I’m a deer, she thought, as her feet rose and fell. I’m a deer, a hare, a hound. I’m not tired. I’m not afraid. She stopped a few times to drink from the waterskin and stretch out her tight calf muscles and retie the cloth around her shorn head. She looked back when she stopped, and saw only the empty mountainside falling away behind her, in waves of silver-green olive leaves and burned red earth.
The sun had edged into the west when she stopped for the last time. She craned up at the great metal door and the peak that soared like jagged horns above it. The door seemed bigger and darker than it had those other years. She unwound the cloth from her head and tilted her face into the wind that always blew here—the breath of the Goddess, warm and sweet on blistered skin. She closed her eyes and saw bright orange spots dancing beneath her lids. When she opened them again, she walked straight for the door. Its metal was hot under her palms and brow. She traced her fingers over the lock and the lines of the smaller door. She bent and set her ear to the door-within-a-door and heard a dull, bottomless roaring that was somehow deeper than silence.
“Asterion,” she whispered, “I’m coming.”
The procession arrived at sunset. Chara heard drums and flutes first, then a distant babble of talking, and singing that scattered on the wind. Suddenly the figs she’d eaten felt like stones in her belly. She pressed herself even farther into the shade of the thick, squat rock she’d chosen, which hunkered on a rise to the west of the labyrinth’s mouth. As the procession’s sounds grew clearer, she imagined what she’d see if she dared to look: the brilliant scarlets, blues, and greens of flowers and dresses and the marble statues on their rolling platforms; the iridescent glinting of shells; the stark white of the Athenians’ shifts; the dark brown of their masks and the bull faces stitched into the golden banners.
She crouched, nearly motionless, until the red sky filled with black and stars. Only then did she ease her cramped limbs straight and peer around the rock. She blinked at the torchlight and godfire that streamed and twisted in the Goddess’s breath. People-shadows were moving among the flames, but she wasn’t interested in them—only in the ones who wouldn’t be moving. Her sharpening vision found them swiftly; after all, she knew where to look. Fourteen of them, bound and still, kneeling in two rows before the door. The boys were in the front, the girls behind. If the girls’ arms had been free they would have been able to reach back and touch the metal. Chara wondered briefly whether it would be hot, even at night.
Theseus, she thought as her eyes sharpened and she made out the shape that had to be him—the one that was straighter and broader-shouldered than the others, are you ready? Am I?
As in those other years, there were no guards: just two priestesses, standing at either end of the boys’ line, facing the throng. Chara had watched them, last time; she knew that they wouldn’t glance back at the Athenians unless one of them cried out or caused some other sort of disturbance. None of them did, as deeper night fell. They knelt without moving. The shapes of their mask-horns wavered on the ground, caught in the light.
Eventually all the lights dimmed and died. A flute trilled a last, fading line of notes. A baby whimpered and coughed and went quiet.
Chara slipped out of her clothes and into the white shift a priestess had given her. She had told the sister that one of the Athenians had soiled hers. Fear caught her when she was halfway down the slope. She didn’t falter. She kept crouching low, kept angling toward the line of girls.
Sotiria, she thought. Sotiria’s all you’re after. Don’t even try to glance at Theseus—look only for her.
She was at the very end, as Chara had known she would be: the priestesses liked to arrange the sacrifices with the smallest at either end and the tallest in the middle.
Chara dropped to her stomach and pulled herself over the stone-nubbled dirt. Not a deer, a hare, a hound: an invisible snake . . . She slithered until the girl’s bound, crossed ankles were right in front of her. Chara lifted herself onto her elbows and whispered, “Sotiria.”
The masked head snapped up.
“Shhh,” Chara murmured. “Gently. I’m right here, just like I said I would be. Everything’s fine. The priestesses can’t see or hear us.”
Sotiria nodded. Chara was close enough to see that her lips were cracked and her skin was caked in dust that made her look very pale, in the starlight. Chara tugged the mask off. Sotiria made a hissing sound and squeezed her eyes shut. When they opened, they were black and steady on Chara’s. Her eyebrows looked very thick and dark beneath the polished nakedness of her head.
“Good,” Chara mouthed. She smiled. Sotiria didn’t.
Chara eased the razor out of her belt and moved behind Sotiria. It took only a few minutes to saw through her wrist bonds, which were thickly knotted and slippery with blood. (And long: thank the Goddess, long enough to re-tie, even after they’d been cut.) Sotiria shuddered but made no sound. The ankle bonds were even thicker, and they creaked as Chara was working at them; the girl beside them shifted on her knees and turned.
Chara froze. Sotiria, who’d been flexing her arms in front of her, craned to look over her shoulder, her black eyes even wider than they had been. Chara put her finger to her lips and smiled again, even though her insides were crawling with dread. She watched the masked girl wet her own lips with her tongue, as if she were about to speak. Instead she slumped farther back onto her heels and dropped her chin to her chest. She made a low, keening sound that lasted for the space of one long breath out. No one else stirred.
