(Author's Note: Labyrinth scholars will easily recognize the names of Linda, Jeremy, and Robert Williams, as well as the famous speech "Through Dangers Untold" as belonging to Jim Henson and Terry Jones. Labyrinth Ph. Ds will recognize the titles "Meander's Queen" and "Robin Zakar." These characters and names belong to their respective authors: Laura Phillips, Terry Jones, Dennis Lee, and the incomparable Jim Henson.

Italicized speeches attributed to Caliban are from William Shakespeare's Tempest.

The character Jones, the orderly, is lifted from the film Sucker Punch. He's despicable and deserves much worse than what Tyto does to him.

Lyric lines are distorted (or mirrored) cribs from David Bowie's "Underground," as is Tyto's melody.

We're very close to freedom now. Tell me if you saw the tricks that Channard missed. Prince of Owls, Uncrowned King, is a marvelous magician.)

He saw him spread his wings above her, and hood her from harm. He saw him grasp her firmly in his talons, and never scratch her skin.

It began very quietly, and easily, the next day, the first of thirteen days. When she came into the common room, after Channard's cursory examination, Tyto Albans was there waiting for her. She rushed to him, embarrassed by being late. His clothing was perfectly in place, and his hair combed. She gave him a look of confusion, and held up the comb. He took it gently and offered it to her, speaking a few soft words. He went and sat on his customary couch, tossed a pillow down to the floor, and beckoned her to him.

She came, of course she came, and sat, ungracefully, between his knees. She flinched and trembled when he lifted the tangled mess of her bramblethorn hair and felt, with his fingers, the potential paths to order. She darted quick and nervous looks up at him, as if she were committing a horrendous breach of etiquette. But he only smiled down at her, such a friendly smile. He eased her head down to rest on his knee and piled the wealth of her elf-locked head over his lap. Slowly, her eyes eased half-shut as she lost herself in the world of his comfortable touch. In the second hour, when she heaved a great sigh and eased back against him, hugging his thigh with both arms, he ran his hand from the roots of her forehead to the very tip as if to praise her for her courage. She twitched her eyebrows occasionally when there was an accidental tug, but then Tyto rubbed the hurt place with little circles of his thumb, and kept going. At intervals he ran his tongue over the teeth of the comb and dampened his spittle down the length of an untangled tress.

He never gave any sign of being aware of Channard spying, or of anyone or anything else in the common room. It was if they were under glass, inviolate, only her, only him, and the task at hand.

As he combed, things came loose from her. The strands of intermixed torn hair he ate as they came free. Channard gagged slightly the first time Albans did this. He remembered the stench of her, unwashed and unhygienic and dirty, and gagged harder. But Tyto ate the bits of her with relish, ate even the pieces that weren't properly part of her, but had been mixed in with the tangles—lint, ragged strings, even once a paperclip and a hairpin, though the metal must have agonized him going down. The utter shamelessness of them both was … it should have been disgusting. But the shame was beyond the wall of glass, with Channard. Finally the weed-patch of Medea's hair was a black river, thick and strong as a horse's tail. That black river spread out his blue-black kilt, crested in waves of order.

She wasn't asleep. She'd given herself completely over to his care, but was awake and aware for every moment. When he began to comb the length of her, all from scalp to tip, their faces were reflections pleasure and mutual trust. He gathered the heavy weight of it in both hands, and coiled it carefully over her shoulder. He put his hand over the crown of her head, shifted his legs to support her, and waited for her to close her eyes and sleep. He closed his eyes as well, but Channard sensed, even though he saw Tyto's eyelids flicker in the pattern of REM sleep at the same time as Medea's, that he wasn't sleeping, or at least not dreaming his own dreams. The afternoon bled away in a spiral of themselves. Neither moved until the room closed for that day.

"What does she dream of?" he asked Tyto that evening.
"Nothing you're capable of observing," Tyto said. "Remember our bargain. Don't interfere."

On the second day, the pattern continued in the path Tyto had set. He combed her hair, and then began to braid and twine it in four and eight and five-part strands, creating complicated knots and designs echoed in his own clothing. As he braided, he asked her questions. To some of these, she raised her head, interested, answered in monosyllables. To the rest, she said nothing, only looked out of her eyes with that habitual expression of blank hurt. When the hurt came into her face, Tyto laid his hand over her forehead until it passed.

