"They say the goddesses spin a thread for each of us."

Light poured into the temple antechamber, setting flecks of floating dust aglow like tiny embers. Bathed in the haze of sunlight, the High Priestess of Antalis did not smile as she spoke. Despite the waves of her silver hair, the memories of joy etched into the lines of her skin, there was no gentleness in the woman, no matronly softness. Thin as the reed she twirled between her fingers, Thais dao Nadira inspired fearful obedience from her audience of acolytes.

"Some of us have long, winding threads." The girls avoided her sharp gaze as she walked between them. To be caught and measured in that piercing scale, to be seen and weighed by the High Priestess, was as terrifying as facing Antala herself. "Others weak." Tala blushed. "Or short." Nadya paled. "Or frayed." Tamren fidgeted.

"But they're all woven together with careful intent."

Without pause, Thais circled Audre, who seemed to sink into the floor, desperate for the earth to swallow her. With the reed, Thais corrected the girl's slouching posture. The tap of its stinging edge did not interrupt the lesson.

"Only Eheia, the weaver of death and dreams, and Antala, who sees all things, know the full tapestry. They alone see whether our threads run in parallel, never to touch, or if they twist together and join for eternity. The goddesses—"

"What if the thread is wrong?"

Miles and memories away, Yalira flinched. Her childish voice echoed with innocent petulance.

"Wrong?" Thais towered over her and, even in the phantom-grip of dream, she smelled of oleander and dulcamara. "Do you think the goddesses can be wrong? Or do you think that bastard-born girls know better than the divine?"

The laughter of the High Priestess was acidic, sharper than the slap of her reed. Humiliation scalded her cheeks, burned away her voice. Or at least, that was how it had happened, that morning's lesson as an acolyte.

Dream diverged from memory.

"I only mean, what if you dislike your thread?"

Thais dao Nadira rippled, her edges as insubstantial as the light and shadows that enveloped her, her voice as faint as smoke, as deep as water.

"I wonder where your thread will lead, Yalira dao Eheia. Will you follow it to the end?"

In her bed, free of any traces of goat heads and treasonous messages, she woke with sudden clarity. Sleep had come reluctantly in the aftermath of Andar's truths, his motivations and delusion, but it had come, and with it had followed the strangeness of dreams. The names of now dead sisters, the embarrassment she'd felt before them. Hadn't they laughed with the High Priestess all those years ago?

Don't be foolish, Yalira, Thais had chided. All mortals follow their threads.

There had been no question of choice. The High Priestess had fixed her unflinching gaze upon her someday successor and, in the privacy after lessons, slapped her hands raw for interrupting. The message had been clear: there was no room for doubt in the service of Antala.

In the wake of sharp memory, her palms stung, itched with restlessness.

We are not in Antalis, Yalira reminded herself. Though the thought did not soothe her. Full of doubt, she had no thread in Semyra. Was she a bridle on Andar's onslaught of the known world? A bastard turned priestess turned queen? Or was she a conspirer against him? A hidden knife?

Weak, short, frayed—was this a warning, a sign? Was there no destiny for Yalira of Tyr?

She reached into the secret confines of the bed frame, retrieving the tome that bore her name. She had not thought it important to read that night she'd spent pouring through the prophecies of Antalis. These were her words. Or else they were the worthless manipulations of her words. Regardless, she knew them well. Even in their familiarity, dreams spurred her searching fingers.

Her sleep had not been happy in Semyra. Night after night, she'd dreaded closing her eyes, returning to the images of Antalis's destruction—but it was a different torture to have relived her days with dead women. Instead of the blood-stained garden, the crumbling mountainside, the dark unknown baited her with bittersweet memories.

A lingering question, the touch of the ethereal.

It had to have meaning.

Still draped in the veil of sleep, it felt vital she revisit that past, that she search for an answer in the same history that plagued her dreams. Her fingers traced her name imprinted into its cover. How strange that answers could only come from a traitorous divergence from tradition, a power Andar had promised her.

"Did you receive my gift?"

Rishi's cloying voice floated from the entry. With her usual disregard for pleasantries, she invited herself in.

Answers, it seemed, would wait.

"Honestly, Yalira, no wonder you're so thin! Missing every meal like you do."

A step behind, still veiled in the promises of dreams, Yalira asked, "What gift?"

The goat's head? Or the treasonous note?

The note near matched Rishi's aims, her comments in the garden. Yalira, Empress of Tyr. But why would she also play in subterfuge and shadows when she had already made her words plain? Yalira's teeth hurt, clenching over the missing pieces of the tapestry she could not see.

The Lytvian queen, glowing in a deep crimson that matched the tint of her wide smile, gestured to a small box on perched on the lounge. She opened the carved lid to reveal a chain of onyx, a twin to the necklet hanging from her own throat.

"I've had them commissioned to match! Silver for you. Gold for me, of course."

Dripping from her fingers, the chain's dark stones gleamed in morning light.

"You're being kind, Rishi" Yalira murmured, slipping the bound prophecies into her blankets as she moved to accept the gift. "Very unlike you."

