The Shadow Behind the Stars (10 page)

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.

I didn't say anything. Maybe they wished to forget themselves in their work, to think of anything but the way Monster's eyes had closed and his frame had shuddered as he went. I couldn't blame them for that. I took up my usual spot, and soon my spindle was whirring.

Almost right away I knew that something was wrong.

As I passed the start of our thread to Serena, I noticed the first of the signs—her fingers curled just a tad differently than usual, just a smidgen less elegantly, so that as she pulled the thread across her palm, it grated. Not as a rough spoon against a pan; not as a harsh crow call in the morning. As a grain of sand in a lump of butter, maybe, or a tiny speck in a bowl of pure cream.

But this was already much worse than Serena's tense silence on the mainland. This was enough to slow the thread down. I spun at my usual speed—I know no other. And Serena took the thread almost as quickly, almost as smoothly. But not quite. Instead of clarity and ease, I felt a strange tightness growing in my hands. I ignored it. I kept on with my work; I tried to slow the spindle, without any success. Serena passed
the thread and marked the place for Xinot's scissors.

I heard the blades opening. My spinning stopped. I looked over at my sisters, jolted out of my work by a sudden dread. Xinot's blades did not sound like that. They were not supposed to
scream
as they opened.

Xinot was glowering at the thread, as though she hated it, as though she blamed it for something. Serena's face was expressionless, as if all her joy in our work had been extinguished. She was still handing the thread to Xinot, marking it with her nails. It was wrong, the place she'd marked. I could feel the thread twisting and shivering, and I could smell it smoldering, red-hot in its wrongness.

It was not a death. I could not think to know precisely which, but it was much too short or much too long—either way, disaster; either way, a world's end.

I could not move. I could only watch as this angered Xinot took the thread, as her scissors straddled the place the joyless Serena had marked. She would know better. That was surely why I was pausing so long. I was certain that my eldest sister would be able to feel the wrongness too. But there was nothing stopping her for several long heartbeats—nothing until I gave a great gasp and threw myself toward her.

I snatched the thread away. Her scissors
snapped
on empty air.

We stared at one another. Serena blinked, and a bit of light came back into her face. The fury on Xinot's faded just a shade.

In the calm, we knew how close we had come to something
terrible. The darkness was swirling all about us; we could taste our magic, as we can on starlit nights. It was filling us up, so that our fingers buzzed with its mystery. Our eyes shone, in fear.

The darkness does not speak to us in words. There are some human oracles who claim to hear its voice. Perhaps they do, or perhaps they interpret the sensations of the dark, translate its deeper stirrings into human speech. We need no such translation. Our magic was warning us. It was telling us that the balance of the world had nearly tipped, and that it would have been our fault.

It was pouring horror into us. It was showing us the whole tangled web of its power, as though we did not already know its shape and complexity. It was reminding us of our purpose, and we were remembering our love of it, how unthinkable it would be to unravel one strand of its maze.

I dropped the thread, and it coiled back onto my spindle. The darkness drifted away.

“Chloe,” Serena said at last. I did not look at her. I was shaking. “I am sorry,” she said. “I could not help it. It was our magic that took him away.” She sounded lost, but I could not comfort her.

I didn't care how upset they were. Nothing excused putting at risk everything we loved. How could they? It was too precious; it was too beautiful; it was too
alive
.

“Just a cat,” I said after a moment, and I could not keep my voice calm. I could not keep the tears away, and I hoped my sisters realized they were tears of rage—that I wasn't like
them, that I could never be as weak as them. “He was just a
stupid
cat.”

No, I wouldn't think of him. I wouldn't remember his fur beneath my fingers or the sweetness of his voice.

Xinot said, into the tight, hard silence, “We will not work today.”

It was practical. It could have been nothing more than an assurance that we would not mess it up again. But her words had been harsher than that, with more of a snarl. She had heard our magic as clearly as I had, and she had felt it urging us to accept the rightness of our threads. Xinot was saying that at least for today she would do no such thing.

The wisest, the darkest of my sisters, refusing to accept death. And the kindest, the most comforting of them, asking me for understanding. My horror had not left with the darkness. They were turning their backs on our magic, so I turned my back to them, and I left the house and the island to take our boat out alone as far as I could go. I did not answer when the sun spoke my name; I did not look into the waves to see what deep creatures might be somersaulting. I only rowed as hard as I could, and the tears fell hot along my cheeks, and I hated my sisters, that day, for what they had almost betrayed.

We did no work that day, nor all that night. We picked up the threads again the next morning, and Serena's face was calm and bright, and Xinot's fury had melted away—but for small glowing embers still deep in her eyes, perhaps. It was not enough, anyway, to cause more problems. We spun
and measured and
sliced
, smooth and clear and precise. We hummed some dreadful ditties, and we became ourselves and one another and the thread. I do not know what my sisters did on that day we did no work. We never spoke of it, and we did not ever speak of Monster again.

WE CLIMBED OUR ROCKY PATH
slowly, one by one. It was slick from the rain, but we did not fear that. Serena went first, to pick out the way, then Xinot, and I came last, watching to catch my eldest sister in case she should stumble.

She didn't. She moved deliberately, choosing each step, but then hopped and climbed as fearlessly as Monster had used to do, using her cane as deftly as if it were a third leg. She lifted her face to the spray from time to time, and I thought I saw her smiling into it.