Minotaur

by J. A. Rock

  “What have you seen? Did you see her kill Denson’s brother? Did you see her kill that man in the garden?”

  “I do not watch her kill. I only tell her where she might look for tributes.”

  “You are sick,” I snapped at her. “And you’re a coward. Why don’t you use your magic to defeat her?”

  “There are powers far greater than mine. And aren’t you the one who wanted to run last night?”

  I turned away.

  “Perhaps I am a coward,” she said, as loudly as I’d heard her dare speak till then. “I am afraid!”

  “If she has done the things I’ve seen—tortured people . . . She is truly a beast, then! She is as bad as they come.”

  “Good and bad have no place here. There is only survival.”

  “And that is how you justify it? Doing her bidding. Leading her to her prey?”

  Asteria’s glance tossed shadows like a candle flame. She headed for the cottage. “I need no justification. I do what I must to survive. I am her slave, and I will indeed be free one day, but serving her has bought me my life. Why should I be displeased that she has taken a liking to me?”

  I shrugged. “I would not want to be the sort of person a monster takes a liking to.” I thought guiltily of my dreams, the ones the beast had seemed to infiltrate. How I’d felt strangely honored—chosen.

  Asteria stopped suddenly and bent over with an arm across her stomach, as though she were ill. “I miss freedom,” she whispered. Tears fell from her closed eyes, and her lips curved up in a bitter smile. “God, I miss it.”

  “There’s no time to feel sorry for yourself. You get your freedom by acting.”

  She opened her eyes and gave me a cold stare. “By being like you? Bumbling into the labyrinth for a chance at the treasure, with no idea what you’re up against?”

  So she’d guessed, then. Guessed I was not a warrior, but a greedy fool.

  “I thought it was about the treasure, at first.” I met her gaze, not sure why I wanted so badly for her to understand. “But I want to fight. I want to stop her.”

  I realized, with a gradual, slinking terror, that this confrontation would be nothing like I imagined. I was a new soldier in a long-standing war, dreaming of the day I’d arrive for battle. Preparing for the front lines by imagining over and over that I would be brave when it counted. That I would defend my brothers and sisters and slay my enemies. Only to find myself, when the charge began, divested of my shield, separated from my fellows, and hacked apart by enemies.

  Asteria got a strange expression on her face, like she was watching the end of something rather than the beginning. She smiled, though, a slight but luminous thing. “Pretty thing,” she said, “you may yet win.”

  She looked sad, bitterly sad. And it dawned on me that perhaps the reason Asteria was alive—and the reason she had never tried to kill the beast—had to do with love.

  “Are you lonely here?” I asked her softly.

  She gave a laugh that seemed unsustainably light, a stone pitched through the air. “I used to think no one could ever be lonely, as long as she had eyes. I used to think the world was full of strange and wonderful places, and that I would find a home in one of them.” She said no more than that.

  I had never, in all my memory, felt safe or wanted. Fear kept me sharp, kept me alive. But the more breaths I took alongside Asteria, the more I looked into eyes the color of earth, the more I wanted to believe that I would win and she would protect me. That I would learn to avoid pain, that I’d never again see Kenna with her lips sewn shut or Bitsy falling to the ground or Alle’s face as she stood holding the thread, watching me disappear.

  “What do I have to do?” I whispered.

  Her expression was kind, almost pitying. “We’ll make you an armor. I can do that much for you. And when you finally meet the beast, you’ll be protected.”

  We spent the next few hours hunting through the cottage, picking up any metal objects we found along the way. Bolts and silverware, discarded food tins. Jewelry. An old brass carousel pole we found lying across the floor of an otherwise empty room. Asteria knelt beside the pile of metal.

  I didn’t see how she did it. I only saw the carousel pole begin to melt, slowly. And then it swallowed bolts, and a fork’s tines dripped away. She rose with sheets of molten metal tossed over her shoulders like garments. She walked to me and began to touch me. Softly, her head tilted back, her lips parted, her hair falling between her shoulders, getting caught in the liquid gold. She ran her fingers between my breasts and tugged down my shirt. Lowered her head and licked down my chest, her fingers gliding along the sides of my jaw.

