The Shadow Behind the Stars Read online

  I did not think, so I did not realize I had reached it until I was stepping past the leaning walls of her village, down her streets. Then I saw, and I stopped, and I dropped my bags and stood there. There wasn’t a spell my sister could have cast to take away this pain.

  There was not even a word for what was left of Aglaia’s village.

  Ruin. Desolation. Tragedy.

  They are thin, insufficient things, words. They conjure abstractions, not actualities. They speak in the present, not of the past that drifted like a song through the tumbled stones and scattered pieces of this world—the grubby shirt left spread across a stump, maybe to dry; the bucket lying beside a well, grass inching up and around; the earthen bowls still stacked high, now displayed for the world to see, their cupboard door clinging to a lone hinge.

  It hadn’t been long enough for this place not to feel as though its inhabitants might come back any day. They might come walking up that path through the overgrown pear and fig orchards, chattering, and fall silent one by one as they saw the dirtiness, the brokenness awaiting them. So much work, they would say to one another. It will take so long to set this to rights.

  See, but they would do it; they would set it to rights, building new walls and attaching cupboards, shaking out that shirt with a grimace and filling that bucket with fresh, clean water. It would be work, but they would do it. This village was waiting for them; any day now, they might arrive.

  My sisters stood in the center of the village, where the paths met, where there might have been stories in the evening and the children would have gathered to play their games. They were not speaking; they did not acknowledge me as I came up next to them, dragging my packs, dragging my feet as well.

  Of course we had heard of this before, of entire villages disappearing, their every citizen dead, gone, all snapping off at once.

  It was different not only because we were here, but because we saw it through her eyes. It was different because it belonged to her.

  “She will find whoever did this,” Serena said, and I had never heard her voice so sure and heated. “She will find them, and she will kill them.”

  “Yes,” said Xinot. “Of course she will.”

  Endymion. I could not say a thing.

  We stood, for hours it seemed, unable to move or stop staring. “What did you see from your hill, Chloe?” Serena asked after several eternities. “Could you catch a glimpse of our sea?”

  I opened my mouth to lie to her, then closed it again. She was already crying, though she smiled at me through the tears. Surely there could be no protecting her, not after she had seen this. It was too horrible, too broken, too real. She and Xinot would know the third word even if I never told them. They would understand the thing that shaped Aglaia’s path.

  “We must keep on,” I said at last. “She will be far ahead of us now. I will tell you everything along the way.”

  Ten

  ENDYMION.

  This was his city. This, with its white stone walls gleaming in the sun, with its yellow streets and colorful market squares. Leafy trees lined the wider avenues; ripe figs hung above the heads of passersby, so that you had only to reach to grab at sweetness.

  There were poor, but their rags seemed cleaner and their faces rounder. There were rich, but more of them stopped to share their coin, and more of them took time to smile up into the sky, watching the wispy white clouds dancing by.

  We could not deny that the prince of such a city was a hero. Endymion was no fake, no bloated pig or sniveling weakling. When Endymion went to war, he won. When he put his mind to solving some problem in his city, it was solved. When he wooed a beautiful girl . . . well, she came back to him in the end, didn’t she? With steps of joy and purpose, thrilling over her fate. Leaving a trail of celebration in her wake, like crumbs of cake.

  Here the air shimmered with stories of Aglaia.

  She arrived just yesterday!

  Is she as lovely as they say?

  A fervent nod. More. I hear the gods themselves are jealous of her.

  That one made us look at one another worriedly. No mortal wants the gods becoming jealous, especially of a thing like beauty. The most beautiful gods are not known for their intelligence, or for their kindness.

  “Our prince,” we heard one little beggar child say, her curls surprisingly pretty, “will marry her this very week!”

  He loves her.

  She loves him.

  The bards will tell their story through the ages.

  It was agreed upon and rejoiced at; it seemed that everyone was coming out into the streets, giving up their work, and talking it over from every angle.

  It was the easiest thing to find out where she was staying. She had arrived early yesterday afternoon, so we had managed to make up time in our last frantic rush back from her village and north to Endymion’s city. It was said that the prince would come down out of his grand house to pay her a call this evening, to declare his everlasting devotion and to bring her back with him.

  In the meantime, she had taken a room at an inn in a modest section of the city, for which humbleness she was much praised.

  “And she to be our princess!” a clothier said.

  The wine seller next to him clapped his shoulder. “A girl of the people. She’ll not forget where she came from.”

  My sisters had not wanted to hear me when I told them that the raiders who had destroyed Aglaia’s village had not been raiders at all, but the man it seemed she was giving herself to, and his loyal soldiers. I showed them his thread; I made them smell the rotting at its core. They had not wanted to hear the prophecy, either, but they had listened, and they hadn’t questioned its truth. Last night, our final night on the road, Xinot had disappeared for hours, and when she came back, she clattered the thing in her pocket so unceasingly that when she stopped, my mind still shook with its echo.

  “You should have told us long ago,” Serena had said as we started out this morning.

