The Flame in the Maze

by Caitlin Sweet

  “Father,” Icarus said now, to the man who was hiding his face. “Come away from there.”

  Daedalus didn’t move, not even when the olive tree beside the hut tore free of the earth and slammed down an arm’s length away from them. As this sound faded, so did the wind. All Icarus could hear were pebbles trickling down the face of the newly-opened crevasse.

  Sotiria was sitting at the bottom of the slope that led up to the hut. Icarus picked his way over the fresh rubble to her. “The mountain door may have broken open,” he said. His voice was quiet but sounded loud. “We might not even need Father’s godmarked hands, now!”

  She nodded and frowned at the same time. “But what if it hasn’t?”

  “I’ll go find Phaidra, at the palace: she’d be able to open the door with her godmark. But we need to leave now, in case we need the extra time to get her. Father!” he called up the slope, where Daedalus was still crouching. He cocked his head up. His arms tightened around his knees.

  “Get up, Father! It’s time!”

  Daedalus didn’t move. Icarus walked to him with Sotiria beside him. She hunkered down in front of Daedalus, whose eyes wobbled and slid before settling on hers. After a long moment, she said, “You aren’t going to come, are you?”

  Icarus looked from one to the other. His mouth opened and shut with a snap, like a beak. “What? Father—is she right?”

  Daedalus’s own lips sagged apart. Icarus looked past them to the wet darkness where the ruin of his father’s tongue was. He waited for a grunted word he’d understand; a denial; a reason. There was only silence. Except for a bird’s call, far, far above—only silence.

  Sotiria spoke at last, a long while after they’d started walking. “You mustn’t blame him. You can’t. He’s in such pain—too much for even me to take away.”

  He felt himself swallow. Took a breath and let it out again. He wanted to turn to her and ask her whether she could feel his own pain, but he didn’t.

  “Icarus,” she said, when he said nothing. “It’s all right. You’ll go back to him when this is done.”

  He stopped. “How can you be so sure?” His voice sounded splintered and faint. “This may be the end of all of us. Who knows. Maybe not even the gods know.”

  “Maybe the gods don’t,” she said. “And maybe we can’t. But I didn’t come all this way with you for nothing. The earth just moved. Now it’s our turn.”

  He looked down at his feet, which grasped at summer-stiff grass, and his taloned fingers twitched.

  “You’re right,” he said, after a silence. When he started off again, toward the Goddess’s mountain, she had to lengthen her own stride to keep up.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was late afternoon when Icarus and Sotiria stepped onto the mountain path—or tried to. The earthquake had turned it into a line of waves: red-gold earth, churned and chipped, tumbled into shapes that poked at the soles of his feet. They walked in the yellowed grass at its edges, though even that was sharp. The light around them was burnished, but the sky ahead was blurred with smoke. Icarus glanced up at the sky once; after that he kept his gaze on his feet. So close, he thought, and he imagined Chara and Asterion singing nonsense rhymes into the smoky air, and he walked faster.

  When the shattered path sloped upward, he thought, Not close: here.

  The door hadn’t broken open. It loomed as it always had, the small one nestled in it, both of them snug and locked. Tendrils of smoke wove like floating snakes in front of the metal. More smoke billowed from the mountain’s peak—but it made him dizzy to look up that far, so he kept his gaze on the door.

  “What now?” Sotiria said.

  No idea, he thought—and then he heard footsteps. He turned back toward the ruined path. For a moment the world slid out of focus—because there was Phaidra, with Ariadne behind her. They’d seen him: Ariadne’s eyes were narrow; Phaidra’s were wide. He tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t.

  And so the gods have delivered you to me outside, and I am strong. The moment he thought this, he felt the feathers that dusted his skin retract with sharp, wrenching motions; felt his long hatred turn to sickness in his belly.

  “Sweet hands of Aphrodite,” Sotiria whispered. “I remember them: the princesses.”

