“How?” Smoke curled from his mouth. The backs of his hands were webbed with kindling flame.
The messenger swallowed. He was beardless; a man who spent more time in Athens than at home and had taken on Athenian fashion.
“My lord, it was King Aegeus’s nephews—the Pallantides—they were jealous of the prince’s prowess. They . . . they stabbed him with the tusks of the boar he had tamed. Others were there, too—someone tried to reach the prince, but one of the Pallantides summoned a net made of silver fire and cast it over Androgeus so that no one could touch him. He died slowly. Many watched.”
“King Aegeus. What has he done?”
“He has sent a message.”
“And what does it say?”
“My King?”
“Say it to me.”
“It . . . it says: Minos, King of Crete, my city mourns your son and begs your mercy.”
“That is all.”
“Yes, Minos King.”
“That is all.”
“It is.”
Minos whirled to face the messenger. Flames leapt from his fingertips and seared black lines into the floor.
“Then there will be war.”
“Yes, my King. It is . . . expected.”
Ariadne looked at all of them in turn: Minos; Pasiphae, her hands buried in her hair, pulling her head down toward her knees; Glaucus and Deucalion, pale and gaping; Daedalus, frozen mid-stride, his own head turned sideways as Icarus’s so often was. And Asterion. Asterion, who was crying.
“Leave me.” Minos’s voice rasped. “Everyone leave me.”
The boys almost ran between the pillars and Phaidra followed, tripping over her skirts. Naucrate took Daedalus’s hand and drew him out after them. Soon only Pasiphae and Ariadne were left, with the king.
“Husband.” Pasiphae looked broken; she sounded broken.
“Go!” Minos thundered. She rose. Her skirts were dark-damp where her legs had been pressing on them. Water ran down her brow and neck but not her cheeks.
“May Lord Zeus abandon you,” she said. “May you cry out for him in your solitude and find him gone.” She lifted her face to the rain, once she was outside, and then she walked, and it swallowed her.
Ariadne and Minos were alone. He was staring blindly at his hands and the flames that dribbled down from them. She took a step closer. Still he stared.
“Father,” she said, very softly.
His eyes leapt to her, saw her, filled with tears. “Ariadne,” he whispered. He held out his arms and she ran into them, as if she were still a child—only now he was the child. He sobbed and clung and she didn’t care that his palms scalded her through her bodice.
“Hush,” she said, and smiled.
CHAPTER SIX
Chara fell so hard that all the breath seemed to leave her body. She made a sound like “umf” as the dust from the path rose and settled around her, and then she gasped and flipped onto her back. Glaucus was above her, brandishing the blue-and-scarlet painted stick he carried everywhere. Chara lunged up and grasped the end of it with both hands. She tugged sharply and he stumbled; she hooked her foot around his and he fell even more heavily than she had. As she rolled away from him, she heard Icarus and Asterion laughing.
“That’ll teach you to take on a girl who’s so much smaller than you,” Asterion said.
Glaucus was laughing, too, in a wheezy sort of way. “Peace?” he said as he got to his feet. He extended his hand to her and she took it.
“Peace,” she said and snatched the stick out of his other hand. She sprang away from him and he shouted, and their footsteps pounded yet more dust from the sunbaked track. She knew he’d catch her in just a few paces, so she slowed before he did and dropped the stick.
“No peace, next time,” he said and ruffled her hair. She swatted at his hand, growling, and he laughed again.
The four of them walked on in silence until Glaucus muttered, “Ariadne’s following us.”
Icarus appeared to trip over his own feet, and flushed to the tips of his ears. “Really?”
“Shh,” Asterion whispered. “Really. Every time I almost look back she tries to hide behind a bush. No, Chara,” he said as she shifted to glance back herself, “don’t. Let her think we don’t know. Just be . . . normal.”
Icarus’s walk had suddenly gone very stiff. He looks a bit like a wading bird, Chara thought.
“So,” he said, his tone as stiff as his gait, “where are we going this time?”
