The Shadow Behind the Stars by Rebecca Hahn Page B

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?
    â€œWhy 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.”
    â€œNot all,” said the oracle. She was angry, but there was a brush now of wariness to her. I should not have laughed.
    â€œSome aregiven 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.”
    â€œI am not a fraud!”
    â€œHow 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.