  “You,” Ariadne said, when she was close enough to reach out and touch Icarus’s cheek—or claw it, more like. He stopped looking at her because he knew he’d claw at her first, and there was too much else to do. Instead he looked at Phaidra. Her eyes were so bright that he wanted to close his own, but he didn’t. You’re here, he thought, feverishly, and forgot about the bile of Ariadne. I see you so clearly—for the first time, after so many years.

  Ariadne rounded on Phaidra, her eyes alight with rage. “And you! You let them out after all!”

  He shifted his gaze and stepped toward Ariadne. “She didn’t. We got out ourselves. We planned it for years.” He laughed suddenly, tipping his head up at the mountain’s peak. The smoke was white against the darkening blue of the sky. “We thought we’d fly together to the island, then away.” Years and years, and see, now: no father. No long, slow glide to the island beneath our prison. Just you and another prison, my Lady.

  “And you still may,” Sotiria said.

  “And who are you?” Ariadne snapped.

  Sotiria’s eyes rose to Ariadne’s. “Sotiria.”

  The princess frowned. “I remember . . .” She sucked in her breath. “You’re an Athenian—Chara and I visited your cell the night before the procession! Your hair was long and tangled then.” She laughed almost as Icarus had. “She switched places with you. She went to you to plan it, even as I went to him.”

  “To him?” Icarus repeated. The second word cracked—because he already knew. Prince Theseus: of course, of course, though Icarus didn’t yet know why or how.

  Ariadne reached up and touched the edge of the lock. Her filmy sleeves fell away, revealing an arm that was taut with muscle, and brown except for its scars. “And why did you come here, bird-man?”

  He tried not to sneer back at her. Phaidra’s face was still there at the edge of his vision; when he spoke, it was to her. “The earth moved. I thought . . . I hoped the lock would have broken. I hoped the door would be hanging open; that we’d be able to go inside and find them.”

  “And it isn’t,” Ariadne said, waving her free hand. “It isn’t hanging open. So we need to get it open, and see whether Zeus’s earth-shaking has made a way for us, inside.”

  “Why so desperate, Princess?” Icarus said, and Phaidra said, calmly and coldly, “Yes—why, Sister? I’m not sure you really answered, when I first asked you this.”

  “How dare you?” Ariadne said. Her hand clenched, on the lock. “How dare you ask me to explain myself? You—”

  “Stop.” Sotiria spoke quietly, but they all turned to her. She was looking back down the path, and they followed her gaze. The sky behind them was pulsing with orange.

  “The procession,” Ariadne said. “The king. Already.” She reached out and gripped Phaidra’s wrist; dragged it up to the lock. “Open it now.”

  Phaidra glanced at Icarus, who smiled at her. She smiled back, then stood up on her toes and placed her palms and fingertips on the lock. The silver flowed immediately. It coursed over the metal and into the air around it; it turned her golden hair to white, and the lock to liquid, before it sprang open. The low door opened too, with a muffled clang.

  “Yes!” Ariadne tugged on it until it swung wide. She knelt, her hands out, seeking air, and the others crouched behind her.

  There was no air. No opening. The doorway was blocked by three slabs of stone that might have been placed deliberately, so neatly did they fit together. No space atop or around them; no spaces between—just seams to show they were separate pieces.

  “No,” Icarus heard himself say. He put a hand on Phaidra’s back and press
ed. She was so slender, but so strong and solid. She didn’t move.

  Ariadne lunged forward with a shriek. She pounded her fists against the stone, growling and panting.

  “Stop,” Sotiria said again—loudly, this time. She hunched over, curling her fingers (even the broken ones) into her palms. She’s in pain, he thought. Ariadne’s pain—and I can’t do anything at all.

  Ariadne kept hammering at the blocks. “I need him!” she cried, and the stone darkened with her spit. “Godsblood—let me in! I need him!”

  Yes, he thought. Suffer. Bleed.

  Phaidra turned and took Icarus’s hand in both her own. She was cool; he wanted to pull her closer, to feel the coolness everywhere, like windy sky on flesh and feathers. To forget.

