The Flame in the Maze

by Caitlin Sweet

  “Icarus,” she said. “I am sorry it has taken me this long to return to you.”

  His thin, misshapen lips parted and curled. “Ah, Princess. Imagine how sorry I have been, not to have seen you all this time! For when last you were here, you took my ball of string—oh, and you broke my father’s hands with a hammer, and watched as your father cut his tongue out—oh, and then you watched my mother throw herself into the sea.”

  Yes, Ariadne thought, as Phaidra gave a wordless cry, and all of that sickened me—but then she thought, I was sharing a secret with my father, and I revelled in it. As I do now.

  “I have longed to visit you, and why not—for how well you speak! The palaces have not been the same since you left them.”

  She was going to say more, but she heard a sound: a long, slow dragging. Breathing that was raspy and moist. She didn’t want to look, but did—and Daedalus drew himself up from the floor, hairy and ragged. For a moment she remembered how tall he’d been, and how he’d smiled at her the day he finished making her dancing ground, and how his hair had been close-cropped black, threaded with white.

  He sprang at her with his mutilated hands extended.

  Icarus threw himself between his father and Ariadne. She caught a glimpse of Daedalus’s fingers, which weren’t fingers—tiny spears, maybe, or tree branches tipped with claws longer and sharper than Icarus’s. “No, Father,” Icarus panted. “You leave her to me.” He clutched Daedalus’s strange, warped hands and turned to her. “Princess. Why are you here?”

  Phaidra had retreated and was standing by a rock. Ariadne noted this, even as she straightened and slid her gaze to Icarus. She noted, too, that Daedalus was sinking to the ground. “My old friend,” she said, “I need you.”

  Icarus laughed and said nothing.

  “Yes. I need you—for my father is mad, and intends to give himself to godmarked fire at the door in the mountain. The door you made, Master Daedalus”—she glanced at the man curled like a sleeping child on the earth—“and I cannot bear the thought that the place will be destroyed, because there may be people living within: Athenian sacrifices, and my brother, of course.” She drew a deep breath. “Only you and your father can show me how to find them, once my sister has opened the door. Only you can lead me to them quickly, so that they may be saved.”

  No laughter, this time: just silence. Water dripped somewhere, regular as heartbeat.

  “You cannot bear the thought,” Icarus said at last. He drew a shuddering breath. “You, Princess Ariadne . . .” He made a muffled noise and spun in place, feathers rustling and whining in the wind that was hardly a wind. One of his feet sent the lamp scudding into the rock where Phaidra was; the light went from pink to blue to gold to green in a breath, then died entirely. Ariadne held up her own lamp, whose glow seemed very dim.

  “You wish to save them,” Icarus gasped as he stopped spinning. He pointed his taloned fingers at her and waggled them. He’s gone mad, she thought. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. “The Athenians whose entry into the mountain was so dull to you that you watched the sky instead. And your brother! The boy you set on fire when he was, what? Two years old? Yes, Chara told me—and she told me much else, besides. About how much you hated him. And now you cannot bear the thought that he might die?”

  Phaidra had sunk into a crouch. Her hands were clasped; her eyes darted between Icarus and Ariadne and Daedalus. I should’ve knocked her senseless after all, Ariadne thought. She shouldn’t be hearing these things, seeing . . .

  “I am glad you mentioned Chara,” Ariadne said, making her voice catch a little. “Because she, too, is in the labyrinth. Yes,” she went on, as his mouth-beak fell open, “she is. She disguised herself as an Athenian, and I noticed her too late—as she was leaping through the doorway. Two months ago, Icarus. And in barely two more the mountain will be on fire.”

  He went to Phaidra and hunkered down in front of her. “Phai,” he said quietly. “Is it true? Is Chara inside too?”

  Phaidra nodded. “Though I didn’t,” she began, and cleared her throat, “I didn’t know about Father’s plan.” They gazed at each other, as unblinking as Minos, until Ariadne said, “So, Icarus?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Your mother will put the fire out.”

  “She will try. But this will be like no other fire. Her power may be no match for his.” She put her lamp on the ground and walked around Daedalus. She set her hand on Icarus’s hair, which was smooth, not matted with filth, as she’d expected it to be.