  I gasped. Felt the heat of the metal, sweat falling down my forehead, catching in my eyelashes. The fluid gold swirled away from her body and circled mine. I cried out at the pain, but soon I was in love with it. I moved like a snake, sliding against that source of pleasure until it wound around everything inside me—my stomach, my heart, my shoulder blades. It swept up into my throat until I could have screamed fire.

  I was pulling hard on the thread. I could feel Alle pulling back, a series of frantic tugs as though to ask what was wrong. I knew a panic bound in a wicked ecstasy as the thread started to slip from my wrist. I’d tightened it three times this morning, and still it seemed to want to be free of me.

  The metal began to harden around me, forming plates. Asteria pushed her palms against my back and front, and she breathed into the plates until they grew hot once more against my skin. And then she herself seemed to liquefy, to flicker and then melt into gold, and she became part of the armor. I looked around for her, to make sure she hadn’t simply stepped out of my line of vision. But she was gone, and I smiled softly at the space where she’d been and put my palms to the metal. The plates cooled gradually, and the gold turned to burnished copper. I believed I could see her shadow swimming in it like an eel. Then she appeared again before me, fragile, colorless, but smiling. Her middle had become a sheet of dark glass, and I gazed at myself.

  I saw all that I could be, and I was grand. Not beautiful. But powerful. I would no longer have to settle for being transformed—I would do the transforming. I would draw Alle and her mysteries like a magnet; I would be needed and admired and confided in.

  As I stared at my reflection, it began to move and change. From the slough of what I had been rose some crystal version of myself, glinting in brilliant patches like ice mounded on a road. Not a street tough but a warrior, holding a sword. My jaw was set, my brow heavy, my eyes dark and burning. I looked ready to slay the beast. I’d come this far, and I was going to free the labyrinth’s prisoners—free the town from this creature—and then go back to Alle. We were going to make a life together like the one we’d dreamed: endless freedoms to be tried on and then cast aside, each of us the other’s only certainty.

  “What do you think?” Asteria whispered. She sounded strained. Blood vessels netted themselves across the glass, and then fat and muscle and skin grew over it until the mirror was swallowed. A hint of fragrance—vanilla and fruit—seemed to cover something that lurked beneath the surface of the fresh air and forest smell. Not rot, but age. An undusted room. An underground place.

  “I want to be that,” I said honestly, ignoring my moment of mistrust.

  “I cannot make you anything that will last.” Her voice was soft with a regret that sounded a little too smooth, too practiced. “I can take things from the labyrinth, I can patch them together, but the armor will fade. I cannot give you a sword, but I can tell you where one lies. Do you know how to fight?”

  “Not really,” I admitted. “I practiced with sticks at my—back home.”

  “A blade hangs in her chamber. Just above the fire. If you can get hold of it, you’ll know what to do.” She leaned forward and kissed me. Her lips seemed to have sharp edges—I started to draw back. But then she softened, and the kiss became as pure and deep a thing as I have known.

  The thread pulled tight, and a soft cry vibrated through my
body. She pushed me back against the wall, and I yielded to her, all boldness and despair and a rhythm that had become familiar to me. The thread fell from my wrist. And when we pulled away and started once more into the dark reaches of the maze, I left it behind.

  To pass the time as we walked, I told Asteria my favorite Dark Tales. Another midnight went by. The armor disappeared, but I felt as if I still wore it, as if it were under my skin. I learned to recognize trees that bore fruit, and to search the labyrinth’s rooms for secret feasts. I resented it when she left for hours at a time to visit the beast. In her absence I grew bored and was spooked by shadows. I often imagined that I still had the thread, that I was tugging in patterns, sending Alle messages. I was aware that I should be more upset to have lost that connection, lost my way. But I was freer somehow without it.

  I grew harder, too, in the hours I spent on my own. I was easily spooked but not afraid. Once I found a rushing stream that cut through the floor of a wide corridor and seeped under matching doors on either side of the hall. There were wide flat stones in the stream, and the crossing was easy. But I stopped on the middle stone when I noticed a dark shape beneath the water.

