Page 4 of This Divine Revelry

They call my brother the Minotaur now. The bull of Minos. A monster – a legend to be feared.

But I’ve prepared: stockpiling herbs and medicines, packing away jewels and fabrics in case I am found out and need to flee, even sending away my one and only friend so my father can’t slaughter her in my stead.

The labyrinth, though, remains a mystery.

Thankfully, the man who made it is currently trying to teach me how to conjugate verbs in Lycian.

‘I’m sorry,’ I half weep, tossing my wax tablet aside and burying my face in my hands. ‘I just can’t focus, not today. Not with … what’s coming.’

Phaedra’s head snaps up beside me.

It’s risky, admitting any form of discomfort about all this.

Daedalus lowers his scroll by the barest hair – which is as close to his full attention as I’m getting.

‘Yes,’ Phaedra says dryly. ‘It’s so difficult to concentrate amidst all the excitement.’

I shoot her a look and find her glaring right back. After years of looking near identical, we spun in differing directions the moment puberty hit. I take after our mother – tall and undoubtedly regal, from the tightly bound curls wreathed about my head to the sharp tip of my upturned nose. But Phaedra has more of our father to her – golden and sleek but with an edge of savagery the polish can’t mask. It’s in her clenched jaw and the way she shows her teeth when she smiles, and it’s here right now as she narrows our father’s glacial eyes.

‘Shall we imagine it a thought exercise,’ Daedalus says – always searching for the opportunity to twist anything into a lesson. His son, Icarus, is quite the opposite, constantly dragging Glaucus into trouble, and so I wonder if he sees Phaedra and me as his only chance to impart wisdom. ‘You find yourself in a labyrinth. What steps do you take?’

‘I would find the exit,’ Phaedra says at once. ‘If you consistently turn in one direction in a maze, you will escape it with ease.’

Daedalus nods. ‘But if danger lurks within, you would run the risk of stumbling upon it as you search.’

‘I got in somehow,’ Phaedra says. ‘An entrance is an exit – so I would walk back out.’

Daedalus catches my eye and my gut tightens. He knows.

I feel it with certainty. I have not been as careful as I thought.

‘Let us say this labyrinth is clever. The door not at the end of its spiral but some place in between, and containing a series of mechanisms that make it immediately unrecognizable from any other wall.’

Phaedra is quick, growing antsy with the constant additions. ‘I’d mark it.’

‘Clever enough to shift any substance on its surface.’

‘And let me suppose – once I do find it, it’s locked? Barred? Some other force to make me reconsider my ingenious plans?’

‘Quite impossible from within,’ Daedalus agrees. ‘The door is as hungry for blood as the labyrinth itself. But let us assume, in this exercise, that you are both capable of feeding it.’

My sister pales, and I suspect this brings it too close to the realm of reality. Her lips press thin, and she glowers murderously. ‘It is inescapable – is that the point of this exercise? To prove that there is no way out?’

Daedalus turns to me, his dark eyes shrewd. ‘You have been awfully silent, Ariadne. What do you think?’

I have been so busy cataloguing his clues that I had not thought to answer myself, but now I meet his eye and I consider the puzzle at hand. That’s all this is. Fourteen lives in the balance, yes, but a puzzle nonetheless.

‘It’s not a maze,’ I say at last. ‘It’s a labyrinth. A single path, no matter the twists it takes. Death, if it lurks within, will find you.’

‘So?’ Daedalus pushes, and I feel my heart sink. The solution he offers is the only one I cannot possibly take – the tributes are watched day and night, the guards more heavily armoured than the labyrinth itself.

‘So you do not find yourself in the labyrinth. You escape before you ever step through its door.’

Daedalus snaps his scroll, rolling it up quickly. ‘I think that’s enough for today. But it’s worth ruminating on your perception of a path, Ariadne. Often, not all directions are blocked. Only those you might consider taking.’

He walks swiftly from the atrium. I move to do the same. The tributes arrive tomorrow and Daedalus has made this even more complicated. The door vanishes. It cannot be marked. It cannot be opened from the inside. So there goes my original plan of making a copy of the key and slipping it to one of the Athenians.

I might have to wait until my father parades them there and see how it is opened, who has the key and how the door works. Then make some rash, ill-considered move.