I should be performing at Roy Thomson Hall tonight.

I performed there in 1987, when I was 17 and my high school turned 75. I sat in the trombone section alongside alumni who’d graduated decades and decades ago, and we played wonderful, challenging, exhilarating music, to at least one standing ovation. My friends and I volunteered at the school over the celebratory weekend, too. We talked about where we might be in 2012, for the 100^th. We tried to imagine kids, jobs, mortgages, people not yet met. I had a whole lot of trouble envisioning all of these. The one thing that was always clear was that I’d be on that Roy Thomson Hall stage again, playing music with old friends.

Only I’m not.

I still have these anxiety dreams: I’m sitting in front of a music stand, clutching my trombone. I raise the mouthpiece to my lips. I take a deep breath. I focus on the music—and I can’t read it. It’s gobbledegook. I feel sick. Everyone’s staring at me.

I wake up.

Generic anxiety, yes—but it’s specific too. Music defined me, as a teenager. It gave me purpose, friends, joy. It made me love high school. It carried me into adulthood, when I joined a community orchestra. The last concert I played with this orchestra was a pops one—movie music, including (gasp!) Star Wars. I belted out Darth Vader’s theme, even though I was feeling horribly nauseous. I was pregnant with my first child. After she was born, it was too hard to make the rehearsals. I was tired and I needed to be near her—and then, when she was older and didn’t need me near her quite so often, I was scared. I hadn’t picked up my trombone in years. It would take work to get my embouchure back—and there was so much else going on in my life now. The few times that someone asked me to sub in that same community orchestra, I balked. Mahler? Are you kidding?

Then came this year. Facebook messages from high school friends: “Will you be playing at the reunion??” Invites to dinners and a tour of the new school that’s gone up atop the bones of the old one. I responded “No, unfortunately”—or I didn’t respond at all. I’m not quite sure why.

I’m so happy now, in the 2012 I couldn’t imagine 25 years ago. But tonight I’m missing 17 so much that I can’t swallow over the lump in my throat. I miss those heavy black music stands and the sheet music I had to tape together so that it wouldn’t drift all over the floor. I miss sitting in that back row, the only girl amongst a sea of brassy boys. I miss that horrible polyester grey miniskirt that clung to me in the freezing rain that inevitably fell on the Santa Claus Parade. I miss Shostakovich and Beethoven and doing the Oom-Goo-Baa. I miss the thrill of that last, long, glorious chord, and the silence before the applause.

Happy hundredth, North Toronto Collegiate Institute. God help me, I miss you.

Caitlin Sweet, Class of ’89

The dearest wish of my heart used to be full-time writerdom. This wish persisted from about 1978 to 2006. It was granted (thanks to a second maternity leave, a second book contract, and a supportive first husband) for the last three-plus years of this period.

Now? No way. After nearly four years of having full-time-writer’s-block, it was getting a 9-5 job (and a divorce) that made my creative juices flow again.

This job is a fairly low-level administrative position in the Ontario Public Service. I schedule a lot of meetings. I book flights and cars (never for myself). I hand invoices over to the people who deal with invoices. I attend regular IT meetings and format PowerPoint presentations and try to keep the shared network drive in some semblance of order. I order office supplies and deal with the photocopier when it abruptly refuses to print. It’s a pretty menial job—and yet. It grounds me. The people in my office and across the hall ground me. We go for coffee. We go for after-work drinks. We gather (usually at my desk) and talk, not always about work. We laugh a lot. We work well together and we like each other.

My co-workers know I write. They respect this—and they sometimes use these “alter ego” skills of mine, when they need some of those PowerPoint documents edited, or briefing notes checked. That’s fine. I like doing it. I’m pretty good at it. And hey—I’m learning what it takes to design, build and maintain consolidated courthouses in Ontario, which is kind of cool. People often say, “You must really, really want to quit your job—you know, be like that Harry Potter woman.” They look at me incredulously when I say I don’t.

So this is my experience: an administrative day job; a creative-writing-teaching night job; part-time kids; occasional stints in hospitals, helping babies arrive; and, in and around all this, writing. It works for me. Even when it doesn’t, and I freak out to—but not at—Peter (someone who’s been a full-time writer almost his entire professional life, and who’s taken a good deal of thin with the thick of this decision), I’m bone-deep sure that this is a juggling act that works for me.

