by Rebecca Hahn
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.
Eleven
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.
&nbs
p; “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.”
“You think we are blind to this?” Serena said.
“I think,” said the woman, “that you have not walked the mortal realm in many ages, and that there is a reason for that. I think the stories they tell of you are true—that you do your work without a care for its result, that you, who should be the wisest of creatures, don’t even understand your own art.”
I said, finally, snarling at her, shaking off my sister’s arm completely but staying at her side, “Mortal, you are overfull of your few years. You talk to us of understanding—us, who have seen the birth of stars. Us, who measured your life before you knew you existed; us, whose thoughts you could never comprehend. Save your wisdom, old one, for your grandchildren. We’ve no need of it.”
“Have you not?” The woman peered about at us all. “Have you not, indeed?” She shook her head. “You three are no wiser than babes, toddling from wall to wall for the first time. You think because you’ve lived forever, you know what it is to live.
“You”—she gestured to me—“you are youth without potential. You are strength without purpose. Eternal youth is not youth at all—it is frozen time, incapable of learning or growing. Our young people grow in bounds every day, in thought and body and spirit.
“And you,” she said, turning to Serena, “you think you understand what it is to be a mother, a woman in her prime? But you have no yearnings for youthful days gone past, and you have no fear of the shriveling days to come.
“And the oldest of you is the least like us of all.”
“Am I?” said Xinot. Her eyes were dark pebbles; her fingers twitched and twisted. She did not look human, true, but she did look wise, inscrutable, a creature of the night. I had always believed that Xinot knew things Serena and I only guessed at. That there were answers in her to questions the world hadn’t thought to ask.
The old woman blinked at her, as if reconsidering what she was about to say. But then she gave a shake of her head and pointed a finger at Xinot. “You, crone, may be closer to the mysteries than your sisters. But you do not know the mystery of having lived a long life. You have not felt yourself change from day to day. You do not wake in the morning believing that you can run again, as fast as you ever did. You do not taste death in every last bite of food, feel him following as you shuffle about.”
“Do I not?” said Xinot. “Do I not know death as well as you?”
In the silence, we all heard it. A gritty snap, as though a rusty pair of scissors was clanging shut. The old woman didn’t move; I couldn’t see her blink.
Then she drew in one long, shuddering breath. “You have seen much, all of you,” she said. “But you will never understand what it is to live, to grow, to die. You will never understand the uncountable, priceless moments that make up those threads that you so casually spin, that toss us here and there with no thought for what’s kind or what’s fair. We are nothing to you.” Then, low, “And you are nothing to us.”
It was only what we had heard a dozen times in stories along the road: that we were separate from mortals; that we did not care. And it was true enough. There was no reason to lose my breath, hearing it again; there was no reason to hate this woman so.
Serena said, and there was such a bitterness in her voice, “What is it to you, then? Why should it matter what we know about Aglaia or about living, how wise or how ignorant we may be?”
“It doesn’t,” the woman said. “Not in any practical way. It’s only that she’s just gone off with him, and everyone is so overjoyed, and I know that something is not right.” She nodded at me. “I’m not completely blind, maidy. I can sense the power that drips from you three. But you let her go to her fate anyway, so you cannot use it—or you choose not to, which comes to the same thing. And I cannot help wishing that you were different than you are, and resenting that you are not. And I am old, and I can speak my mind without fearing what you might do to me.”
Xinot said, quiet, sure, “Resenting does no good.”
The woman did not say anything for a moment, and then she sighed. “You are right, of course. No good at all.” She turned back toward the door; she paused, saying over her shoulder, “I’ll bring you a pot of stew, shall I? You needn’t risk coming down into the inn while you stay.” Her mouth quirked, and she laughed a dry laugh. “I don’t suppose you’d care to be recognized by most people. Most wouldn’t like you any more than I do.”
She opened the door and left. After a few moments more, I went over and snatched my cloak from the floor, and I threw it around my shoulders. I sat by the fireplace with my hood pulled up, and my sisters left me alone.
We were not there when Aglaia and Endymion rode into the courtyard of his grand house. We were not there when he gave her the most elegant of his rooms or when he showered her with gowns, with jewels, with sweets. We didn’t have to see her letting him take her hand as they planned their future. We didn’t have to see the light she kindled in her eyes when he walked by or the way he looked at her, as if she was the answer to his dreams.
It wasn’t our place, out there where the world was watching, where the stories were being spun.
It was ours to wait in the inn’s dusky room, to do our work, to listen. We could have known all that was happening by running our hands along Aglaia’s thread or by closing our eyes and finding it in the darkness, but there was no need. The old innkeeper, Hesper, told us everything when she brought our meals. She kept her word; we didn’t even leave our room to go down to the main floor where she served the other guests.
The stories Hesper brought were the ones heard by all the people of the city. Every word their heroes spoke, every touch and glance was passed along from maid to cook to delivery boy, and down through the sun-washed streets like rain.
They were in love. They were happy; they would be married in three days.
Rumor after rumor about the wedding circulated, gaining in splendor with each telling—there was to be a grand marriage feast; a largesse would be given, so huge that every beggar would be fed that day. The dancing would last far into the night. All the city’s richest lords and ladies would attend, and all would wear shining new gowns, new fine-cut tunics.
Hesper didn’t say anything more about us being powerless, but she relayed all these things dryly, giving us many looks. We ignored her; or at least, Xinot and I did. Serena smiled at the old woman and asked after her lad in the kitchen. We stayed silent as they chatted, and I remained irritated long after she had gone.
“Powerless,” I muttered as we ate our noon meal the day before the wedding, seated on the floor around a plate of fruit, cheese, and bread. “I’d like to see a thing with more power than we have.”
“Is it power if we never choose to use it?” said Se
rena, and I gave her a sharp glance, but she was calm, chewing a date.
“We choose not to use it because of how powerful it is,” I said.
“Hmmm,” said Serena.
Xinot said, “You are not suggesting that we do something?”
“No, of course not,” said Serena.
“There’s nothing to do, anyway!” I said.
Serena gave me a pacifying look. “I didn’t say there was, Chloe.”
“What could we do?” I said. “Kill Endymion before his time? Oh, maybe we should just take out his thread and cut it into pieces!”
“Chloe,” said Serena.
I got to my feet and moved away from them toward the window. “What are we doing here?” I muttered.
Neither of them answered. When I turned, they were frozen, looking up at me. Xinot said, “We followed her this far.”
Serena said, “She shines bright.”
I sighed, and I shook my head. I peeked out through the shutters, where the sky over the city’s white walls was sparkling blue. I didn’t tell them we had to pack up, to run from this girl as fast as we could. I didn’t want to, not any more than they did.
“What did you mean,” I said suddenly, turning from the window to face Serena, “when you said I was only as old as you in years? What other way is there to be old?”
Serena blinked at me; she shook her head. “Never mind,” she said. “I don’t know what I meant.”
Xinot said, gnawing calmly on a heel of bread, “Mortals count their age in years, Chloe. We are not mortals. Time does not do the things to us that it does to them.”
“Yes,” I said. “So?”
Serena said, “Xinot, it does not matter.”
“So,” said Xinot, “in years you are as old as Serena, as old as I am. In essence, though, you never will be. We will never be young, and you will never be old.”
I said, “You sound like Hesper. Are you saying I am as inexperienced as Aglaia, that I know as little about the world as—as a newborn mortal?”