The Shadow Behind the Stars (13 page)

“I will tell you,” she said, and she was offhand, looking somewhere over my head. “There is no reason not to. The girl isn't around to object.”

She hadn't heard the rumors, then. Out in her cave, she'd be the one person in the land, maybe, who didn't know that Aglaia had lived through the raid, that she was on her way to destiny.

She said, “You are right. I gave the child three words. The first was
beauty
. The second was
clarity
.”

She paused so long that I said, with something of a snarl, “The third word, oracle.”

She did not want to say it, but she did. “The third word, stranger, that I gave the girl was
pain
.”

Pain.
Pain.
Aglaia's final word, the thing that shaped her life—not just today, not just tomorrow, but the whole bright thread of the girl's long life. Beauty, clarity, and
pain
.

I did not want to believe it. I would not believe it.

Was this how it felt to be a mortal, bound to a path and unable to change it? Was this the same ridiculous refusal of acceptance that drove men and women to our doorstep, begging us to spin them a new thread? I had thought such mortals sad and insolent and slightly crazed. But my refusal was not sadness or insanity. I was simply making a clear and knowledgeable choice that the world must not be the way it was.

Who was this woman, anyway, to say this was how the world was?

“Why would you give a child a prophecy like that?” I was almost hissing, it was so low. “What could possess you?”

The oracle drew upright, her hands against her knees. “I am only the voice,” she said, sure and proud. Her eyes were deep as the corners of her cave. “I listen to the darkness, and I feel it moving through me. I could no more alter its meaning than I could change my own fate. I am the instrument, and it is the hand that sweeps along my strings.”

I laughed, though there was no joy in it, and the oracle glanced at me with surprise, straight into my face. I turned from her. I steadied my breathing; I pulled my hood lower, forcing the power to drip out of my voice back into the dark. I said, “Except for this one girl, you give the children of these villages each the same prediction, though they could not possibly all live long and happy lives.”

“Not all,” said the oracle. She was angry, but there was a brush now of wariness to her. I should not have laughed.

“Some are
given long and happy lives, as you say,” she went on. “Others are not so lucky. I do not conceal the darker fates.”

I said, impatient, “You add enough variation that the villagers keep coming back. If you gave them all exactly the same words, they would not look to you for their prophecies, for they could not pretend then that you were not a fraud.”

“I am not a fraud!”

“How much do they pay you for your services? Do you give the better fates to the ones with the larger money bags?”

She stood, her chin high and her eyes flashing, and she thought that she could intimidate me. I should have stepped back from her; I should have cowered. My anger was rising again, though. This woman made a game of forces she could not understand. She earned a living by the worst sort of falsehood—she demeaned the glory of our threads.

I said, only just managing to keep from throwing back my hood, letting my hair fall loose and my voice shine dark, “It is a dangerous game you play. There are those who might object to it, those who have the means to make their objections known.”

She wanted to throw me from her cave. She wanted to call down some toothless curses on me, some little rhymes that would have scared her villagers half to death. She was as in love with the power as I was—only mine was real.

Something held her back, though. I wasn't ordinary enough, even with my old gray cloak. There was an edge to me she hadn't encountered before.

She said, still angry but keeping herself in check, “Who are you? I've never seen you in these parts.”

I almost laughed again. Who did she think I was? Surely not the youngest of my sisters. Perhaps a rich lady or a princess even, come to seek a fortune but wanting to be sure she was legitimate? That would explain why she had given me the word so easily. I drew back, toward the tunnel. “It doesn't make any difference who I am.”

But she was following me now, trying to peer beneath my hood. I turned my face away.

“If you mean to stir up trouble for me, it won't work. I've been giving out prophecies for many years, longer than most of my villagers can remember. They won't believe you if you speak against me, no matter who you are.”

“I didn't come to stir up trouble.”

“No? Why did you come, then?”

Now I was sidling farther away, down the tunnel to the entrance. The woman was right. There was no point in staying longer. She had given me the word I wanted; there wasn't anything to be gained by scolding her.

The light would be behind me now, casting my face in deeper shadow. Still she was trying to see me clear, matching me step for step.

“I have what I came for,” I told her. “I will leave you in peace.”

“What?” said the oracle. “You came to heckle me? Or . . . no.” She had stopped, and I stopped too, halted by the sudden understanding in her voice. “You came because of that girl. Aglaia. You're about the same age, too. But you're not her. You can't be.
She died in the raid, along with everyone she knew.”

Pain.
“Did she?” I said, too quiet, too deadly. “If that were true, how would your prophecy be fulfilled? Beauty, yes; she had always been beautiful. And clear sight—no doubt she had that, too. But where, oracle, was the third word? Where in the shape of that girl's village life was the
pain
?”

The oracle had frozen. I scarcely cared. My rage was trickling all through me now, familiar and strong. I let my eyes spark. I let my hood fall back enough that my hair swept out along my cheeks, black and gleaming.

She said, hardly a breath, “You . . .”

It was not possible that she recognized me. Not this charlatan, with her false promises and falser pride. She would not know her own fate if it tapped her on the shoulder.