For me. Not for everyone. So why do I feel a desire to quell and caution, when students of mine declare, “God, I’m so quitting my day job the second I get a publishing deal/start selling books online”? It’s the same feeling I get when I’m talking to a pregnant woman who tells me she intends to yell for an epidural the minute she gets to triage. A response bubbles and seethes in my throat; I try either to put a lid on it entirely, or to use an even, laid-back tone that belies all the seething. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I don’t.

These responses aren’t based on logic, though I’m able to employ a semblance of this. To that pregnant woman: “Early epidurals often lead to longer labours which in turn can lead to maternal fever, which in turn can lead to increased interventions and, ultimately, your baby being taken from you almost immediately after birth for monitoring and the insertion of a tiny IV of antibiotics.” And, to the would-be-full-time-writer: “You might do just fine now, with your three-book contract, but what about five years down the road?” or “If you can pay off your mortgage and put a significant amount of money away for savings, go for it.”

Sounds kind of reasonable, right? But I’m afraid that my impulse to discourage isn’t based on logic at all. It’s like I want to reject another woman’s instincts because I didn’t have the same ones. Like I want to quash other people’s dreams for a full-time writing life just because my attempt at this didn’t go so well. Ego, defensiveness, envy—they’re always lurking, threatening to turn sweet grapes sour.

I’d like to think that the wine isn’t all or even mostly oxidized, though. Because, really? I’ve never been happier.

Cheers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Scott would probably want me to interrogate my affection for him, because (he might say) our brains are tricksy, pattern-seeking, biased organs, and the more fervently we believe in the veracity of the decisions we think we make with them, the more deluded we are.

Or, as he says, “We’re all idiots around here.”

I’d like to interrogate my affection, and perhaps I will, when the furor dies down. But that’s the thing: there’s furor. And I, who have always feared confrontation and upheaval and rocking of all sorts of boats, feel compelled to address it.

Back in August of last year, “acrackedmoon” (I’ll refer to her as “ACM” from now on) wrote a post called “R. Scott Bakker: Prince of Misogyny” on her blog, Requires Only That You Hate. The post spawned a slew of comments, both pro and con, and a couple of far more recent posts on Scott’s own blog.

In one of his posts, he addresses humanity at large, thus:

“…if you actually give a damn about people, then you need to be careful about accusing them of being sexist or racist, because, as a simple matter of fact, you could do real damage and you could be wrong.”

And ACM is so very wrong.

Some of her assertions, paraphrased from the vitriol that is her blog entry (and the comments she makes after it): He’s a misogynist. (“Bakker’s offenses have to do with misogyny.”) Or he’s not a misogynist (“nor have I called him a misogynist”)—he’s just a bad writer whose pretentious claims as to the feminist underpinnings of his books are undermined by his total lack of skill. No, wait: he’s just a bad and pretentious man—“a self-important little roach,” in fact.

Several of ACM’s respondents attempt to question both these assertions and the bitterness with which they’re made. Several try to make cogent, rational counter-arguments.

I’m not going to be one of them.

Granted, I’m not all that good at crafting careful, reasonable arguments when I’m involved in a spirited exchange. I get emotional: I flush from neck to hairline and/or my voice leaps at least an octave and/or I cry. It’s horrible, because the person with whom I’m speaking usually assumes I’m being manipulative, not playing fair, getting out of producing an actual, empirical argument. I’m not. In fact, my emotional responses infuriate me. I’d love to keep things rational. I’d love to cite provable examples, rather than personal anecdotes.

But not this time.

Based on ACM’s posts and her responses to others’, cool-headedness would get me nowhere. What remains, then, is biased, knee-jerk, reactive, cathartic heat. This is playing right into her hating hands, of course—but I guess that makes it a win-win.

Of course, she’s ready for me, and indeed for anyone who might know Scott and defend him:

“You don’t know me, you don’t know meeeeeee.” Either it’s their wife, or their mom, or their goldfish, who thinks they are just dandily perfect human beings and would never, ever do or say anything that’d be sexist/racist/homophobic…After all, people who know them say so.

