The Flame in the Maze (18 page)

“Tell me what they said? If you remember.”

“I remember.” She paused, then told him. Ariadne begging Karpos to marry her. Karpos and Deucalion laughing, their bare shoulders touching. Glaucus, with his painted stick that would never be a sword. Minos burning up the countryside while his subjects gossiped and cowered, or craned to watch.

Asterion's eyes closed, as she spoke—but when she stopped his hand pressed her knee, and he said, “What about my mother? And my sister Phaidra?”

“The Queen continues as ever: beautiful and hard. Though she is always gentle with Phaidra. Phaidra, who is very, very beautiful, herself. As bright as Ariadne is dark. And very strong, though no one would've believed it of her, when she was the child you remember.”

“I knew she was strong,” he said. “I watched her rescue a toad from a snake, once. She was magnificent.”

You're speaking normally
, she thought, but didn't dare say.
You're coming back.

He sat up and opened his eyes. “So have you eaten all the figs?” he said, and smiled, just a little.

“Theseus was right.” The same night; perhaps the next. “Ariadne, too. I
am
a monster.”

She sat up so that her knees were touching his. The blue glow was beating out the rhythm of her blood, far above them in the dark. “We're all monsters.”

“You don't know. You can't understand.” He sounded tired, not angry.

“You're also a man.” She could say this now, to the Asterion who was back with her.

“I don't remember becoming one. I was a boy, the last time I was with you.”

“I don't care what you are.” A sort-of lie, but her voice didn't betray her. “You could be part lobster, for all I care. Though,” she added, “that would make things—”

“Pinchy,” he said. They laughed. She leaned toward him and put her forehead against his. He laid his hands on her head and dragged his fingers back and forth over the stubble there. She put her own hands over his and pressed them down, hard.

“At least you won't get tangled in my curls.”

“I always loved your curls,” he said, and slid his hands down to her cheeks and pulled her in and kissed her.

At first her head was full of words that kept her from feeling much:
He'll end this; he'll walk away again.
But he didn't. She was the one who pulled back—but just to see him, in the dimness. To trace his smile as she'd traced the marks of their names.

He lay down and she slid on top of him, holding him with her arms and legs; holding him as he slid inside her with a groan. He dug his fingers into her hips and moved her up and down against his, and she threw back her head and saw the crystal and the air that looked like sky. He pulled her back to him, and she eased her fingers and tongue along all the scars she could feel. When he shuddered and went still, she lay listening to the slowing of his heart.

She was nearly asleep, still sprawled on him, when he said, “Have you done that before?”

“Once,” she murmured, “with a bull dancer who imagined himself quite wonderful.”

“And was he?”

“Once, I said. That's all.”

“I did it once too,” he said slowly. “Or almost, anyway.”

She was fully, abruptly awake. She eased herself off him and rolled over, and he fitted himself into the curve of her back and legs. “Polymnia?” she said. Her tongue felt swollen in her mouth.

“Yes. But I couldn't . . . I ran from her. I think I was almost always the bull, after that. Chara,” he went on, and one of his horns poked at her neck as he nuzzled her, “I feel as if my skin needs yours, now, so it can stay like this.”

She swallowed.
Forget Polymnia. He's here; he's with you.
“You don't want to change again at all?”

After a long silence, he said, “I don't think so. I don't know. And it's not as if I have a choice, anyway. As long as there's heat, it'll happen.”

She squeezed his arms, which were crossed over her breasts. “Icarus was jealous of you. We had a fight, at the top of the mountain, when I was sure there'd be a way in. He said he envied you, in here.”

Asterion's breath was warm against her stubbly skull. “And I'm sure he hated himself for it.”

“He did.”

“Poor Icarus. Poor all of us.”

His arms loosened and his breathing grew deep and slow. The sweat between their bodies dried.

::
Chara?
:: she heard, just as she, too, was falling asleep. ::
Where are you? It's been two weeks; come back to us.
::

She woke to the whine and snap of cracking crystal. Asterion was already on his feet.

“What is it?” she said groggily, rubbing a hand across her face as she sat up.

“Maybe the start of an earthquake. There've been a few, while I've been in here, but small ones. This feels different.”

She stood up and reached for her robe, long-forgotten on the moss. “We should get back to the others,” she said. Just then, Theseus's mind-voice filled her, much louder than the night before. ::
Chara! The Great Goddess may be opening a way for us. I have summoned the ship; it will be waiting.
::

The ground lifted and fell beneath them and they sprawled into each other, fumbling to stay upright. Behind them, metal shrieked. “The bridge!” Asterion cried, and they stumbled toward it through shards of falling crystal.

The bridge had pulled farther away from the ledge; its slenderest section was listing down toward the abyss, an arm's length away.

“We'll have to jump,” he said. “Now, before it moves any more.”

She crouched and rocked, rubbing her fingers into her sweaty palms. “Just like the waterfall,” she said. “Right?”

