The Door in the Mountain by Caitlin Sweet Page B

Chara thought,
She should look funny, so far above us with the lamplight making her nostrils huge and her eyes beady, but she doesn’t. She looks beautiful and frightening
.
    “Go, Asterion.” The queen spoke coldly and clearly, in the spaces between the thunder. “Wait for me in the throne room. Ariadne’s well-wishers are gathering there now.”
    “In that case,
I
shouldn’t be there.” Asterion smiled and Chara snuffled (which was the sound she made when she was trying not to laugh).
    Pasiphae snapped, “
Now
.”
    He rose. His eyes glinted as he glanced at Chara; then he walked out of the lamplight and into the darkness.
    Chara rose too; she expected that the queen would tell her to, if she didn’t.
    “Come with me,” Pasiphae said, and turned. She strode among the jars so quickly that Chara had to hurry to catch up. She remained a few paces behind, as they went up stairs and along corridors, past altar pools that the rain was turning into tiny stormy oceans.
    “In here,” the queen said when she finally halted. They were standing before the princess’s doorway. Chara had never been inside Ariadne’s rooms—not at Knossos and not here at the summer palace either, even when Glaucus tried to persuade her to come with him to rearrange the princess’s perfume vials or put fish skeletons in her bed. Now Chara crossed the threshold after Pasiphae, her heart jumping a little in her chest. The room was long and thin and had higher walls than she had ever seen. They were painted bright blue and ochre: the sky and earth of island summer.
    The cloth on the bed was yellow and brown.
    “A new skirt and bodice,” the queen said, gesturing to the cloth.
    Chara gazed from it to the woman beside her. “Yes,” she said. “They’re very nice.”
    Even Pasiphae’s frown was beautiful. “They are for you. Put them on.”
    “For . . .” Chara knew her own frown wasn’t nearly as lovely as the queen’s, but she couldn’t smooth it away. “I don’t understand. My Queen.”
    Pasiphae bent to brush at something invisible on her skirt pleat. Her gold pendant winked in the pale hollow of her throat. “You are too old to be wrestling with boys, and the way you trail around after Asterion is unseemly. Your mother apparently had no desire or will to tell you otherwise, when she was alive, and I did not much care when you were small—but now I do. It is time you dressed like a woman of Crete. It is time you acted like one.”
    “But my Queen—” Chara began.
    “Part of being a woman of Crete is knowing when to speak and how. Perhaps you will learn these things when you serve the Lady Ariadne.”
    Chara couldn’t help it: her mouth fell open. “Serve . . . the princess.”
    “Yes. I am giving you to her—today, for her birthday. She needs a slave and you need a useful position within the household. The arrangement will suit you both. Now dress, girl, before the celebration is over.”

    Ariadne had been angry in the morning as she gazed out at the lightning-split black of the sky. In the afternoon, when everyone gathered in the Lily Chamber to celebrate, she was happier. The lightning (which flickered in sheets now, not Zeus’s bolts) played over Galenos’s face as he recited the poem he had written for her. Rainbows streamed from the gnarled fingertips of Phaidra’s old nurse and wavered on the floor by the hearth, which shone with its own, real flame. The room smelled of rain and earth, heated oil and poured wine, and the fig pies Naucrate had made. And it seemed as if all the summer palace’s inhabitants were there, from youngest to oldest, lowliest to highest, even Minos’s priests, who lurked like a line of ravens just inside the outer pillars, where the rain blew in on gusts of wind.
    “My elder daughter may be unmarked,” the queen said, when the tributes had been made, “but she is still blessed. Anyone with eyes to see knows this.”
    Ariadne turned slightly in her own chair and smiled at