  “It should not matter why I want in,” she said. “You should not care.” She drew her fingertips down through his hair and felt him shiver. “Four years ago you would have longed to do my bidding.”

  She knelt behind him and wove her arms around his chest. His shoulder blades were sharp against her breasts, and the tips of some of his feathers were sharp too, but she didn’t flinch. She pressed her skin against his and breathed slowly, grateful that for some reason he didn’t stink too terribly; grateful that his own breath shuddered and rasped. He still wants me—of course he does, probably more than ever, because he’s seen no one but his poor, ruined father, all these years.

  He stood, drawing Ariadne up with him, and turned in the circle of her arms so that he was facing her. “And what will you give me, if I help you?” She did flinch a bit, this time; his twisted lips were very close and she smelled the old, stale air that seeped between them.

  She slipped out of his arms and took two paces back. Undid the clasp of her jacket and pulled it open, and watched his eyes travel from her face to her breasts, and stay there. It didn’t matter that they were lumpy with old burns—nor that her arms and hands were. She saw him drink her in as if he were dying of thirst.

  Phaidra rose and ran for the mouth of the corridor, but Ariadne hardly noticed her, nor Daedalus, who stirred and moaned. She lifted her hands and ran her middle fingers around her nipples, and as they hardened she began to untie the girdle at her waist. Think only of Theseus. Think only of Icarus leading you to him. Think only of Athens, where you will be queen.

  “No.”

  She barely made out the word, because just then the outer door screeched open and clanged shut.

  “No,” he said again, in a voice that she was sure meant yes. His tiny round eyes were still on her breasts, so she cupped them and stepped toward him. Her thumbs made languid circles on her own skin.

  “Yes, Icarus. You will have me here, now—perhaps again at the mountain, under the open sky? Put your hands on me and—”

  He walked to where she stood and stopped with his thin, feather-splotched chest almost touching her. “No,” he whispered, and smiled, and walked away from her.

  He knelt beside Daedalus. She whirled to look down on them both. There was a pressure in her belly, rising, squeezing her breath away—but her voice rang out anyway. “So your hatred of me is stronger than your desire to help your friends.”

  Icarus shrugged a bony shoulder. “The gods will see to their fates. And yes.”

  Daedalus’s dark eyes watched Ariadne fumble with the clasp of her jacket. “Then your father will help me,” she said, “because I’ll make sure neither of you gets any food; I’ll starve you, and he’ll beg to show me the labyrinth—you will both—”

  “Starve us?” Icarus said. “In the two months before the king gives himself to the mountain?”

  The pressure was inside her head, throbbing, turning her vision flat and white. When it cleared a little she saw Daedalus, straining up from his knees. “Ih-oh,” he said, with his tongueless mouth, and she knew with a horrible, vivid certainty that the word was “Minnow”—that name he’d called her, in his workshop without a roof, and in the sunlit corridors of Knossos, when she was a child and he was the master with hands of godmarked silver. “Ih-oh”—beseeching, sad, not quite hopeless.

  Ariadne picked up her lamp and went to the
corridor. She moved with a care that she knew looked exaggerated, but it was better than running. She crawled to the door and seized its handle. For a long, cold moment she thought that Phaidra had locked her in, but then the door swung open with a scream that made her grind her teeth. She crawled more quickly, because the wind was so fresh, and Icarus might be behind her, reaching out his talons to push past her into the night.

  Ariadne stood up on the ledge, as shakily as a child learning to walk. When she turned back to pull the door closed, Phaidra was in front of it, her arms spread wide.

  “He didn’t want you, did he?” Phaidra’s fingers twitched. Golden hair blew against her cheeks and across her lips.

  “Oh, he wanted me.”

  Phaidra continued, as if Ariadne hadn’t spoken. “And he wouldn’t help you, just as I won’t.”

  “Close the door,” Ariadne snapped. “Do it now, before one of them attacks us and gets free.” Phaidra narrowed her eyes and half-smiled. Ariadne had never seen this expression on her sister’s face before: quiet and calculating; older.