I know him, and I say so. Granted, I’m not his wife (though I did attend his wedding), or his goldfish (he prefers cats). I’m his friend. And since this whole tawdry mess is obviously about making personal, emotion-based pronouncements about him, I’m qualified. ACM isn’t. She hasn’t met him; it sounds as if she hasn’t even met anyone who has:

I’ve read impressions of people who met him IRL [in real life], and it seems he is about as pompous and ridiculous there as he is online, which is quite the contrast to the more common ‘author x is offensive online but fairly polite at cons.’

Scott doesn’t exactly contradict her:

Now, I’m not a popular guy. Part of it has to do with personality, I’m sure. I’m foul mouthed, and I have the bad habit of carving someone the instant I decide I like them (and only being polite to those I dislike). I’m a horrible know-it-all. I’m chronically disorganized and typically unreliable as a result.

With apologies to the man in question for contradicting him on the subject of himself, I say:

OK, so Scott is foul-mouthed, and many of the words he uses that aren’t foul are big. “Pompous,” though? “Not a popular guy”? Nope.

I’m not sure who ACM’s sources were. I’ve hung out with him a whole lot over the years—both one-on-one and in the midst of con crowds: crowds as big, congenial, energetic and goofy as he is.

Scott. Me. A whole whack of other people.

Yes, he enjoys a good argument—a good one. I’ve never seen him be arbitrarily provocative or underhanded or mean; he’s always willing, even eager, to be proven wrong by a bracing and informed counter-argument.

Beer & Sympathy

Here’s a photo of us, taken at Ad Astra 2006. You’ll note that, while I’m wearing a sparkly dress (the lovely Lesley Livingston and I both sported these outfits for a couple of hours, when we acted as auctioneers for the Sunburst Award), I’m also looking kind of unhappy. And boy, was I. My second book had been out for a year, and I’d just gotten a royalty statement back from Penguin Canada, and it showed negative sales. Yes: negative sales. Hence the unhappiness. But there was Scott—there he is, in the photo, leaning in to listen to me, and to talk to me; offering the sort of impassioned, profanity-laced, unequivocal support he had ever since we met in 2000, on the Del Rey Online Writers’ Forum where we’d posted our first sample chapters and held our breath.

The sample chapters he posted were from The Darkness That Comes Before—the book ACM reviles without having read more than its first five pages (as she admits right off the bat, in her post, and contradicts somewhere in the comments). I read the chapters, and then much of the initial draft, and then the entire final product, when it was published.

I cringed more than once, as I read; the myriad, relentless abuses of power and people in the book are pretty hard to bear. But I never felt that Scott’s depiction of these abuses was gratuitous or self-indulgent. Partly because I know him, yes—but also because I’m pretty clear that authors don’t have to be nasty people to write about nasty things.

Authors use imagination and intellect to make things up—things they might be drawn to on aesthetic or thematic levels, but which might horrify them on an emotional one. He made up a dark, dire, grim patriarchal world in which women, men, beasts—hell, any and all life forms—are degraded. I understand readers who say, “Wow—this book isn’t my thing at all—I’m going to put it down forever.” But it’s a gargantuan leap from “I really don’t like this book” to “I really don’t like the man who wrote this book.” It’s a leap ACM makes effortlessly—because she was never actually reacting to his fiction. No: she’s made her claims about his novels, and him, based only on things he’s said in online forums and interviews and on his blog; based on the “impressions” of shadowy second-hand sources.

But why? She attacks his books without having read them. She attacks his character without having met him. There’s no reason here, and no reasons—just an inexplicably personal kind of rancour.

The rest of us who simply derive his attitudes from what he says and does online, well, we could never be magical enough to truly know him.

Magic has nothing to do with it, but luck may. And I’m grateful to be one of the lucky ones.

Hey, Scott. You do understand Nietzsche. Go Leafs. I miss you.

You’ll find this sentence over in the “Author” section of my website. It has also appeared, paraphrased, in several brochures, reviews and interviews.

