The Nadir of the Labyrinth

by Christopher DeRosa

Table of Contents

Part 5: The Princess’ Tale

I have known my father was a cruel man since I was very young. I grew up around that cruelty, watched my father inflict it on others. I knew nothing but that cruelty, and I was taught that, as King, my father’s pronouncements were inherently just and good, as mine would one day be as Queen.

I spent most of my childhood learning lies, the lies that my father’s court whispered in my ears and the lies I learned from the army of tutors, scribes and wise men who were my teachers. I learned to stifle my emotions, to react with ambivalence to bad news and with anger to good.

I was taught by our Master of Horses to ride with an imperious visage. We would ride around the grounds of the castle as the workers and servants went about their daily business. He would give me the same advice: “Do not acknowledge them; they are beneath you. You must control all around you, do not give them a chance to not be in your power.” He would repeat it over and over as we rode through the high city. These were my first lessons.

I learned to speak as a Queen to the people at court and ensure they displayed the proper courtesy to me. Only later did I realize this stemmed from a fear of my father, by extension a fear of me. All the groveling I inspired, that my teachers praised me so greatly for, was all from the specter of my father that loomed over me. I grew up haunted by that specter, yet I never realized it.

I learned other things then, as well. Letters of course, how to read the seasons and stars. The history of our kingdom and those that neighbor us. I learned the rudiments of magic as well, though I was taught no spells. My teacher was a mage of the Cirene. Though he was the only man at court not of noble blood, he was feared perhaps as much as I, for he was my father’s advisor, always the first at his ear.

He had a son though, about my age, named Andreas. He grew up away from the court, as he was not a noble’s son. I saw him only during the great yearly celebrations my father threw to praise the gods for our kingdom’s good fortune.

I have such a vivid memory of the first time I saw Andreas. My father was sitting upon this throne in his finest robes, his golden crown shone on his head. Beside him stood my teacher, the mage. They were laughing about something, though I do not know what. Around them teemed hordes of the nobility dressed in their greatest finery, though each careful not to exceed the grandeur of my father.

Andreas was there as a young boy. He peered out from behind his father with an expression not truly fearful but timid. I remember that I wanted to talk to him, the natural reaction of a child when surrounded by so many other people they do not understand. But I did not; I remembered the lessons of my father’s Master of Horses. Such behavior would be unbecoming of a Queen.

We did speak that night, though; my teacher and father introduced us after the feast was done. Andreas seemed glad to get away from the arguments and petitions of the court, though perhaps it was simply to leave the imperious gaze of my father.

Out on the balcony, we just talked that evening about all the things that children will. We must have been a sight, two children dressed like royalty out there in the moonlight in the midst of the pageantry of the court. No amount of teaching can truly burn away the wonder and excitement of childhood; we talked about all kinds of things, our parents, the ways we spent our days, what we did for fun.

He was amazed at my stories of riding on the King’s horses through the streets of the high city. He told me of the magic his father worked, how he turned stones into frogs and mice for him to play with and back again. It amazed me at the time how open he was. He spoke how he felt about things, about the world.

What amazed me most of all was when he told me that my father scared him, though he quickly amended that it was “only a little bit.” I think that was when I finally started to understand my father and how he controlled the world around him. But I was just a child, and full understanding would not come for years.

As the festival wound down, Andreas’ father called him away, and Andreas kissed me right on the cheek. It meant nothing, a child’s kiss. But I was the crown princess. I was untouchable; the very act would have been enough for one of my father’s executioners to bound over, axe in hand, and hew the little boy’s head from his shoulders had anyone witnessed it. Nobody had, though. I almost screamed in surprise. We saw each other at other celebrations, other festivals. Each time, he would kiss me as he left.

There was a different event at which I saw Andreas. It was an execution. Nothing as grand as the yearly banishment to the labyrinth; that would not begin for years. A noble had slighted my father and was sentenced to be beheaded. The court turned out in its entirety to watch.

My teacher was there and he had brought Andreas. We sat next to each other as we watched the condemned man climb the steps set into a hill near the castle where the bloodstained chopping block was set. The executioner waited there with his big, notched axe.

This was not the first execution I had seen; my father had brought me to all of them from a young age. He wanted me to see the kind of power I would wield one day. Andreas had never seen someone die. The axe whistled down through the air and hit the man’s neck with a crack as the spine was severed. Blood fountained from the neck, and Andreas wailed into his robes. It was a trait of his that would follow him into manhood; he hated the sight of blood.

The two of us grew up together, though we only saw each other a few scant times a year. We wrote letters to one another, though, and I sent them out on my father’s courier birds. Over the years, we had many conversations on the balconies of my father’s palace and long walks through the castle gardens.

We both grew into the bud of adulthood with all the challenges and confusion that brought. Years flowed by and, for the both of us, the secretive kiss we would share as we parted grew to mean more than childish innocence. I was told that no matter what, I would be queen, I must control all around me, and that included myself.

We were walking in the garden during the festival of the spring equinox when he said it. There was no buildup, no preamble, just the blunt and honest truth that I had grown to expect from him.

“Elena, I love you.”

I had already known that. All the years spent blunting my feelings had not blinded me to it. I felt it flutter within me with every courier bird that alighted upon my window with a message from him. Maybe it was just the passion of youth, but I loved him for his honesty. For his sincerity.

“I love you, too, Andreas,” I said and met his eyes. His face lit up, relieved. I could not imagine that he thought I would betray him to my father, but the idea must have crossed his mind. We agreed to find a way to meet sooner, a way that would keep him safe from the wrath of my father.