Asterion squinted at the path ahead of them, which looked to Chara like a flat, red-brown snake wending its way among the new green of the hills. “Just to the waterfall.”
“Good,” Icarus said, less awkwardly. “It hurt when I fell out of the tree last time.”
Glaucus snorted. “Yes, and the farmer wasn’t pleased with us, either.”
They left the road when it passed an ancient, lightning-split cypress. Chara drew her hand along its gnarled trunk and one prickly green frond, then hurried to catch up with the others. It was easy to keep pace with Glaucus and Asterion, but Icarus was much faster than all of them—especially when he used his metallic silver string to swing up to the rocky outcroppings that jutted like giant fists from the earth, and leapt off them. Every time he did this, the breath caught in her throat because perhaps this would be it: perhaps he would hang suspended for just a moment longer and then climb into the windy blue of the sky with his arm-wings trailing silver godlight. But his feet carried him back to the ground every time, with a solid, mocking sound that made Chara wince.
“You know, it’s heat that makes me change,” Asterion said to Icarus when they were all sitting above the waterfall. Chara brushed the spray away from her face as if this would help her hear him better. “Maybe there’s something like that for you but you just don’t know it yet.”
“Maybe it’s cold,” Glaucus said. He was knocking his stick against the boulder he was sitting on—thwack thwack thwack, like a drumbeat beneath the water’s song.
“Or hunger,” Chara said. “Fear, maybe. I don’t know,” she added in a rush, “of course I don’t, because I’m not godmarked . . .” Not that I mind, she almost said, only she thought, just in time, that this might hurt someone’s feelings.
“Maybe I won’t ever find out,” Icarus muttered.
She blinked at him through rainbow mist as his head bobbed and his slender toes scritched and dug at the earth. He looks like a bird. It’s not fair that he can’t fly.
Ariadne wondered again why she’d picked a thornflower bush to hide behind. It wasn’t just the stubby thorns themselves, which plucked at her skin and clothing whenever she leaned forward—it was also the fragrance of the delicate pink blooms. Such tiny flowers, and yet their scent slid up her nostrils and made her need to sneeze. She squeezed her nose between her fingers. Be silent, she thought. They mustn’t hear you.
They hadn’t heard her when she was following them, even though she hadn’t been all that far behind, and there was barely any cover once they left the road. They’d been too involved with each other: talking with their heads bent together, wrestling, racing—even the girl Chara, who still didn’t look like a girl (all that tangled hair and bronzed skin, and the loincloth as short as a boy’s). Ariadne heard them laughing. Glaucus sounds like a sick toad, she thought. If only I could skewer him on that stick of his.
She enjoyed mocking this stick, which he kept by his bed. She’d watched him when he thought he was alone, spinning and stabbing it into the air like a sword. He had no real sword though he was sixteen and Androgeus had had his first before then. Glaucus had wanted the one Daedalus had made, the one that looked like a dagger until you turned a switch in its hilt and a series of bronze segments emerged, but Daedalus had said no: that sword wasn’t for boys. So Glaucus had no sword, and no place with the soldiers who’d left last month for Athens.
Now the three boys and Ch
ara were sitting on boulders beside the mouth of a waterfall. Ariadne could see only the tops of their heads: Asterion’s jumble of golden curls, Glaucus’s finer, darker ones, Chara’s mass of black knots, and Icarus’s strange, shifting, many-coloured layers. She could hear them very clearly, though, even over the rumble and hiss of the water.
“You know, it’s heat that makes me change,” Asterion was saying. Gods, how she hated his voices—the boy’s and the bull’s. “Maybe there’s something like that for you but you just don’t know it yet.”
“Maybe it’s cold,” Glaucus said. He was knocking the stick against his boulder.
“Or hunger,” said Chara. “Fear, maybe. I don’t know—of course I don’t, because I’m not godmarked. . . .”
Icarus’s head dipped out of sight for a moment. Ariadne knew he was bobbing it as he always did whenever he was embarrassed or nervous or angry—whenever he was anything, really. He muttered something she couldn’t hear.