Like mine, this minotaur is confused (though maybe not as reproachfully silent)

Problem is, slow progress has been no progress for about nine months. I went on writing hiatus when Peter got necrotizing fasciitis last winter. By the time I felt that I’d returned to a Cretan frame of mind, I had to go back and edit The Pattern Scars. I’m utterly incapable of doing two creative things simultaneously, so the Minotaur settled onto the back burner. At first he bellowed and then he huffed a lot and now he’s lapsed into a reproachful, furry silence. And I’m afraid I won’t be able to coax him back to me.

It might be happening again. It might not. I have no idea, because I’m not writing, and when I’m not writing, I get anxious and defeatist and lose all sense of perspective and proportion.

So: write, already. That’s it: the simple, in-your-face-obvious solution. But! But. I’ve been away from it for so long; I’ve lost the thread (a satisfying analogy, given the subject matter); I have no writing time except on Thursday evenings; it might be easier to start from scratch, get that new-idea buzz on…

No: I’ll try. I’ll coax and wheedle, on Thursday evenings, and maybe the Minotaur will bellow back at me.

Also like mine, this minotaur is adorable.

In a show of bravado and/or resolve, I’m going to go beyond blathering: I’m going to post the first chapter of this latest work-in-progress, here and now. (Please forgive its unsightly formatting.)

Take that, me. Take that and write with it.

*

The Reproachful Minotaur (working title only)
Chapter One

It was no use: the water did not move.  Ariadne bit her lip and watched her reflection do the same.  She dug her fingernails into the basin’s sides and leaned forward so that all she could see were her own wide brown eyes.

“Ariadne – no – let go.”  Her mother’s hands lifted her off the stone.  Just before they did, Ariadne saw the water fill with sky.  “Do not try so hard; it will not make the god think any more kindly of you.  Wait, and breathe…Good.  Now look again.”

She stepped back onto the stone that brought her upper body to the lip of the basin.  She did not look at the queen, but she could see her shadow on the water.  The smooth, still water that refused to ripple.

“It will not work.”  Ariadne’s voice sounded high and wavery and she coughed a little, as if she had had to all along.

“It will.  You are Poseidon’s child; you are a daughter of the Bull.  Here – watch me one more time and see how I call up his power.”

No, Ariadne wanted to say – I’ve watched before and I’ve tried before and nothing ever happens for me, even though I’m a princess and already five – but then Pasiphae tilted her head toward the basin, and Ariadne did watch.

For a moment there was only more stillness.  Small things moved – the golden rings that dangled from her mother’s ears, and the wispy clouds above the palace’s walls – but Ariadne hardly saw them, just as she hardly heard the voices that sang and shouted in the corridors beyond the altar.  It was the quiet that consumed her.

Pasiphae’s green eyes were on the water, yet they seemed to be gazing through it too, into a place Ariadne could not see.  For a few breaths the queen stayed like this – like a statue or a bird carried motionless on a river of wind.  When she curved her fingers, Ariadne started (she always did, even now that she expected to).  The gems on Pasiphae’s fingers winked, and the copper wrapped around her wrists glinted, and one black ringlet slipped down over her shoulder and bobbed just above the water.

The queen smiled.  Now, Ariadne thought, and there it was: a circle in the centre of the basin; a silent ripple that rose and broke like a miniature tide against the stone.  The queen lifted her hands and the ripple became a wave, and the wave leapt out of the basin.

Ariadne sucked in her breath.  She knew what would happen; she had watched her mother draw swells from a calm sea and turn a stormy sea to mirror.  But she gasped now, as Pasiphae held the ring of water in mid-air.  It shone as her gems did, struck by shifting sun and cloud shapes.  It pulsed a bit, as if it too were breathing.

“My thanks, Lord Poseidon,” Pasiphae whispered.  She smiled another, even more dazzling smile and brought her hands slowly down, and the water flowed back into the basin and was a smooth, still pool again.

“And so you see,” Pasiphae said briskly as Ariadne blinked, “you must not strain; you must be quiet, open to the bull god’s gift.  I learned this from my own mother and was marked by the god by the time I was three.  It is past time for you.  Now.  Try.”

