The Shadow Behind the Stars Read online

  I didn’t say anything. Maybe they wished to forget themselves in their work, to think of anything but the way Monster’s eyes had closed and his frame had shuddered as he went. I couldn’t blame them for that. I took up my usual spot, and soon my spindle was whirring.

  Almost right away I knew that something was wrong.

  As I passed the start of our thread to Serena, I noticed the first of the signs—her fingers curled just a tad differently than usual, just a smidgen less elegantly, so that as she pulled the thread across her palm, it grated. Not as a rough spoon against a pan; not as a harsh crow call in the morning. As a grain of sand in a lump of butter, maybe, or a tiny speck in a bowl of pure cream.

  But this was already much worse than Serena’s tense silence on the mainland. This was enough to slow the thread down. I spun at my usual speed—I know no other. And Serena took the thread almost as quickly, almost as smoothly. But not quite. Instead of clarity and ease, I felt a strange tightness growing in my hands. I ignored it. I kept on with my work; I tried to slow the spindle, without any success. Serena passed the thread and marked the place for Xinot’s scissors.

  I heard the blades opening. My spinning stopped. I looked over at my sisters, jolted out of my work by a sudden dread. Xinot’s blades did not sound like that. They were not supposed to scream as they opened.

  Xinot was glowering at the thread, as though she hated it, as though she blamed it for something. Serena’s face was expressionless, as if all her joy in our work had been extinguished. She was still handing the thread to Xinot, marking it with her nails. It was wrong, the place she’d marked. I could feel the thread twisting and shivering, and I could smell it smoldering, red-hot in its wrongness.

  It was not a death. I could not think to know precisely which, but it was much too short or much too long—either way, disaster; either way, a world’s end.

  I could not move. I could only watch as this angered Xinot took the thread, as her scissors straddled the place the joyless Serena had marked. She would know better. That was surely why I was pausing so long. I was certain that my eldest sister would be able to feel the wrongness too. But there was nothing stopping her for several long heartbeats—nothing until I gave a great gasp and threw myself toward her.

  I snatched the thread away. Her scissors snapped on empty air.

  We stared at one another. Serena blinked, and a bit of light came back into her face. The fury on Xinot’s faded just a shade.

  In the calm, we knew how close we had come to something terrible. The darkness was swirling all about us; we could taste our magic, as we can on starlit nights. It was filling us up, so that our fingers buzzed with its mystery. Our eyes shone, in fear.

  The darkness does not speak to us in words. There are some human oracles who claim to hear its voice. Perhaps they do, or perhaps they interpret the sensations of the dark, translate its deeper stirrings into human speech. We need no such translation. Our magic was warning us. It was telling us that the balance of the world had nearly tipped, and that it would have been our fault.

  It was pouring horror into us. It was showing us the whole tangled web of its power, as though we did not already know its shape and complexity. It was reminding us of our purpose, and we were remembering our love of it, how unthinkable it would be to unravel one strand of its maze.

  I dropped the thread, and it coiled back onto my spindle. The darkness drifted away.

  “Chloe,” Serena said at last. I did not look at her. I was shaking. “I am sorry,” she said. “I could not help it. It was our magic that took him away.” She sounded lost, but I could not comfort her.

  I didn’t care how upset they were. Nothing excused putting at risk everything we loved. How could they? It was too precious; it was too beautiful; it was too alive.

  “Just a cat,” I said after a moment, and I could not keep my voice calm. I could not keep the tears away, and I hoped my sisters realized they were tears of rage—that I wasn’t like them, that I could never be as weak as them. “He was just a stupid cat.”

  No, I wouldn’t think of him. I wouldn’t remember his fur beneath my fingers or the sweetness of his voice.

  Xinot said, into the tight, hard silence, “We will not work today.”

  It was practical. It could have been nothing more than an assurance that we would not mess it up again. But her words had been harsher than that, with more of a snarl. She had heard our magic as clearly as I had, and she had felt it urging us to accept the rightness of our threads. Xinot was saying that at least for today she would do no such thing.

  The wisest, the darkest of my sisters, refusing to accept death. And the kindest, the most comforting of them, asking me for understanding. My horror had not left with the darkness. They were turning their backs on our magic, so I turned my back to them, and I left the house and the island to take our boat out alone as far as I could go. I did not answer when the sun spoke my name; I did not look into the waves to see what deep creatures might be somersaulting. I only rowed as hard as I could, and the tears fell hot along my cheeks, and I hated my sisters, that day, for what they had almost betrayed.

  We did no work that day, nor all that night. We picked up the threads again the next morning, and Serena’s face was calm and bright, and Xinot’s fury had melted away—but for small glowing embers still deep in her eyes, perhaps. It was not enough, anyway, to cause more problems. We spun and measured and sliced, smooth and clear and precise. We hummed some dreadful ditties, and we became ourselves and one another and the thread. I do not know what my sisters did on that day we did no work. We never spoke of it, and we did not ever speak of Monster again.

  Eight

  WE CLIMBED OUR ROCKY PATH slowly, one by one. It was slick from the rain, but we did not fear that. Serena went first, to pick out the way, then Xinot, and I came last, watching to catch my eldest sister in case she should stumble.

  She didn’t. She moved deliberately, choosing each step, but then hopped and climbed as fearlessly as Monster had used to do, using her cane as deftly as if it were a third leg. She lifted her face to the spray from time to time, and I thought I saw her smiling into it.

  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 cam
e 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.

  Everyone had heard of her beauty, and of the raid on her village as well. We learned that after the raiders had gone, the neighboring villagers had come to put the bodies of Aglaia’s family and friends to rest. They had been burned in a great fire out in the nearby fields; no one had picked through the remains to tally every person.

  That she lived seemed a wonder to these people.

  “Poor little thing,” we heard from our innkeeper one evening; he had given her a room the night before. “All alone in the world!”

  “Not alone,” his daughter replied. “Didn’t you hear? She won’t be alone for long.”

  “Hush,” the man said. “That’s only a rumor; we don’t know for certain yet.”

  After we’d gone to our room, Serena wondered aloud if the girl might have heard some news of Aglaia’s pregnancy. I only shrugged, but I had a different idea, and that very next day we started to hear another name entwined with hers.