The Shadow Behind the Stars (2 page)

But just now there were no coals, and no fire, and no pit. The girl blinked around, her mouth gaping and closing like the mouth
of the fish that was sliding from her hands.

Xinot narrowed her eyes at Serena. “Do something,” she hissed.

Serena jerked her head at that and lowered her hands. She cleared her throat—a comforting, melodious sound.

“Thank you, dear,” she said. The girl stopped gaping, grasped the fish again, and focused on Serena's face as though it was the only thing she remembered.

Possibly it was. Serena was now this girl's first real memory, after all.

Serena said, in that gentle murmur only she can manage, “My dear, will you please tell my sisters your name?”

“Your sisters?” She blinked around at us now. “These are your—sisters?”

Serena laughed, low and bubbly. “I call them that, despite the vast difference in age. They are my closest living relations, all I have left in the world.
Your name, dear.
”

Not many would be capable of defying Serena when she's become insistent, and this girl was no exception. “Aglaia,” she said at once, with a slight bow. “I am Aglaia.”

“Lovely!” Serena clapped her hands and smiled at the girl. I had seen that expression on her face before, that warm softness as she talked with one of you. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Aglaia, and we will happily accept your gift.”

“Oh.”
Now the girl's face was shining. “Will you?”

“Yes, of course, if you will share it with us.”

“Serena,” I muttered, reminding her, “we've no business eating a meal with a mortal.”

She eyed me and muttered back, “It's only one fish. It's nothing, Chloe.” Then she turned to the girl again, laying a hand on my arm. “My youngest sister will show you where you can get the beast ready for cooking, down by our shore.”

The girl tilted her head at me, so open, so trusting. Her eyes really were the color of our sunlit sea.

“Xinot,” I started, turning toward my eldest sister. “Do you really think—”

She cut me off with a wave of her blades. “Oh, go on, Chloe,” she said. “She won't bite you.”

“Won't she?” But my sisters were looking at me expectantly, and I couldn't win against them both. “Fine,” I said, sighing. “If you want to eat this fish so much, I suppose you'll need her out of the house while you start the fire.”

“Exactly,” Serena said.

So I slid my spindle into my basket with the wool. Then I grabbed Aglaia's arm, and I pulled the mortal girl from our house.

At the water's edge, we crouched down together, and Aglaia began to wash the fish. My toes curled along the side of a flat rock, my tunic pulled low over my ankles. My hair was whipping around my head; it does that sometimes, especially when I am wary of something or feeling some strong emotion. I watched as she scraped the scales with a sharp piece of shale and then used the stone to slice open the fish's belly. She did not speak; she wasn't paying me any mind. I bent over toward
her, looking into her face. Her eyes went sideways, noting I was there, but she only turned up her lips at me and continued easing out the guts. I sat back again.

It isn't fair, the sort of life you mortals lead. Even forgetting death, even forgetting how little time you have to understand anything, there is so much difficulty that I sometimes wonder how you can keep on going. What had happened to Aglaia happens to someone every day. Mothers watch their children starve. Fathers are enslaved.

It is a marvel sometimes that you don't sit right down and give up. It is a marvel you don't scream at the gods for creating the world this way, that you can lift your head still, and smile, and want to live—that you can demand from us a reason to want to live.

I watched this girl; her hair was gleaming in the last of the sun's rays. No doubt he was delighted to have such a fresh little beauty to smile upon. “Your hair,” I said at last, wondering at how it could still shine like that after all she'd gone through. “Your hair is quite beautiful.”

Aglaia said, “Thank you,” pronouncing each word clearly, with a small space between. Abruptly she turned toward me and reached out a slimy fish hand, as if wanting to show that she held no dangerous thing. “I am Aglaia.”

“Yes,” I said, leaning back, my hair spinning across my nose. “I know.”

But she kept her hand held out, and she had a funny plastered-on smile that hadn't flickered or melted when I'd pulled away from her. So I slipped a hand from where I'd
tucked it in my tunic and gripped hers, quickly. Then I slid it away again. “I'm Chloe.”

“It is nice to meet you,” said Aglaia.

I nodded, warily.

She turned back to her cleaning and didn't look at me again.

I waited as she finished, as she pulled the kidney from the fish and made to throw it and the guts into the sea.

“Don't!” I said, coming to my feet and reaching for her hand. We didn't need our shoreline smelling of fish guts, or our toes to squish in them when we visited the waves.

Aglaia stopped and stared at me, her mouth slightly open. She was blinking fast, as if recalculating her world.

I spoke slow, and low. “We have a garden. Let's bring the nasty stuff there and give it to the plants.”

She looked down into her hand, where the guts were beginning to drip between her fingers. “Nasty stuff,” she said.

“Come along.” I gestured to her, and she followed me up the rocks, onto the green cap of our island. We went around to the back of the house, where Serena keeps our garden growing in the lee of our walls, out of the wind.

It's an impossible task, much of the time. The air is so salty, most things choke to death. Come one big storm in the growing season, and our whole crop fails. It's lucky we don't suffer from lack of food, or we'd never survive out here on our rock. Or we'd survive, but we'd be miserable every second, like that idealistic fellow who broke the rules and spent several eternities chained to a stone, watching birds eat out his liver every afternoon for lunch.