Ariadne leaned forward.  She stared at her eyes and brow, which were frowning.  She tried to ease away the frown, and did, but then she realized that her hands were clenched.  Please, she thought, Lord Poseidon, come to me as you come to her – I’m going to be six soon, and you still haven’t come to me, and even the cook’s child bears a mark –

“Stop!” cried a new voice, so loudly that the water seemed at last to quiver.  Ariadne stumbled backward off the stone.  She felt her mother’s fingers dig into her shoulders before they pushed her away.

“Husband.”  Pasiphae’s voice was flat but somehow also sharp, like the shell Ariadne had cut her knee on the summer she was four.

“Wife,” Minos said.  His teeth showed through his beard; they were bared like an angry dog’s.  A smile, Ariadne knew.  Her father’s smile.  She smiled too, a little, and her heart thumped in her chest.

“I see you are still attempting to prove that the child bears your god’s blessing,” the king said.  “You are very sweet, Phae, when you are desperate.”

“She bears his blessing because I bore her.”

The water in the basin began to bubble and froth.  Ariadne smiled even more widely as red-gold light bloomed beneath her father’s skin.

“Admit the truth at last,” Minos said.  He was rubbing the tips of his first two fingers against his thumbs; Ariadne watched sparks kindle and spin.  They turned to cinders as they fell.  “Her gift may well be from Zeus – for she is also my child.”

Pasiphae took a step toward her husband and now Ariadne could see both of them, standing very tall, a forearm’s length between them.  “She may be your child,” the queen said in a low voice, “but this one, at least, is not.”

She put her hands on either side of her belly, which was a small round lump beneath the green folds of her dress.  She pulled the folds taut so that the lump was very clear.

Minos made a sound deep in his throat.  He raised his hands and held them flat; bronze and copper fire licked along the seams in his palms and up into the air.  The flames stretched and shimmered and crackled, and Ariadne lifted her face up into their heat.  Behind her the water hissed and churned; it spattered cool against the back of her neck.

“If you continue to flaunt your union with the bull priest, I will cast you out as I did him.”  Smoke coiled from Minos’ mouth as he spoke.

Pasiphae laughed.  Her cheeks and arms were beaded with moisture.  Ariadne knew that soon her mother’s dress would darken and cling to her, as if she had been swimming, and that her father’s tunic would be bored with blackened holes.

“You will not cast me out,” the queen said.  “When you banished him, my people rioted – they shattered Zeus’ altar – imagine, Husband, what they would do to this island if you did the same to me.  No.”  She laughed again, and the water tinkled and sang.  “I will bear Poseidon’s child here.”

Minos thrust his arm out.  It was bare, coursing with light that was gold now, and so bright that Ariadne had to look away.  She saw a tongue of flame dart out and attach itself to her mother’s cheek.  It slithered and lashed but could not cling, for Pasiphae’s skin was slick with water.  The queen closed her eyes, and Minos cried out a deep, ragged word that Ariadne did not understand, because his open mouth was awash with smoke and rippling with heat.

“Mama!” Ariadne cried.  She was not afraid; she just wanted them to look at her now, not at each other.  “Papa!”  But they did not look at her.  They stared and stared, only the two of them in the world, so far away from her.  

She reached out and raked her nails along Pasiphae’s arm.  The queen rounded on her, water spraying from her mouth, and from the palm that struck Ariadne across the face.  “Go – go now,” the queen snarled, but Ariadne was already running.

*

“Hush, Minnow.  There, now – hush…”

Naucrate’s skirt smelled like lemons.  Ariadne burrowed into it as far as she could, until she felt Naucrate’s knees pressing against her forehead. 

“You ran very fast,” Naucrate said.  Her hands stroked Ariadne’s back, which was still heaving.

Ariadne nodded into the cloth.  She had run fast, and far – all those corridors and courtyards, their walls just blurs of paint.  She had not even slowed when she passed the dolphin fresco that had a tiny figure of her in it, beneath a curling wave.  She had been too angry.

“Look at me.”

Ariadne did.  Naucrate’s head was angled a little; the sun slanting in from the doorway was playing over her dark hair and the bronze shoulder pins that held her shift closed. Her lips were not smiling but her eyes were.  Good, Ariadne thought.  She will listen, and then she will give me a treat.  She always does, when I cry.

