The Shadow Behind the Stars

by Rebecca Hahn

  Endymion.

  I hadn’t told my sisters about him, but Endymion was a hero to his people; soon enough we knew all the tales. We learned how he had fought a dragon and pierced its flaming heart. How he had led his soldiers into battle, again and again, helmetless so that his locks flew back in the wind and his war cry echoed against the sky—how he inspired such fear in his enemies and such loyalty in his men, numbers of soldiers did not matter, only courage, only bloodlust. How he had sailed across the sea and come back with a gleaming crown set with jewels never seen and the head of a giant whose eyes opened wider than cart wheels.

  He was a myth already, and he was still a young man.

  The people we met were sure that Aglaia was headed toward Endymion’s city. He ruled them from there; he was prince over all the land we traveled through. And he was loved. The people’s faces glowed when they talked of him. He had brought peace and prosperity to his land.

  We had been told, the second night of our travels, that it would be a six days’ journey to Endymion’s city; as we grew closer, it seemed that the rumors of Aglaia and this prince became more precise by the hour—and more joyful.

  “She has come to marry him,” a miller’s wife told us as she passed with a wagon filled with bags of flour. “She was glowing with her gladness.”

  A wheelwright standing in the sun outside his shop confirmed it. “There is to be a wedding. He thought her dead. We all did.”

  “Was he happy to know that she lived?” Serena asked. I could not stand the hope in her voice.

  “Happy?” The wheelwright turned an unbelieving face toward her. “It is the best thing in his life.”

  He loves her, they said. She loves him. Again and again, everywhere we went. The hero was to marry his love; the beauty was to marry her prince. The whole land was to celebrate.

  “It is too bad,” I said once to a girl who was walking her geese alongside us, “that the lady’s family is not alive to see her married.”

  “Oh,” she said, “but it is a miracle that she survived. That is what she says. A miracle that she lives to be wed.”

  So, not a whiff of grief was to darken Aglaia’s wedding. Not a hint of trouble to worry her bridegroom—who was also the father of her child, I was certain. This prince was not used to refusal.

  I could see the moment my sisters began to believe in Endymion’s glory. I saw how they walked with lighter steps, how they breathed freer and smiled at the people we met. They thought the girl was on her way to destiny. Not one that shrieked and shattered, but something full and beautiful, the nicest sort of end.

  I let them believe it; I had to, didn’t I? I couldn’t expose them to the twistedness, the rot I had smelled on Endymion’s thread. I had to keep it from them for as long as I could and hope that Aglaia’s future would be happier than her past, that this journey would end with us seeing the girl settled into as contented a life as my sisters dreamed.

  It was all I could do: stay silent as we heard the stories of this brave young prince and the things they were saying about Aglaia—Lucky girl. He always loved her. Now she’ll have a chance to be happy!—and pray that my sisters wouldn’t notice the darker underbelly hidden on the flip side of these green leaves.

  Nine

  A DAY BEFORE WE WERE to reach the city, the scent of Aglaia’s thread veered off to the east. We stood at the crossroads, smelling it. We knew the way to Endymion lay straight ahead. When a woman came by with a basket of freshly picked flowers, we asked where Aglaia’s road would lead us, if we were to take it.

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Just a few villages, some fields. If you’re looking for the city, it’s on ahead.” She pointed in the direction we had been heading.

  “Nothing else?” I said. “Only fields and villages?”

  “Well . . .” She thought, and then she said, “I suppose, a good day’s walking, there’s also that sad ruin. The village where our Aglaia used to live, the one who’s to marry our prince. Nothing’s left of that, though. There’s no reason to visit.”

  We thanked her, and we let her go her way, and then we turned east.

  That night I asked our innkeeper a few pointed questions when I went down from our room to fetch some food. Yes, Aglaia had passed through here only the day before. Yes, her old village lay to the east; we’d reach it late tomorrow morning if we set out early enough.

