The Shadow Behind the Stars

by Rebecca Hahn

  We had pulled together, Xinot, Serena, and I. We had stepped away from her as she spoke, linking our arms, becoming one. We knew one another’s thoughts, and we knew how little we wanted to say this thing. But we deal in truth. Beginning, middle, or end: We could not tell this girl a falsehood any more than we could have given her family different births or lives or deaths.

  We know, we said. We know the song of the thread as we know our own fingers, our own palms. We have only to shut our eyes to read any thread we choose.

  “Yes,” said Aglaia. “I know you can. I know you do.”

  How many nights had we sat with this girl around our fire? How many times had she laughed with us, and now it was as though she had never heard our voices, had never kissed our cheeks before she snuggled into her blankets.

  She turned from us without saying another word. She took her cloak down from its peg. She stepped through our door out into the rain, and the wind threw it shut behind her.

  It stormed all that night and into the next day. We did not go out to the sea; we did not do our work. We sat around our fire and watched the lightning’s shadow sliding along our threads, sparking them orange and red and white. We listened to the thunder; we felt the rain hurling itself along our roof, a loud, messy drumbeat. It raged, this storm, a tearing, howling thing. It did not want to leave the world the way it was. It wanted to bite and thrash. It wanted to destroy.

  The fire did little that night to diminish the dark that had trickled in under our walls, through the cracks at the edges of our door. It was a dense darkness, alive and certain. It had come when Serena had taken her spell from the girl, as though it had been waiting, as though Aglaia was a scented flower and it an eager bee.

  We knew it. Not only because it was ours—it was our magic—but we knew this particular darkness, this thing that had shaped her path. We knew it because it was hers. Aglaia had said that when she closed her eyes, she could feel our threads murmuring to her, that she had spent so long in our house that our magic had begun to creep in under her skin. Aglaia had been empty; that had allowed our magic in. But we are also empty, in a way. It’s why we go out to the waves every night—to fill ourselves back up. And living with this girl for so many weeks, I think something similar had happened with us and her powerful fate.

  I knew my sisters could feel it too. We could hear one another breathing, and we knew the tingle that was inching along every bit of us. I had been right to keep this girl from them. One conversation, one look at the true Aglaia, and they could not look away again.

  We resisted it, all through that night and half the day, as the storm barked and snarled. We tried to forget the shine of her eyes. We tried to ignore the dark undercurrent swirling around our ankles, singing to us as a siren would, to come, to jump, to dive.

  I tried to remember my determination that I would let this girl go.

  When the thunder had rolled away, when the lightning had paled and then diminished, the darkness still churned, and our breaths still caught, and we still tingled.

  The gulls began to call out to one another, asking how their neighbors had fared through the rain. I left my sisters sitting silent, and I went to our door and pushed at it. It complained, but I snapped a word, and the door flew open, and the world rushed in.

  The sea was rolling and rolling, energized from the storm. The air was cool and buoyant. Even through the clouds, the sun reached down pale tendrils, gleaming at the ends of my hair, pulling me toward him, murmuring my name.

  I followed; I went out past our house to the east end of the island, where a line of rocks led me out to a point overlooking the frantic waves.

  I stood there in the final drizzle, the winds whipping round. I closed my eyes against them; the sun touched my lids with soft gray kisses, and the sea showered me with spray.

  Of all us sisters I am the most susceptible to sensory passion—for a human boy who fetches us water from a well; for a poem; for a place. Not the comforting love of Serena’s mothering, but a hard, fiery love that tears at the space where I would keep a soul.

  I gave myself up to it, standing there. I took in the sea and the sky; I let the sun flatter me. If I stood like this long enough, I might forget Aglaia’s words about it being our fault. I might forget the tug of her thread, the smell of it, the shine. I might forget the baby and Endymion and the way she said my name. Chloe, she used to say. Chloe, you must help me.

  When I went back along the line of rocks toward our house, I saw what the storm had done to our garden. The leaves were bruised; the stalks were bent. The peas, the beans were scattered like so much bird food. And our vines.

  Serena had come out of the house as well; she was standing next to what was left of them. Tiny grapes had squished, here and there, in the melee. Our trellises were broken into fragments. Grape leaves draped over every bit of the garden, and the vines were tangled strings.

  I went over to my sister and I touched her arm. “They weren’t much to speak of, anyway.”

  She shook her head. One hand was near her mouth, and she stared down at the mess as though there was nothing else.

  “We’ll plant new ones. We’ll do it better; they’ll grow tall and beautiful. You’ll see.”

  “Oh, Chloe,” she murmured. “Do you think I care about the vines?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She shook her head again.

  “What is it, then?”

  She turned to look at me. The sky was in her eyes. “He used to sit here. Right here. He used to bat at the fruit and watch the birds fly.”

  That creature, the one who had wormed his way into our lives. It was hard to tell, with everything all over the place. But she was right. Just here was where he used to sit, and just here was where we buried him. And the storm had covered it over with vines and sticks and small squished grapes.

