The Shadow Behind the Stars (3 page)

This girl was already getting in the way of even our smallest pleasures. I had done enough waiting. “Aglaia,” I said, and she smiled at me. “What did you say this place was again? My sisters would like to know.”

Serena looked up from her work, frowning from me to the girl. She had coaxed Aglaia into draping her cloak near the fire while I served the fish. It had warmed as we ate, and now my sister was busy patching its tears and fraying edges.

“I told you,” said Aglaia, “this is home.”

The silence following that statement was all that I had wished for.

“What did you say?” said Xinot, twisting on her stump to stare at the girl.

Aglaia said again, as matter-of-factly, “This is home.”

“Your home?” said Xinot.

“Ours,” said Aglaia.

Xinot opened and then closed her mouth, for once at a loss. I raised my eyebrows at Serena, who was furrowing her brow at me as though I held the answer to this, as though this was some trick I had worked up when I was out with the girl.

I muttered, “It's
your
spell.”

“I didn't mean . . .” Serena tucked her needle into her skirt and cleared her throat, leaning over toward the girl.

She said softly, “Aglaia, dear, I'm afraid you can't stay here.”

“Why not?”

“Well . . .” Serena looked to me again; I shook my head.

“You know she doesn't remember,” I said.

Aglaia said, “Why can't I stay here? Where am I to go?” She was still perfectly placid, but there was confusion in her voice, and maybe a note of desperation. The world would seem so simple to her now, and we were denying what she knew of the shape of it.

Xinot said, finally, nodding at the girl, “She's right.”

“What do you mean?” said Serena. “That this is her home?”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

I let them come to the obvious solution; I watched the girl as they spoke. She seemed to already have forgotten that we were discussing her. She was leaning back on my stool, gazing into the fire. I thought I heard the beginning of a humming tune drifting across the pit.

“Then what are you saying?” said Serena.

Xinot said, “We can't throw her out, not with whatever your spell did to her. Her mind is lost; look at her.”

My sisters turned as well toward Aglaia, who continued to
sit and lean and hum. The firelight brushed the ends of her hair, and the humming floated, soft and strange. She seemed a thing apart, untethered.

Xinot said, in her hard, low way, “I know you didn't mean for this to happen. But now you have to take the spell away.”

Serena didn't respond; she kept on watching the girl, and I saw a shiver dance across her skin.

“Even if we could keep her, sister, this is no home for her. You've seen her thread, how bright it is. Do you think she should burn for all those years out here with us? With our bare rocks and empty wind?”

Serena said, “She's happier this way. There is no home for her out there, either.”

Then they were silent, remembering what Aglaia had fled.

When Xinot spoke again, it was more quietly, and she sat back on her stump so that her eyes seemed even darker, even deeper-set than usual. “This isn't a cat.”

“A cat?” Aglaia looked up at this, eager. “Do we have a cat?”

Serena reached out to brush the girl's cheek, so terribly tender. “Not anymore.”

I was shuddering. Xinot would have to put a stop to this. She would have to snatch our sister's fingers away from the girl's smooth skin, to toss Aglaia out our door, spell or no spell. If Serena wouldn't give her back her mind, she would have to do without it, and without us.

Aglaia said, her eyes on Serena's face, “Is that my cloak you are sewing?”

“Yes, child.”

“Oh,” said Aglaia, a breath. “How good you are to me.”

We couldn't
keep
her. We couldn't let Serena look at her
that way, with kindness. It would kill her. It would end up killing us. I turned to Xinot, and I saw her eyes sliding my way. I didn't have to speak; she knew my thoughts. We almost always do. But my eldest sister sat silent, leaning back on her stump. Something had sent her into her old manner of watching, waiting, an enigma in the dark. She shrugged at me with her bony shoulders, as if to say there was nothing to be done.

I wanted to scream at them. I wanted to grab this mortal girl and throw her out myself.

But the weight of one sister's choice and the silence of the other held me still. I have never been the first of us three. Serena speaks most; Xinot knows most. I am the quickest, the loveliest, the readiest to anger. I do not decide such things as whether an orphaned girl should be given a bed in our house.

Serena picked up her sewing again, and Xinot sat back and said nothing. I rose, frustrated, from the stones and went to sit against a far wall, shaking my hair closed about my face and glowering at nobody.

The girl I was sure would be our doom hummed to herself for a while longer. Then she got to her feet as well and wandered over to the nearest shelf, reaching out a curious hand toward our glittering towers of threads.

Apparently Xinot did think there was something she could do about
this
; she was up and next to the girl faster than I could blink. She grabbed Aglaia's raised arm with tight, crooked fingers. The girl turned, startled, and her mouth made a little O. Before Serena's spell
took it away, I saw the naked fear there, the horror in her eyes.

That was the third surprise, and the most unsettling—the strength of that horror, the way it had outlasted Serena's spell.

Then Aglaia's eyes went dim again; she relaxed her arm in Xinot's hold. My sister took her by her shoulders, lightly, and turned her from the shelves.

I felt a tension in my wrists. When I looked down, my fists were clenched and trembling.

“Come sit next to me, dear,” Serena said. Her head was bent; she was still stitching away at the cloak. She looked up at me as Aglaia obediently moved across the room toward her. She smiled, and it was so unruffled, so clear and calm, I knew she hadn't seen the thing on Aglaia's face.

I whispered a word to my hands, and they unclenched. Before Serena could read something in my frown, I managed to send a small smile her way. I don't think it was very convincing, but she brightened anyway. That's all it takes with Serena, usually. A smile, a hug. She lives for our happiness, Xinot's and mine.