Channard observed that when she responded to a question as he braided, he finished the arrangement and knotted it over upon itself. When she didn't, he would spend more time than he had creating the knot in undoing it and combing it free. By the end of the second day, a third of her hair hung over her shoulder in arcane designs.

"What do you ask her?" he demanded of Tyto Albans.
"I ask her who she is."

On the third day, when she refused to answer a question, Tyto undid the knot and then tugged cruelly on the empty skein of hair until she opened her mouth to speak. The questions came at slower intervals, but when they did, she began to spit her words with some heat, in fuller sentences. The last coil of the day, she turned and glared at him with an expression of righteous anger Channard had only ever seen on Tyto's face before. Her chest heaved in passion, and he thought for a moment that Medea might strike out. But Tyto only nodded in impartial acknowledgement, and finished the knot.

"Why do you hurt her?" Channard asked.
"Her silence is a tangle that must be undone. She must claim her anger, even if it's painful. It must needs shake free with her voice."

On the fourth day, Tyto came very close to murdering one of the orderlies. It happened in the afternoon. Instead of being taken to the common room after the men's lunch, Jones had decided to take Tyto to the showers for a private conversation. Medea had waited impatiently for Albans to return to her, moving around the common room like an angry cat, searching for him everywhere, and Channard knew something was wrong. What he'd found, when he'd gone looking with Hobart and a guard in tow, was Albans and Jones in the deserted showers. Albans was coolly fitting Jones' keys into the lock, fingers smoking from the metal, searching for the right one. He backed away respectfully when Channard and his entourage entered. Jones was in the corner with his face ash-pale and his blood on the tiles, holding his guts in his abdominal cavity with both hands. Albans had apparently attempted to eviscerate him. "Send him to the common room," he barked, holding out his hand to Tyto, who grinned and gave him Jones' keys.

"You sure 'bout that, Doctor?" Hobart asked.

"I'm sure," Channard said, disgusted. "You, help me get Jones to surgery. Don't question me." The balance of that afternoon was spent in patching up the orderly and pouring blood, anesthetic, and antibiotics into him.

"So you've discovered the father of Medea's baby," Channard sneered at Albans that evening.

"I've discovered the one who raped her. He didn't like me being close to her. It sounds familiar, doesn't it? He wanted to convince me that he should be able to rape her again. He was asking my permission. I said no. It felt quite good to open him up." Tyto was cheerful, and Channard thought he could still see the blood on his hands. "Did he die?"

"No, he'll live, and barely have a scar. You were quite neat. But this will cause trouble, Tyto, you realize that."

"Only for him. Dismiss him. I'm sure you don't like sharing the watering hole with other predators. And if I have opportunity to be alone with him again, I'll kill him. That would be more trouble for you than for me. After all, I'm a madman. One must make excuses for madmen; I've seen it on the vile teevee. Otherwise what am I doing here?"

"I can't have you going around disemboweling the employees!" Channard snapped. "This is the last one."

"As you say, Doctor-Phillip-Channard. I solemnly promise that I will only disembowel those who try to get between me and my work." He bared his teeth. Who was he? This ghoul?

When she entered on the fifth day, her hair hung in ordered lover's-knots down her back, every hair claimed in the complex configuration; it was a symbolic maze of questions and answers that Channard couldn't decipher. She came to him, and Tyto removed her grubby sweater and picked the threads of it apart with his fingers. He slit the sleeves and the waist of her nightgown with those talon-nails and interwove the cotton and the wool back over her breasts and belly so that she was dressed as he was, but as a woman. Channard sneered at them, the dressing of the wren in peacock-feathers, and he saw how alike they were. The way they touched—even as he hatefully envied them in their cozy nest together, he could see it wasn't sexual, quite. Albans touched Medea as a Germanic hero might have touched his sister, with intimacy and without desire. And when she was all knotted snug in her new clothing, he could see—couldn't not see—how round and high her belly was, how her flesh was firm, breasts heavy and full with pregnancy, and how the reweaving of the sweater and the cotton supported her back and proudly accentuated her condition like the filigree setting of a jewel. Albans drew her hands over herself, helping her assume the iconic and timeless pose of expectant motherhood. He spoke to her. She put her hands over her face in anger and despair, but he moved her arms again, gently, despite her resistance. She nodded, and he stroked her face in empathy.

