daubed two wooden frames with yellow wax and onto them he pressed the feathers he had collected from the great seabirds that fed on Crete’s shore, long-pinioned, wide and white. Two sets of wings, they made. He tied one to his own arms, and one to his son’s. They stood atop the highest cliff of Knossos’ shore and leapt.
The ocean draughts caught them, and they were borne aloft. East they went, towards the rising sun and Africa. Icarus whooped, for by then he was a young man, and this was his first freedom. His father laughed to see him diving and wheeling. The boy rose higher still, dazzled by the sky’s vastness, the sun’s unfettered heat on his shoulders. He did not heed his father’s cries of warning. He did not notice the melting wax. The feathers fell, and he fell after, into the drowning waves.
I mourned for that sweet boy’s death, but I mourned more for Daedalus, winging doggedly onwards, dragging that desperate grief behind him. It was Hermes who told me, of course, sipping my wine, his feet upon my hearth. I closed my eyes, to find that impression I had made of Daedalus’ face. I wished then that we had conceived a child together, to be some comfort to him. But that was a young and silly thought: as if children are sacks of grain, to be substituted one for another.
Daedalus did not long outlive his son. His limbs turned gray and nerveless, and all his strength was transmuted into smoke. I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.
Chapter Twelve
WE WENT THE LONG way back to Aiaia, avoiding Scylla. Eleven days it took. The sky bent its arc over us, clear and bright. I stared into the blinding waves, the white-flaring sun. No one disturbed me. The men averted their gazes when I passed, and I saw them cast a rope I had touched into the waves. I could not blame them. They lived on Knossos and knew too much of witchery already.
When we landed on Aiaia, they dutifully carried the loom up through the woods and set it before my hearth. They led up the eight sheep. I offered them wine and a meal, but of course they did not accept. They hurried back to their ship, strained at their oars, eager to vanish over the horizon. I watched until the moment they winked out, like a snuffed flame.
The lion glared from my threshold. She lashed her tail as if to say, That had better be the last of that.
“I think it will be,” I said.
After Knossos’ sunny, out-flung pavilions, my house was snug as a burrow. I walked its neat rooms, feeling the silence, the stillness, the scuff of no feet but my own. I put my hand to every surface, every cupboard and cup. They were all as they had been. As they would ever be.
I went out to my garden. I weeded the same weeds that always grew, and planted the herbs I had gathered on Dicte. They looked strange away from their moonlit hollows, crowded in among my glossy, bright beds. Their hum seemed fainter, their colors faded. I had not considered that perhaps their powers could not survive transplanting.
In the years I had lived on Aiaia, I had never chafed at my constraint. After my father’s halls, the island seemed to me the wildest, most giddy freedom. Its shores, its peaks, all of them yawned out to the horizon, filled up with magic. But looking at those fragile blooms, for the first time I felt the true weight of my exile. If they died, I could harvest no more. I would never walk again the humming slopes of Dicte. I could not draw water from its silver pool. All those places Hermes had told me of, Araby, Assur, Egypt, they were lost forever.
You will never leave, my sister had said.
In defiance, I threw myself into my old life. I did what I liked, the moment that I thought of it. I sang upon the beaches, rearranged my garden. I called the pigs and scratched their bristled backs, brushed the sheep, and summoned wolves to lie panting on my floor. The lion rolled her yellow eyes at them, but she behaved herself, for it was my law that all my