The Shadow Behind the Stars (15 page)

Still, as we weren't allowed to read Aglaia's thread for her, this was the next best thing. Xinot flicked her wrist, and the bleached bits tumbled across the wood floor between us.

They scattered, a little one landing a finger's width from Serena's heel, a rib bone pointing its ridge toward Aglaia's right eye.

I bent forward, my hair across my face. Serena clasped her hands on her knees, and Xinot crouched as crookedly as ever, her cane laid behind her, a small smile twitching.

“Well?” Aglaia said, and we all three hushed her.

A swimming bird
, Xinot said.

A flying fish
, said Serena.

I scrunched my eyes; the bones wavered in the dim sunlight, between my strands of hair. The shadows crept, and crept; a murky finger traced along my cheekbone.

I felt a horror.

I said,
Something has gone devastatingly wrong
.

A burning sea
, Xinot said.

A frozen fire
, said Serena.

I said,
There is an end to patterns. All the threads are coming loose.

The bones rattled on the floor, though no one touched them. The room flashed dark, and my eyes and the eyes of my sisters rolled back in our heads. We said, as one,
We will be to blame.

Then it was gone.

I was breathing fast, hard. My neck was slick with sweat. We looked about at one another. I held Xinot's gaze, and she shook her head. “Not now,” she said. “Not for a while yet.”

“It might not happen,” Serena said.

Xinot's fingers flicked. “It might not.”

Aglaia said, “What did that mean?”

“A good question,” I said. “Any ideas?”

But Xinot was still shaking her head. She reached out to gather her bones, and she dropped them back into her pocket;
I heard that clattering as they settled against her shears. “I have been casting these bones over and over again. Always they tell me a similar tale, of impossible things, of catastrophe. I don't know what it means.”

“They're only fish bones,” I said. “You cannot trust them.”

She looked at me, without a smile. “Chloe, you felt what I felt. Are you going to tell me it was not true?”

I looked away.

Serena said again, softly, “It might not happen. Prophecies do not always come true.”

“It might not,” Xinot repeated, but not as though she believed it.

Aglaia was frowning, watching us. “It has nothing to do with me or my baby, though?”

Xinot said, “We don't know. It might.”

Aglaia said, “But you haven't any idea what it would mean for us?”

“No.”

Aglaia pushed to her feet, stepping out of our circle. She turned her back on us; she went over to the window and poked one finger through the shutters to peek at the crowd in the street. “They love me,” she said.

We were silent.

“They came out to see me, all along the road. They wanted to touch my hand; they wanted to tell me how happy they were that I had survived after all. They wanted to wish me joy.” Her hand fell back to her side and the shutters closed, but she did not turn from them. “Joy,” she said.

I wrapped my arms around my knees; I held my face against my skirt. There had been no
joy
in the oracle's fortune.

“Why did you follow me?” Aglaia asked us again.

Now Serena tried to answer. “Yours is a powerful path, Aglaia. We are drawn to such paths; we wanted to see it to its end.”

I shook my head against my skirt, but I doubt any of them saw. She was right. I knew that she was right about Aglaia's path, about us being drawn. There was something missing, though, and my throat was caught again, with that thing that made it impossible to speak.

I wouldn't have known what I wanted to say anyway.

In the silence, we could hear the murmur of the crowd rising excitedly. I lifted my head. Aglaia was peeking through the shutters again. Xinot had moved to a chair near the empty fireplace; she was staring into its depths. Serena had her face turned up toward the girl.

A clattering, not like Xinot's bones—harsher, louder. Many horses, coming toward the inn. I got to my feet and went over next to Aglaia. She twisted her summer-sea eyes toward me and moved over to make room. We peered out through the shutters together.

The crowd was moving to either side of the street. At first we couldn't see anything arriving; we only heard the clattering getting harsher, getting louder, and then they came stomping in, a whole troop of them. Horses with gleaming flanks, soldiers in glinting armor and colorful tunics. At the front was an unarmored man on a golden stallion, leading a
pretty white mare. His hair was as bright as his horse's mane. He sat tall and smiled about at the crowd with flashing teeth.

I knew who this was; I knew what lay behind that golden smile, and I hated him. My hair was beginning to drift, sliding through the shutters as though it would have liked to reach out and strangle him where he sat. It had that power, you know. If I'd been allowed to take lives, I could have set him on fire with one word and then watched as he burned away to ash.

Next to me, Aglaia's breathing had changed. The shutters were rattling, only just a bit as she trembled. Then something hardened in her face, and they stopped.

I said, watching her, “You don't have to go with him. No one will make you.”

She said, “Yes, Chloe, I do,” and for a moment it was as though we were back in the boat, the way she said my name, the way there wasn't any anger in her voice.

If she hadn't said it in that way, I wouldn't have offered. “I could go with you.”

She looked at me, and for an instant I thought she might say yes. Then she backed away from the window, and from me. She dropped her hand to her side; she smoothed her skirt. She stood straight, and determined, and as tall as that man. Even in this dim room, her loveliness stunned. Xinot turned from the fireplace; Serena got to her feet.

