The Shadow Behind the Stars Read online

  The night after Aglaia told me of her prophecy, I stood out with my sisters at the edge of our shore. I watched Serena’s moon gleam; I listened to our waves crash. I tried to understand how I could have let myself become so involved with this girl.

  I had felt our magic gathering around her, and I had heard her story, the powerful tragedy of her path. I had grappled with it as we worked—the thought that Aglaia’s horror had been shaped at my spindle. The thread had prickled against my palms, but I had managed it. I had been sure that our camaraderie, our acquaintanceship—whatever it was—held no real danger.

  But I had been wrong. I knew it now, because when I had heard Aglaia’s prophecy—beauty, clarity, and something so terrifying her parents had never told her what it was—I had not shrugged it off. I had not reasoned that the oracle was surely false. I had not reminded myself that thus were the lives of mortals: unpreventable, tragic more times than not.

  I had been willing, in just that moment, to destroy the whole tangle of the web we spun, if I could set Aglaia free.

  Out there, under the shifting stars, I grappled with my anger one more time; I faced it head on, feeling its broken edges.

  Give me someone to love, a young girl’s voice begged, blowing on a breeze.

  And another, I think that he loves me. How can I be sure?

  And a third, The world is ours, it seems. Let us keep this happiness. Let us be together.

  My pleading girls, my young ones . . . there are some mortal women who pray to us, as they would to gods. We have no real influence over their lives, but they look to us for guidance anyway, and we hear their whispers on the winds that sweep all about our island. The young girls, just beginning to round themselves out, send their prayers to me. The mothers talk to Serena, and the old ones, with all their wisdom gnarling their hands and teeth, make their requests to Xinot.

  The whispers of my girls that night were so concerned with love. They had no thread to spin, no darkness to serve. When their love was lost, they could rage without fear. If the one they loved fell into some great tragedy, they could go mad if they wished, and the world would keep on turning.

  My sisters were looking out to sea, their hair drifting gently. I closed my eyes, and I listened to the thrumming underneath, the beating heart of our magic. For the first time in many days, I let it fill me up. It was a pattern old as starlight, a marvel old as time.

  My anger slipped away; the prayers whispered along my cheeks, lifting away the tears I could not help in that moment, knowing how close I had come, knowing how much I had almost betrayed. I loved my sisters; I loved my work. Aglaia was new, unknown, mortal. Next to our glory, she was nothing.

  I determined then, finally and certainly, that I would not speak to her anymore. I would let the spell take her deeper away from herself. She would disappear, and I would not think of her again.

  Oh, and it would have worked; she would have faded, and I never would have thought of her, or only at intervals, as a strange memory, a danger that had come in on the tide and had gone away again.

  A week passed. I fished from the shore. I did not go out in the boat, and when Xinot asked me why, I said I was growing bored with spending so much time with our blank-faced guest. She did not question it. She had forgotten, I think, the darkness gathering; she had forgotten the moment that first night when Serena’s spell had flickered and a piece of the truth had shown itself on the girl’s face.

  She had forgotten, or she had decided not to think of it again. I took her example, and I put the last weeks’ discoveries from my mind. Aglaia, the one I knew, the one who told me secrets and looked at me with hope, was gone. The girl on our island was only a shell, an empty flask, a rained-out cloud shredding itself to bits.

  It should have been obvious, the thing that pulled Aglaia back to us.

  Any mortal woman would have noticed long ago, but we aren’t alive enough to have felt it ourselves. And by the time I realized, Aglaia knew as well. She knew. She didn’t have a bit of sense left in her, but she would trail her fingers across her belly. She wouldn’t be looking at anything in particular, but there was purpose in her eyes again. There was sharpness, even as they went all soft around the edges.

  I saw it before my sisters did. It had been several days since I had last taken Aglaia out in the boat, and they hardly noticed her anymore, she was so hollow. She gathered her stones and sang her songs; she slept and she ate. They could ignore her as they ignored a flock of birds overhead or a creeping plant covering a rock.