“Tell me what is wrong.”

Ariadne swallowed.  They weren’t looking at me did not seem right, even though it was true.  “They were fighting,” she said instead, and snuffled.

“And what were they fighting about this time?”

“Their gods.  And the new baby.”

“Ah.  What were they saying about the new baby?”

The words came quickly, now that she knew which ones to speak.  “My mother said that the king isn’t its father, but I don’t understand this – he’s my father, and Deucalian’s and Glaucus’ and Androgeus’ – how could he not be this baby’s too?”

Naucrate straightened.  She seemed to be gazing at something above Ariadne’s head.  The smile was gone from her eyes.

“There are rites – the gods inhabit the bodies of priests…but you are too young to understand.”  She blinked and looked back at Ariadne.  “Your mother thinks that Poseidon came to her and is the baby’s father, and your father does not want to believe this.”

“He was so angry,” Ariadne said in a rush, glancing up under her eyelashes to watch Naucrate’s face, “I think he hurt her – the fire was all over him, especially in his hands, and he was trying to touch her…”

Naucrate smoothed the damp hair back from Ariadne’s brow.  “He did not hurt her.  I know the king.  He used his fire on me once, when I…displeased him.  But even though it crackled and smoked and made me very hot, it never hurt me.”

Ariadne shuffled backward, away from Naucrate’s stool, and crouched with her arms around her knees.

“Little Princess – was there more?”

“It’s just…they were angry about me, really, at first.  Because they both want me to have their god-gifts, but I don’t – I’m unmarked and I always will be.”  She had not expected these words, which made her want to cry real tears.  She bit her lip.

Naucrate rose and went to the table that stood beside the inner door.  Ariadne straightened, real and false tears forgotten. 

“You do not know that,” Naucrate said as she plucked the lid off an alabaster jar.  “I was seven when I was marked, but after all my yearning, my gift was slight.  Who could be impressed by a girl whose whistling sounded like birdsong – even if she could imitate any bird on earth?  No, in the end there was so much teasing that I thought I had been better off unnoticed by the gods.”

She came back to Ariadne and knelt, holding the open jar.  Inside its smooth, purple-veined white were three honey cakes.

“Remember that Daedalus is also unmarked – and yet Cretans, and Athenians too, think him a great man.  Now take one of these,” she said.  “They’re fresh, and even sweeter than usual.  Icarus will be hungry by now; will you take him one?”

Ariadne nodded, her mouth already so full of honeyed oats that she could not speak.  Naucrate put another cake in Ariadne’s palm and closed her fingers around it.

“Good.  You know where to find him.”

Ariadne did not run this time.  She walked slowly, drawing her free hand along the stone walls, feeling where they were sun-warm and where they were shadow-cool.  A line of tiny bulls led her around corners and up steps; Daedalus’ bulls, which he had painted low enough that a child could see them.  She knew when she came to the one with the golden bird perched on its horn that she was nearly there – and the steps down came after it – and then she was there, in the first of Daedalus’ workrooms.

This one had no roof: it was a courtyard, bounded on all sides by blue-washed walls and scarlet columns.  Ariadne could see the three entryways to the other workrooms; the one with the paint pots and walls covered with brushstrokes that never seemed to be the same the next time, and the one with looms that clacked all by themselves and other machines of metal that whirred and clanged, and the one deep beneath the ground that held sea creatures captive in pools fed by salt springs Daedalus had coaxed from rock.  These others were wondrous, but the courtyard was more wondrous yet.  Here there were towering blocks of marble, some already carved in shapes of men or beasts, others shrouded in cloth and surrounded by wooden ladders and platforms.  Vines crawled up the walls and over patches of ground.  Tools lay upon them, and models of ships and cities, and even a tiny Knossos, with all its corridors and rooms, and painted clay figurines that were its people.  Beside Knossos was the Acropolis, which she knew was far away over the sea, and which Daedalus did not speak of, though Naucrate had told her that he had come from Athens.

He was crouched before the little Acropolis now, with his back to her.  She crept up behind him until she could see over his shoulder.  He was holding two figurines in his hands: one as long as his forefinger and one half that size.  His head was bent.  She could see white strands in his close-cropped black hair.

