The Shadow Behind the Stars

by Rebecca Hahn

  He is clean and lovely. He winds around the basket, over Aglaia’s legs, and he mews a clear, contented mew. He is alive.

  You would think it would be enough, that Monster is alive.

  Without saying anything, Xinot tosses me the circle again, and I throw it back into the basket. I draw out a new thread; I wind it around my spindle, and I tear out the imperfect bits. Oh, I try so hard. I wish there was a song to sing; I wish we had come up with a perfect tune. There is only silence as the spindle falls and twists, falls and twists.

  I hand the thread to Serena, but I already know that it is the same as before. Xinot rings the thread, and we watch the cat appear, licking his already spotless paw.

  Xinot says, low and harsh, “It is not Monster.”

  “It is,” I say. “It must be. I could feel his life in the wool.”

  But Xinot is shaking her head. “He’s missing the parts we remember. He’s not the same as he used to be.”

  I say, “I couldn’t separate them. The important parts from the problems. They were so close, I couldn’t take them apart—as though they were two sides of each other, as though they were day and night.”

  “The sun and the moon,” Serena murmurs, in a lost sort of way. “The stars and the bright blue sky.”

  We watch the cat and the humans sleeping for what must be another eternity.

  Then the deep thing surfaces, and I know what it wants.

  Heavy with how much it has grown, heavy with the hurt of each breath, I stand, and I go over to Aglaia. I shake her shoulder, very hard, knowing nothing less will wake her now. She raises her head, and she blinks at me.

  “You are Chloe,” she says.

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “And these are your sisters,” she says, smiling at them.

  I wait until she looks back at me. She is pretty—her eyes are blue and her hair is gold and her skin is smooth. I cannot say that she is beautiful, though, not in the way that I remember Aglaia being beautiful. And her eyes are clear, but not in a knowing way. In the way shallow water is clear, as though you can see right through.

  Such smooth stones, without a bump or blemish, as empty as the face of this girl, under Serena’s spell.

  I say to her, “Aglaia, will you hand me Taddeo, please?”

  She smiles at me. She holds out her son, and I take him into my arms. Then I bend down, carefully, and I scoop Monster up in one hand and hand him to Aglaia.

  She takes the cat, nestling him against her chest just as Tad used to be. She cuddles him close, stroking his fur. She says, in her sweet voice, “Chloe, this is very soft too. Is it another son?”

  I had a friend once.

  Her eyes were deep as a summer sea.

  Her hair was bright as the midday sun.

  She smiled, and you thought the world was beautiful.

  She was brave, and she was clever, and she loved her son so much that she died for him.

  I watch Aglaia stroking our cat, and she doesn’t know the difference between him and the child in my arms. When I look at my sisters, they are not crying or angry or as numb as I was. They know the deep thing too, and it is hurting them.

  The universe stretches on and on, colorless. I hold Tad tight, looking down at him. He sleeps; he does not dream. I rock him, though I know that he cannot feel it. I tell the deep thing, again and again, that he is alive.

  And Aglaia is alive, and Monster is alive. I want that to be all that I know. I want that to be all that I want. It is what I promised her, before we left her in that inn—to keep her son safe, no matter what, to the world’s end.

  But when Serena reaches over and grabs the circles from Xinot’s feet, when she pushes them into the basket, deeper and deeper until they are nothing but wisps of wool, and the boy in my arms and the girl on the ground and our cat all wink off, and never were, I don’t try to stop it. I let it happen.

  And then Xinot reaches into her pocket, not the left-hand one where she keeps her shears or her not-shears, but the other one, where she kept the baby Tad’s thread, and nothing else that I have seen. She draws out the thread we spun in the basket, that gave us this new beginning. It shines golden, but when I squint, I can see right through it, as I can see through our colorless ground, as I could see through Aglaia’s eyes.

  My eldest sister stands. She takes one of Serena’s hands, and I take the other. Together we face the basket; together we circle it. Xinot shoves the thread down into the wool, and it begins to fizzle away into nothing at once.