“Don’t say that,” Asterion said. “Listen: for me it starts like a buzzing—only not one I can hear—a buzzing like something in my belly. Then it spreads until it’s even behind my eyes—and after that everything looks wobbly and strange, and all my skin hurts.”
Glaucus snorted. “I don’t care if it would mean the gods favoured me more—I wouldn’t want a gift like that.”
“I would.” This time Ariadne heard Icarus’s words because he stood as he spoke them. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I feel the buzzing, too, you know—except it starts on the outside and never moves in. It gives me feathers and a beak and it changes the way things look, but it never goes inside to help me fly.”
Ariadne had never heard him say so much at once. She eased herself up so that her head was above the bush, but all she could see was his back. His bony hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides. She imagined his eyes, small and round, fastened on the foaming water below.
“So we’ll try this again,” Glaucus said as he rose too. “I’ll make a wind and you jump and try to let it catch you. It almost worked last time, remember?”
“With Deucalion,” Icarus said. “And it didn’t almost work.”
Chara nudged Icarus’s chest with her shoulder. “Come on, Icarus. Just try it. Let Glaucus help.”
Yes, Ariadne thought, give poor Glau a chance. After all, our father didn’t, when he sailed for Athens.
All the children had stood in a row on the cliffside, just as they had when Androgeus’s dolphin ship had been below them. Again, people had massed behind them. This time, though, the king didn’t speak to the crowd. He hardly spoke at all. He walked slowly along the line of his children. He didn’t look at Glaucus or Deucalion or Phaidra, who all gazed at him as if they were waiting for him to. He didn’t look at Pasiphae, whose own eyes were fixed on the sky. He stared at nothing—or perhaps at something no one else could see.
“Father?” Asterion’s voice was quavery but clear. “Deucalion and Glaucus could make a wind—it’s what they did for Androgeus. . . .”
Minos paused mid-step. He squinted at the steel-grey clouds and cocked his head, as if he’d heard something faint and puzzling. He drummed his fingers on the bronze helmet he was holding under his arm.
“I am glad, Ariadne,” he said in the hoarse voice that seemed to be his all the time, now, “that no one has dared speak to me and call me ‘Father.’ I am glad that no one has been fool enough to do that.”
His eyes swivelled to her. They were black and cold. She nodded. She didn’t smile but he did, suddenly and swiftly. He reached out and touched her cheek. There was no warmth in his fingertips.
“Bring them to their knees, Husband,” Pasiphae said. He spun and walked to the cliff path without even a glance at her.
As the ships—so many, darkening the sea—had turned westward, Ariadne had wrapped her arms around herself. Keeping her joy in, where it would be safe.
Now she hugged herself too, but only to protect her arms from the thorns.
“Very well,” Icarus said. “Glaucus can help.”
Asterion stood up. Ariadne could just see his head and shoulders. His horn nubs gleamed when he turned to the other three.
Glaucus leaned forward. She couldn’t hear anything except the water and a high insect hum from the bushes around her. She knew that he would be whistling notes that would flutter and wander until the god told him which one was right. (“Does he say ‘That one!’ in your ear?” she’d asked him once. “No,” he’d scoffed—but he could never explain what did happen.) When he raised his silver-lined hands, she knew it was time.
Icarus’s hair rippled. Asterion’s and Chara’s thicker hair did not, but the ends of their loincloths did. Droplets of spray from the waterfall blew up and away from them in a curtain of mist. A moment later Ariadne felt the wind. It swirled around her ankles and up her legs, and she had to clutch at her skirts to keep them from billowing. As it grasped at her hair and breath, she thought, Not bad, Glau, and immediately after, Don’t let it work—please don’t. . . .
Icarus took a long pace back. He lifted his arms and bent his head low, with his chin parallel to the earth. She saw feathers: they poked out of his skin, more every time she blinked. Soon his arms were trailing streamers of them, and they joined somehow, one to the other, until they were wings. They shone bronze, copper, and gold, and when he moved them quickly they snapped like sails.
