached for my wool. I’d want to drop it, to stab at it with my spindle, to tear it into little bits and let it drift away across the sea.

  I’d want to punish it, the thing that had hurt Aglaia so.

  No, I told my wool as it itched against my palms. No, I am not concerned with that girl. No, I will not fail you, not today, not tomorrow. I have not the weakness of my sisters.

  I gritted my teeth, and I kept at my work.

  It soon enough seemed that the problem was solving itself. As one week drew into two, and two to three, I found that Aglaia’s moments of clarity were growing shorter, no matter how much effort I put into my spell.

  She didn’t talk as much about Endymion or the raiders; she stopped asking for my help so frequently. Instead her thoughts seemed to be focused more and more on the early days of her childhood: She spoke of her mother teaching her to bake bread, of harvesting the fields with her father, of playing games with her brother and sister.

  On one of the last days that Aglaia and I went out in the boat, she told me a story from the very beginning of her life, when her parents had taken her to visit a local oracle.

  “It was the tradition,” she said. She was murmuring that morning, drifting halfway between Serena’s spell and her waking self. She spoke almost in one sentence, long and meandering like our boat’s path through the waves. I was listening quietly, my hands laid light along the sides of the boat.

  “The oracle gives most babies in our village the same blessing,” Aglaia went on. “A long, happy life. She gave my parents that blessing, when they were born, and my brother and my sister, too.

  “Sometimes she mixes it up. She says one or two of our children will have problems to overcome, that their roads will not be all easiness and comfort. She never says, though, that they’ll not win out in the end, and those who receive this harder blessing take it as a challenge. When they find themselves in difficulty, they tell their neighbors, ‘Thus the oracle said that it would be,’ and they do not despair over their fate. They take heart in its inevitability and fight through to happier days.”

  I could see today’s clarity fading already, the light, pale as it was, diminishing in her eyes. I was struck with a sudden premonition that I would not speak to her in this meandering way again. These long mornings in the boat were drawing to a close; after this, the spell would take her.

  I had to keep her here just a few minutes longer. I had to hear the end
of this story; I had to know Aglaia’s fate—whether it was the long, happy life or the harder blessing. I reached across and took her hands, held them tight. She blinked down at them.

  “What did the oracle say about you, Aglaia?” I asked her. I didn’t think it would be anything true; such women are almost all of them faking their powers for status in the villages they serve or for a few extra coins.

  Aglaia blinked, and blinked again. “She said . . .”

  I gripped her hands harder. “What?”

  Her face snapped clear for an instant and she said, looking straight at me, “She gave me three words that she said would shape the course of my life. The first was beauty; my parents smiled at that.” I did too. Anyone with eyes could have given her that fortune. “The second was clarity, a vision of the world not skewed by any illusion. The third . . .” She trailed off again, shaking her head.

  I was frowning. Clarity? What sort of oracle gave that word to a child, and one who was destined to grow so clear-eyed as this girl, so true and purposeful? “What was it?” I said. I squeezed Aglaia’s hands. “What was the third word?”

  She kept shaking her head. “I don’t know.” Her hold was slackening. Her voice was softening. “My parents never would tell me what the third word was. They used to look at each other, though, when I asked. They looked at each other . . . I could see . . .”

  She shut her eyes. When she opened them, she would be gone.

  “Aglaia?” I leaned in close to her, murmuring the words and sending them softly to her ears so it would sound as if they came from inside her own head. “What did you see?”

  She said, only a whisper, trailing off into nothing, “When my parents looked at each other, I could see their fear.”

  Then she let go of my hands, and she opened her eyes to me. She tilted her head, blinking, smiling prettily.

  Five

  I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. Hadn’t there been enough warnings? It hadn’t only been Serena’s children—even here, even out at the edge of the world, the danger had come to find us, long before this mortal girl showed up. And oh, it hadn’t been some hero come to beg for the answer to a riddle, and it hadn’t been some god’s son completing an impossible task. The most dangerous things—do you know this yet?—the most dangerous things are small and harmless. They look at you out of their bright round eyes, and they rub your ankles with their soft round heads. The most dangerous things worm their way inside of you, until you forget what you’ve always loved, until you betray what you’ve always believed in.