  But I still watched her, now and again. I saw the hand on her belly, the focus in her gaze. When I thought, I knew that she hadn’t bled, and it had been five weeks since she arrived; the moon had waxed and waned. How utterly blind we had been.

  A baby could not be ignored; a baby could not be forgotten. I knew that I could not hide this secret from my sisters for long.

  Before I told them, though, I took Aglaia out in the boat once more and passed my hand across her face.

  She looked up at me at once. It was the old Aglaia, just as much there as she had been the first time, when she had told me that the raiders hadn’t been raiders at all.

  “Chloe,” she said, certain, “I am going to have a baby.”

  “Yes, I know.” I had to ask it. “Was there a man that you loved in your village? Were you about to be married?”

  She turned her gaze toward her belly. She shook her head. “No. There was no one.”

  “There must have been someone.”

  “No.”

  She looked back up at me, frowning. I knew. I had known before I asked, but I hadn’t wanted to believe it.

  Already, she was fading again. I hadn’t put much effort into my spell; all I had needed was the answer to that one thing.

  “Chloe,” Aglaia said urgently, reaching across and grasping my hand. As she had so many times before, she begged, “You must help me.”

  And I answered, once again, “There is nothing I can do.”

  But in between the flickerings of Serena’s spell, her eyes were wider and clearer than I had ever seen them, and her cheeks were flushed with more than the brisk sea breeze. “Chloe,” she pleaded, “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am going to be in the next several months or if I am going to be able to care for myself. And Chloe, I am going to have a baby.”

  She fought the spell as it took her. I saw the struggle there on her face, and I couldn’t look away from her. She had never battled with it like this. When it had come before, it had been between one blink and the next, and she had gone quietly into its hold. Now I could see my Aglaia still there, even as her eyes glazed, even as her breaths smoothed. She was there, just behind it, and she held on, one moment, two, with nothing but the jagged fingernails of her will.

  It took her, though, in the end. And then she was sitting all placid again, and I was alone in the boat.

  I told my sisters that evening after we’d eaten, while Aglaia was out gathering her stones. There really was no point in keeping this a secret. It was better to tell them at once, before they discovered it for themselves.

  We were in our usual places around the fire: Xinot on her stump, Serena leaning back in her chair. I hadn’t ever reclaimed my stool from Aglaia after that first night. I used it while we worked with our threads during the day, but once the sun had fallen, I left it for the girl and sat on the floor. It had suited me, anyway. Because I was below the others, they saw fewer of the glances I shot our guest, less of whatever worry I couldn’t hide away.

  I was braiding a basket that evening for gathering our vegetables. I’d snipped its long grasses from along our northern shore. They bent when I told them to bend, and when they dried, they held their form perfectly.

  The wind was rushing outside our open door. There was a green cast to the sky; it would storm before the night was through.

  My sisters stared at me, Serena’s hand going to her mouth and Xinot, for a moment, speechless in her shock.

 
“A baby?” said Serena.

  Xinot echoed her. “She’s going to have a baby?”

  “Who is the father?” said Serena.

  “Was she married?” said Xinot. “She didn’t say anything about a husband, did she?”

  “No,” said Serena, “we would have remembered that. Maybe there was a sweetheart, maybe from another village. He could still be alive.”

  “And we’ve been keeping her from him.”

  Serena stood, her eyes wide. “I have to take the spell away. We have to send her back.”

  I kept my head down; I kept on plaiting the grasses for our basket.

  “She has a life, after all,” Serena continued. “She has that whole long thread.” She looked over at its shelf; we all knew exactly where Aglaia’s thread lived. I had caught both of my sisters standing beside it in the first few weeks after the girl arrived, watching it gleam. They never touched it, though. Neither did I, nor did I search for its coil in my mind and read it there. I’d no wish to know any more of this girl’s path than I already did.

