Labyrinth of Shadows
Page 27
He lunges to his full, towering height, his shadow falling across Theseus’s prone body. Only one stomp of those razor-sharp hooves and it’ll be over.
Hobbling, I edge toward Theseus from the side, skirting the crumbled fountain, the statue of some god I don’t recognize toppled and shattered. “I’m Ariadne, your sister. I came to save you.”
Asterion takes a menacing step toward me, but it’s a step away from Theseus. I change direction, walking backward, hoping I don’t stumble over the broken, heaved floor as I lead Asterion further from Theseus’s body.
The creature towering over me is truly monstrous, a brutal, savage beast I don’t recognize. His eyes are glazed with red, wild and unseeing. Where is my brother? Where is the humanity I believe still lies within him? He bellows, and I inhale the stench of damp fur, oily hide, and the fetid stench of rotting meat.
The stone floor seems to drop away from beneath my feet, fear a cold fist in my chest.
Run! My mind screams at me. Save yourself! Run!
Staring into the crazed eyes of the Minotaur, my courage threatens to fail me.
But it does not.
If I do not act, the Minotaur will take everything from me that I care about—the last shreds of my brother’s humanity, Theseus, my own life.
My fingers find the vial hanging around my neck. I didn’t come this far, fight this hard, and sacrifice this much for nothing. I’m not the same girl who entered the Labyrinth. Cowering, ruled by fear and shame, controlled by others.
I am someone else now. Someone of my own making. I won’t be ruled by anything, not by my mother, not by the gods, not by their curses, not by fear. Whatever the fabric of fate, whatever tapestry the cruel, fickle gods designed to trap us—I can tear it to pieces.
Asterion paws the ground. His head lowers.
A howling fills my head, a silent roaring in my ears. The pain fades. Everything fades, until all I see is my brother.
He charges, an explosion of thundering hooves and flashing horns.
I twist out of the way. The tunic catches around my legs, and I nearly fall.
His hooves slide, scraping the slick, mossy floor as he crashes into the fountain behind me. Something cracks and shudders. He whirls and snorts angry, frustrated breaths. He is huge, and wounded, yet he still moves with swiftness and grace. It doesn’t surprise me; I’ve seen the same grace in the bulls in the arena.
I jerk at the belt at my waist, undoing the rope. In one swift movement, I rip the tunic over my head and toss it aside. I wear only my loincloth and the linen strip wrapping my chest, the dagger at my thigh, and the leather strap holding the vial around my neck. The cold air strikes my bare skin, but now I am free to move.
“You are Asterion,” I shout with all the command of a princess of Crete. “You are the son of Queen Pasiphae and the sea god Poseidon, stepson of King Minos, brother to Phaedra, Androgeus, and to me, Ariadne.”
He charges me again. My heart bucks in my chest. I dodge, still agile and lithe despite my ankle, despite my weariness, my exhausted muscles remembering the movements, remembering the dance. By sheer willpower alone, I remain on my feet.
“I am your sister! You know me!”
Asterion wheels, bellowing in frustration.
I twirl away, just out of his reach, leading him further from Theseus. “You weren’t always like this. You were the boy who climbed cliffs with me to stare out at the sea. We counted the sails of the ships and imagined the beautiful places they were going.”
He swings his head furiously, blade-sharp horns glinting. His muscles bulge beneath his matted coat, grimy with blood and dirt.
“You loved white lilies. You picked them in the garden to give to our mother and to me. You loved to hear me sing.”
He charges again.
I crouch low, tracking my brother’s movements, the flexing muscles of his haunches and chest, the flicker of his eyes in one direction or another, telegraphing his next move. I spin and dart out of harm’s way.
“I know you remember, Asterion!” I cry. “Remember who you are!”
Asterion gives a mighty thrust, swinging his head hard and high. I weave, ducking to avoid the heavy chop of his horns, and curl into a ball, tumbling out of reach. I land hard on uneven chunks of stone, a mangled bronze bowl jabbing into the small of my back.