  I peered down, and the current seemed to slow so that I could see. Rocky Bottom lay on the shallow riverbed, his cheeks bloated, his eyes wide. I experienced a moment’s sickness, but then I remembered: Phantoms. Illusions.

  Rocky Bottom reached up with one arm. I started, nearly slipping from my stone. He banged on the underside of the river’s surface, with a sound like he was knocking on glass. His eyes bulged and a jet of bubbles came out his nose. I crouched and tried to reach into the stream but found that beneath a few inches of burbling water, the surface was hard and smooth. Water sloshed into my shoes, soaking the cuffs of my pants. I went to my knees and pounded, coaxed, tried to dip my hand in the water as I had done at the fountain. Then I stopped.

  He is a murderer, and not worthy of your pity. What, will you pity the beast when you stand before her? Will you lower your sword?

  I stood. Rocky Bottom continued to knock. I stepped onto the water. Felt it rush around my feet. Looked down at Rocky Bottom’s wide eyes and frantically moving mouth. And then I walked on.

  “I don’t think you have been honest with me,” I said with a practiced coolness.

  Asteria had just returned from her latest visit to the Minotaur. We were in a room that looked a bit like Rock Point’s parlor, except crumbling and dusty. As usual, she had been reticent when I asked what she and the beast had talked about, what the monster had required of her. “I think perhaps you have some love for the beast.”

  She did not answer. So perhaps it was true. I didn’t know whether I was disgusted or pleased. Or envious.

  We made our way through a creaking door and found ourselves in a ballroom. Huge white pillars supported a mezzanine, and a mahogany piano stood on one corner. Above us was a night sky with far more stars than I’d seen before in my life and smoky white clouds drifting across the darkness.

  “Is she not wholly a monster, then?” I asked. “Did she really kill a mother who sacrificed herself for her child?”

  Asteria turned to me, and in that moment I felt more frightened than I had been so far in the maze. “I have no love for her,” Asteria said calmly, her gaze blank. “My only wish is to stay alive.”

  “What about the people before me who have tried to slay the beast? Why didn’t you help them as you’re helping me?”

  One side of her mouth curved up slightly, and her eyes moved slowly back and forth. “I have seen many fools try to do what you are doing. They are doomed and were not worth the risk to my own life to aid them.”

  “So why am I different?”

  “Because you think.” She crossed the ballroom, leaving dirty footprints on the blond wood floor. I followed. “The brave are not the ones who merely answer the call. Any fool can embark on a quest. The brave are the ones who do their duty and come away, not with a monster’s head on a pike, but with some new knowledge.”

  Miss Ridges had said once that reading meant nothing unless you could articulate what a story had given you. But I’d always disagreed—though I’d never found the words to argue. You didn’t have to be able to analyze to appreciate a story. You had only to be able to feel, deep in a place that didn’t deal in words, how that story was yours and everyone else’s too.

  “But the monster’s head on a pike doesn’t hurt,” I said.

  She smiled. “No. But it is not the most important thing.” She paused before the piano. I waited for it to start to play by itself, but it was silent. “So tell me. What will you learn here?”

  “I want to be unbreakable.”

  I didn’t think it was true, even then. Invincibility wasn’t learnable. But I look back now and can’t think what I would have said in its place.

  Still, it gave me some satisfaction to tell Asteria I wanted to be unbreakable. And to be unable to see, in her eyes, in the slow nod of her head, whether she thought I was a fool like the rest of them.

  I cannot say who began the kiss, only that the clock tower could have made its midnight collapse and I wouldn't have noticed. A dampness formed over my skin; my shoulders went slack. She touched my breast, slid her thumb around my nipple, and I gasped against her lips. When we parted, I retreated, panting, and stumbled to the floor.