  I got down on my knees and reached out a hand to the muddle, swept away some leaves. After a moment, Serena folded herself to kneel beside me. As the clouds started to peel away and a fresh new breeze came in, we cleared the mess from the creature’s grave, until the dirt was bare and the fallen vines formed a wreath.

  Then I sat back on my heels as Serena bent over it, her face hidden behind her hair as mine so often was.

  I watched her, and I smelled this breeze, and I smelled Aglaia’s thread, and I thought.

  This girl was so dangerous. Her path might lead us anywhere, to any sort of terrible place. Already even I had lost faith in our work, questioning the rightness of her fate.

  If we left, I still would not be able to risk telling my sisters the dark secrets she had told me. I alone would have to know what Aglaia had said. I would have to bear it, and not let even my face show it.

  I don’t know how Xinot came up behind us so silently, but then again, I don’t know why I was surprised that she could. She bent her craggy face down near my shoulder and said, “Can you smell it, Chloe? The future that sparks on this wind?” She turned her nose into it, looking out to sea, and then swiveled her neck so she was facing our rocky path and the mainland. The breeze was sweeping just like that, in from the sea, over our rocks toward land. Of course there were no actual sparks, but it did smell as though there were: sharp and exciting, new as my wool.

  It was pushing at us, and Aglaia’s thread was pulling at us, and my sister’s eyes were whirling.

  Xinot reached behind her back, and she dragged two large black sacks around to me. I peered into them.

  “I don’t know . . . ,” I said.

  She slipped a small purse out from her skirt. It jangled, and Serena looked up, over at her. “This is for you, sister,” Xinot said, and thrust the bag into Serena’s hands. “I’ll have enough to do pulling my old bones along.”

  Serena opened her bag as well, though we all knew what it was. When we had come away from the mainland, we had brought quite a stash of coin with us. We’d tucked the bits into the corners of our house; while Serena and I cleared the vines, Xinot must have been hobbling f
rom wall to wall, finding our pieces. The coin wouldn’t be what they used today, but it was gold.

  Serena said, with such hope that I knew it was already far too late, “Are we going to follow her?”

  Xinot pointed her cane into the wind. “I’m not entirely sure we have a choice. You can feel the strength of this thing as well as I can.” She peered closely at us. “You can smell it.”

  I was shaking my head. “I don’t know . . .”

  Serena murmured, tying the bag closed, “She shines bright.”

  Xinot tilted her head. “She pulls dark.”

  I did try. I said, “She’s nothing to do with us,” but even I didn’t believe it when I said it.

  My eldest sister shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She held out a hand to Serena. “Coming?”

  Serena didn’t take the hand, but she pushed herself to her feet. “We can’t go without Chloe.”

  “Nonsense.” Xinot took Serena’s arm. Much too effectively for a woman her age, she pulled our sister away, to the west, toward the pathway leading to the mainland.

  As they left the grassy green cap of our island and started down the rocks, Serena was still protesting, and Xinot was still pointing her nose ahead determinedly, pushing away with her cane. I called out to them, “Wait!”

  Xinot kept on, but Serena tugged at her arm. They stopped at the edge of the rocky pathway, looking back at me.

  “Just—wait,” I called. I picked up one of the big black packs, and I ran back into our house.

  Xinot had filled one bag with my spindle and wool; the other, the one I carried now, was mostly empty, for whatever threads we spun along the way. It held only one thing: a coil of long, golden thread, glittering bright as day.

  I walked along our shelves, listening for the other. It was as easy to find as it had been before, and I slipped it into the bag, though I didn’t like to see it curling up next to hers.

  Then I tied the sack shut, and I slipped its strap over my head, across one shoulder. It was light; the other would be much heavier. I took my cloak down from its peg and grabbed Serena’s as well. Xinot was wearing hers already; she rarely took it off.

  I hesitated before I opened the door.

  What were we doing? How did we think we could follow a mortal girl, no matter how strong the pull of her thread, no matter how the wind sparked? What did we think we were going to do if we found her at the end of this path? We were not the sort who did things. We were what is, what must be, what cannot be altered. We were not meant to meddle.

  I shut my eyes, and I tried to remember, again, all the reasons I had decided to let Aglaia go, all the reasons there were to be glad that we were alone on our island once more.

  But there, behind my eyelids, was the girl’s bright face. There was the sky in my sister’s eyes as she stood by our creature’s grave. And there was the coil of Aglaia’s thread, calling, teasing, tempting me to go, to leap, to dive.

  I was drawn by her path, and my sisters were drawn as moths to a flame, as ravens to a shine.

  Even if I went out to them now and said that I couldn’t come, it was possible that Xinot would shrug her bony shoulders and turn her rounded back, and she would leave anyway. And where Xinot went, Serena would go. And what was I to do: spin my thread and hand it off to no one? Listen to the prayers on the wind without my sisters there beside me?

  Without one another, we are nothing. Not mortals, not gods. Empty, lonely voices swallowed up by the world.

  I passed through our door, and I shut it tight behind me. I whispered a good-bye to my sea and my winds. The sun would never leave me, but the others were keening when I turned my back to them.

