“Why did you summon me here?” I demanded. “Let me hear you admit it.”
Her eyes opened at once, keen, as if she had been expecting me. “It was a gift, of course. Who else would have enjoyed seeing me bleed so much?”
“I can think of a thousand.”
She smiled, as cats smile. It was always more fun to play with a live mouse. “What a shame it is that you can’t use your new binding spell on Scylla. But of course you would need her mother’s blood. I don’t think that shark Krataiis will oblige you.”
I had thought of it already. Pasiphaë always knew where to aim the spear.
“You wanted to humiliate me,” I said.
She yawned, pink tongue against her white teeth. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “of naming my son Asterion. Do you like it?”
Starry one, it meant. “The prettiest name for a cannibal I ever heard.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. He can’t be a cannibal, there are no other Minotaurs to eat.” She frowned a little, tilting her chin. “Though, I wonder, do centaurs count? They must have some kinship, don’t you think?”
I would not be drawn by her. “You could have sent for Perses.”
“Perses.” She waved a hand. What that meant, I could not say.
“Or Aeëtes.”
She sat up, and the covers fell from her. Her skin was bare, except for a necklace made of squares of beaten gold. Each one was embossed: a sun, a bee, an axe, the great hulk of Dicte. “Oh, I hope we keep talking all night,” she said. “I will braid your hair, and we can laugh over our suitors.” She lowered her voice. “I think Daedalus would have you in a minute.”
My anger spilled its banks. “I am not your dog, Pasiphaë, nor your bear to be baited. I came to your aid, despite all our history, despite the men you sent to their deaths. I helped you with your monster. I have done your work for you, and all you give me is mockery and contempt. For once in your twisting life, speak the truth. You brought me here to make me your fool.”
“Oh, that requires no effort from me,” she said. “You are a fool on your own.” But it was reflexive, not a real answer. I waited.
“It is funny,” she said, “that even after all this time, you still believe you should be rewarded, just because you have been obedient. I thought you would have learned that lesson in our father’s halls. None shrank and simpered as you did, and yet great Helios stepped on you all the faster, because you were already crouched at his feet.”
She was leaning forward, her golden hair loose, embroidering the sheets around her.
“Let me tell you a truth about Helios and all the rest. They do not care if you are good. They barely care if you are wicked. The only thing that makes them listen is power. It is not enough to be an uncle’s favorite, to please some god in his bed. It is not enough even to be beautiful, for when you go to them, and kneel and say, ‘I have been good, will you help me?’ they wrinkle their brows. Oh, sweetheart, it cannot be done. Oh, darling, you must learn to live with it. And have you asked Helios? You know I do nothing without his word.”
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? Aeëtes 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 Aeëtes 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.