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she needed to, while the palace waited.
    The pebbles were cool. She lingered on them at first, drawing her soles over them as if she were wading through water. Soon she was moving faster, spinning as the music did, tracing patterns over stone and dust. Her dancing master had taught her these steps, and yet she felt others among them that were her own and the earth’s.
Maybe this time
, she thought as she leapt and whirled.
I’ll be surrounded by a silver light and everyone will know that I’ve finally been marked.
    But there was no light except the sun’s. She knew this as she folded herself onto the ground in the very centre and the last of the flute’s notes faded. For an instant, her heart broke again—but then the cheering began, and she straightened and smiled at all the people who loved her.

    That afternoon, Ariadne couldn’t sleep. She lay as motionless as she could atop her sheet, her arms and legs spread wide, but sweat still seeped from her skin and flattened her hair. She imagined her mother lying in
her
bed, one corridor away. The same sunlight would be oozing between the round pillars up near the ceiling; the same heat would be pulsing through the walls. But Pasiphae would probably be sleeping, her own skin beaded with water, not sweat.
    Ariadne groaned and sat up. The paint on her walls seemed to swim: the green coils of plants and their crimson flowers; the brown of fawns and hares. “Deucalion,” she said, and reached for some hairpins. He would help, she thought as she stuck the pins into her sodden curls—he’d summon a small, fresh wind that would soothe them both. But he was asleep, curled up like a cat in the chamber beside hers. Glaucus was asleep too; even the children’s slave was sleeping, sitting cross-legged with her back against the square pillar that separated the boys’ rooms.
    Ariadne almost woke her brothers (with a single, piercing scream, right in Glaucus’s ear), but then she thought,
No—it’s so quiet, and I’m alone—I’m the only one awake, and I could do anything I wanted . . . If only Phaidra didn’t have a nurse, I could creep in and put a lizard in her cradle. But Asterion—
he’s
just moved into his own chamber. Yes—Asterion . . .
    He wasn’t alone: that girl, Chara, was asleep on the floor at the foot of his bed. She was lying on her back with her limbs splayed, as if she were on the finest of mattresses and not stone. Ariadne ground her teeth in annoyance. The child was always with him when her mother, Pherenike, was attending to the queen—a small, thin, dark-haired little shadow whose grey eyes were strangely solemn, when they were open. Now, though, they were tightly closed.
    Ariadne looked from Chara to Asterion. At first she thought he was awake because his arms and legs were twitching. He was facing the doorway but his chin was tucked against his chest and she couldn’t see his eyes. He twitched and twitched, and his limbs made hissing sounds on the cloth. She stepped through the doorway and walked slowly toward the bed, her bare feet silent on the stone. When she was close enough to touch him, he sucked in his breath and flung himself onto his back. She froze and held her own breath until she saw that his eyes were closed. They rolled beneath their lids, up and down and around. She remembered this rolling from the cave, nearly two summers ago; the very same movement, though his eyes had been open that time. She also remembered that his horn nubs had glowed like molten bronze, before. Even though his hair was much longer and thicker, she could see that it was the same now: two points of light were throbbing on either side of his head.
    It was very hot in the cave
, she thought.
And it’s very hot in here
. She pressed a stray curl flat against her forehead, wound it tighter with her fingertip until it was like a whorl of seashell.
What would happen to him if it got hotter?
    Getting the lamp was easy. There were only a few slaves about