  I went around to the garden and picked up my other pack. My sisters were still waiting at the edge of the rocks climbing to the mainland. Serena smiled as I came up next to them, and Xinot gave me a nod and a twitch of her eyebrows. I nodded back, though I had no answering grin. I hefted my packs more securely, and I followed them from our island.

  PART TWO

  Seven

  THERE HAD BEEN A CAT.

  Maybe you have already figured this out—that the creature we had buried beneath our vines, the creature who first brought us such danger, had been sweet and soft and helpless.

  I have not told you much of him yet; it hasn’t been important to our story. But the thread is unwinding now toward the world’s end, and you will need to know this soon enough. So I will need to speak of it, much as it hurts me to say it. There will be more hurting later; I will think of this as practice.

  It had been Xinot who found him, wandering through a storm out along our rocky path; and Monster had always been Xinot’s cat, before he was Serena’s, before he was mine. Serena wouldn’t have had it in her not to love a fluffy bit of a kitten. But there was also something mysterious about him, so as to enrapture my eldest sister. Monster had never seemed to me an ordinary cat.

  Maybe it was how close he had come to death that day—he was so small, and so ill-fed, that surely he would have been swept off to sea in that storm if Xinot hadn’t brought him home. After that, he was always loyal to her, though Serena rubbed his ears most often and I caught his fish. Xinot was as likely to ignore him as to invite him onto her lap, but he would sit by her side anyway, most nights, no matter how Serena tried to coax him.

  And he did not fear. Not the jagged spaces between our rocks, not the hawks and terns many times larger than him. He even went roaming for his mice through thunderstorms as dreadful as the one that had brought him to us. As the lightning flashed sharpest, he’d show up at our door, bedraggled and shedding lakes. His eyes would be bright; his tail would lash. While the raindrops pounded against our roof, he’d jump at the shadows like a kitten, even when he was many years old. The gods have decreed that cats will hate water, but Monster came alive in a storm. It seemed the closer he was to death—sharp rocks, grasping claws, and especially the near drowning of his childhood—the more delighted he became.

  Is it any wonder, then, that Xinot loved him?

  For many years, Monster was as essential a part of our lives as our piles of thread, as our spindle and shears, as our nights at the edge of the waves. Maybe, for a while, even I thought he would stay forever. Maybe we began to believe that he had come to us because he really was no ordinary cat, and that he would live as long as we did, as long as the stars still burned.

  Sometimes we are as hopeless as you mortals, with your impossible dreams. Sometimes even we blind ourselves, as though the world stops spinning when we can’t see.

  Oh, nothing especially horrible happened to our Monster. Nothing more horrible than happens every day to thousands of cats. He was old. He had lived with us longer than most cats are granted life. When he grew sick, we knew that the end would be coming soon. We built him a bed of blankets by our fire, and we took him outside to see the sky each night, to watch the waves coming in. He was not unhappy.

  Until the end, my sisters did not grieve. Xinot sat beside the cat many hours of each day; our work went on as always, but at a slower pace. I have never seen my eldest sister touch anything as gently as she touched Monster’s fur, between his ears, down the curve of his back, out to the end of his tail. Again and again she would stroke him, and she would whisper a deep, soft tune that made his eyes twitch and his legs stretch out.

  When she stood up, she grimaced, holding her back and rubbing her shoulders, but never once did she complain of pain.

  Serena—she was all smiles and busyness as Monster faded away. She started coming out to fish with me, though the cat was losing his appetite and most of what we caught went to waste. The fish he did eat, Serena ground to a soft paste. As she slipped it between his jaws, she chattered to him of the color of the sea today, of the birds we’d seen out on the rocks, who would have fled for their lives if Monster had been on one of his stalks.

  When Monster stopped swallowing the food Serena fed him, she took to sitting next to Xinot, reaching out now and again to touch his head as well. />
  I watched them. From across the room, I watched their little trio, and I was glad my sisters were not despairing over their pet. I didn’t join them in their vigil. I did bring in a toy mouse I had made for Monster out of wood and soft bird feathers, which he kept tucked between some stones at the back of our house. I put it near his nose, where he could smell it, and I scratched his ears. When we knew it would only be hours now and the others were out of the house for a moment, I came over again and bent down near him. “Little Monster,” I said, “we are going to miss you dreadfully. Go well into the dark.”

  Then I kissed him, right at the top of his head. He made a soft mewing noise, so I knew that he knew I was there.

  When my sisters came back inside, I was against the opposite wall, and I didn’t come back over until he had reached the end of his thread.

  There are only so many places on our island with dirt soft enough for digging, and we talked about taking him out in our skiff and giving him a burial at sea. But none of us could bear the thought of him drowning out there forever, his fur going slick and his lungs filling up.

  Instead we dug a spot for him under the grapevines, where he had liked to bat at our tiny fruit and flatten himself against the trellises, watching for gulls.

  When that was done, Serena and Xinot turned from the grave, their faces blank as the dull gray sky, and went back into the house. I came inside after them; they had already sat on their stump and chair facing the door, Xinot with her scissors out, Serena turned toward my basket as if waiting for me to hand her the next thread.