We all watched as Aglaia pulled her head up high, as she said, without any trace now of familiarity, “No, you mustn't follow me. There isn't any way for you to help. We've determined
that. I must go alone and do it myself. It's my path, after all.” And, flat, with maybe a slight bitter twist, “My destiny.”

She took a breath; it filled her up and set her toward the door. She left us there to go down through the inn and out into the street, where Endymion and all his people were waiting.

WE WATCHED THAT FIRST MEETING
from the window, silent shadows in a row, peering through the shutters.

The crowd quieted as the girl came out of the inn. She stopped at the bottom of the steps; she made a bow to Endymion. He smiled at her. It was a beautiful smile, and there was no fear in it. He didn't know that she knew. For him, this was the ending he had always believed he deserved.

As Aglaia walked up next to him, she smiled back, and it was as beautiful as his. He said something to her; she laughed, and if I hadn't seen her trembling beside me at this window only minutes earlier, I might have believed it too. There were answering smiles all through the crowd. Some of the women were holding their hands to their mouths or chests, tearing up.

He offered her the pretty white mare. One of his men
dismounted to help her climb up; she took his hand but kept her eyes always on the prince. When she had settled onto the mare's back, Endymion leaned close to her, and closer, and then, there in front of all his people, he was kissing her, and she did not flinch or wrinkle her nose or claw out his eyes. I don't know how, but she kissed him back and smiled again when he leaned away.

They turned and rode up the street together, and the crowd strewed flowers all along their way.

Some time after they had gone, an old woman, back bent, hunched over her cane, came up to our room and walked in on us without knocking.

Our cloaks were still puddled on the floor before the fireplace. We hadn't yet managed to leave the window, to turn away from where the girl had gone. The daylight was fading and lamps were being lit; we could still hear the stir of happy gossip in the crowd, which was only now beginning to disperse.

We looked toward the woman, and she crinkled her face at us. She said, “You gave my boy a fright.”

We blinked, remembering. The boy in the kitchen, the one who had tried to stop us from coming into the inn.

Serena said, calm and sweet, “Please accept our apologies—”

“Don't worry yourself, mother,” the woman said.

My sister lost the rest of her words.

“The lad will live. He's seen stranger things in my inn.”

I peered at the woman, sniffing for traces of the scent that had clung to the oracle's cave, the scent I hadn't taken the time to search for until I'd made a fool of myself. There was nothing, only dry old skin and soap.

She pointed her nose at me. “Checking me over, maidy? I'm not a ghost or a ghoulie, just an old mortal with eyes to see.” She opened them wide at me, and they were filmy, their lights already fading.

Xinot said, “Innkeeper, we will be needing a room.”

The woman said, “Have you coin?”

“Of course,” said Xinot.

She shrugged. “Then have this one, if you like. How long will you be staying?”

“You needn't fear,” said Xinot. “We bring no troubles for you.”

There was a silence. The woman chuckled. “You think that I am feared of you, crone?”

Serena murmured, “Most people are.”

“I am not feared of powerless things.”

The silence now was thick. Aglaia's last glance, the one when she had almost let me come with her, flashed before me. She had gone down to him alone; she had kissed him. She was with him now, and I hadn't strangled him, and I hadn't burned him to bits.

I said,
Watch yourself, old one.

“Oh, you don't like that,” the woman said. “You've been dabbling in little truths for ages; I would think you'd be immune to the things.”

Little truths?
I said.
Dabbling?

“Chloe,” said Serena.

“Who's the mistress here?” the woman said. “Yours are the
spinning fingers, maidy, but who shears you the wool?”

Serena was holding me back now from crossing the room to this upstart. If she thought her age would grant her leniency, she was in for a rude surprise. I cared not how many summers she had seen. I'd been around before the seasons started.

My
spinning fingers
were itching for a spell, one not nearly as mild as Serena's memory trick. “Let me go,” I spat.

She whispered back, “Chloe, she doesn't know what she is saying.”

The old woman was watching us patiently, leaning onto her cane. “Oh, I don't doubt that you have to power to kill me, little girl. With the tip of one fingernail, I'm sure. With one scratch on my withered face.

“Tell me this, though. You came to see that girl, the one Endymion is going to marry. You talked with her; you sat with her before the fire.” She gestured at our discarded cloaks. “Then she went away, and you didn't follow. Maybe, whatever your task here is, it's finished. So why did you ask me for a room?”

Xinot said, “That is nothing to do with you.”

The woman shrugged again. “No, but I'm old, and I don't mind being bothersome. The city is beside itself with joy, you know. Our prince, his destined bride.” Her eyebrows went up. “Isn't she?”

Serena's hand
was slackening on my arm, but I was frozen where I stood. This woman, without even a name, without beauty or clear sight—she was all I could see, all I could hear.

“She didn't say much to me,” the woman went on. “I doubt she says much to anyone. She smiled, but I know the difference between a smile and happiness. I couldn't see it very well, the way she must have held her head up high, the excited flutter of her fingers as she talked with me and my boy of our prince. But I could hear the way she labored for breath in between her words. I could feel the hitch at the ends of her sentences, so slight, just a nervous habit maybe, except what does she have to be nervous about? Not our destined princess, not as she goes to meet her fate.”