  “Close it or by all the gods and goddesses I will hurt you.”

  Phaidra’s arms dropped to her sides. She bent over and pulled hard on the handle. “Good,” Ariadne said. “Now lock it—quickly.”

  The silver from Phaidra’s hands lit the ledge and the cliffside and the air above the sea. It flowed from skin to metal and stone, and Ariadne drew closer so that it fell on her, too. It blazed so suddenly that she was blinded. She heard the metal within the lock click, and her eyes cleared.

  The godlight had already dimmed. Wisps of it flickered along Phaidra’s fingers and pooled in her palm, then snuffed out. The girl rose and went to the cliff steps.

  “Phaidra! Wait!”—but Phaidra didn’t.

  Ariadne tucked her skirts up into her girdle and followed her, very slowly; the lantern left her with only one hand, and the moments when it was only her feet that held her to the cliff left her breathless and dizzy. By the time she reached the top, her sister was already far away, and Ariadne had to run to catch up.

  “Wait, I said!” She put out a hand and grasped at Phaidra’s arm. Phaidra halted but didn’t turn. “Remember,” Ariadne continued, trying to sound as if she hadn’t had to rush, “if you tell, if you return to him, he will only end up suffering. Swear to me you will not do these things.”

  At last Phaidra looked at her. She was still wearing that half-smile; still a woman, not a child, considering something clever and secret. She said nothing—just shook Ariadne’s hand away and slipped off again, like godlight fading in the grass.

  Chapter Three

  Ariadne heard Karpos before she saw him: the ringing of his chisel on marble; the tap-tap of his hammer—and, somehow, the silver of his godmark, twining through the other sounds. A statue, she thought as she walked toward the doorway of his workshop. A big one; I can hear it in the way he strikes the stone.

  This workshop was much smaller than the ones Master Daedalus had left Karpos at Knossos; he’d had to push workbenches and stools and strange metal machines aside to make room for the block of marble. He was kneeling at its base, resting his forehead against it. His bare back was to her; it was streaked with sweat-darkened dust, and his brown loincloth had turned white with it. One of his hands was resting on the chisel he had laid on the ground. Hand and chisel glowed with silver, as did the three toes that he had already drawn from the marble.

  “Princess,” he said, without moving.

  Ariadne’s pulse quickened, though she’d told herself sternly that it wouldn’t. See how well he knows you? she thought. The gods wish us to be together; now they must tell him so.

  “Who will this be?” she asked, as carelessly as she could.

  He turned his head so that she could see half of his face. His eyes were closed; perhaps he was still seeing the vision his god had shown him, of the figure within the stone. “Your father the King.”

  She was glad he couldn’t see her startled blink. “But he forbade any images of himself to be made—forbade it as soon as his mark began to scar him!”

  Karpos shrugged. He opened his eyes but didn’t look at her. “He wishes one final likeness to be made.” He paused. “He has demanded that it be a true likeness.”

  At last he looked at her, and she gazed back at him, and between them was an image of Minos as he was: eyeless, blistered, bleeding, a patchwork of crimson and black.

  “He means to give himself to Zeus.” She hadn’t intended to speak so quietly, but the words came too swiftly for her stop them. “At the Goddess’s mountain.”

  “Yes,” Karpos said. “I know. What I do not know is why you’re here now.”

  She smoothed away a scowl. “For your help.”

  He stood and stretched his arms up over his head. His right hand brushed the marble once, twice, trailing silver. “You must have exhausted all other possibilities, to be coming to me.”

  You have no idea, she thought. She said, “And why would you think that?”

  “Because you wanted me to marry you and I said no. Because you do not allow ‘nos,’ unless they come from you. So. What do you imagine I might do for you?”

  “You need to convince him not to do this thing. Tell him that he must wait, to see if his godmark cools or dies.”

  “And why do you imagine he would listen to me?”

  “Because he made you his heir. Because you crafted a statue of his beloved son Androgeus, and he has just asked you to craft another of himself. He respects you. Perhaps only you, now.”

  “Princess. Do you truly think I have not already tried to speak to him?”

  “Try again.”

  “Why would I do this for you?”