Pain flashes through me—my ankle, my arm and shoulder, my aching side. For a heartbeat, my eyes refuse to focus—everything pitches and spins. The massive stones all around me tremble with a mighty fervor.
I climb slowly, dizzily to my feet. Dread forms a stone in my throat. I can’t keep this up for long. My body is too exhausted. It has nothing else to give me, no matter how much I want it to.
“You used to talk,” I say, the memories flooding me even as I speak the words. Are his eyes still as red? Or do I see a faint hint of brown? “You would sing with me. Not well. Neither of us could sing well. Not like little Phaedra, with her dark curls and golden voice. You—you used to say I sounded like a squealing goat. Do you remember?”
He wheels and charges. Images flash through my head—the arena, the sand and sun and chanting crowds, the king-bull thundering down on me, eyes glinting with hate and rage. There isn’t time to move.
I know who I am.
I lift my arms, crouched and waiting. Waiting for him to come to me. The timing must be perfect. My muscles coil, straining, aching. I call on every ounce of strength and courage I can muster.
The floor shakes beneath my feet as he roars, hooves churning, a mountain of rage and death.
Closer, closer. Now.
I spring at him. My hands find their grip on his lethal horns. Asterion rears his head and I release my hands, flipping high over his broad back. I curl into a ball and spin through the air, weightless, soaring up and up before arrowing down, the vast, cavernous ceiling of glittering stars flashing by.
I glimpse a flash of red. A fallen pillar—leaning against a cracked but still standing wall—it’s too close, the Minotaur so much taller than any bull I’ve ever jumped before. I tuck tighter in midair, curling my neck and head beneath my arms. I spin twice, three times, arcing through the air.
The side of my head and shoulder just barely graze the pillar. And then I’m straightening, lengthening my legs, tumbling down into a landing.
This ground isn’t the sand of the arena, but unforgiving stone. Instead of rolling and springing to my feet, I land with a shuddering crash, jolts of pain spiking up my ankles through my knees.
Still, I did it. I conquered the Leap of Faith.
There’s no time to relish the victory. I move, starting to run toward the stairs, but my foot gives out.
I fall. Pain splinters my ribs. Get up. Get up! I can do this. I must. I twist, trying to pull myself up, scrambling over mossy stone, stars exploding behind my eyes.
Where is the Minotaur? I strain my neck, craning, searching the cavern, peering into the shadows crouched among the crumbled walls, the rotting, moss-streaked stairs, the listing terraces.
A fearsome shadow falls over me.
Chapter Fifty-Six
He looms, a shadow among seething shadows. Hot breath spews into my face, my nostrils filling with the stench of him. I blink rapidly, desperate to clear my head.
I try to roll to the side, to gather my legs beneath me so I can flip to my feet and spring away. But I can’t move. Asterion presses his furred arm against my chest, holding me down with an immense pressure. He crouches over me, his massive head and shoulders filling my vision.
“You are Asterion!” I choke out, gasping for breath. “Ruler of the stars!”
The red mist swirls. I see hints of brown. I must make him hear me.
“You’re meant to be a prince, a king! Not a beast, not a monster locked in the dark!”
I’m willing to offer my life, but not for nothing. Not before I give him the elixir. Not before he understands.
I grasp the vial with one hand, lifting it toward him. “After you
kill me, take a drop of my lifeblood and add it to this elixir. Then drink it, drink it all. Do you understand? It’ll save you. You’ll be human. You’ll be a prince!”
He roars into my face, his breath fetid and terrible. I wince, tensing for the death blow.
Pain tugs me into a darkness I can’t resist. I see my own death grinning back at me.
But he doesn’t maul me with his gnarled fists. He doesn’t trample me with his hooves. He doesn’t plunge his horns into my chest or gouge out my raw, pulsing heart.
His broad chest heaves, blood matting his fur, his misshapen snout twisting in an expression I can’t read. Something flickers behind those red-flecked eyes. The swirling haze is lessening, there’s awareness there—humanity.