  “Nonsense,” said Xinot. “She was protecting you from it.”

  “And you,” I couldn’t help saying, though my eldest sister glared. “I am the strongest-willed of us, Xinot.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “your strong will has kept us so safe from this girl’s pain.”

  I snapped, “I never would have told you if we hadn’t seen her village.”

  Serena said, “But you didn’t try to keep us from that, Chloe.”

  I stared at her; she was right. I could have argued against taking that path. I could have said we should go on ahead and make it to the city before Aglaia backtracked.

  I said, much softer, “I didn’t think of it.”

  Xinot said, “Or didn’t want to. You were determined to seek out that oracle, after all, and what good could that have done?”

  “I was angry,” I said. “I thought she was false.”

  “There are hundreds of false oracles,” said Xinot. “Why did you care about this one so particularly?”

  Serena laid a hand on our sister’s arm. “She cares about the girl,” she said. “Of course she wanted to know the third word.”

  And I wanted to say no, that I didn’t care, not as she had about her children, not as they had about our cat. Not in a way that could turn me from our calling, not ever.

  But I must have been fated not to respond, because just at that moment, something was stuck in my throat. I swallowed, and my eyes teared up with it. Serena reached across to tuck my hair back gently, and I didn’t shake her off.

  As we slipped through the streets of Endymion’s city, we drew no wondering looks. All were busy gossiping and laughing; all were immersed in Aglaia’s happy ending. A crowd had gathered outside her inn, and a woman pointed out her window willingly. We went around to the back of the building and came in through the kitchen.

  We have come to visit Aglaia, we told the lad there as he looked up from his chopping.

  He gestured behind us toward the door with his knife. “You and everyone else,” he said. �
��Get away with you.”

  We drew back our hoods. Not us and everyone else, we said. Just us.

  Well. It was nice to know that mortals kept a place for us, after all, that your forgetting was as Aglaia’s spell had been, out on our island: throw away the veil, confront you with the truth, and you could see again with clear, if frightened eyes.

  He was not capable of speaking after that. Xinot led the way past him through the kitchen, Serena following close behind. As I walked by the lad, I ran one finger along his cheek and smiled a very small smile. I felt his eyes watching me all the rest of the way.

  We paused outside the door to her room.

  We could hear her singing. Just a small tune, a hum of violets dripping with rain, of rich dark soil, ready for tilling. It was a song she would have learned as a child, growing up on the slopes and in the valleys of her land, watching her family plant their vines and prune their fruit trees. It was a song from the middle of life, where there are no wonderings of where you are to find your purpose and where there are no worries about what’s coming at the end. Where the rhythm of the days is sacred, because each waking and each sunset is fulfillment—you have done it, you have found the way to happiness in life. Family, hard work, stories around the fire: one such day, you think, would be reason enough for a life.

  There was no hidden wrongness in this song; I had no wish to push Aglaia from a boat to make her stop. As I listened, I thought that I had heard the tune before, but I could not think where.

  When I turned to ask Serena, there were tears in her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I murmured.

  She shook her head. “The most beautiful things,” she said, and stopped.

  “What?”

  “It is always a miracle, that there are beautiful things.”

  “Is it?” It seemed to me that the world was filled with beautiful things, that you could no more take away the violets or the stories than you could Xinot’s snap at the end.

  Serena only smiled, through the tears. “I would say you’d understand when you are older . . .”

  I laughed softly. “I am as old as you, sister.”

  “In years,” said Serena.

  “Is that not how we determine age?”

  “Chloe,” Xinot said suddenly, and we both looked at her. “Stop being stupid.”

  I opened my mouth, ready with a retort, but she held up two curled fingers. Aglaia’s song had stopped. We opened the door, and she was looking at us.

  She was sitting alone on her bed. She watched as we filed in, as we closed her door again and stood in a semicircle before it.

  This room must have been the grandest in the inn. A merchant or a minor landowner might have stayed here with his spouse in that good-size bed. The fireplace was clean and big; the window was shuttered with pretty painted wood.

  I don’t think Aglaia was seeing any of it. Her hair was tidy; her tunic was smoothed. She sat with exact posture at the end of the mattress, her hands tucked between her knees. She was not gone, as she had been when Serena’s spell was in full force. Her eyes sparked and her mouth quirked sardonically to see us again. But she was in thrall to another sort of spell: a path, a purpose.

  “You,” said Aglaia at last.

  Us, we said.

  “Have you been following me all this way?”

  Yes, we said.

  “Why? What do you want?”

  Serena said, gently, “What are you going to do?”

  “What do you think?” said Aglaia. “I am going to kill him.”

  We nodded. It was reasonable.

  “And the child?” said Serena.

  Aglaia smiled, and again I was surprised at how much life there was behind it. The world to this girl would seem pale and thin. We three must seem little more than clinging mists or floating phantoms. “My child will be rich,” said Aglaia, “and powerful, and happy. My child will have its birthright, everything it should.”

  We nodded again. We did not disbelieve her.

  Again she said, “What do you want? Is there something that you can do for me?”

