The Shadow Behind the Stars (7 page)

I gritted my teeth, and I kept at my work.

It soon enough seemed that the problem was solving itself. As one week drew into two, and two to three, I found that Aglaia's moments of clarity were growing shorter, no matter how much effort I put into my spell.

She didn't talk as much about Endymion or the raiders; she stopped asking for my help so frequently. Instead her thoughts seemed to be focused more and more on the early days of her childhood: She spoke of her mother teaching her to bake bread, of harvesting the fields with her father, of playing games with her brother and sister.

On one of the last days that Aglaia and I went out in the boat, she told me a story from the very beginning of her life, when her parents had taken her to visit a local oracle.

“It was the tradition,” she said. She was murmuring that morning, drifting halfway between Serena's spell and her waking self. She spoke almost in one sentence, long and meandering like our boat's path through the waves. I was listening quietly, my hands laid light along the sides of the boat.

“The oracle gives most babies in our village the same blessing,” Aglaia went on. “A long, happy life. She gave my parents that blessing, when they were born, and my brother and my sister, too.

“Sometimes she
mixes it up. She says one or two of our children will have problems to overcome, that their roads will not be all easiness and comfort. She never says, though, that they'll not win out in the end, and those who receive this harder blessing take it as a challenge. When they find themselves in difficulty, they tell their neighbors, ‘Thus the oracle said that it would be,' and they do not despair over their fate. They take heart in its inevitability and fight through to happier days.”

I could see today's clarity fading already, the light, pale as it was, diminishing in her eyes. I was struck with a sudden premonition that I would not speak to her in this meandering way again. These long mornings in the boat were drawing to a close; after this, the spell would take her.

I had to keep her here just a few minutes longer. I had to hear the end of this story; I had to know Aglaia's fate—whether it was the long, happy life or the harder blessing. I reached across and took her hands, held them tight. She blinked down at them.

“What did the oracle say about you, Aglaia?” I asked her. I didn't think it would be anything true; such women are almost all of them faking their powers for status in the villages they serve or for a few extra coins.

Aglaia blinked, and blinked again. “She said . . .”

I gripped her hands harder. “What?”

Her face snapped clear for an instant and she said, looking straight at me, “She gave me three words that she said would shape the course of my life. The first was
beauty
; my parents smiled at that.” I did too.
Anyone with eyes could have given her that fortune. “The second was
clarity
, a vision of the world not skewed by any illusion. The third . . .” She trailed off again, shaking her head.

I was frowning.
Clarity?
What sort of oracle gave that word to a child, and one who was destined to grow so clear-eyed as this girl, so true and purposeful? “What was it?” I said. I squeezed Aglaia's hands. “What was the third word?”

She kept shaking her head. “I don't know.” Her hold was slackening. Her voice was softening. “My parents never would tell me what the third word was. They used to look at each other, though, when I asked. They looked at each other . . . I could see . . .”

She shut her eyes. When she opened them, she would be gone.

“Aglaia?” I leaned in close to her, murmuring the words and sending them softly to her ears so it would sound as if they came from inside her own head. “What did you see?”

She said, only a whisper, trailing off into nothing, “When my parents looked at each other, I could see their fear.”

Then she let go of my hands, and she opened her eyes to me. She tilted her head, blinking, smiling prettily.

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER.
Hadn't there been enough warnings? It hadn't only been Serena's children—even here, even out at the edge of the world, the danger had come to find us, long before this mortal girl showed up. And oh, it hadn't been some hero come to beg for the answer to a riddle, and it hadn't been some god's son completing an impossible task. The most dangerous things—do you know this yet?—the most dangerous things are small and harmless. They look at you out of their bright round eyes, and they rub your ankles with their soft round heads. The most dangerous things worm their way inside of you, until you forget what you've always loved, until you betray what you've always believed in.

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
.”