“You’re my brother! You’re not a monster.”
He doesn’t attack. He is listening.
I close my eyes and start to sing a tremulous song about the goddess’s bountiful blessings, but the words don’t matter. I sing like I did that night in the darkness when he brought me the moonflower.
I feel him. Smell him. Hear his snuffling, snorting breaths. He makes a sound, low and wounded, like the panicked whine of an animal caught in a trap.
My eyes fly open. His gaze pierces through me—confused recognition, that shock of shame so human it jolts straight to my core. “I am Ariadne, your sister,” I whisper. “And I love you.”
He lets out a ghastly, keening wail—something more human than animal, and more awful for it. The stones quaver; the air ripples and heaves.
The weight of him springs off me.He slinks a pace away, his hooves scraping against cracked marble.
Freed, I scramble to my hands and knees, chest heaving, side aching. I clutch at my ribs, feeling for something broken. Everything works, though the pain is intense. But I’m not dead. And neither is Asterion or Theseus.
Asterion hunches in the corner opposite Theseus’s body, his head lowered over his chest. The shadows flicker around him like wraiths from the underworld.
“Ar—iad—ne.” His tortured voice is hoarse and ragged, like the word is torn from his throat.
“Yes!” I force myself to my feet, stagger over to him, and fall to my bruised knees. “I’m your sister, Ariadne. You’re Asterion, ruler of the stars, prince and heir to the throne of Crete. Do you remember who you are?”
Wearily, he raises his great head. The red mist swirling in his eyes fades. They’re deep brown again, the eyes I remember from so long ago, soft and gentle and fringed with long, dark lashes.
Maybe the red mist is a curse of madness bestowed by one of the gods. The same way his cousin Heracles was cursed when the gods wished to punish him. Stricken with madness, he didn’t recognize his own wife and children; thinking them enemies, he slaughtered them all.
Or maybe it’s simply the curse of the Labyrinth, the consequence of all this blood and death and darkness.
Either way, I finally see my brother for the first time. And he sees me.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
The air is cold, but I don’t shiver. The pain pierces my ribs, my ankle, but I don’t give in to it. The shadows seethe around me outside the blue light of the starry glow-worms, the darkness growing stronger and heavier, but I no longer fear it.
I kneel beside my brother, beside Asterion, the monster who is also a man. His monstrous form remains for now, but the man is still alive within him, even after all the terror and rage and death, even after all this time cursed in darkness.
“Why—did you—come?” he growls. His head is still lowered. He barely meets my gaze.
I hold out the vial. “With this, I can heal you. With a drop of lifeblood, this potion transforms into a magic as powerful as the gods. The same way the gods appear in different forms, it’ll allow you to take the form of another—” My voice cracks. “You can escape this place and begin again.”
“I—cannot.”
“Yes! You can. You can be human. You can lift the curse. You can defy the gods.”
“I cannot—defy the gods.”
“Curse the gods,” I hiss. “Curse Earth-Shaker. It’s a god who made you this way to punish our father. But was he punished? Did he change? Did he care? Only our mother suffered. And me. And you, most of all.”
“I—deserved this. It is—my punishment.”
My throat tightens, my mouth going dry. “How can you say that?”
“I am a—monster.”
“No! You aren’t!”
My brother’s horns are stained red. I think of Kalliope, her pale face, her blank, unseeing eyes, the blood pooling around her head. I think of Nikolaos, of the piles of yellowed bones, so many bones. I think of my nightmares, my scar itching. My stomach roils. “You did terrible things. But Earth-Shaker made you this way. And King Minos starved you, locking you up in the dark, forcing you to kill.”
He shakes his shaggy head. “Even if not—in visage…I am a monster—in my heart.”
“But now everything has changed. You have a choice now.”
“I cannot change—what I am,” he rasps. “This is my fate.”
“No!” I cry, anger springing up within my chest. “I refuse to believe that. The gods be damned! They’re cruel and fickle. We can change our fate.”
