She spat upon the floor.
“They take what they want, and in return they give you only your own shackles. A thousand times I saw you squashed. I squashed you myself. And every time, I thought, that is it, she is done, she will cry herself into a stone, into some croaking bird, she will leave us and good riddance. Yet always you came back the next day. They were all surprised when you showed yourself a witch, but I knew it long ago. Despite your wet-mouse weeping, I saw how you would not be ground into the earth. You loathed them as I did. I think it is where our power comes from.”
Her words were falling on my head like a great cataract. I could scarcely take them in. She hated our family? She had always seemed to me their distillation, a glittering monument to our blood’s vain cruelty. Yet it was true what she said: nymphs were allowed to work only through the power of others. They could expect none for themselves.
“If all this is so,” I said, “why were you so savage to me? Ae?tes and I were alone, you might have been friends with us.”
“Friends,” she sneered. Her lips were a perfect blood-red, the color all the other nymphs had to paint on. “There are no friends in those halls. And Ae?tes has never liked a woman in his life.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Because you think he liked you?” She laughed. “He tolerated you because you were a tame monkey, clapping after every word he spoke.”
“You and Perses were no different,” I said.
“You know nothing of Perses. Do you know how I had to keep him happy? The things I had to do?”
I did not want to hear more. Her face was naked as I had ever seen it, and every word sharp as if she had spent years carving it to just that shape.
“Then Father gave me to that ass Minos. Well, I could work with him, and I have. He is fixed now, but it has been a long road, and I will never go back to what I was. So you tell me, sister, whom should I have sent for instead? Some god who could not wait to scorn me and make me beg for crumbs? Or some nymph, to mince uselessly across the sea?” She laughed again. “They would both have run screaming at the first tooth. They cannot bear any pain at all. They are not like us.”
The words were a shock, as if all this while her hands had been empty, and now she showed her knife. Sickness flooded my throat. I stepped back.
“I am not like you.”
For a moment, I saw the surprise on her face. Then it was gone, like a wave washing clean over sand.
“No,” she said. “You are not. You are like Father, stupid and sanctimonious, closing your eyes to everything you do not understand. Tell me, what do you think would happen if I did not make monsters and poisons? Minos does not want a queen, only a simpering jelly he keeps in a jar and breeds to death. He would be happy to have me in chains for eternity, and he need only say the word to his own father to do it. But he does not. He knows what I would do to him first.”
I remembered my father saying of Minos, He will keep her in her place. “Yet Father will only allow Minos so much license.”
Her laughter clawed at my ears. “Father would put me in the chains himself, if it would keep his precious alliance. You are proof of that. Zeus is terrified of witchcraft and wanted a sacrifice. Father picked you because you are worth the least. And now you are shut on that island and will never leave it. I should have known you would be good for nothing to me. Get out. Get out and let me not see you again.”
I walked back through those corridors. My mind was bare, my skin bristling as if it would rise off my flesh. Every noise, every touch, the stones beneath my feet, the splash of fountains from a window, crept evilly upon my senses. The air had a stinging weight like ocean waves. I felt myself a stranger to the world.
When the figure separated from the shadows of my door, I was too numb to cry out. My hand fumbled for my bag of draughts, but then the distant torchlight fell upon his hooded face.
He spoke so softly only a god could have heard. “I was waiting for you. Say but one word, and I am gone.”
It took me a moment to understand. I had not thought him so bold. But of course he was. Artist, creator, inventor, the greatest the world had known. Timidity creates nothing.
What would I have said, if he had come earlier? I do not know. But his voice then was like a balm upon my raw skin. I yearned for his hands, for all of him, mortal though he was, distant and dying though he would always be.
“Stay,” I said.
We lit no tapers. The room was dark and warm from the day’s heat. Shadows draped the bed. No frogs sounded, no birds called. It was as if we had found the still heart of the universe. Nothing moved except for us.
After, we lay beside each other, the night breeze trickling over our limbs. I thought of telling him about the quarrel with Pasipha?, but I did not want her there with us. Outside, the stars were veiled, and a servant passed through the yard with a flickering torch. I thought I imagined it, at first: a faint tremor shaking the room.
“Do you feel that?”
Daedalus nodded. “They’re never strong. A few cracks in plaster. They have been coming more often lately.”
“It will not damage the cage.”
“No,” he said. “They would have to get much worse.” A moment passed. His voice came quiet through the darkness. “At harvest,” he said, “when the creature is grown. How bad will it be?”
“As many as fifteen in a moon.”
I heard his indrawn breath. “I feel the weight of it every moment,” he said. “All those lives. I helped make that creature, and now I cannot unmake it.”
I knew the weight he spoke of. His hand lay beside mine. It was calloused, but not rough. In the darkness, I had run my fingers over it, searching out the faint smooth patches that were his scars.
“How do you bear it?” he said.
My eyes gave off a faint light, and by it I could see his face. It was a surprise to realize that he was waiting for an answer. That he believed I had one. I thought of another dim room, with another prisoner. He had been a craftsman also. On the foundation of his knowledge civilization had been built. Prometheus’ words, deep-running as roots, had waited in me all this time.
“We bear it as best we can,” I said.
Minos was frugal with his ships, and now that the monster was contained, he made me wait on his convenience. “One of my traders passes near Aiaia. He sails in a few days. You may go then.”
I did not see my sister again, except from a distance, carried to her picnics and pleasures. I did not see Ariadne either, though I looked for her at her dancing circle. I asked one of the guards if he might take me to her. I did not think I imagined his smirk. “The queen forbids it.”
Pasipha? and her petty vengeances. My face stung, but I would not give her the satisfaction of knowing her cruelty had hit home. I wandered the palace grounds, its colonnades, its walks and fields. I watched the mortals as they passed with their interesting, untamed faces. Each night Daedalus knocked secretly at my door. It was borrowed time, we knew it, which made it all the sweeter.
The guards came just after dawn on the fourth day. Daedalus had gone already; he liked to be home when Icarus woke. The men stood before me, stiff in their purple capes, looming as if I might try to break past them and escape into the hills. I followed them through the painted halls, down the great steps. Daedalus was waiting amid the chaos of the pier.
“Pasipha? will punish you for this,” I said.
“No more than she does already.” He stepped aside as the eight sheep Minos had sent as his thanks were herded onto the ship. “I see the king is as generous as ever.” He gestured to two huge crates, already loaded on the deck. “I remember you like to keep yourself busy. It is my own design.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You honor me.”
“No,” he said. “I know what we owe you. What I owe.”