“Ha!” she cried.  She lunged forward and wrapped her arms around his neck.  She felt his muscles bunch and tense and saw him drop the figurines onto the ivy.  When he turned his body around he was laughing.

“Again, my Minnow!” he said, disentangling her arms and rising at the same time.  “How do you do it?”

“You’re always thinking,” she said, craning up at him.  “So it’s easy to surprise you.”

He smiled.  His teeth were straighter and whiter than her father’s, though his beard was just as dark.

“Today I am thinking about what must lie beneath our feet,” he said.  “Fire, I believe.  An ocean of fire that turns rocks to gold.  If only I could pluck them free.”

“You’re silly,” Ariadne said, scuffing her sandals against the ivy and the stone.  “My feet aren’t hot at all.”

Daedalus nodded at her.  “Of course I am silly.  And I am glad I have you to remind me of it, Princess.  Now, then – what are you holding onto so tightly?”

She held up her hand.  “It’s for Icarus.”  The honey cake was lumpier than it had been, and her fingers were sticky.  All of a sudden she wished she had eaten this one too, and returned to her rooms.

“Ah,” he said.  “You are kind as well as regal.  Can you guess where he is?”

She did not want to look.  But she did: she glanced up to the scaffolding around the tallest slab of marble.  He was there, a hunched shadow moving back and forth: she could see this even from so far below.

“Icarus!” Daedalus called.  The shadow head turned sharply and cocked down.  “Look who’s come to see you!”

Icarus was still for a moment.  Good, Ariadne thought, he’ll stay there – but then he spread his arms wide and let himself fall from the platform.  She caught her breath and stepped back, even though he was nowhere near her, and she had seen this before.  He fell sharply, righted himself and fanned his arms up and down until his feet struck the ground.  He crumpled there, knees to ivy, hands skidding out in front of him.  Then he rose and stumbled toward her.

His arms bristled with short white feathers, she saw as he approached.  Again she tried not to look, tried not to care that there were more than last time, or that his nose was thinner and longer.

“Highness.”  His voice was high.  He was taller than she was, of course – he was seven – but his shoulders were still rolled forward, so his eyes were level with hers.  His pale eyes, silver-white-blue, with round nubs of black within.

“Here.”  She thrust out her hand.  The honey cake felt sodden and heavy.

One of Icarus’ hands darted out.  His fingers grasped the cake – only they were not blunt fingers: they were sharp.  Ariadne glanced down and saw translucent points shining from his fingertips.  She remembered the owl she had seen at the mountain shrine where her father had taken her last summer, with her brothers.  An owl with talons that had curved around its perch.

“My thanks.”  His hair looked more layered than it had a few days ago.  Shades of bronze and gold and brown brushed against his cheeks and neck.  She wrenched her gaze away from it, but then she was looking at his mouth, with its cleft upper lip, all twisted and purple in the middle.

“Your mother wanted you to have it,” she said, staring at his bare feet.  His toes were splayed too wide, but otherwise his feet looked unremarkable.

“Yes.”  Daedalus put one hand on her head and one on Icarus’.  “And we thank you, Ariadne, for delivering it.  Now Icarus must eat and rest – yes, rest, my son.  If you tire yourself out with changing now, you will never learn to fly – you know this.”

Icarus cocked his head and shifted from foot to foot.  “Very well.”  His voice was a bit deeper but still sounded like it came more from his nose than from his mouth.  Only a few of the feathers remained on his arms.  Ariadne could not recall having seen the others vanish.  The flesh where they had been was pocked with red circles.  “Come back tomorrow, Ari?”

She swallowed and scuffed her feet again.  No, she thought, you disgust me – even more words she could not speak aloud, if she was to continue being the favourite of the great Daedalus.  Before she could say anything at all, though, voices and footsteps sounded from behind her. 

“Master Daedalus – we’ve brought the new hammers for the forge.”

There were five men, their bare chests shining with sweat.  Two were pulling a wagon, or something like a wagon (it seemed to have too many wheels; Daedalus had probably designed it as well).  Ariadne turned and darted away from them.  She did not look back, not even when Icarus called her name.