As Aglaia knelt down on the stones next to Serena, putting her head on my sister's knee and beginning to hum again, Xinot turned back to the shelf and nudged and shifted the coiled threads into perfect order. There was no need. Aglaia hadn't actually touched them. But Xinot stood there for several minutes, poking and twisting and tucking in glowing strands. When she turned away finally, I caught her eye before she ducked her head.

She knew. Xinot had seen the fear too, and the strength of it bothered her.

Maybe we could have told Serena, hoping to convince her to let the girl go. If our sister had realized the extent of the horror her spell was keeping buried, she might not have thought it a good idea to repress such a powerful thing. But even I didn't want to expose our sister to that pain. Not Serena, for whom a smile, a hug was the bright sun shining on her. Not Serena, who had only recently begun to smile again herself.

And anyway, Xinot and I didn't fully understand it either. We never have, that sort of human nightmare. We've never understood the depth of it, the way it lasts and lasts. For us, everything is temporary. Oceans change their currents. Borders shift and blur; even mountains fall. Soon enough, everything returns to the way it was before.

For you mortals, forever is a much more manageable term. One lifetime—that's all forever takes. One death, and forever is achieved. For you, horror and pain and grief really can last forever.

Serena kept on with her sewing. I retreated behind my hair. Xinot watched the girl from the corners of her eyes, and our fire crackled.

Late that night we went out to stand by the sea as we always did, and we left the girl curled up on a pile of Serena's knit blankets against one wall. She had tucked herself in cozily, calling out good night to us as if she had known us all her life.

Serena called back to her; Xinot and I said nothing. We left for the waves as soon as we knew she was asleep.

As we stood there, salt on our lips and moonlight tangling our hair, I didn't speak to the others about Aglaia. I wanted to forget her; I wanted to pretend there was nothing on our island but my sisters and the words brought by the wind. I closed my eyes; I breathed; and it should have been easy there.

After all, we are the daughters of the night. Xinot is the eldest, and I am young as a girl, but we all awoke at the same dark moment in the beginning of everything. When we go out to the edge of our rock and watch the stars spin, we remember where we came from, and we become more of who we are.

We need sleep even less than we need to eat. We could keep working with our threads all through the night if we wanted, but that's not what keeps us awake. There is always work to do, and the more we work, the more there seems to be. So we don't worry about that. Long ago, we used to fret much more. When even the sun was young, we wore our fingers to the bone trying to keep up with the piles of shining wool that never diminished in my basket. We thought that if we stopped, the wool would overflow, and mortals would not be born or live or die, and we would have destroyed the world.

But my heap of work never grows or shrinks. It is always exactly the same, whether we work on it or not. We've never stopped altogether. We take breaks. We garden. We never leave our work for more than several hours at a time.

Still, we do not worry about spending time away from the
threads, and we do not work at night unless our fingers are itching for it.

Instead we go out to the moon and the waves and the wind. We stand or sit along our shore, not next to one another, but we know where the others are.

We don't do anything in particular, not that you would recognize as action. We watch it, the way the world breathes in the night. Sisters of darkness—it is one name for us, and an apt one. Things are hidden in the dark. Things are unknown and inescapable. We might not always understand our own art, but we can feel it. We can taste it in the air on a clear, cold night. We can smell it in the brine when a storm is brewing over the waters. We are only sitting or standing, and listening to the prayers of the day, but we are also at some deeper level conversing with the magic that fills our threads.

When we watch and listen in this way, we become a thing that has meaning, that takes joy in each breath. Every night, we fill ourselves up with this joy, and then we spin and measure ourselves out and we provide the perfect endings each day.

That night, as Aglaia lay sleeping in the house at our backs, our magic was swirling and flowing in a strangely deliberate way. When I closed my eyes to forget the girl, I could almost hear it speaking. A soft murmur drifted all about, rising and falling, as though telling some great story—the sort that cannot be stopped once it has begun, the sort that holds you captive until the end.

It seemed . . . directional. And yes, when I concentrated, I could sense it sweeping over and around us, across our island,
toward the house and our sleeping guest. It was gathering there, the magic, the stuff of our infinite work. It was interested in her; it had some claim to her.

I opened my eyes and looked over at my sisters. Serena was smiling up into the moon, which was full that night. Mine is the waxing moon, and Xinot's is the waning, but our middle sister loves the bright shining moon, all round and brilliant.

Xinot, though, was frowning. She had felt the flow of our dark magic too, and she didn't like it any more than I did. It seemed Aglaia wasn't just a poor lost thing after all; it seemed it would be harder to forget her than I had hoped. She had a future; we knew that from her thread. And our darkness seemed to be saying that hers was a stronger, deeper destiny than we had guessed.

Xinot turned her shadowed face toward mine. I knew her thoughts. We could tell Serena; we could ask her again to take the spell from Aglaia and send her off to meet this fate, mind and painful memories returned. We could set her free, and free ourselves of her.

But Xinot shook her head, and looked away again. I bunched my fists into my tunic, turning my face to the wind as well. Fine, then. I would have to find some other solution to this. As much as I did not like to admit it, Xinot was right. It was too risky—even if we told Serena how powerful this girl's fate was, we couldn't be sure our sister would allow Aglaia to leave. She might want to help; she might take the girl further into her arms. What was cloak-mending today might become cooking lessons tomorrow, or giving her the names of toads,
or telling her ancient tales. Serena loved the brightly shining ones, and Aglaia's thread was as brilliant as tonight's moon.