Rishi's laughter rang out as she draped the necklace around Yalira's head, pulled her hair from its loop.

"True," she conceded. "But sisters can be kind, can they not?"

With a wink, she twisted the stone at her own throat until it gave.

"And see? In true kindness, I've shown you the best part." With the necklace itself, behind an invisible seam, hid a hollow compartment. "A bit of henbane, a touch of opium. Perfect for hiding all sorts of unkind mischief."

Yalira brushed her fingers against the cool stones at her throat. Their weight was solid, but it did not settle her. There were no untruths, no flickers of dishonesty, but there was something that lived in what Rishi did not say.

Copper-skinned and dark-haired, was the other queen her future, her mirror? The strange living reflection smiled.

"And it's an anniversary for me, did you know? Eight years in Semyra."

"So many," Yalira answered hesitantly. "But you've only been married a year."

Rishi pulled her to sit on the lounge, their knees touching. The wide smile turned secretive.

"I never mentioned it? I was half-raised in Tyr. My father didn't inherit the throne until I was eleven—there's terrible habit of cousins marrying cousins in Lytvia. It leaves a complicated line with inheritance—I was born near Antoch, visited my mother a few times a year in Syle. Why, I suppose I only lived a few months at the palace in Tjaret."

She shrugged, as if that were the end of the story, as if she had not volunteered the first hints of personal information beyond her favorite wine. All the queens, Yalira realized, had been distilled to their name and origin. And Rishi, for all her gossip and guidance, had never mentioned any details of her past.

"I didn't know you've lived so long in Tyr," Yalira said. Though her friend's smile did not waver, the freshly scratched surface of unspoken secrets pulled taught.

There is no room for an outsider queen. Those were the words Rishi had whispered under the full moon, the reason she'd given for Yalira's ascension, Yalira's bid for power.

And yet, she was a stranger to Semyra. And Rishi was less of an outsider than she had implied.

She clicked her tongue. "Don't frown like that! You'll age before your time. It's not important that I've lived here. The people don't care about me in the slightest. You are their queen."

The long-buried question Yalira should have asked weeks ago surfaced, solidified.

"But what does that make you?"

If there was a flicker of doubt or a flash of fear, Yalira could not see it in Rishi's bright eyes. Wickedness and affection bound in unreadable hazel.

"Your sister, Yalira," she said through her smile. "And your guiding shadow."

Heartbeats and breaths seemed to pause. There was no threat, no malice, and yet Yalira could not uncoil. Unspoken whispers, just beyond reach.

"Calm yourself, little priestess! I will be very comfortable in the background."

Rishi's laughter eased the tension, though the lingering distress echoed. With forced effort, Yalira returned the smile.

"You should have told me."

"You should have asked." Rishi shrugged. "Ease your heart, Yalira. History will remember us as great friends."

Rishi stood with a fortifying breath, a brittle-spun tilt to the edge of her lips. Kindness, uncertainty, these were not familiar steps for the Lytvian Queen and their edges were foreign in each gesture, each word.

"I admit, I wanted the gift to soften the blow."

It was the careful inflection—Rishi's sudden inability to meet her eye—that sent Yalira's intuition writhing in her gut, burning in her throat. This was not the awaited foreboding that followed Andar's fury, not the constant tension of living in Semyra. This was a novice bearing a mortal message. The creeping acid of it reduced Yalira's voice to a hoarse whisper, filled her mouth with oleander and ashes.

"What blow?"

In uncharacteristic hesitance, Rishi stumbled through the words, "You missed the last few forum meetings and—"

"What blow, Rishi?"

The queen swallowed and met Yalira's eyes. Green and bronze and pity. "Andar's advisors are calling for a purge of the slums. They've been discussing it for days. The plague has spread out of control."

The world screamed for a scattered handful of heartbeats. And then it calmed to hollow, silent dread. Without thought, Yalira flew to change into her healer's garments, the silver-threaded veil, and to find the small assortment of tools and herbs she'd collected over the past weeks. Offering the spoils of Antalis was not enough to temper the sickness. Tala had been right—she should have been at the altar, she should not have left them.

"Listen, Yalira! You don't understand," Rishi insisted. She followed each step pleadingly, beseechingly.

But Yalira understood. To stem the spread of disease, the forum was recommending amputation. They would cut away the infected tissue before toxic fingers could twist themselves further into the city. It was the logical play, the necessary sacrifice.

Only, it would cost her priestesses.

"You cannot stop me, Rishi," Yalira answered. Her steady hands wrapped a surgeon's blade, fine-carved bone needles. Purgatives, antipyretics. She had seen those first patients at the new altar, she had seen the symptoms and their course, but she would bring everything, anything. She would—

"She cannot stop you." The voice stilled her, shook her spirit into fury. "But I can."

A/N

I've always loved the mythology of the fates -- from their Homeric call-outs to their depiction in Disney's Hercules. I'd like to think that the nine goddesses can all spin threads, but it is only Antala and Eheia fighting over the weaving. 

As always let me know your thoughts :)