The Flame in the Maze by Caitlin Sweet

Author:Caitlin Sweet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction
Publisher: ChiZine
Published: 2015-10-29T18:00:39+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Asterion slept for a very long time. Maybe he isn’t sleeping, Chara thought as she watched him. She longed to touch his cheeks and forehead, his lips and hair, but a strange, new shyness kept her hands at her sides. Maybe he’s unconscious. Maybe his god is finally granting him rest that will help him. She stared at his wound, which Alphaios had dabbed at with a wet, almost-clean corner of his robe, and remembered Sotiria, who could have healed it.

She started when Alphaios said, “Chara?” She glanced up and saw bright daylight on the rock above. “Do you still have Master Daedalus’s string? Theseus wants to tie her up with it.” He jerked his head toward Polymnia, who was slumped against a wall, her chin to her chest. Her arms were limp on either side of her, her bloodied palms up.

Chara eased Asterion’s head from her lap to the ground. He moaned, and his eyes moved beneath their lids, but he didn’t wake. “Let me,” she said.

The ragged end of the string cut, as she wrapped it around Polymnia’s wrists, and more blood smeared both of their skin, but Chara didn’t falter. “If I’d known what you’d do,” Polymnia said in a dull, dead voice, “I would have tried to kill you, that morning outside the mountain door. My hands were bound then too, but I would have tried anyway.”

Chara said nothing, and looked only at the string.

“Wait,” Alphaios said after she’d knotted it. He leaned forward to cut it with the blade he’d made himself, from the shell. “I want to do her ankles.”

He wound the string even tighter than Chara had, and Polymnia gasped and reared back, hitting her head against the wall. Melaina laughed and drifted over to them, not limping at all now, carefully avoiding the place where Asterion was lying. “Difficult, isn’t it?” she said loudly to Alphaios. “When desire turns to hatred. When love becomes a rage so strong that you could kill—”

“Melaina,” said Theseus wearily, “enough.”

She ignored him and bent down over Alphaios’s shoulder. “She’s not even all that beautiful,” she said, and patted him on the shoulder.

She is, though, thought Chara. She really is—and she remembered, with a rush of dread, how Asterion the bull had charged, after Polymnia had cried out—protecting her? Defending her? All these years; what were they, to each other?

Asterion still hadn’t woken up by nightfall, though metal and stone screamed as two of the corridors changed, and Alphaios and Melaina shouted at each other about who should bathe first, until Theseus commanded them to be silent. They retreated to opposite sides of the altar stone, and Theseus settled against the wall beside Polymnia. Asterion’s head was back in Chara’s lap. She tried to stay awake, and thought of that other time when she’d tried, and failed—and she failed again, because her weariness was too heavy to throw off.

She woke to Polymnia’s voice, and air drenched in silver. She tried to spring to her feet, but couldn’t: only her ears seemed to be working.

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