  She was violently hungry. She crawled on all fours toward me, her back end swaying, clots of thread hanging from her ragged clothes. Her exposed breast swung as she crawled. Her black hair was like a lion’s mane, bending and shivering with a life all its own. Her smile dared me, jolted me. I wanted to be on my back, my spine jerking and arching like some broken piece of a puppet. I wanted her to sew my mouth shut like one of the beast’s dolls and let this confusion bleed from me, tumble in bad rivers from between my legs.

  I knew a moment’s repulsion, an accusation that never made it out of my mouth—How can you be a slave, when you are so clearly wicked? How can I pity your tattered clothes, your sharp ribs, when you were born to consume? And then I was guilty, thinking of Alle, who didn’t love me and wouldn’t love me, but whom I still wanted, with a childlike desperation, to impress.

  And then I stopped thinking, because she swept over me like flames, and all that is best about living—the small wonders, the darknesses that get folded inside, the thrill of taking from a world that wants you to wait politely with your hands out—seemed to hiss across her skin in terrible currents.

  Oh, I was alive then. And I was far from unbreakable.

  We were interrupted by a plink high above us.

  The stars dropped out of the sky one by one and shattered against the ceiling. They were the size and shape of Christmas ornaments—not balls of gas at all. They burst, and their points skittered across the glass, frosting it like ice. Finally one hit so hard that a cracked web appeared in the ceiling and the star fell through. It plummeted and then fractured at our feet.

  Asteria pulled me close. “Watch out!” She sheltered me with her body as the stars continued to fall.

  Finally the whole night came down, the black sky fluttering like a banner and draping itself over the ceiling. Stars’ points lodged in it, glinting down at us like teeth. Through the spaces where the fabric of the sky didn’t quite cover the glass, I could see only blankness, an endless white, and it frightened me.

  “Nothing is real here,” I whispered, watching the bits of star on the ground fading. I gripped Asteria tightly, digging my fingers into her shoulders. “Fuck. Damn this whole shit-slimed world. I thought this place . . . It’s all just spells; it’s all nothing.”

  “Not nothing,” she whispered back, burying her face in my hair. “I promise you, there is something real here.”

  I wanted to believe her. To trust that I had found the real thing, that every moment before entering the labyrinth, I had been a prisoner, and that this was freedom. But I only felt alone.

  The next day, we passed two men pulling cartloads of fish across a wid
e, empty clearing where grass grew between stones and an odd carnivalesque tune climbed the walls until we could no longer hear it. A lizard scuttled near my feet, and I stopped and watched it for so long that Asteria was nearly out of sight when at last I bolted forward to catch her.

  I told her, that day, about the storm and the ocean. About playing on the beach, making the waves rise. She smiled, and I felt the warmth of that smile—not deep inside me but on my surface, fleetingly. It was a ribbon that caught in my hair and between my fingers before blowing away. “You must have a tremendous power, Thera. Very few can command anything in the labyrinth.”

  “But why would I have power? I mean, I’ve never done anything magic that I know about, not in my whole life. And there are plenty of times it would have helped, to be sure.” I was babbling excitedly, spurred by this new idea of power, wondering what I might do with it.

  “Perhaps you were meant to come here.” She said it very softly, and I looked at her, puzzled. I had a flash of memory—on the floor of my childhood bedroom, playing with little animal figurines. Looking up suddenly to find my mother in the doorway, watching me. I remembered staring at her red lips and the lines around her eyes and trying to figure out if she was smiling or not, because her mouth curved upward slightly, but she did not seem happy.

  “I have thought that too, at times,” I said.

  Asteria touched my shoulder. Her hand was scuffed—abraded knuckles and streaks of dirt. I followed her.

  We came upon a large iron gate in a dark plot of land that looked like a cemetery without graves. In front of the gate, a bird was choking on a worm. I couldn’t tell if the creature was trying to swallow the worm or spit it out, but eventually the worm spilled from the tiny yellow beak, growing longer and longer. I watched Asteria go up to the bird, lift it in her hand, and twist its neck until it broke with a twiglike snap. She tossed it to the ground and pulled the seemingly never-ending worm from its mouth. She hauled open the iron gate, which creaked, and used the worm to tie the gate open.