Chara set the razor to Sotiria’s ankle bonds again, and they parted in a few cuts. She pressed the girl’s shoulders until she sat back, shuddering more violently than before, her eyes gleaming with tears. “There’s no time,” Chara whispered. “You have to bind me right away.”
Sotiria swallowed and nodded. Her hands trembled as she picked up the lengths of rope. She shuffled behind Chara and slipped the rope around her wrists.
“No,” Chara murmured, as soon as Sotiria had made the first loop. “They made their knots tight. You have to make yours tight, too, or they’ll wonder.”
Sotiria pulled, hard. Chara had been expecting this, but she chewed at the inside of her mouth anyway, to keep from gasping.
“Now the mask,” she said.
This time the girl’s hands were firm right away: they slipped the leather over Chara’s stubbly head and pulled it sharply down, almost to her upper lip. Chara tried to suck a breath in through her nose but the mask pressed against both her nostrils.
“Stop,” Sotiria hissed. “Breathe only through your mouth. And don’t be afraid if you feel like you’re not getting enough air: you will.”
Chara drew in another breath, and another. “Thank you,” she said at last. “Now listen: there’s a rock just up that slope—a big one shaped like a tooth. There’s a waterskin there for you, and a bag with some food and a few coins, and my old clothes.”
The silence that followed seemed so long that Chara thought Sotiria had slipped away without speaking, but then she said, “I shouldn’t. I take people’s pain away; I promised to do that, in there. I promised them, and they’re my countrymen, my friends. . . .”
Chara shook her head and wriggled her bound hands. “I’ll be more help to them. I will, though I don’t have any godmark at all, let alone one as powerful as yours. I’ll be the only one who knows what they’ll be facing. Who they’ll be facing. Trust me with this, Sotiria. And go—quickly.”
After a moment fingers brushed her cheek, below the mask, and then her throbbing hands. “May all my gods and yours protect you,” Sotiria whispered. “Farewell.”
Ariadne had slept fitfully, beneath the whispering cloth of the royal tent. Now, an hour after dawn, the words of her mother’s speech sounded like the buzzing drone of bees, even though Pasiphae was standing only a few paces away. Ariadne fastened her eyes on Theseus, bald and masked like the commoners but standing a little too tall, a lit
tle too proudly. His eyes swivelled, behind the holes of the mask, and found her. She felt a thrumming in her head, so sudden and powerful that she clutched her own hair convulsively.
::Don’t . . . afraid.:: The words crackled and stung and she winced. ::This is how I . . .::
She frowned at him, and even though he’d told her that she wouldn’t be able to respond to his mind-voice, she thought, I can’t hear every word, my Prince—should I be able to? Is this how it is with everyone?
His lips curved. ::You will . . . from me soon . . . this, Princess.:: He spoke no more words into her head, but the thrumming was still there, like a pulse far beneath her own heartbeat. It stayed, even when she tipped her head back and watched a hawk turning in the pink-blue air far above all of them. Even when she closed her eyes, Theseus of Athens was still with her.
When the great door screamed open behind her she felt the motion through her shoes and up her legs and gritted her teeth, just as she had the other times. She opened her eyes and didn’t move them from the hawk, but even so, she pictured the lock coursing with the same silver that would be streaming from Phaidra’s hands. Minos’s hands would be dribbling sparks and gouts of flame—but he might, at least, stay silent.
Pasiphae’s voice stopped. The priestess’s began; when her droning ended, with a cry of “Accept our gifts, Great Mother! Accept our obeisance, Bull Prince!” Ariadne finally lowered her gaze to the place directly before the door. She saw the first bull mask come off. Saw the first young man roll back on his heels, reeling as the light struck his eyes. He flailed his just-freed arms and twisted around so that he was facing Ariadne. He opened his mouth in a soundless cry.
The priestess raised her snake staff. The gold trim on her bodice arms flashed. “Go with blessings,” she called. The two guards grasped the youth’s arms and walked him to the yawning black emptiness of the doorway. They bent him forward and thrust him inside.
He disappeared immediately, just as all the others would. Four years ago Ariadne had thought a great deal about this vanishing. Two years ago she hadn’t—but now that Theseus was there, everything was different. He was next. He was throwing his shoulders back, the fool—and when one of the guards wrenched his hood off he tossed his head as if he still had a golden mane. He, at least, didn’t seem blinded; his eyes swivelled to Ariadne’s once more, then away, before she had time to glower at him.
May you be as strong as you are bold, she thought. For only you are good enough to take me from this place. Only you, someday-king of Athens.
“Go with blessings!” the priestess called. Theseus pretended to stumble, as the guards turned him toward the door, but even so he looked graceful and coiled; a warrior, disappearing before anyone knew he was one.
:: In :: said his mind-voice, and she shivered as the word plucked at her veins. ::In . . . beautiful and deep and . . . ::
No more words came. Ariadne wrenched her eyes away from the place where he’d been and concentrated on the hawk again. While the guards sent one sacrifice after another into the darkness, she pretended that there were no onlookers, no banners; nothing but this bird alone in the sky.