This year we'd had
good fortune with the weather. Several small cabbages were growing in the shade of the house, and we'd have a large crop of onions and cucumbers. There were even some lentil pods almost ready for picking. I brought Aglaia over to our grapevines down the slope a bit. There was a doomed endeavor if I ever saw one. Our vines only ever grew tiny bitter fruit, hardly worth eating and certainly not of a quality for making wine. But Serena couldn't help trying. When we had lived on the mainland, many centuries ago, our vines had been the envy of every mortal and several gods as well. Our wine could make the dullest man dance; it could put the saddest old woman to sleep and give her wondrous dreams.

We missed our wine.

Aglaia and I spread the fish guts at the base of the vines, and I whispered to them, a gift-giving rhyme from a lovely altruistic culture that had lived nearby but had died out generations ago.

Then we went back down to the shore and we washed our hands with the help of the sea. I watched as Aglaia lifted the readied fish and started up the path to our house. She had done everything I had asked, simply and without argument. She had been so at ease, sitting by the water with me, and now each step she took was precise and unhurried. I remembered the harsh strength that had been in her voice this afternoon. She had seemed half-wild then, with her raw feet and flashing eyes—a wounded eagle, not a nesting wren.

I called after her, curious, “Aglaia, where do you think we are?”

She stopped and looked back at me, a line between her eyes. “Don't you know?”

I shook my head at her.

The line deepened. “I think . . .” She looked about at the waves, at the rocks, at the orange light we could see now flickering through our door at the top of the hill. “I think I've come to stay with you. I think this is home.” Her face was smoothing out. “Yes, Chloe. This is where I live. This is our home.” She smiled. It was a big, sparkling smile, the sort that mothers stitch onto their daughters' dolls. She said, with a bit of a laugh, “Come on! They're waiting for us.” And she took off up the slope again, grasping the fish tight in her hands.

I stood there staring after her. She didn't yet know my sisters' names. And . . .
home?
I wasn't sure even I considered this our home. Home was for babies and growing old. This was a place to live, a place to do our work.

But Aglaia was far ahead now, and the others were shortly in for a second surprise. I couldn't imagine how Xinot was going to react to an addle-brained mortal girl calling this her home. She would have to agree with me now; she would have to throw Aglaia out as soon as she heard. She might even apologize for not arguing with Serena about the meal. I sucked in a breath and started eagerly up the slope after the girl. It wasn't often that my sister admitted she was wrong. I wasn't going to miss this for all the stars and their songs.

WHILE AGLAIA AND I HAD
been out washing the fish, my sisters had gotten a fire blazing in our pit. Xinot sat on her stump near the edge, poking at the cinders with her cane. The dark wood took no harm from the heat; it wasn't an ordinary sort of thing, with ordinary obedience to physical laws. She didn't look up as Aglaia and I came over with the girl's gift, but she tapped the metal grill she'd set upon the coals so that it clanged a bit, and the girl placed the fish on it.

Then Aglaia drew my stool over next to her and sat down, resting her elbows on her knees. My sisters eyed me, Serena with worry and Xinot with a gleam of amusement.

I shrugged and settled onto the stones on the other side of the fire. I could view my vindication just as happily from here.

I was in for a wait, though. Serena came over and placed
her usual chair next to me, and we were all silent for a bit, watching the fish cook. It was the perfect time for them to question our uninvited guest. There she was, sitting in
my
place, bending over our fire as if she belonged. And my sisters hardly glanced at her. Xinot kept poking at the fire with her stick. Serena was sewing some useless thing—you'd think, after working with the thread all day, she would be sick of all forms of needlework, but Serena's always knitting us caps and tacking together bits of yarn and cloth to hang on the wall. All pointless, as Xinot and I would never hide our hair from the wind, and there's hardly room on our walls for anything but shelves and piles of thread. Still, she keeps at it. She spins her own yarn out of the little grasses that grow along our rocks. I think she must use her magic for it, as it seems an impossible task.

She was busy with something—a cushion for her chair, I think; her old one was beginning to fray—and she didn't seem the slightest bit concerned with the girl she'd just bespelled. She pulled at her yarn and hummed to herself, mulling over some secret thing.

I glared across the fire at Aglaia. She smiled back at me. I glared harder; she smiled more. So I scowled into the fire instead and joined my sisters in ignoring her completely. One more hour; one shared meal. If the girl hadn't declared her intention by then, I would give up the satisfaction of seeing my sisters uncover it themselves, and I would give fate a hand.

When the fish was done, we apportioned it into four driftwood bowls, though we are never in danger of starving and
could have saved the whole creature for the girl. Xinot ate silently; Serena made approving noises. I picked at mine at first, but the smell was too exquisite, and soon I was tucking into it as eagerly as the others. We're never in danger of starving, but a fresh grilled fish is as tasty in our mouths as yours.

Then we threw the bones to the fire, though I saw the way Xinot flicked her fingers toward them, and I knew she would have liked to toss them over the stones to uncover some fortunes. Not the most accurate of fortune-telling tools, fish bones, but when they aren't spewing nonsense they are dramatic. Filled to every curve and ridge with stories of hidden jewels and questing princes.