The Flame in the Maze (17 page)

She did all of this before she could think. The space between the daintily tapered end of the bridge and the ledge was one she probably could have crossed in a single long pace, but fear, and his command, made her leap. She landed, sprawled, rolled onto her back, wheezing with laughter.

“Up, old woman,” he said from above her, his hands on his knees. She struggled to sit— her bones had all gone soft—and struggled to breathe, because now, suddenly, she was crying.

Asterion's hands were on her shoulders. “I shouldn't have brought you here. The mountain is . . . different. There was never this . . . much wind or heat, before. I'm sorry. . . .”

She gulped and dragged her hand under her nose. “That's fine,” she said, smiling shakily up at him. “But whatever's on this side had better be worth it.”

At first, Chara thought that the chamber was made entirely of crystal. There was no single source of light: it came from everywhere, rainbow and white; when she squeezed her eyes shut, she still saw its dazzle. If there was an end to the expanse, anywhere, she couldn't tell: no ceiling, no rock wall anywhere but at the corridor's mouth.

Asterion took three paces past her, to the place where hard-packed dirt became crystal. She couldn't see his face. “How long has it been since you were last here?”

“Don't know.” He looked back at her: a stranger with inward-turned eyes. “How long since they put me . . . inside?”

Questions
, she thought, with a shiver made of dread and relief.
At last
. “Four years. A little more than that.”

“Ariadne . . . thought of it, didn't she? Of putting me in here? And the king did . . . the rest?”

“Yes.”

“Who else knew?”

“Ariadne and your father were the only ones who weren't surprised. It was their secret. She'd have wanted it that way. Asterion,” she said, wanting to touch him, but wary of his stranger's gaze. “Show me this place?”

He stared a moment longer, then blinked as slowly as one of Karpos's statues, and returned. “Of course,” he said, with a twitch of his shoulders, and a shadow-smile.

A path wound through the crystal, which rose in blocks that were jagged or smooth, knee-high or far, far taller than Chara and Asterion were. She started every time she moved and her reflection did the same, distorted and close; she tried to look only at him, padding slowly across the slippery ground. The path branched and he led her right, without hesitation.
It's a labyrinth within a labyrinth
, she thought, and remembered Ariadne's puzzle box, with its tiny metal figures.

After they'd taken two other, narrower paths, Asterion stopped. She was behind—no room beside—and saw something dark on the ground just beyond him. He blew out a long, slow breath. “Well. Here we are.”

She stepped after him onto a small patch of brown-red rock, fuzzed with moss so painfully bright that she thought,
How had I already forgotten green?
A trickle of water had carved a channel in the crystal of one of the enclosing walls; the trickle disappeared into the moss, soaking it almost black.

“Some of this light must be from the sun.” She whispered, because she wanted to be able to hear the burble and drip of the water.

“I thought that too, when I first came here. It hurt me. It hurt that there was . . . still sun, somewhere.”

She dug her toes into the moss—the dry green, then, paces later, the damp almost-black. She walked around the entire patch—thirty-two paces in all—and had taken fifteen steps across it when a piece of cloth made her stop. She hadn't noticed it before, because it was folded up into a very small square, and was so dirty that it blended in with the rock.

“That was . . . someone's,” he said. “Kosmas's, maybe.
She
set it aside. I picked it up. I never had anything of my own; I was naked when I fell, because I was . . .”

“The bull,” she said, “or mostly. I know. I was watching.”

“. . . And I took this because I thought . . . it might make me feel more human. To wear it.”

He picked up the cloth and twisted it in his hands until his knuckles went white.

“Did it work?”

He shook his head. “But maybe now I could make a . . . loincloth out of it, anyway . . . Try again.”

“No—don't,” she said, and felt herself flush. “I mean, you're obviously a boy—a man.”

He grinned. It shocked her as the green had; she thought,
I'd forgotten—O gods and snapping turtles, but he's beautiful when he smiles like that.

“If I shouldn't . . . neither should you.”

She slipped out of her own robe and dropped it at her feet. Her skin was blazingly hot; so was everything underneath it.
We've been like this before
, she thought, as if she could reason the heat away.
When we were children. He'd be naked after a rite; I'd be wearing only a loincloth—gods, but it bothered Ariadne, and her mother.
But
this wasn't the same. Of course it wasn't.

She sat down by the damp moss with her legs drawn up under her chin. He knelt in front of her and leaned to put the edge of her robe in the water. He wrung it out over her shoulders and she gasped at its cold and its long, tickling trails. He dipped it again and squeezed it over her front, this time. When he sat back she saw the cloth tremble in his hands, and reached out to hold one of them. She shifted so that she was kneeling, and he put a hand on the back of her stubble-roughened head and pulled it closer to him—to his lips, which were dry and cracked and slightly parted.

If he kissed her, it was too quick for her to feel. What she did feel was him pulling his hand away, and bumping her shoulders with his as he thrust himself to his feet. She stood too, but he was already stumbling away from her. The crystal walls warped his shape and features; he wobbled, as if she were seeing him through receding veils of water. He took one path and then another, until he vanished into the glare.

She sat with her back next to the stream, even though she wanted to run after him. “No,” she said quietly—aloud, because her voice made her feel steadier. “Leave him. He'll come back. Be patient.”