  There is just enough time for Xinot to let go of the thread, to take her hand out of the basket and grip mine, before everything goes away: limitless directions, first breath, thought.

  And then we were back with the oracle at the crossroads, and it was a very dark night.

  Nineteen

  WHEN I HAD SHOVED MONSTER’S thread back into the basket, he had winked off, as though he never was. That had been the truth of it, when those bits of wool were where they had begun.

  And the truth of this world now, after we had given back that beginning thought, was that there had never been any crumbling. No mountains had flown; no great void had shivered as it winked out.

  The night was still dark. The oracle still edged away from us, down the road. We still stood beside our basket, hands empty, looking down at him. The boy. Still dead, and nothing to be done.

  We didn’t need to speak. I closed my packs and hefted them onto my shoulders. Xinot rubbed the head of her cane, over and again. Serena bent down to lift the boy, and he drooped in her arms like . . . I cannot describe it.

  It was possible that Endymion’s soldiers would be searching along this road. If we waited for them, if we told them that this was their prince, that they should burn him alongside his mother—

  They would not believe us. Tad was no infant now.

  If we told them who we were, if we explained everything and showed them some small magic to prove its truth—

  That wasn’t our way. Secrecy, hiding, not becoming involved. We knew now just how important it was; we knew now just how dangerous you mortals could be. We could not wait for the soldiers. We could not hand Tad over to some farmer or merchant along the road.

  He was ours, and we would send him into the dark in the proper way—in the way they had sent his father, in the way they would send his mother.

  We left the road; we left the oracle still watching us warily.

  We walked together over the hills, over ground that was so colorful, even on this night. It was black, yes, but also blue and purple and silver and deepest green. It shimmered with all the colors that there were. I didn’t know what we would find at the top of each rise; I didn’t know how the slope would bend, and I felt the rightness of that, the not knowing.

  A few hills away from the road, we stopped and stood in our half circle, watching the clouds, watching the colorful hills. The shadows danced beneath my sisters’ eyes. Their skin glowed as the boy’s did, bloodless in Serena’s arms.

  It was an easy thing, to call the fire up. It was as easy as calling our cooking fire in our island house. The flames spat and swam, eager, alive. They would not jump the pit we had given them, but they wanted to. They wanted to eat the world up. They wanted to gobble the sky.

  It was hard to give the boy to them. I don’t know if Serena ever could have. She was holding him so tightly, and her cheek was on his hair. I went over next to her; I touched her arm.

  “We must let him go,” I said, trying to convince myself that it was a possible thing to do.

  She looked up at me; there was wildness in her gaze. I blinked, and I remembered another pair of flashing eyes; as my sister spoke, I remembered another beautiful, terrible question, in another harsh voice. “How can you, Chloe?” Serena said. “How can you let him be dead? How can you give him up? He’s only a little boy.”

  I didn’t know. Not how I would stand when it was done or continue down the road. I didn’t know how I would breathe after this, but I knew that I wo
uld. The boy had died, as his mother had died, and we would go on and on.

  I said, “There’s nothing else to do, Serena. Do you want to go back to that colorless place?”

  My sister looked away. She said, so low, “You don’t understand. You’ve never understood. You’ve never loved them like we have.”

  “Serena,” Xinot said, behind us, “you don’t mean what you say.”

  “She never has! Not Monster, not any of them. She’s never cared for anything but her own comfortable existence.”

  “Is our existence comfortable?” Xinot said. “I didn’t know.”

  Serena was rocking and rocking now, bending over the boy. “You know what I mean. You said it too. She’s too young to understand things. She’s too young to love like we do.”

  I told them, “I loved Monster.”

  Serena shook her head.

  “I did. Xinot said something once, about me spinning that thread, the one that would have ended it all then. I thought she was wrong, but now I know that she was right. I was angry after I stopped her from cutting it because a part of me had wanted her to. I couldn’t admit that; it terrified me.