He kissed the top of her head. “Just like that,” he said, and she jumped before she could think, and falter.

She'd thrown herself down—too far down, because the filigree was running out, just beyond her reaching hands. She gave a cry and strained, her bare feet running in mid-air, and the rock behind and ahead of her grumbled and shifted in puffs of tiny pebbles, and then her hands found metal, and clung. She swayed at the end of the lowest, thinnest part of the bridge, the weight of her body pulling it down still more. Hot wind belched from the chasm; when she glanced down, the fire seemed closer than it had before, as if it, too, were reaching.

“Climb, Chara!” Asterion sounded very far away. She couldn't turn to look at him, because she had to concentrate on her hands.
Move
, she told one of them—and it did, in a quick, lurching dart. The other ended up above it; the first above that. She climbed until she reached the wider portion of the bridge, which was still in its original position. She hauled herself onto its relatively flat expanse and lay on her stomach, panting.

“Don't stop!” Asterion called. She got to her hands and knees and crawled, no longer looking at the glow of the fire or the crumbling stone. All she saw was the ledge where the bridge ended. It seemed to get no closer, and she whimpered in frustration—but at last her hands were on solid ground and her arms collapsed and she lay for a moment with her face in the dirt.

She sat up when Asterion shouted, and turned just in time to see him hurl himself from the opposite ledge. He landed on the drooping section of bridge with a
clang
. As he did, the earth gave another shudder, and the metal shrieked and twisted, and more hot air came gusting up from the chasm. Even she felt it, up on her ledge, but Asterion took the full force of it. She watched him writhe against the bridge. He lifted his face to hers, and she saw the terror on it. He yelled again, and the yell became a roar, and his lengthening horns flared silver-bronze.

One of his hands slipped as its fingers began to fuse.

“No!” she cried, leaning out into the space beside the bridge, digging her own fingers into the ledge. “Asterion: keep climbing! You're so close—don't stop . . . .” His head was pressed against the bridge; she couldn't see his face any more. “Asterion: think of the falls. You told me to—do it yourself, now. The water, so cool on your skin. Your skin, Asterion. The water. The air—the cool wind that throws spray against your cheeks—you have
goosebumps
—”

His fingers weren't yet hoof. He lifted his head; she still saw terror, but his eyes, seeking hers, were steady when they found her. She called out more words she hardly heard, though she knew that “cool” and “chilly” and “water” repeated, repeated—until he pulled himself up. The scars on his shoulders and back darkened and contorted as he moved. He glowed with sweat, and fresh blood from his shoulder, and his hands lost their grip a few more times before he dragged himself onto the broader section of bridge. He stood up, as she hadn't, and ran.

When he reached her, he kissed her brow and lips and neck. Between each kiss was a word: “Thank . . . you . . . Freckles. . . .” She gasped, this time with laughter.

“Lead us back, my Prince,” she said, and felt him pull away.

“Not ‘my Prince,'” he said, in a cold voice that reminded her of his mother, Queen Pasiphae's. “Not that, or ‘my Lord' or ‘Bull-god.' None of that. Ever.”

She put her hands on his cheeks, which were grimed with rust from the bridge, and ash blown up from the abyss. “Very well, Asterion,” she said. “Let's go.”

He shivered and blinked, as if he'd been far away, and smiled at her, and looked eight years old, not eighteen.

Thunder rolled beneath their feet. The bridge screeched and warped and tore free of the rock. Chara watched it fall toward the fire that was not so distant any more, and then she turned back to Asterion, and they ran together.

The tunnels were like living things around them: roiling with rock or plaster dust, tipping, bending. A row of columns cracked and crashed behind them; an ocean frieze exploded in painted fragments that tore at Chara's skin; a doorway collapsed just as they threw themselves beneath it. Her breath tore at her too, in hot, stinging jabs, and her muscles—almost unused, in the crystal chamber—felt white with pain. But she kept up with Asterion, who darted and leapt as if he'd always been only a man. He finally paused when they reached the entrance to the altar chamber. When she came to stand beside him she could see the chamber, between the pillars: its jars, some toppled; the steps and waterfall and the shadows of people who were rising, stumbling, to meet them.

“Thank the gods,” Asterion said, between heaving breaths, “it's the right door.”

She took his hand, and they passed through it.

The earthquake didn't seem to end. Even when the wo-rst of the shaking and heaving had passed—churning up the stones of the floor, sending the obsidian on the walls falling like needle-sharp rain—new gouts of steam and flame still leapt out from the corridors that remained, and from fissures in the ground. The heat was almost unbearable. Asterion's feet and one of his hands were hooves, and his horns were long, and the golden fuzz on his cheeks turned brown and thick. He was still mostly Asterion, because the trickle of water remained (though it was warm, now, even before it hit the fractured stone), and because Chara gazed at him, and made him gaze at her, and whispered old and new rhymes against his human lips.