Then she heard a rising murmur beside her. She glanced sideways at the people before the door. The priestess and guards were clustered around an Athenian girl. She seemed to be the last one: a slip of a thing, awash in her loose white robe. Her mask was off. The priestess was running a hand over the girl’s head, which was all Ariadne could clearly see of her. It was far stubblier than the others’ heads had been. Stubbly, and crisscrossed with angry red cuts. “No,” Ariadne heard the priestess say. “This cannot be. Something is not—”
The Athenian took a step back and turned so that Ariadne could see her profile. At first she saw only a slender girl who wasn’t as smoothly, flawlessly bald as the others—but a moment later she saw something else: another girl, overlaid atop this one. A girl whose nose was familiar. Her nose and her freckles. A girl whose sea-grey eyes, roaming wildly up and around, found Ariadne’s and went still.
Ariadne moved forward slowly. She thought slowly, too; the new pulsing in her head was so strange, so relentless. “No,” she managed to whisper. “No!”—louder, so that her mother and the priestess and all the people in the throng would turn to her, at last.
They did. And as they did, the slip of a girl sprang silently out of the guards’ grip and sprinted for the labyrinth’s door.
“No!” Ariadne cried, one last time. “Stop—Chara: stop!”
Chara bent and leapt into the darkness.
EPILOGUE
“’Tiria?”
The child was skinny and brown, perhaps eight years old. During the three days he’d known her, he hadn’t left her side.
She’d run, as Chara had told her to. She’d run all day and all night and then most of the next day and night, through passes that took her farther and farther from the Goddess’s mountain—and at last she’d fallen. The child’s shepherd father had found her, sprawled unconscious on his highest pasture, and taken her back to his hut to set her broken ankle bone.
“What’s your name?” he’d asked as his hands gripped and twisted.
“Sotiria,” she’d stammered, twisting herself, as if she might be able to wriggle away from the pain. She’d borne so much pain—other people’s, mostly, thanks to her godmark. But this was her own, and it was strange and raw, not silver at all.
The child had put out a hand and laid it on her burned, bald head, and his father had snapped, “Let her be, boy.”
And Chara had said, “No, no, it’s fine,” because the child reminded her of her brother.
When she’d woken the next morning, the child had been crouched beside her pallet, his eyes wide and solemn. This should perhaps have alarmed her, but it didn’t. She’d smiled at him, though she’d wanted to cry—because she wasn’t, now, at a port, trading Chara’s coins for passage away from Crete. Because the boy was like her brother. Because her ankle throbbed, and the shepherd was kind, and had asked her no questions.
“’Tiria?” the boy said again. He was sitting with her against the broad, tangled bole of an ancient olive tree. The shepherd had carried her here at her request, and commanded his son not to bother her with talk. “Why did you fall?”
“Because I was running in the dark, and I’d been running for too long.”
“Why were you running?”
“Because I was trying to get away from the mountains. Because people might have been chasing me.”
“What people?”
She didn’t answer. She watched the shepherd, who was standing on a hillock below them. He was gazing down on his flock, scattered across the bright green of the pasture and among the trees around its edges. The mountain’s red-brown flank rose above them all, stark and shadowless in the midday sun.
“You talk funny,” the child said.
She took a deep breath. “I’m not from this island.”
“So were you trying to get home?”
“Yes.” She bent forward and fiddled with her bandage so that he wouldn’t see her tears.
“When your ankle’s better will you try again?”
“Yes,” she said, remembering seagulls wheeling above the port at Athens, and the columns atop the Acropolis glowing at sundown as if they were on fire, and her brother’s eager, cracking voice.
“Are you sure you want to go home?”
Many peaks away, a plume of black smoke rose into the cloudless sky. The Goddess’s breath, or King Minos’s mark-madness? Sotiria imagined Melaina conjuring a blackness to match the smoke’s, and Tryphon crying out in fear. She imagined Adrastus laughing, and a beast stirring in the dark. And even as she imagined these things, she felt Theseus’s mind-presence in her blood and bones and veins and up behind her eyes. He was many peaks away, where the smoke was. All of them were there, together.
“No,” she said, as her godmark grasped at her with its gentle,
tireless, silver claws.
The boy nodded emphatically. “Good,” he said, and leaned his head on her arm.
The shepherd whistled and thwacked his staff against his leg. One sheep bleated, then several more.
The gods have given you this chance at peace, Sotiria told herself. Be still, now; don’t think at all. There’s nothing more you can do for them.
And for a time, she almost believed it.
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PROLOGUE
The sky above the Goddess’s mountain was on fire. Manasses saw it first.
“Papa!” he called from outside the hut. “Come and look!”
Alexios set down the bowl of curds he was holding and stepped out of the lamplight and into the night. His godmark always turned darkness to silver-tinged day, for him—but this darkness was different. A sheet of red-orange threaded with silver lightning hung to the south. It rippled slowly and silently, blotting out the stars.
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