  I turned my face from her; I did not want to answer. She had asked for my help so many times, and so many times I had refused her.

  Serena said, “Probably there is nothing we can do.”

  Aglaia looked back and forth between us. “Can you kill him for me?”

  We shook our heads. We’re not allowed to do that.

  “Can you tell me whether or not I will succeed?”

  No. We cannot tell you what the thread has said.

  Aglaia let out her breath, looking over at the window, through which the sun was eavesdropping. We could hear the murmuring of the crowd below, each hoping to catch a glimpse of their prince’s wife-to-be. “What good are you, then?”

  Not much, we admitted.

  Then Xinot tapped her fingers against her cane and said, sharp and excited, “We could toss the bones.”

  We looked at her.

  “It’s not as dependable as reading the thread,” said Xinot. “It’s only a fortune-telling trick, but we are better at it than most.”

  “I’m sure you are,” said Aglaia. She narrowed her eyes, considering. “But I’ve no bones.”

  “Oh, I have,” said Xinot. She reached into her left-hand pocket, where she kept her shears, where she kept that clattering, clattering thing. Aglaia watched warily. Out came Xinot’s fingers, laced with the spine and ribs of a fish and dripping with many tinier bones.

  I leaned over them. “Have you been carrying these all this while?”

  Serena said, “Is this where you go in the middle of the night? To play with your toys?”

  All those times I’d thought my sister too otherworldly to bear the press of the mortal realm, all those times I’d watched her slip from our room and felt an awe at the mystery that measured the length of her veins. “Xinot,” I hissed, and couldn’t say anything more.

  She said, placid enough to enrage, “I get bored.”

  Then Aglaia was moving over toward the fireplace and sitting down upon the floor. We followed her; we sat in a circle, the four of us, and of course it reminded me of the many nights we had sat like this, facing one another across our fire pit as a fish smoked deliciously on the grill.

  Aglaia saw me watching her. “What is it?” she said, though without any friendliness.

  “Do you remember?” I said. “Do you remember it at all?”

  Serena poked me. “Hush,” she said, and Aglaia hadn’t opened her mouth to answer. I didn’t want her to look the way she did—angry, as if the only thing keeping her from snarling at us was the hope that our fish-bone predictions might help.

  Some hope. We might be better at it than most fortune-tellers, but tossing the bones is a notoriously unreliable way of seeing the future. Fish bones do not tell the truth, not in the way that our threads do. They tell stories, when they aren’t spouting nonsense, and most fortune-tellers could not separate the fiction from its fragile strand of prophecy.

  Still, as we weren’t allowed to read Aglaia’s thread for her, this was the next best thing. Xinot flicked her wrist, and the bleached bits tumbled across the wood floor between us.

  They scattered, a little one landing a finger’s width from Serena’s heel, a rib bone pointing its ridge toward Aglaia’s right eye.

  I bent forward, my hair across my face. Serena clasped her hands on her knees, and Xinot crouched as crookedly as ever, her cane laid behind her, a small smile twitching.

  “Well?” Aglaia said, and we all three hushed her.

  A swimming bird, Xinot said.

  A flying fish, said Serena.

  I scrunched my eyes; the bones wavered in the dim sunlight, between my strands of hair. The shadows crept, and crept; a murky finger traced along my cheekbone.

  I felt a horror.

  I said, Something has gone devastatingly wrong.

  A burning sea, Xinot said.

  A frozen fire, said Serena.

  I said, There
is an end to patterns. All the threads are coming loose.

  The bones rattled on the floor, though no one touched them. The room flashed dark, and my eyes and the eyes of my sisters rolled back in our heads. We said, as one, We will be to blame.

  Then it was gone.

  I was breathing fast, hard. My neck was slick with sweat. We looked about at one another. I held Xinot’s gaze, and she shook her head. “Not now,” she said. “Not for a while yet.”

  “It might not happen,” Serena said.

  Xinot’s fingers flicked. “It might not.”

  Aglaia said, “What did that mean?”

  “A good question,” I said. “Any ideas?”

  But Xinot was still shaking her head. She reached out to gather her bones, and she dropped them back into her pocket; I heard that clattering as they settled against her shears. “I have been casting these bones over and over again. Always they tell me a similar tale, of impossible things, of catastrophe. I don’t know what it means.”

  “They’re only fish bones,” I said. “You cannot trust them.”

  She looked at me, without a smile. “Chloe, you felt what I felt. Are you going to tell me it was not true?”

  I looked away.

  Serena said again, softly, “It might not happen. Prophecies do not always come true.”

  “It might not,” Xinot repeated, but not as though she believed it.

  Aglaia was frowning, watching us. “It has nothing to do with me or my baby, though?”

  Xinot said, “We don’t know. It might.”

  Aglaia said, “But you haven’t any idea what it would mean for us?”

  “No.”

  Aglaia pushed to her feet, stepping out of our circle. She turned her back on us; she went over to the window and poked one finger through the shutters to peek at the crowd in the street. “They love me,” she said.