  He nodded once. “We have to go,” he said.

  Phaidra nodded too. “Where?”

  It came to him at last, in an image so clear that it blotted out everything else. Chara scrabbling at the mountain; Chara’s lips moving as she begged him to throw his string up, because surely they’d be able to climb it? “There are lava tubes near the top—pipes. I tried to reach them once, with Chara, and it didn’t work”—blood under her nails; the string a useless silver pile around his feet—“but the earthquake may have loosened things, up there. It has to have somewhere.” He glanced back down at the orange stain in the sky. “Yes,” he said, still to Phaidra, “We go up.”

  Ariadne was in front of him, just as she had been in his prison. Near enough to touch. “And,” he said, “we leave your sister here—because if I have to have anything more to do with her, I’ll probably kill her.”

  Phaidra didn’t smile, but she glowed anyway, somehow. “Let’s go, then,” she said.

  Ariadne followed them, of course, but she was silent, and only Sotiria glanced back at her. Icarus stumbled on stones and earth, but Phaidra’s hand was there, and he grasped it, holding on as if he were drowning, as King Minos had told everyone he had.

  It didn’t seem to take very long before they were beneath the black pipes that still seemed to gleam, despite the thickening darkness and the darker pall of smoke.

  “No,” he said—and it was just like it had been years before, with Chara, only worse. Worse, because this was the end. The mountain was shuddering beneath them; the mark-mad king was closing in behind them. Father, Icarus thought, helplessly.

  Phaidra let go of his hand, and for a moment he was afraid he’d fall over. He turned to her, straightening and shrugging at the same time. He was just about to say something that he hoped would sound wry, rather than defeated, when she leaned forward and kissed him. He pulled away quickly, before he could really feel the warmth of her lips, and stammered, “Phaidra—don’t tease me; don’t—” She smiled and put her hands behind his head and pulled him back to her again.

  Never, he thought, as a humming filled his ears. Ariadne made a disgusted noise, but she sounded very far away. This was never going to happen to me. Phaidra said, “Icarus: don’t be sad. There’s a way.” He didn’t hear her say this; he felt the words passing from her lips to his. He drew away just enough that he could see her—though she was mostly a blur, gold smudged against blue-black, like one of Daedalus’s paintings—and then he kissed her, over and over, gasping with breath and laughter in between.

  Feathers pushed up through his skin so suddenly and swiftly that he stumbled backward. He cried out as the bones of his arms and legs lengthened. He hadn’t changed this quickly since he was a child—and he’d never changed so completely. He watched it happen, with vision that was his and wasn’t. He looked up from his own body, at the people around him. Ariadne was crouching, staring up at him with horrified eyes. Sotiria was pressed against the mountain, her own eyes huge, her mouth open. I wonder if she feels this pain? he thought as it burned its godmarked silver through his blood and flesh. She had to be: it was spilling out of him—pouring from the ends of feathers and beak and flexing, grasping talons. He beat his wings to shake it off; closed his eyes to pull it deeper.

  Phaidra’s whoop brought him back to himself. He peered down at her. Down. Down? he thought, and the word echoed strangely in his silver-soaked head. None of him was touching the ground. None. He was stretched out with his fingers and toes dangling; he could have brushed the top of her head with them.

  He gabbled meaningless words and fell. Only when he hit the ground did he realize how the air had felt: slippery and cool, like water—except those words didn’t touch the truth of it. He gasped and clawed at the earth, which was too hard, too dry; it crumbled and scattered.

  Phaidra was beside him. Her hands flattened his feathers. “You can fly!” she said, and laughed a deep, rich laugh. “You can fly up there and get inside—Icarus: you can fly!”

  “Yes,” he said thickly, as his beak stretched back into lips, “but I think you’ll have to kiss me again.”

  She did.