  Yes, he could tell me where the oracle lived who had given the children of that town their prophecies. She was the same oracle he had asked prophecies of for his own children. His round face brightened, and he began to tell me what those were, how they had been promised contented lives, luck, lots of love.

  I cut him off; I think he was offended. But I could not stand his naïveté, and after I’d grabbed some bowls of soup, I turned from him and walked away.

  I did not tell my sisters that next day where I was going; I left them as soon as we were out of town. I said there was a place I had heard of, with views to the north and the east. I said that maybe I could catch a glimpse of the sea, or maybe Endymion’s city.

  Serena offered to come along with me; I shrugged her off.

  “The path would be steep for Xinot,” I said, and when my eldest sister snorted, I went on, “Oh, leave me alone, will you? If she can run outside in the middle of the night and we aren’t allowed to follow, I think you can let me climb one hill all by myself!”

  Xinot said, “What’s this about not being allowed to follow?”

  “Oh,” said Serena, “I told her what you said about feeling penned in by all these people.”

  “Penned in!” said Xinot. “I never said that. I sound like a sheep.”

  “Yes, you did. You know you did.” Serena was beginning to look harried, and I grabbed the moment.

  “If Xinot can feel penned in, then so can I!” I said, and started up a nearby hill.

  “Of course you can,” said Serena, hardly paying me attention now. “You can catch us up along the road. Go safe!” And she turned again to smoothing Xinot’s ruffled feathers.

  It wasn’t far. A few hills, around several copses of trees. No crop fields grew near her cave; it was a wild area, with brush and bushes and rocky streams. There was a large, flat stone in the valley just to the south of her place; it was scattered with brass coins and some wilted blue flowers.

  I paused before it. I thought of sweeping them off, these meager offerings. But then I pulled my cloak tighter around me to hide my anger, and I climbed the final slope to the entrance of her cave.

  “Who goes there?” The voice came almost at once, drifting on a chill breeze down the winding passageway.

  I stepped in toward it. One turn, two, and the cave opened out into a large round chamber. I’d no need to blink away the sun; I saw in the dark as well as any owl or lion, and still I could not see all the corners of this room.

  She sat in a sort of chair made of cave rock in the center, her hands placed flat along its rough arms, her feet flat against the earth. Her hair was long, and it hung down free over her shoulders as mine usually does. She must have rushed over to this seat as she heard me entering and positioned herself where she’d seem the most akin to our magic.

  “Who are you?” she said. “What do you seek?”

  Now I saw how a clever jutting of rock hid another tunnel, off to the left. She’d have an actual home in there, with a bed and a place to cook. If the offerings out in the valley were any indication, she lived much better than most dwellers of caves.

  I didn’t come any closer than the end of the entrance tunnel. It was cold here; I didn’t mind that. It reminded me of the wintry days on our island, when the wind scratched and bit. I breathed in this misty place, and I felt my fury at this woman growing.

  “There was a girl,” I said, as calmly as I could manage.

  The oracle tilted her head at me, and I hated its haughtiness. “There are many girls.”

  “You gave her a prophecy.”

  “As I do.”

  “
Not like this one. You gave her three words. The first was beauty. The second was clarity.”

  I stopped, and she said, “Beauty, clarity—a good fortune.” There was no uncertainty in her voice. There was no fear of me, or of what she had done, or of the power she had played with so cavalierly.

  If I had wondered before, I knew now. Any true oracle would have known me on sight.

  “Not the last word,” I said. “It was something that made her parents look at each other with fear.”

  There was silence in the cave. “What does it matter to you?”

  “It matters,” I said. “I will not go until you tell me that third word.”

  “Will you not?” She stood; she came a few steps closer, and she squinted at me. I looked back at her, not straining at all to see the gray hairs on her head, the slight limp as she walked.

  After a long moment, she turned, and she went back to her chair again. She sat tall in it, and her dark dress melted into the stone and earth and cold.

  “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.