That day, they sat upon the couch side-by-side, like a King and Queen in state, saying nothing, but slowly drawing closer to each other, until their clothing and their arms and their hair seemed to intertwine, a double-spiral of dark and light. Her lips moved and his did not, and she whispered to him for a long time, two pairs of eyes fixed on some middle distance of the infinite. They seemed lost in nothingness, but Channard felt, he felt… that they were both seeing some far shore, a chasm-rift that separated them both from their freedom.

On the sixth day, they watched, together, a broadcast of a local production of The Tempest. And this time it was Tyto's lips that moved, asking questions, repeating lines, laughing at the clowns, and brooding on the soliloquies of Caliban.

"Well," said Channard that evening. "I see you've come to appreciate literature. Maybe when this nonsense is over you'll apply yourself more carefully to learning to read."

"Why bother?" Albans scoffed. "You taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."

"So you identify with Caliban, and not Ariel?"

"Ariel served his master, and Caliban defied him."

"Ariel won his freedom."

"Ariel bent the knee and begged to get what was always his by right. Caliban did neither and had back his island. The isle 'full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.' Caliban got his isle back, like a sleeper who in dreaming, sees the clouds 'open and show riches ready to drop upon him that, when he waked, he cried to dream again.'"

"I could always sedate you again, if it's dreams you want," Channard said angrily.

"But I'm not the dreamer," Tyto said. "Not anymore. All the dreams are hers now. And you'll not touch her."

On the seventh day, Channard realized that Tyto might actually know what he was doing, and could actually succeed in his task.

Medea began to write.

Tyto Albans had brought Channard's unloved and unused composition book and—smuggled or begged from someone else—three ballpoint pens to the common room. He pushed them over to her on the low table before their couch and leaned back.

They talked for a long time then, a very serious conversation. They told jokes to each other, laughed with each other. And in the fourth hour, Medea uncapped one of the pens, opened the naked pages, and began to write. She curled up with the book wedged between her lap and her belly, and rested her feet on Tyto's lap. He rubbed them as they talked. She would pause in her writing, look up, and say something to him. And then he would say something back. She would write a bit more, or scribble something out, ask a question, hear an answer. Writing. For a few hours only, she wrote down quite a bit. At the end of the day, Albans took the book from her, directing her attention up at the observation booth. They both stared up at Channard.

"Well?" Channard asked that evening, holding out his hand for the composition book.
"I told her you'd want to look it over." Tyto offered it to him. "We'll need it back."

Channard read, silently. He'd been expecting something profound, or some sort of confession, or perhaps even alchemical formulae or a map to the lost city of Atlantis. Anything except poetry.

Father my Father, come fetch me soon
It's under the earth I am.
Sister my Sister catch me up soon
For under the earth I am.

"Now why is it that I think these are your words," Channard said. The poem continued for several nonsensical verses, all tinged with yearning and begging and freedom deferred. Only a few lines were crossed out. Medea's penmanship was square and neat as type. "If you'd begun to learn to read and write when I asked, you wouldn't need her to play secretary."

"I have plenty of time to learn for myself later. This is for her. They're not just my words. They're hers as much as mine. She tells me the story and I tell it back to her. Somewhere between us both, we find the right words."

Brother my Brother, my mind has gone wild.
It's under the earth I am.
My lover, my lover where is our child?
It's under the earth we've gone.

It's only forever
until we are found
with the lost and lonely.
We're underground.

Tyto hummed a run of four notes as Channard read the last lines, the words working in his head to the rhythm of the music. The words fit, and the final note was uplifted, as if to question, or to imply hope. Channard flipped through the rest of the blank pages and tossed the whole back across the desk to Albans.