Darkness fell around her, almost between breaths. All that was left of the blaze of colour and white was a deep blue glow far above, which seemed to pulse in time with her heartbeat.
The sky
, she thought.
The night sky above Knossos; the horns on the palace roof, darker than the sky. Ariadne standing up there, watching for her father's return from Athens. The same sky, nights later, when Asterion gored the king. The High Priest made lightning and thunder; the ground split open at our feet. And they took Asterion away.
Each word, each memory was thick and tangled with weariness.

When she woke it was still dark, except for the blue—but there was a shadow across from her. She saw him as the sleep cleared from her eyes: crouched, coiled, rocking. She didn't speak. After a moment he crawled over the moss to her, and she saw that one of his legs was dragging behind him, and that it ended in a hoof. His horns were longer than they'd been when he left.

He took her hand, and she flinched, though she didn't mean to. He guided her forefinger to some carved lines in the wall beside her, which she hadn't noticed. He drew her finger along them, slowly, his hand shaking a little. The marks meant nothing, at first—but then, after he'd made her trace them again, she felt the shape of his name and, right beside it, hers. She drew in a quick breath and turned her fingers around so that they were gripping his.

“I wanted to remember,” he whispered. “I was afraid I'd lose . . . everything. I used obsidian to carve them. I . . .”

His belly hollowed as he sucked in his own breath.

She held herself still, though she wanted to draw him in against her. “Do you remember everything else?” she said. “Everything that's happened to you in here, when you were the bull?”

He slid himself away from her and lay down on his side. He was silent for so long that she thought he'd gone to sleep. “Yes,” he said at last, and curled even more tightly into himself.

She sat with her hand on their names and waited for dawn.

He didn't leave again, in the days that followed, but he hardly spoke, either. One morning his hoof had turned back into a foot; the next, his arms were covered in fur, which became scarred flesh again by nightfall. She made her own way back and forth to the crevasse to empty her bladder and bowels of the very little food she was eating; when she returned he was always where she'd left him, silent, his eyes rolling away from hers.

He didn't eat at all.

She left a fig near his hand, as she ate one. She broke off pieces of salt fish and dipped them in water and placed some on the stone, while she ate the others. He didn't even glance at the food.

“You have to eat,” she finally said, though she'd promised herself she wouldn't be the one to break their silence.

He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the mossy patch, staring at nothing. “I don't,” he said, and she started; she hadn't expected his voice.

“Here: have one fig. Just one. You need strength; your shoulder won't heal quickly enough, otherwise.”

“No!” he shouted, and leapt to his feet.
There
, she thought dully,
now he'll go
—but he didn't. He paced, stumbling a bit with every turn he took.

“Why did you bring me here with you?” She tried to speak quietly, but the words cracked and came out louder.

He stopped pacing and stood with his forehead against the crystal, facing away from her. She saw his reflection—his closed eyes, his parted lips, blurred.

“It was wonderful, being . . . back. It was—at first. Now . . .”

He turned and walked to her and sat down with a
whoosh
of breath that sounded like the bull's.

She shook her head, though he wasn't looking at her. “I can't imagine what any of this has been like, for you. All these years. And I don't have any idea what to do now, myself. I was so certain I'd find you—but I didn't ever think past that.”

“Because you knew . . . we'd both die in here.”

She kept shaking her head, until her vision swam with crystal and light. “I don't believe that.”

“And even if we did get out, and . . . escape . . . where would we go? How . . . would we live?”

“I don't know.” She could barely speak over the lump that had risen into her throat.
We
, she thought. She wound her fingers together and squeezed, tight.

“You used to bring me things,” he said, some time later. “After a rite. After I'd changed back.”

“I did. So here—look: it's a fig!”

He made a snuffling noise that was almost a laugh and took it from her. He turned it over and over in his palm. “I can't eat yet,” he said. “I'm sorry. For everything.”

They didn't speak again that day. At night, as they lay against opposite walls, he said, “Prince Theseus was going to kill me.”

She propped her cheek on her hand. “He was.”

“He shouted . . . into my head.
Into
it. As he was . . . about to strike me with his sword. He called me . . . monster.”

“Ariadne told him that's what you were. She lured him here to kill you, then take her back to Athens with her.”

He snorted. “Ariadne, Queen of Athens.”

“Yes. But that won't happen, now. He's seen what you really are.”

“And what's that?” he asked.

A man
, she wanted to say, but couldn't.

“I wrote to you,” she said, on another, later day.

He turned to her. He was lying down; she was sitting beside him, close, not touching. “Really?” he said.

“While your sister was sleeping. I wrote and wrote—on paper, not clay. I hid it in that place we found—that loose spot behind the olive oil jars.”

He squinted at her, as if the light were too bright. His cheeks were hollow and fuzzed with golden hair. He was all sharp edges and empty space; all scars upon scars upon flesh thin as Ariadne's Egyptian paper. “Why?”

“Because I missed you so much. And it helped to think that I'd read them to you, someday—that I'd read to you about how I'd planned to save you. Then I was afraid someone would find them and stop me.”

“What did you do?” One of his hands came out and found her knee. She didn't move.

“I burned all of it. Took a lamp out to the waterfall—and then I worried that Ariadne would be waiting for me when I got back, just like she was that time we came back from there with Icarus and Glau.”

“And was she?”

“No. It was the middle of the night, and you remember how she used to sleep.”