  “Because it is in the interests of the people you will rule. They are in danger now; imagine what will happen when his godmark consumes him! Imagine the injuries, the deaths—the riots that will happen when the priestesses’ followers realize that their precious bull-boy god has been killed!”

  Karpos smiled. “How delightfully surprising it is, Princess, that you have decided to be a loving sister to Asterion!”

  “You insult me.”

  “I distrust you.” No smile now; just a line of lips, pressed tight.

  She closed the space between them in four paces. She put both her hands on his chest and dug her fingers into his skin. “You wanted me, once,” she hissed. “I know you remember. ‘I’ll carve your likeness at the summer palace, Princess! I will, I will!’”

  He placed his hands over hers and held them there. His palms were cool and rough with dust. She wanted to keep touching them until they warmed—only no, she didn’t: all she wanted was Theseus and Athens and anger.

  “I was more taken with my godmark than I was with you,” he said. “And I was so young—anything beautiful was a thing to be pursued. I am wiser now.”

  Her hands twitched with the desire to claw at his calm, lovely eyes, but his own hands kept them still. Before she could command herself to move, she heard a whistling, coming from the hallway. Closer, closer—the rising and falling music of wind blowing over the mouths of empty shells.

  The sound stopped. “Karpos!” a voice called, and Karpos stepped away from Ariadne.

  She turned toward the doorway to look where he was looking—at her older brother Deucalion, who was gaping at her.

  “Ari!” he finally said. “I didn’t expect . . . well.”

  Karpos smiled at Deucalion, who smiled back at him. Ariadne felt her stomach twist, then flushed so deeply and quickly that sweat broke out on her palms and on her neck, beneath her hair.

  “Ah,” she said after she’d swallowed carefully, to ensure that her voice wouldn’t crack. “I see, Karpos. I see. If you could, you would make my brother queen. How terribly sweet. How happy I am for you both.”

  “Ari,” Deucalion began, but she was past h
im before he could say more. The wind of his godmark tugged at her heels as she walked away.

  The moon was waning when Phaidra returned to the prison. She’d wanted to go back the very day Ariadne had taken her there; she had, in fact, made her way as far as the underground storage jar chamber and put her hand on the latch before thinking, No—not yet—she’ll expect this. She won’t expect you to be patient.

  As Phaidra was walking back up the stairs toward the courtyard, Ariadne’s slave found her. “My Lady Phaidra? My mistress is looking for you.”

  Of course she is, Phaidra thought, with grim, amused relief. She followed the slave to Ariadne’s chambers.

  “You wanted me?” Phaidra said, widening her eyes to questioning innocence.

  Ariadne narrowed her own. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I wanted you . . . to talk to our mother about the king. She has always preferred you to me. Talk to her. See if he has spoken to her about his intention to give himself to his godmark.”

  Phaidra smiled at her. “Very well,” she said, and left the chamber before her sister could think of more to say.

  Phaidra had spoken to Pasiphae about Minos, simply to keep busy. Her mother, it turned out, did know about the king’s plan, for Hypatos had overheard him telling Ariadne about it. The queen had said, “The gods will decide his fate, as they do all of ours,” and turned her face away.

  “But Mother,” Phaidra said, “what if the mountain explodes in fire? Asterion is—”

  “Asterion is beyond us.” Pasiphae’s eyes were back on Phaidra; they were dark, their green nearly vanished. She lifted her hands from where they’d been pressed, in her lap, and Phaidra saw that they’d left wet, silver prints. Her mother’s godmark, belying her words? Phaidra didn’t—couldn’t—care. She was already up and walking; measuring out her steps, because soon they’d have to lead her back to Icarus. And, two weeks later, they did.

  It was day, this time. Phaidra couldn’t find Ariadne—not even in the baths, where Ariadne had told her slave she’d be. And when, on impulse, Phaidra asked a kitchen slave about the princess, the slave told her that Ariadne had been seen leaving the palace, on foot and alone. Phaidra said, “Surely not! My sister would never do such a thing!” But the slave bowed and insisted. Very well, Phaidra thought, it must be now, and she walked down into the cool shadows of the storeroom, before she could be afraid.