"Hold out your arm," Channard said. "I'm putting you on a regular course of sedation. Evening and morning, do you hear me?" But he felt disquieted, and not even making Albans submit could soothe that uneasiness. Albans complied, not even meekly, but as if the steel needle and the morphia compound couldn't touch him at all. He was still humming a skirl of notes which devolved in places to snatches of the poetry sung under his breath, even when Channard closed on him.

On the eighth and ninth days, she became his handmaiden again, or as if their roles were once again reversed, her leading, he following. The sedative compound made Albans wild for a few minutes before it took effect, and he came to the common room dazed and worn out. It was Medea's turn to support him, to lead him to their intimate corner, to sit and be near him until he unfroze and stopped treating his body like an experimental machine. By midmorning, Albans seemed thawed, and when Medea spoke to him, he was able to speak back, but with long pauses and sometimes with heaving breaths or stutters. By the afternoon, he could speak to her the way they had the day before, and they wrote together. Channard reviewed their literary works in the evening. They seemed to be writing some sort of story together, made up of poetry and soliloquies. Pages of the composition book were ripped out and folded in, as well as pieces of loose paper that had once been the duty roster or the backs of old memos taken from the corkboard.

It was difficult to sort out the characters—it seemed to be about a Queen whose child, or perhaps whose husband, and sometimes both together, had been stolen away to the Underworld by a wicked Goblin King who was sometimes also benevolent and kind. The parts kept shifting, and it was difficult to track which speeches belonged to which part, or sometimes if it was even a part at all. But what seemed clear in the story, which Channard rolled his eyes to discover, that Medea was, with Albans' help, writing the story of her life in which she hadn't murdered her child at all. She was a foil for Meander's Queen, searching the Labyrinth for a child—and sometimes a husband—which had been stolen. He didn't even bother to make notes. It was the negative confession of Medea's guilty conscience. Albans' cure, if this story was meant to be the cure, was to help her tell a story in which she evaded all responsibility for her sins.

On the tenth day, the Radamanthus Asylum had visitors.

Channard had expected Kline to call in a favor for their long-ago meeting together, and was slightly nervous. But it was only a group of Triptoleme University students, in their third year, that Kline begged access for. They were theater students, wanting to examine the madhouse for inspiration for some play. Three of them caught his attention in particular—the blond boy, Jeremy, the dark-haired Linda, and their guardian shadow, Robert.

"What play is it again?" Channard asked Jeremy, after introducing himself and outlining protocol for visiting the common room.

"Marat/Sade," he said, smiling. "It's very modern. It's set in a madhouse, with all the inmates putting on a play written by the Marquis de Sade about the death of Jean-Paul Marat."

He ushered the group of eight into the common room but kept up the conversation with the interesting triad.

"We're trying to really evoke the feeling of madness and rage of the eighteenth-century asylum," said Linda. "The Marquis de Sade—he's fascinating. Jeremy's going to be marvelous in the part." She clasped the hand of her object of obsession and moved away into the room with him. Channard smiled and turned to the third wheel.

"And you, Mr. Williams? Are you also in the performing arts?"

Robert blushed. "No. I'm just here with Linda. Second year, specializing in family law." He looked around. Channard found him very easy to read. Robert Williams was a cautious, insensitive, honest man. He was here to follow the graceful Linda the way that Channard was here to follow Tyto. "I don't have much experience with mental illness. But this place is surprisingly pleasant."

"For a madhouse, you mean?" Channard smiled and was gratified to see Robert blush again. "No, I don't take offense. Discipline and routine, that's the best regimen."

Robert, watching Linda, saw Linda watching Jeremy, who was watching Channard's pet creature. Williams followed the train of eyes until he looked beyond Tyto Albans, who was holding magnificent court on his paired couch, and at the figure all in cobweb white at his side. "Is that woman… is she pregnant?"

"Yes," said Channard, irritated. "Sad to say, it's difficult to hold lunatics to basic standards of human decency. And medically treating her is more complicated. I'm attempting alternative methods. The baby will need to be placed for adoption, which is even more complicated."

"Is it his? That man's?" Robert was staring his dislike at Tyto Albans.

