The Flame in the Maze Read Free

should get up and come with us to your Throne Room, where we will continue this discussion.”
    Minos sat up, very quickly. Ariadne heard a wet ripping sound, saw gobbets of what had to be flesh glistening on the dusty ground. She tried not to look at his chest and thighs. “I will speak with Ariadne now,” he said to Pasiphae, so sharply that he almost sounded like his old self. “And I will speak with her here. Leave us.”
    Water flowed from Pasiphae’s hands—from all her skin, Ariadne knew, because the queen’s jacket and skirt had begun to cling to her, and because her curls had gone flat against her neck and back. Her moist lips parted; Ariadne saw the tips of her perfect teeth before her lips closed again. The queen whirled and walked away from them, toward the staircase that would lead her to the royal apartments.
    Minos growled a laugh, and it, too, sounded so terribly familiar.
It’s just the two of you
, Ariadne thought.
Just like before, when he loved you and promised you the queenship, and you loved him. Only it’s not. Remember: he betrayed you, and he is mad, and you
do not love him
.
    When his laugh had faded into tendrils of silver smoke, Minos said, “They are all right—the people who worry about me. I
am
mark-mad. And my god and father, Lord Zeus, no longer wishes me to live in the world of men.”
    He wasn’t breathing hard, anymore. His words slid out of his cracked, blistered, bleeding mouth and he could have been sitting on his throne, leaning toward Ariadne with his fists on his knees, as he had so many times before. She closed her eyes to quell this image, or to pull it closer; she didn’t know which.
    â€œSo I am going to give myself to my god.”
    She opened her eyes. “When?” she whispered, when he said no more.
    â€œIn two months, on the festival of his birth.”
    â€œWhere?” Though she knew, of course.
    â€œThe place of his birth, child. The Great Goddess’s mountain.” This time his laugh trembled a bit, and a tongue of silver-blue flame slithered out between his teeth. “Since Daedalus built his box inside it, the mountain has belonged more to your mother’s god than it has to mine—and more to Athenians than Cretans. It is time that the people remembered Zeus. And they will, as they watch me burn myself to ash for him.”
    He stood up so quickly that Ariadne had to scramble to rise with him. He moaned and doubled over. His flesh seemed to fade and thin, until it looked transparent. Rivers of fire branched and boiled and overflowed; he was Zeus’s lightning and Apollo’s sun, silver and gold, red and white. She felt the heat of him pulse against her own scarred skin.
    â€œWhat if there is no need?” she said. “What if the power of your godmark”—
y
our madness
—“passes? What if you could live quietly, as some others do, when their gods give them rest?”
    He straightened and snorted, and fire trickled from his singed nostrils. “Rest? No. Their gods leave them—they remove their blessing, and their marks. A more desolate life I cannot imagine—to be pitied and feared, not for power, but for loss of it. No: my god feeds my strength, and demands my sacrifice. And I will obey.”
    Good
, she thought.
Though I’d rather have seen you pitied
. “And what of the Athenian sacrifices, when you go?” These words rushed out as if she’d planned them. “You speak of fear—but King Aegeus will no longer fear us, then. He will stop sending the youths of his city here—and then the priestesses will demand that Asterion be freed. Who will do that? Where is the key?”
    Thick, rank-smelling fluid dribbled from Minos’s mouth when he smiled. “Your sister is the only key,” he said. “I commanded Master Daedalus not to fashion any other.”
    â€œWhat?” Ariadne forced herself to press her lips