It frustrated Reja that Ariadne wouldn’t do the rituals properly, but she didn’t scold her any more than she slapped her; she only grimly kept teaching her, one after another, the proper words and gestures for wine instead of oil, perfume instead of wine, as if hoping if she did it often enough, one day it would stick. Ariadne did the lessons, a little out of boredom and a little to be at peace with Reja, who managed things with ruthless efficiency and also sent the novices down to the city each day to bring something else to pour out, another bright living smell to send into the dark.
The acolyte who’d come up with the priests was set to guard them. There was nothing to guard them from, at least no danger that hadn’t always been there, the last seven years while Ariadne had lived there with the queen and all her jewels, but the acolyte had seen something uncomfortable, and it was easier for the high priest and the king to forget about it if he wasn’t around.
He wasn’t allowed to stay with the women, of course; instead he had to build a hut to shelter in farther down the hillside, and Reja kept a hawk’s cold eye on him any time he came up to their well for water, close enough to see the novices. The second day after they arrived, she paused in the prayer she was teaching Ariadne, and she got up and marched to a bush near where the trail down the mountain began. She pulled Nashu out of it by his ear and told him sharply if she caught him at it again, she would have him whipped out of the temple.
But he wasn’t spying on the novices, even though they had their skirts hiked up around their waists, working on the garden. “I want to know where Yidini is!” he said, his voice wobbling up and down through a boy’s soprano, and wrenched himself loose to take a step toward Ariadne, his fists clenched. “Where did you send him?”
She hadn’t been sorry for the priest; to her, the priests were the ones who’d made her brother hide, who’d have put him to death. And Yidini had meant to drag her away. But she was sorry for Nashu, because someone he loved had been taken away and sent into the dark. She still couldn’t help him, though, and when she said, “I don’t know,” he was angry, and he hated her for it.
He crept up the hill sometimes after that to watch her walking to the seal, in the dim early mornings. He hid in the bushes along the edge of the hill. Reja with her older eyes didn’t catch him, but Ariadne knew he was there. She didn’t say anything. There was something a little comforting in how much he cared; it meant she wasn’t stupid for caring, either. She kept coming every day herself to pour the offerings down, a little bit of the mortal world, so her brother wouldn’t disappear forever into the earth.
She wanted the days to change, sometimes; she had been afraid of being taken away, and now some small part of her wanted to go, wanted the life she’d avoided. She could still have had it. The golden chains sat in a locked chest in her room, the room where no one went but her, except hurriedly, in broad daylight, to sweep and clean. Her father, who had kept a bull the god had sent, would gladly have made some excuse for releasing her from the temple to buy a lord with her. And then her brother would melt back into the god like a little pond of water draining into a stream, and the vegetation would creep over the seals, and new grass would grow where the yellowed lines stood.
So she stayed.
The days did begin to change a little, over time. It was the poor hill folk who came first, the ones who couldn’t afford to go to the temple in the city. They brought cups of milk, and an egg or two, and foraged greens. Once an anxious young man came with a lamb on a rope, and when Ariadne came out of the tower that morning, he was waiting on the edge of the labyrinth, and he knelt to her as if to the king and said, low, “My wife is giving birth soon, and the ewe died,” a plea to turn aside the evil omen.
Reja looked at the lamb with greedy pleasure, thinking of the priest’s portion, the best meat, and she said to Ariadne, “I’ll show you how to make sacrifice,” but Ariadne looked at the lamb with its wide uncertain liquid eyes, deep and brown, and said, “No.” She took the rope and led the lamb with her through the passage to the seal. It butted at her as they went, bleating and trying to suck at her fingers, hungry, but she stayed on the track, and at the seal, she said, “There’s a lamb here, if the god will take it to its mother, and let the shepherd’s wife stay with her child up here,” and then she took the rope off the lamb’s neck, and rubbed the matted wool underneath it soft, and let the lamb go. It ran away from her bleating.
Reja and the shepherd were watching her from the edge of the labyrinth. It was like the last time: their faces didn’t know that the lamb was gone at first, and then they looked around wanting to believe it had just run away, but there was nothing for it to have hidden behind on the bare hill, and then finally they had to understand that it was gone. The shepherd fell on his face, pressing his forehead into the dirt, and Reja drew back herself, staring, and then she knelt too, when Ariadne came out of the labyrinth.
Nashu was there, too. Later that afternoon, when Ariadne went down the hill to get some water, and she was alone, he came out of the bushes and stood staring at her with his face twisted up, and then he said, “Why Yidini? He was a true servant of the god! You could have sent that old fat priest.”
Ariadne didn’t bother trying to tell him she hadn’t sent the young priest anywhere. She wasn’t sure it was true, anyway. “Why would the god want an old fat priest?” she said instead, and Nashu was silent, and then he said, “Then I hate the god, if he took Yidini,” defiantly.
“It’s not worth your hating him,” Ariadne said, after a moment; she had to think it out for herself. “He doesn’t care.”
Nashu glared at her. “Why does he care about you, then?”
“He doesn’t,” she said slowly.
The next morning, she didn’t dance. She only walked straight to the center and knelt down by the seal and whispered, her throat tight, “It’s all right if you want to go. You don’t have to stay for me. I’ll be all right,” because she hadn’t thought, before, that she was being selfish by holding on to the little part of the god that could care about her, keeping him there buried in the earth, instead of letting him go back to the rest of himself.
There wasn’t any answer. She left the labyrinth, walking slowly with her head down, and went back into the tower, where the two novices darted sideways looks at her and Reja determinedly looked at her directly and scolded her to eat her supper of olives and bread and honey. That night, Ariadne opened her eyes and looked over at the empty cot across the room from her, and Minotaur was sitting there looking at her. He was bigger than the last time she’d seen him, much bigger: two feet taller than the biggest of the Oreth, and his pale cream-ivory horns were wide and gleaming at the points, deadly. She knew she was dreaming, because he was too big. If he had really been there, she didn’t think she could have stood it. But when she sat up and looked back at him, his eyes were still soft and liquid, and she knew he didn’t want to go back into the god, either. He wanted to keep this piece of himself separate, this part that could love her, for as long as he could. Even if he had to stay down there in the dark.
A rich man from the city sent a lamb, for the sake of his wife, but Ariadne told the slave who had brought it up the hill, “It’s not a fair trade. Take it back.”