Channard discovered his own face held the same expression. "No," Channard said. "She's almost seven months along, and he's only been here since August." Of course it was obvious, by a thousand silent signals, that the Prince Owl and Princess Medea were a matched pair. He, pale in his dark motley and she dark in her white. They sat together on their couch, not touching, but together, like royalty granting an audience to Channard and his gaggle-trail of young theater idiots. Williams moved forward more quickly as Linda and Jeremy approached the couple, and Channard had to stretch his legs to keep up.

"Is he dangerous?" Robert asked, tense.

"Only to himself. He's been mildly sedated. Although you should be polite when you speak to him. And don't touch her," Channard cautioned. "He's very protective of her."

A little of the tension vanished from Robert's face. "I can understand that."

Jeremy and Linda had reached the couch where Tyto and Medea received waited to receive them. They looked each over carefully. The two couples, two fair-haired men and two dark-haired women, made a four-pointed star. By the time Channard and Robert had reached them, they'd apparently already exchanged introductions. Out of the corner of his eye, Channard observed the other five students circulating around the room, watching and mimicking the gestures and poses of the insane until it seemed there was little difference between them.

"Oh, look at it, by all means." Tyto was saying to Jeremy as Channard and Robert approached, waving his hand over the notebook on the coffee table. He seemed bored by the prospect.

Jeremy took it up eagerly. He read with fascination. "Goblin City," he scoffed merrily, and paused at the blocked lines of poetry-speeches. "What is it, seems like Demeter's quest. But that was Hades, not the Goblin King. What's… wow. You know, this could almost be a play. All the pieces are there."

"Jeremy, give him his book back."

"No, listen to this, Robert." Jeremy struck a heroic pose, holding the notebook back from his face, and declaimed,

"Through dangers untold, and hardships unnumbered
I have fought my way here to the Castle-Beyond-the-Goblin-City,
To take back the child that you have stolen.
For my will is as strong as yours,
and my kingdom is as great."

He stared at Tyto Albans with hauteur, waiting for the next line. Tyto stared back at him, in a pose more genuine, more regal than the one the young man had only pretended at.

"You have no power over me," Tyto said. But in the moment he said it, it looked as though a great and crushing weight had settled over his shoulders. He said the line to Channard, and while the words held defiance, Tyto's voice, and eyes, held the sour note of defeat.

"You have no power over me," Jeremy intoned carefully, reading the line. "Seems a bit contrived," he said, frowning at the text. "Still… it's good." He leafed through a few more pages, catching out some bits and scraps of loose paper notes jumbled in with it. "Lots of unsorted mythological themes. Meander's Queen trying to rescue her husband and their child from the Underground Kingdom. Interesting take on the whole Persephone thing. Could I keep it?"

"You can have it after Robert is done with it," Albans said. "It's for him. And for Linda. You come after."

"I don't really…" Robert looked embarrassed.

"No," Albans said firmly. "I insist. It would be a great personal kindness if you would take it. Only… make sure the author's name is on it. Maryam Robin Billings. Maiden name Zakar." He handed Robert a pen. Robert took the book from Jeremy, who seemed reluctant to part with it, and wrote the name.

"These too," Albans said, handing a sheaf of folded ink-scribbled loose pages to him. "The most important pieces are right there."

A sudden commotion over by the doors caught Channard's attention, and he excused himself to deal with the problem. He saw, on his return, that Robert had looked over the white papers and put them into his jacket pocket, saw him thank Tyto Albans—and Medea—for their gift. There was a strange expression on Robert's face. He looked dazed and determined, and his thanks were hesitant and intimidated as he pressed the notebook to his chest. Robert's eyes skittered to Tyto's face and to Medea's.

"Our time together is over," Tyto Albans declared. "I'm sure if you read it carefully, you'll understand your part." And he stood, shaky on his feet, and offered Robert his hand, who shook it.

"Yes," said Robert. "Thank you. We'll be on our way now."

"Robby," Linda whined, "We haven't seen nearly enough. We can't go yet."

"We're leaving now," Robert insisted, taking her arm with some strength. "Jeremy. Get the rest of them. Five minutes. Anyone who stays misses their ride."

Channard was glad to see the back of them. And Tyto and Medea—or Maryam Billings, or Robin Zakar, or whatever new sobriquet Albans had decided to bestow on her—sat together quiet and still, as if all their purpose and all their will had left with their words on the page.