When he left that night, he kissed me, not on the cheek but on the lips. As he did, my mind burned with the image of him walking in chains to that bloodstained chopping block. He was lowborn. The fate of our love had been sealed. We knew this and debated in our letters, scribbled with the franticness of youth. I was the one who had the idea. I would request that he be made my bodyguard. I would make it my first royal pronouncement. My father, his Master of Horses and Andreas’s father would love it.

My father saw through the ruse at once. As I decreed at the foot of his throne, that I desired Andreas as my bodyguard, he laughed to my face. It was the first time I had truly received the brunt of my father’s scorn. I was sure the vision in my mind would come true, that Andreas would be led from that room up to the hill with the chopping block.

My father, to my surprise, accepted my demand. Andreas would be my bodyguard. He then turned to his advisor. “You are skilled in the arcane arts. I want you to make your son a bull. Full of anger. Purge him of that timidity and mold him so that should anyone try to lay a hand on my daughter, he will strike them down without hesitation. Do exactly as I say, or I shall need to find a new mage for my court.”

My father had spoken. Andreas and I looked to each other in terror as his father led him from the room. I did not see Andreas for many months. The courier birds I sent received no answer. I despaired in the thought that he now lay buried somewhere, killed without my knowledge, or rotted deep below my feet in the palace dungeons. I could not know. When I did see Andreas again, he was a broken man, and he now wore the gilded armor of a royal bodyguard with a sword strapped at his belt.

“A guardian fit for your royal daughter, my liege,” his father announced. We left that room at once to our balcony in the empty banquet hall.

“What did they do to you? Are you all right?” I begged of him, plagued him with questions, but he would not answer. There were no scars on him that I could see, but his eyes were dark, the spark of joy gone from them.

“I will protect you, and we can be together now, just as we wanted,” he said and would speak no more. He did guard me, was at my side every day, though he was not the Andreas I had known. He would not touch me, would hardly talk to me and every night I sobbed the stars away, wondering what his father had done to him. This went on for days until I could hardly bear to look at him.

There was a royal procession one day, and I followed my father on a parade through the High City. The crowd turned out to cheer for the royalty. They threw flowers and handfuls of petals as we passed, and one young man reached out from the crowd to grab at a lock of my hair. Andreas was there in an instant, his sword blazed from its sheath and plunged into the young man’s throat. That gilded armor turned red.

The royal guard dispersed the crowd that streamed in, and Andreas pushed me back into the procession. It was not until we returned to the castle that Andreas broke down. “I couldn’t stop myself. Whenever I see anyone near you, I need to hurt them. My arms aren’t mine. I hate this, I hate feeling like this.” He cried then, the first true emotion I had seen from him since his return.

“I still love you.” I breathed and kissed him again. I did not know how long the return of my Andreas would last. To my relief, he kissed me back and for that moment the world turned around us. Then Andreas was pulled away from me, and there stood the Master of Horses. He yelled something, but I couldn’t hear, my head was spinning.

Andreas’s sword was out again, as was the Master’s. Andreas lunged for the master and, from his head, burst two curled bull horns in a bloody shower. The master stepped back, afraid, but his sword caught Andreas’s and with a flick of his wrist my love’s sword tumbled from his hands. The Master put his blade to Andreas’s throat and led us to my father.

I pleaded then for Andreas’s life; I could not bear to see him ascend the stairs to that chopping block. My father laughed at me again. “I cannot refuse my daughter’s request! Andreas, for the crime of defiling the royal daughter, you shall be banished! The mages of the Cirene have discovered an island that shall be your home now, and there you shall be buried deep beneath the earth. But do not worry, you will not be alone there. I shall send others there, so you shall not go hungry.”

Andreas sobbed; his horned head hung. I remembered the way my father sneered through executions and grinned as he condemned lesser nobles to the dungeons. I finally realized that my father simply enjoyed watching others suffer. My love looked back at me as they dragged him from the room, but we were allowed no last words together.

It was then that rumors of the king’s monster and his underground labyrinth began to circulate among the people. That spring, the first group of condemned were sent to their deaths on the bull-headed ship to the lair of the Minotaur. For ten years I watched men and women go to their deaths at the hands of my beloved.

Andreas’s father was among the first group, condemned for his failure to create the perfect bodyguard for the royal daughter. I knew Andreas must hate me then. He hated blood, hated seeing others in pain. I imagined him down there in the dark as he gnawed on bones and cursed my name into the darkness. I did not dare cross my father, for now I feared him far more than the others at the court did.

My days became blurs of pain. I had cursed Andreas with this fate. I had done this to him. I knew I had forced him to become something he hated. I had forced him into exile, into a life of murder. I wished it had been me instead of him, cursed to live as a monster and sent to die in exile. It was only a few months ago that I realized I could not continue.

I went to my father and demanded that Andreas be freed. “As far as I am concerned, Andreas is dead. His sentence has already been carried out.”

My father, now old and decrepit, sneered at me from up on his throne. His gaze was gleeful. Age had begun to pluck at his mind, but his wickedness remained. At that moment, I made my choice: “Then send me to him. I am guilty as well. When the Master of Horses caught us together, I had kissed him, he did not force himself on me. I am complicit of the crime you punished him for.” I did not back down from the withering gaze he had honed over many years on cowering nobles.

Finally, he nodded and, with a slight smile, gave me his answer. “I never was able to refuse you, my daughter.”

* * *

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Copyright © 2022 by Christopher DeRosa

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