Ariadne toyed with a ball of red thread while she watched her brothers play mock fights in the courtyard. Wrap, thwack, thwack, their false swords went against leather shields. It had been almost a year since her father had summoned the bull by calling on the aid of Poseidon. Ariadne could still picture how white it had looked. One of the servant girls had gasped and said it was Zeus come back just as he had appeared when he first led Europa to their island.

Ariardne wove the red thread through her fingers. Everything had changed then. Even the way things looked seemed changed. The colors of the frescos' on the palace walls seemed duller, the whitewash of the walls looked muddy especially when compared to the bull's hide. And it was no longer Araidne's uncle the sad and wise Rhadamanthus who sat on the throne given to their step-father when he married Europa, but Ariadne's father: Minos. When he had summoned the bull it had proved to the people that it was him and not his brother Rhadamanthus who had the gods' favor. Hadn't he also wed an immortal daughter of Helios in addition to summoning the bull? They had whispered. And who has Rhadamunthus to bed or name as his heir? Not a one. While Minos has sons and heirs a plenty and a pack of daughters to boot.

"Is it really so bad to have the gods favor you, Uncle?" Ariadne remembered asking her uncle before he left.

"It is, just as its bad luck for the fish to be found by fisherman."

She pouted, black hair falling across her gray eyes. "What does that mean?"

He uncle had sighed and looked at her, "The gods are not human little one. But they are greater, so some may sport with us like a lonely shepard with sheep or you with a beloved pet but if they think us too wild they will discard us just as easily as you would a dog gone rabid."

Her thick eyebrows furrowed, remembering the golden haired god who had come to visit her sister in the night. ". . . But Acacallis loved him."

Rhadamunthus sat and motioned for her to come climb up onto his lap, like the child she was Ariadne curled up there as if her uncle's arms would be enough to keep her safe from all the change and confusion. "Your father wouldn't remember. . . He was so young when our mother died. But I never saw her smile. She would pace up and down the halls sighing, looking at the skies as if any minute she expected the Thunderer to descend from some cloud coming for her."

"He abducted her in the form of a bull," Her voice was anxious aware for the first time of the symnetry at work here. Her grandmother had loved a snowy white bull . . .

"Yes. . . Keep away from the bull your father summoned. No good will come if your father doesn't sacrifice it as promised."

"Why wouldn't he?"

But Rhadamanthus only gave her a sad, tired smile. "Because your mother won't let him."

Ariadne quickly unwound the yarn from her fingers and left the courtyard when she heard her mother scream signalling her labor pains. Her brothers stopped their whacking of swords to look in the direction of that awful supposedly blessed sound while their sister actually walked toward it, her quick small feet racing across the stone. She remembered the forboding sense of symetry she had felt while sitting on her uncles lap about white bulls and the Queens of Crete. She hoped that whatever her mother was birthing it would come out dark haired and safely mortal. And as she watched her mother push it out she was disappointed.