His head twisted on his neck. He had no nose or mouth; a long silver beak instead, which opened and shut with a sound of metal-on-metal.
“Well done, Icarus!” Asterion cried. “Glaucus, too—now go, go!”
Icarus took two more steps back, these ones jerky and bobbing. His head lowered even more. He bent forward and ran five uneven steps between two boulders, and out in a sweeping thrust, into open air.
The wind gusted. It howled as it did, so no one heard Ariadne’s sneeze. She shoved hair out of her eyes and saw Icarus hovering, his wings catching sun and mist. He hung and then he tilted and banked sharply before his wings crimped and folded . . . and he fell.
The wind died as soon as he disappeared. The splash he made in the pool below was loud. Ariadne bit her knuckles to keep from laughing.
“It’s all right,” Asterion said to Icarus when he had climbed back up (just a thin, sodden boy). “It is. We’ll try again, or we’ll try something else.”
Icarus said nothing. His narrow shoulders twitched. He was side-on to Ariadne now, and she could see crimson speckles on his arm where the feathers had been. It hurts him, she thought, as she often did about Asterion—and again the thought made her weak with envy and hunger.
The children walked back to Knossos even more slowly than they’d walked away from it. Glaucus lagged behind, stopping often to swing his imaginary sword, straining as if it really were bronze, not wood.
Ariadne thought, Hurry up and leave Asterion alone, all of you, so that I can have him to myself; I haven’t been alone with him since Androgeus left . . . They didn’t leave him, and soon the western gate loomed against the darkening sky.
They paused before it. A few people walked past them and made the sign of the horns to Asterion. Icarus and Glaucus made the sign too, before they left him. Ariadne watched them go: together up the steps and between the pillars, then one to the right, one to the left. Chara remained, of course. She and Asterion wandered over to one of the great scarlet entrance pillars and crouched in its shadow (though everything was shadowed, now that dusk had fallen). They stared at the ground, which was good—they wouldn’t see Ariadne coming.
The stones of her dancing ground were so familiar; she could feel them even through her calfskin boots. She didn’t follow their whorls this time—she walked in a swift, straight line.
“Brother.” She could barely keep herself from smiling when he started and fell sideways. Chara looked up slowly, her brows raised a little beneath her mess of hair.
“Half-sister,
” Asterion said, pulling himself back into a crouch. “What do you want?”
His face was tipped up to her. His eyes and voice were steady. No, she thought, this isn’t how he should be. This will not do at all.
“I just want to know what you’re doing. Thinking about Androgeus, maybe?”
Asterion’s expression didn’t change. “I think about him all the time.”
“You must miss him terribly. He was your protector, after all.”
Asterion smiled a strange little smile. “Oh? What was he protecting me from?”
No. Not right. You can do better than this, Ari.
She shrugged. “You don’t seem to miss him at all. Look at you—so calm and cold.”
“I’m not a baby,” Asterion said. “I can hide what I’m feeling.”
Ariadne twitched her skirts and brushed imaginary specks off her bodice sleeves. “I remember when you were born, you know. I remember how you squalled, then—and two years later.” She crouched, suddenly, and leaned forward so that her forehead was nearly brushing his. “I remember how you screamed when the fire touched you for the first time.”
He didn’t move, but Chara did. She scrambled upright, her hands clenched at her sides. Her bare, flat, brown chest heaved.
“Girl?” Ariadne spoke carelessly as she straightened, but she felt her own pulse quickening. “What is it?”
“I remember, too,” Chara said. Her eyes had no grey in them now—only black. “Just now, suddenly, when you said that . . . I was there. I was on the floor—I saw you put the lamp down. . . .”
Ariadne heard Asterion gasp but she didn’t turn to him. “Oh?” She couldn’t say more; she thought her words might tremble the same way her insides did.
“Yes,” Chara went on, even more quickly, “I remember the heat and how everything changed, all the twisting and the fire. I remember you putting the lamp down. You stood there smiling, even though he was screaming.”
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