at her. “Are you mad? It tried to eat my hand! Tell me how such an abomination came to be.”
“Stitch me up.”
“No,” I said. “You will tell me, or I will let you bleed yourself dry.”
“Bitch,” she said. But she was wheezing. The pain was wearing her away. Even my sister had an end in her, a place she could not go. We stared at each other, yellow eyes to yellow. “Well, Daedalus?” she said at last. “It is your moment. Tell my sister whose fault this creature is.”
He looked at me, face weary and streaked with blood. “Mine,” he said. “It is mine. I am the reason this beast lives.”
From the cage, a wet chewing sound. The finches had gone silent.
“The gods sent a bull, pure white, to bless the kingdom of Minos. The queen admired the creature and desired to see it more closely, yet it ran from any who came near. So I built the hollow likeness of a cow, with a place inside for her to sit. I gave it wheels, so we might roll it to the beach while the creature slept. I thought it would only be…I did not—”
“Oh, please,” my sister spat. “The world will be ended before you stammer to your finish. I fucked the sacred bull, all right? Now get the thread.”
I stitched my sister up. Soldiers came, their faces carefully blank, and bore the cage to an inner closet. My sister called after them, “No one goes near it without my word. And give it something to eat!” Silent handmaids rolled up the soaked rug and carried off the ruined couch as if they did such work every day. They burned frankincense and sweet violets to mask the stench, then bore my sister to the bath.
“The gods will punish you,” I had told her, while I sewed. But she had only laughed with a giddy lushness.
“Don’t you know?” she had said. “The gods love their monsters.”
The words made me start. “You talked to Hermes?”
“Hermes? What does he have to do with it? I don’t need some Olympian to tell me what is plain before my face. Everyone knows it.” She smirked. “Except for you, as usual.”
A presence at my side brought me back. Daedalus. We were alone, for the first time since he had come to my island. There were drops of brown spattered across his forehead. His arms were smeared to the elbow. “May I bandage your fingers?”
“No,” I said. “Thank you. They will fix themselves.”
“Lady.” He hesitated. “I am in your debt for all my days. If you had not come, it would have been me.”
His shoulders were taut, tensed as if against a blow. The last time he had thanked me, I had stormed at him. But now I understood more: he, too, knew what it was to make monsters.
“I am glad it was not,” I said. I nodded at his hands, crusted and stained like everything else. “Yours cannot grow back.”
He lowered his voice. “Can the creature be killed?”
I thought of my sister shrieking to be careful. “I don’t know. Pasiphaë seems to believe it can. But even so it is the child of the white bull. It may be guarded by a god, or it may bring down a curse upon any who harm it. I need to think.”
He rubbed at his scalp, and I saw the hope of an easy solution drain from him. “I must go make another cage then. That one won’t hold it long.”
He left. The gore was drying stiff upon my cheeks, and my arms were greasy with the creature’s stink. I felt clouded and heavy, sick from the pollution of so much blood. If I called the handmaids, they would bring me to a bath, but I knew that would not be enough. Why had my sister made such an abomination? And why summon me? Most naiads would have fled, but one of the nereids might have done it, they were used to monsters. Or Perses. Why had she not called for him?
My mind had no answers. It was limp and dulled, useless as my missing fingers. One thought came clear: I must do something. I could not stand by while a horror was loosed upon the world. I had the thought that I should find my sister’s workroom. Perhaps there would be something there to help me, some antidote, some great drug of reversal.
It was not far, a hall off her bedchamber separated by a curtain. I had