  “So she’ll raise the child,” Xinot said. “It doesn’t need us.”

  Without looking up, without pausing in my plaiting, I snapped, “Of course it doesn’t need us. It’s a human baby. It’s nothing to do with us.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Serena. “She should go back to the father, anyway. She would want that.”

  I agreed with Serena. The girl should go. Still, I couldn’t help saying, “We don’t know if the father lives. He might have died in the raid.”

  “Maybe. But what if he didn’t? What if he’s been mourning her all this time?”

  I didn’t answer. My hair was all about me, a pall keeping out the light. The first of the raindrops were beginning to splatter onto our roof; far-off thunder threatened. I could smell the grasses crinkling as I tucked them tight, one over the other over the other.

  A finger poked through into my sight. It was gnarled, crooked. It swept back a length of my hair, and one swirling eye peered in. “Chloe,” Xinot said, “you have always wanted to send her back.”

  I glared out at my sister. “I do want to send her back.” She was overlooking the obvious. They both were, but I’d have expected Xinot to catch on more quickly than this.

  She saw the certain knowledge on my face, and the eye whirled and deepened. She drew back.

  When she spoke, it was cold. “The father wasn’t a villager, Serena. He was a raider.”

  A sharp tongue of lightning licked our walls, and then I heard my kindest sister sitting abruptly in her chair. The grasses went one over the other over the other. Xinot poked at the fire with her stick; my hair shone orange at the edges, and the end of my nose began to warm.

  They didn’t ask me how I knew. They didn’t question the statement’s truth. We know truth; we know its shape and texture, and they could not help but believe me.

  The splattering turned to a steady, hard rhythm and then merged into one heavy sound. The water was starting to come in through our door, but none of us moved to shut it. After a minute, Aglaia came rushing in, her pockets full of stones, soaked through. She shut the door and greeted us as she always did, bright, vague. She didn’t seem to notice when none of us replied.

  “We’ll keep it, then,” said Serena, as Aglaia went over to her blankets to deposit her loot and then took up her position on my stool, wringing her hair. The storm had arrived in truth now: The lightning flickered across our faces, turning them eerie as a mortal’s dream. We spoke between cracks of thunder.

  “We can’t,” I said, through clenched teeth.

  I heard Serena drawing in a breath, low, harsh. She spoke in the same tone: “You saw her when she arrived, Chloe. You know what pain the girl was in. We can’t give her back to that.”

  Yes, I had seen her. Yes, I knew Aglaia’s pain, and I knew the fire in her eyes as she begged me for help.

  Snap. The grass I had been weaving was broken to bits in my hand. I said, irritated, tossing the basket from my lap, “We cannot raise a child, Serena!”

  Aglaia looked over at me. The basket had tumbled into the fire, and the glow from its sudden flame caught in her hair, swept along her cheeks. “A child?” she said. “Is someone going to have a baby?” Her voice was as light as ever, but I saw the hand that drifted to her stomach; I saw how it hovered there, protecting.

  This time, my sisters saw it too.

  “She knows,” Xinot muttered.

  “Only deep inside of her,” I said, frozen, watching the girl. “Not on the surface.”

  Xinot’s mouth narrowed. “Not yet.”

  Serena was watching Aglaia with some strange question, as though she’d never seen this girl before, as though she was noticing the color of her eyes for the first time, the shape of her arms, the curve of her neck. “Aglaia,” she said, soft as a bird’s belly, “do you like children?”

  Aglaia’s face brightened, as a small girl’s does on hearing some happy news. “I love children,” she said. She leaned over toward my sister, her hand still placed on her dress, gentle. “Do you have children?” She looked about at us all. “I think that you do, or you will. I think there are going to be children.”

  Xinot stood abruptly, and Aglaia startled, staring up at her. “Serena,” my sister said, “you cannot protect her from this.”

  Serena’s face gleamed; she rubbed a hand across it and stood as well, turning from Aglaia. “No,” she said. “I’ll have to bring her back.”