Somehow, though, I had gotten her wrong. She did know me. As she stood there, breathless, bracing herself against the tunnel wall, there was the same awe in her face as had been in the mortals who had known us all those centuries ago.

I pulled my hood down low again. I backed away from her.

“Mistress,” she said, reaching a hand in my direction. “Please. Wait.”

I paused, not speaking, not moving toward her.

She stood straight again. She was not lacking in courage, then. Only integrity. “I was not lying about the girl's prophecy,” she said.

I waited, huddled in my cloak.

“It is true that most of my predictions are not . . . specifically
tailored for each baby. I always ask the darkness for the child's future, but hardly ever am I given an answer. Sometimes, though. I am not the fraud you think; I have heard the voice of your power murmuring in my cave. First, when I was a little girl, it told me this was to be my path, that I was to dedicate myself to it. And then, on and off again, throughout the years. They are not usually joyful predictions, the ones given to me to share. At least when I do shape my own, they are reassuring, or touchstones through difficulties.

“I would not . . . I never would give a child a prophecy of pain. Not unless I had no choice. Not unless the mystery I serve demanded it of me.”

She was silent then. I didn't want to believe her. It would have been easy to walk away, dismissing her words as just another lie.

As she spoke, though, I had felt the darkness in the room beyond swirling, thickening. I knew its scent. I should have known it the moment I entered the cave. I should have recognized this brush along my cheek, the way its power flowing through my lungs gave me such energy, made me face down this woman with such fury. I didn't understand it. What could have kept me from knowing the touch of my own magic?

The oracle said, “If you tell me to leave my work and never return, I will. Only know, mistress, that I have never betrayed a true prophecy, and I have never sought to use my position to harm anyone.”

I closed my eyes against her. For whatever reason, the darkness loved this one. It was creeping along her arms,
burrowing into her hair. “No,” I said, and I didn't bother to take the edge from my voice anymore. “I would not ask that of you. I haven't . . . I haven't the right, in any case, to take you from your path.”

She let out her breath, soft.

“Thank you,” I said, though the words tasted sour. “For your help.”

She nodded, and then I did turn away. I left her behind with her terrible truths, throwing myself to the warm summer arms of the sun.

It wasn't a fake prophecy; it was a true one. It hadn't been this woman's fault, but the fault of our own darkness, and the path we had given Aglaia was even more horrible than I had imagined.

I did not let myself think as I rushed from the cave, as I hurried back to the road where I had left my sisters and then on, to the east, across hill after hill. I wanted only to be with them again. I wanted only to take out my wool and my spindle, to sit with them beneath some tree, to forget the third word, the oracle's truth, the bright, burning eyes of Aglaia. I wanted only to shed this knowledge as a dripping cloak, to diminish into the Chloe that I knew, untroubled, the surest of us.

I did not think, so I did not realize I had reached it until I was stepping past the leaning walls of her village, down her streets. Then I saw, and I stopped, and I dropped my bags and stood there. There wasn't a spell my sister could have cast to take away this pain.

There was not even a word for what was left of Aglaia's village.

Ruin. Desolation. Tragedy.

They are thin, insufficient things, words. They conjure abstractions, not actualities. They speak in the present, not of the past that drifted like a song through the tumbled stones and scattered pieces of this world—the grubby shirt left spread across a stump, maybe to dry; the bucket lying beside a well, grass inching up and around; the earthen bowls still stacked high, now displayed for the world to see, their cupboard door clinging to a lone hinge.

It hadn't been long enough for this place not to feel as though its inhabitants might come back any day. They might come walking up that path through the overgrown pear and fig orchards, chattering, and fall silent one by one as they saw the dirtiness, the brokenness awaiting them.
So much work,
they would say to one another.
It will take so long to set this to rights.

See, but they would do it; they would set it to rights, building new walls and attaching cupboards, shaking out that shirt with a grimace and filling that bucket with fresh, clean water. It would be work, but they would do it. This village was waiting for them; any day now, they might arrive.

My sisters stood in the center of the village, where the paths met, where there might have been stories in the evening and the children would have gathered to play their games. They were not speaking; they did not acknowledge me as I came up next to them, dragging my packs, dragging my feet as well.

Of course we had heard of this before, of entire villages disappearing, their every citizen dead, gone, all
snapping
off at once.

It was different not only because we were here, but because we saw it through her eyes. It was different because it belonged to her.

“She will find whoever did this,” Serena said, and I had never heard her voice so sure and heated. “She will find them, and she will kill them.”

“Yes,” said Xinot. “Of course she will.”

Endymion.
I could not say a thing.

We stood, for hours it seemed, unable to move or stop staring. “What did you see from your hill, Chloe?” Serena asked after several eternities. “Could you catch a glimpse of our sea?”

I opened my mouth to lie to her, then closed it again. She was already crying, though she smiled at me through the tears. Surely there could be no protecting her, not after she had seen this. It was too horrible, too broken, too
real
. She and Xinot would know the third word even if I never told them. They would understand the thing that shaped Aglaia's path.

“We must keep on,” I said at last. “She will be far ahead of us now. I will tell you everything along the way.”