  “And I loved Aglaia, before either of you did. I couldn’t admit that, either—did that make me young? But I know now that I loved her, so maybe I am less young than I was.”

  “You?” Xinot’s voice floated between us, a dark spark. “You will never grow up, Chloe, and Serena will never grow old.”

  “And you will never be young,” I said. “Yes, I know.” I thought of the prayers that my girls send me, filled with passion and longing, and I knew that I was wrong, and Serena was wrong. Love doesn’t leave us young ones alone.

  After all, I recognized my sister’s anger; I recognized it because it was mine—the need to lash out, to blame someone. I had done that so many times, not wanting to accept what was. I had done it to my sisters, and to Hesper, and even to the oracle. It was hard to accept this now—that the boy was dead, and his mother was dead, and there was nothing to be done. Oh, it would be easy to rant and rave. It would be easy to scream, to rage, to turn our backs on our calling. But we had done that, and nothing had changed.

  There was a chill wind blowing; it threw my hair about, and I looked up, to where the clouds were blowing too, and the stars were coming out. How were you supposed to keep on going? It was what Aglaia had wanted to know, when the world had given her pain: what there was left to live for now.

  My sisters and I were motionless, watching the clearing sky. There had been no clouds in that colorless place, and no wind, and no stars. So we had never once seen the dark opening like this, or felt this murmur on our skin, or heard this twinkling song.

  It was just a faint hum, a small trickle like a brook along smooth rocks. The stars are so far away, we can only ever hear them on a night like this one—when there is no moon, and the clouds are gone, and the wind is dying down; when it seems the whole world is cool and still and every bird is sleeping. Then, if we listen, if we do not even breathe, we might hear their voices, a shimmering drizzle of sound.

  We listened. We tried not to breathe. We had heard this song, oh so many times, out along the edge of our sea. We had known it so well as belonging to the stars that when we heard it in another voice, in another place, we hadn’t recognized it.

  It was a small tune, a hum of violets dripping with rain, of rich dark soil, ready for tilling. It was a song from the middle of life, where each waking and each sunset is fulfillment. One such day, this song said, might be reason enough for a life.

  It was the song Aglaia had been singing when we had paused outside the door to her room. It was the song we had heard as she pushed the baby Tad into the world. Then it had been joyful, and now it was so quiet and so soft—there was a sadness in it, but I did not want it to stop. It cradled me, even as it made the tears come. It wasn’t broken; it was overflowing, like Aglaia’s face had been, looking at her son.

  We listened. We let our hair drift in the cold air, and we felt our magic everywhere, and we listened to the stars singing our friend’s song.

  When they were done, I turned to my sisters, still letting the tears fall.

  Xinot was hunched, twisted away; her cloak hid what was on her face.

  But I could see that Serena was crying too, as she had cried before out in that hallway, when she had told me that it was always a miracle for there to be beautiful things.

  I held her gaze so she could see the starlight striking patterns all down my cheeks. I reached out my arms for the child, and she kept him one moment, one moment more. Then she gave him to me, and somehow, still hearing the echo of Aglaia’s song, I let him fall out of my hands and into the fire.

  We watched him burn.

  He was so small, and our fire was so hot. It ate his spilled blood first, and Hesper’s lad’s tunic, and his bright hair. It nibbled at his toes. It poured down his throat to his lungs. Bits of him wisped away, as strands of a thread. His thread would have wisped like that in Xinot’s right-hand pocket, after the oracle stabbed him.

  We watched until there was nothing left but fire and wisp and ash.

  As we turned away at last, the sun was just beginning to rise, and he touched the edges of my tears with pale fingers, but he did not speak. He had loved the boy, with his golden hair, with his sea-green eyes. He had loved Aglaia, and he wept as well to see that her boy had died.

  Yes, that morning, as the sun came up, he wept.

  He still rose, though, and when our Tad was gone away into that place we cannot touch, we left him there and we went south, toward the sea again.