  They looked down at me, still crouched across the fire from the girl. The way she had her face turned up toward my sisters, the trust that shone through her—she wouldn’t look at us like this again.

  But of course we had to do it. I wanted to do it. We would finally be getting rid of her. I pushed myself up from the floor and shook my tunic out so it fell full about my ankles. I threw my hair back. I met my sisters’ gazes. “Yes,” I said as the thunder rumbled beneath. “It is time.”

  Six

  WE PULLED AGLAIA TO HER feet and led her over to the front of the house. We ranged ourselves before her, as we had been when she had first appeared on our island. Me, then Serena, then Xinot—all facing the girl, who stood with her back to our door as though she had entered only a few moments ago.

  Serena stepped up next to her. She held Aglaia’s hand and slid her other one behind the girl’s head, over her hair, and she whispered something in her ear. I saw Aglaia’s face as the spell came away. It wasn’t the smooth, sudden understanding in our boat. This jerked her; this made her cry out with its shock, and when Serena backed away, Aglaia was looking about at us with wild eyes.

  This was not the Aglaia that I knew.

  Oh, there were similarities. As she caught my gaze, I saw the same stubbornness and the same spark. Her posture was the same—tall, confident. But the light in her eyes, the strength of her presence were stunning. As the spellbound Aglaia was only an echo of the girl in the boat, so that girl was only an echo of this one.

  And she didn’t know me.

  That was her first question, in fact, when she was able to speak. “Who are you?”

  There was no way that we could not answer. We told her our names.

  “Those are just names,” said Aglaia. “Who are you?”

  Serena turned to Xinot; Xinot turned to me. I said, a whisper, not looking at her, “We’re the shadow behind the stars.”

  She must have followed my gaze, because she walked over to my basket of wool and my spindle. Xinot made some gesture toward her, but Aglaia didn’t try to touch either. She just looked at them, straight and still.

  She said, slow, remembering, “I came to ask you what there was to live for now.”

  Yes, we said.

  “You wouldn’t answer me.”

  No.

  She said, and it was small and breaking, “What did you do to me?”

  Serena moved over beside her. She reached out to take the girl’s hand, but then dropped hers again. “We took away your pain.”
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br />   “No.” Aglaia was shaking her head. “It never went away.”

  “It did. You smiled. You were happy.”

  “I was happy, maybe, but I was still in pain.” She looked at Serena. There was no wild panic now, only certainty. “I can feel the place where it’s been living. It never went away.”

  She looked down at my wool again. “You did this thing,” she said. “You brought the doom upon my village; you gave this pain to me.”

  “It wasn’t us,” said Serena.

  “We only listen to the thread,” said Xinot.

  I was silent. Of course the girl was right.

  Aglaia turned; she crossed in front of us and went up close to Xinot. “You cut their threads. My mother. My father. Everyone.”

  She went up close to Serena. “You showed her where to cut.”

  She came up close to me, and I shuddered at the lack of recognition in her face. All those mornings out in the boat, all those words we had exchanged, and there was nothing left. Not even memory.

  Then, though, before she spoke, she blinked, and I saw the hesitation there, and I saw my Aglaia, the one who had held my hand, begging me to help her, there in her bright-blue eyes. She said softly, “You spun them such threads as would lead them to that day.”

  Xinot tried to reason with her. “It wasn’t our fault, child. We didn’t know.”

  “You knew,” said Aglaia, and her voice was hard again. She turned to our eldest sister and pointed a finger, sure and strong. “You knew. Are you going to tell me that when you spin and measure and cut, you’ve no idea what you are doing? Are you going to tell me that you cannot hear the threads singing, telling you their tales? I hear them. I’ve spent so long in your hovel, and so empty, that their songs have crept in under my skin.” She stopped; she closed her eyes. “I can hear them now, at the edges of my mind, murmuring to me. Are you going to tell me, sisters, that you hear less than I do?”