He looks at me then, lifting his ruined face, his eyes deep wells of grief and pain. There is a brutal beauty about him, a fierce symmetry. I forgot this.
“Do not take me out of this cage—or I will kill—even more innocents.”
“You’ll no longer be the Minotaur. You can shed this monstrous body like a snake sheds her skin.”
“But the snake is still a snake,” he says bleakly.
“That’s not—”
“The fury takes over—I cannot stop what I do…I long to kill, to destroy, to devour. It is my nature.”
“No, it isn’t. Or, it isn’t your only nature. You’re not only a beast. You are human. They tried to beat it out of you, to starve it out of you. They told you that you were a monster enough times until you believed it.”
“I was evil, even as a child. I—I killed a stable boy with my bare hands.”
I wince. “The story they told you was wrong.”
“I remember it,” he rasps. “I remember my hands around his neck…I remember—the taste of his flesh.”
“Do you remember me there?”
“Yes, but...” Confusion fills his dark eyes.
Shame and remorse pierce me. Now, here it is. The moment to speak my ugly truth.
I tell him his story, the story that others twisted to their own designs. That even I chose to forget.
I was ten summers the day it happened. I was alone. For killing and eating one of our father’s prized blue monkeys, Asterion was locked in his chambers, with only a narrow window looking out over the palace grounds for entertainment.
I watched the stallions racing in the fields, their manes rippling like pendants, their pelts gleaming chestnut and cloud-white and rich seal-brown, their galloping hooves ringing like distant thunder. They were the strongest, most beautiful stallions in all of Crete. The king-bull grazed in the same field, a magnificent creature with a hide of obsidian black. I would study him for hours, already dreaming of dancing with the bulls.
I avoided the stables when I was alone. The stables were where Jadikira most often prowled. He was the son of Mijararos, a wealthy horse and cattle farmer, and one of my father’s closest advisers. Jadikira stalked the grounds of the palace like he owned them. His father had lent my father one of his prized breeding mares, a descendant of the wild, flesh-eating mares of Thrace. Mijararos claimed they were the fastest horses in the land; my father agreed. And so Jadikira spent much of his time in the stables, training her foals.
At sixteen summers, he was older than I was and already tall as a man. He had dull, wavy hair to his shoulders, and a narrow, cunning face, the kind of boy who took pleasure in the pain of others, the kind of boy who was smart enough to save his cruelty for when no one was looking.
He was always smiling, but it was a slippery smile, and sharp, one that would cut you if you weren’t careful.
And I was careful.
But not enough. Not that day.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
I remember the heat, the sun beating down on my head and shoulders, insects buzzing in the tall, swaying grass. Sweat beaded my legs under my tiered skirts and beneath my armpits. No one else was around, everyone at some feast or ritual in the throne room I was too young to attend.
Besides Icarus and Asterion, I had no friends. It mattered not that I was a princess; I was the sister of the beast. The daughters of the nobles wanted nothing to do with me.
I stood at the fence alone, watching as I so often did. The animals drew me, the galloping stallions, the majestic king-bull, the frolicking goats.
I felt him before I heard him. I don’t remember the conversation we had. I don’t remember what he was wearing or everything he said, only the words: What an ugly little rat you are. Do you know what we do with rats in Knossos? Do you know what my father would do if you were his? What I will do to you?
I don’t remember how I came to be on the ground. I only remember the sun in the hard, cloudless sky, the long grass tickling the backs of my legs, Jadikira leering over me with that sharp, slippery smile.
And his hand, smashing over my mouth, crushing my pitiful cries.
The memories swirl and fade, my mind skipping away. I remember fear like a knife blade, a crushing pressure around my throat, bruising fingers tightening, tightening. I remember everything fading into darkness.
And then the sound of hooves hurtling toward us. A tremendous roar as the weight of the boy was snatched off me. I lay there, trembling, listening to Jadikira’s screams, the world fading in and out, everything far away and close at once.