  We left the fire burning. It would burn much longer than a fire should. A mortal might see it and fear it—and it will be good if you do. It is a fearful thing, with a terrible hunger.

  It was late afternoon when we came at last to our island today. It had been so long. It had been a lifetime, and more, since we had smelled our sea, and it was sweeter than honeycomb and sharper than aged cheese.

  Our rocks stretched, beautiful, out into the waves. The sandy cliffs were a faint brown line, and the surf that broke on them sent up a smidge of spray. I squinted out into the gray and blue, feeling the world sweep through me, warming me like a wondrous wine. As my sisters and I climbed from our rocky way, my friend was tossing his light, so that as the spray danced and somersaulted, it was dazzling bright.

  Inside our house, Xinot called the fire pit into existence with a quick word. We looked about at our shelves of thread, untoppled, safe on our island. We could imagine ourselves surrounded by piles of coins, they looked so precious in the firelight. It was as though we had never left. It was as though the crisis had never come.

  We stood in silence, blinded by them, watching the light slide along their lengths, onto our skin. When Xinot began to hum, I did not notice at first, it was so soft and melting. But then the notes must have gotten inside, edged themselves between my bones, because my fingers began to itch, as they hadn’t done in weeks, and my blood began to stir.

  I saw Serena’s eyes light up as she heard this tune. She joined in; she stretched the melody out, and it flitted and spun; it flipped and shimmered long. While they hummed, my sisters watched me. They were waiting. They were asking if I was ready yet.

  I didn’t answer them. I didn’t join in, either, but I went to the door where I had left my packs. I undid the strap I hadn’t touched since we had left the boy’s fire burning on that hill.

  We have to believe in it, you know. We have to become it—the spinning and the drawing out and the slicing, the hidden pattern, the question that comes from the dark. When we fall fully into it, we become one another, the hands that pass the thread, connecting us to the others, beginning to middle to end.

  I hadn’t the single-minded devotion of that oracle, not anymore. But I was still Chloe, the quickest, the loveliest, and when my pack fell open, there our glory shone.

  My sisters pulled over our stump and chair and stool, and I let Xinot’s music wrap me rou
nd. I added my voice, a quick, sharp counterpoint. I took up my spindle, and Xinot drew out her scissors. I reached down into my wool and pulled out the first strand, listening to what it wanted to be. There was pain and sadness; there was death in this wool. But I took nothing out and I added nothing in. I passed the thread to Serena, and she measured it, long and shining, and Xinot’s shears were shears again. Somewhere on this world, a mortal was born, and it would not live forever.

  We stopped; the knowledge that it would not live forever sliced us like a jagged rock, like a sharp blade. But as we stopped, as that mortal was born, we felt something waking beneath our tune. It was dark, and it was beautiful. We turned our faces to the newly coiled thread, and we saw it dancing there, our shadow.

  Light and dark, day and night: The shine of that thread and our magic spun and shimmied, intertwined. Oh, it hurt to watch, like too much knowledge hurts, like never being able to sleep.

  But that dance was sliding underneath our skin, as a haunting tune had, long ago, as the eyes of a girl had, as the scrunchy face of her son—and it did not matter if the darkness and the mortals were at odds. They were both inside of us, hard and fiery, both tearing at the place where we would keep a soul. And even though it hurt, so that we could hardly breathe, we didn’t falter, and we didn’t shudder—we spun, and we measured, and we sliced with one will, and the world whirled beautifully.

  When night fell, we left our work to go out to the stars and the sea. We stood there together, conversing with our magic, listening to the prayers of the day. Xinot listened to the muttering of crones, Serena to mothers’ pleas.

  I watched the clouds billow and my half-moon gleam. I breathed in deep, and I closed my eyes to hear the praying of my girls. I felt our darkness churning along the wind, weaving with their words.

  There had been another night, when Serena hadn’t noticed that our darkness was swirling in a strangely deliberate way. Aglaia had been sleeping in the house at our backs, and I had been so sure that I could take her out and drown her the next day, and nothing would stop me.