  This time he knew what was going to happen. He was on his feet before they turned into talons; he was flapping his arms before they were fully wings. Ariadne snorted, and he glanced at her. Why did I ever think I loved you?—and with this thought he surged upward, calling with his new voice—his mother’s voice, a bird’s, full-throated and soaring. He saw Phaidra raise her arms, in the moment before the sky tilted and he tumbled and rose at the same time. The smoke that was the Goddess’s breath was above him, below him, slinking in around him like arms that couldn’t hold him.

  Nothing he tried to think was right. Nothing was enough.

  He remembered Asterion above a waterfall, saying, “You know, it’s heat that makes me change. Maybe there’s something like that for you but you just don’t know it yet.” Icarus angled his wings and dipped and saw Phaidra with her head tipped back. The rest of her was flattened and shortened, with distance and nightfall—but he could see her eyes and the curve of her lips. He sang to her, with his new voice.

  Her mouth was moving. He spun until he was dizzy. He dipped wildly, and his stomach didn’t lurch. He was, at last, himself.

  “Icarus! The pipes!” The wind took Phaidra’s words and twisted them, flattened them as her body was flattened—but he heard her. “Don’t go too high—not yet!”

  The sky above him was endless: he could see a layer of blacker darkness there, could sense a crushing cold lying atop the air he’d always known. When he looked back down, he saw a throbbing bruise of light, and knew that it was fire. He felt waves of humming that reached into the sky from beneath the earth, and knew that the mountain was changing.

  “The pipes, Icarus! Asterion and Chara!”

  The pipes were ranged like tiny gaping mouths below him. He swooped, because he could—and because he remembered Asterion, despite the cold wind and the ribbons of cloud that wove above the smoke.

  He didn’t choose: the pipe simply appeared before him, larger and darker than anything around it. He managed to hover. Every feather felt as if it were the only one. Every feather felt as if it were part of a whole that was larger than his body.

  He flapped his wings, then tucked them in against his sides as smoothly as if he’d always been doing it. The small space within the pipe grew larger. Phaidra called his name and he called hers back—or thought he did—and plunged into the mountain.

  Book

  Five

  ALL

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Quiet, all of you; look!” Chara cried, and pointed. All of them looked, except Polymnia.

  “It’s from outside!” Alphaios said, as the shadow grew on the crumbling stone at the top of the chamber. “It’s coming in! Down! What . . . ?”

  Chara clutched Asterion’s slippery hand with her own and waited.

  The shadow grew, and then it plummeted. Wings splayed and flapped and tucked in close to a slender, feathered body. Chara let go of Asterion’s hand and stepped forward, though she was suddenly dizzy and far, far too hot. The body landed
clumsily on its side, and started making a shrill, skirling noise. She drew closer.

  The noise was laughter.

  Her shriek was louder than the laughter. She threw herself onto her knees just as the slender, feathered creature was drawing itself up; their shoulders bumped and their arms tangled, and now they were both laughing, clutching each other with hands and talons.

  “Icarus?” Asterion said from behind them, and they drew breathlessly apart. Icarus rose as clumsily as he’d landed. He spread his wings wide again and drew Asterion in against him.

  “You died.” The words were muffled. Icarus loosened his wings and Asterion gazed at him with wide, shining eyes. “Chara told me: you, your father and mother—you all died.”

  Icarus’s cheeks were covered with feathers too, and his mouth was somewhere between beak and lips—a strange hybrid of a face, but Chara could still see the pain on it. “My mother died,” he said in a higher, more pinched voice than he’d had before—though she recognized it as his. “Not the way the king said she did. We were all imprisoned—by the king—and Ariadne knew.” His chest heaved and his finger-talons flexed convulsively. “There’s too much to tell, and the king’s close, and he’s going to give himself to his god here, in fire, and I don’t know how much time I can be a bird for, so I have to get you out now: Phaidra’s up there waiting, and Sotiria, and . . . Ariadne.”

  A huge chunk of rock smashed to bits on the floor by the bee column, but no one seemed to notice: they were all gaping at Icarus. He cleared his throat. “She and Phaidra came here together, and there’s been no time to think about how to deal with her.”