The Door in the Mountain (22 page)

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 little 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.

“’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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Worldwide Release October 2015 in Paperback and eBook

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.

“It’s fire,” Manasses whispered. He was tipping his head back, and his eyes were wide and nearly unblinking. “Godmarked fire: I can tell, because of the silver in it.”

Alexios put his hand on Manasses’s shoulder; the child backed up and leaned against him. Below them in the paddock, a sheep bleated and quieted.

Alexios felt Manasses draw a deep breath. “Is that where ’Tiria was running away from?”

After a moment, Alexios said, “I imagine so”—though she hadn’t told him much more about that than she’d told his son.

“Is it where she went back to, when she left here?”

“Child,” Alexios said, too roughly, “enough questions.” He remembered how she’d tried to calm him, when he was hard on the boy. How she’d squeeze his hands and make funny faces until he smiled.
I only knew her for two months
, he thought, as he already had so many times before.
How can I love her?

“I don’t know,” Alexios said again, as gently as he could.

She’d put her slender, scarred arms around him, the night she left with the bird-man, and said, “Someone needs me. An Athenian. I have to go to him.”

“Come back,” Alexios had said, his lips moving against hers with every word. “When you’ve healed him.” His godmark showed her to him with such beautiful, helpless clarity, in the dark.

“Tell Manasses goodbye for me,” she’d said, and kissed him, and slipped away.

Manasses squirmed around to face him. The lamplight from the hut played over his forehead and cheeks. “I want her to come back, Papa. I want her here.”

Silver lightning spread like a spider’s web across the flame.
Godmarked fire
, Alexios thought, and fear froze the breath in his chest.

“So do I,” he said.