Page 19 of The Hymn to Dionysus

18

Hermes is the god of heralds, travellers, merchants, thieves, and liars. Foreigners always say that makes no sense, because how could you be there for merchants but also for the thieves who were nicking stuff off the back of the cart, and the witnesses who they paid off to lie about it, but the thing is, Hermes doesn’t care if things are taken honestly or dishonestly. Gods don’t care about what’s in your heart. Gods care about what’s happening , and what’s happening in all those cases is a crossing. Something moves; news, whether it’s right or not, people, goods, either sold or stolen.

So it isn’t very surprising that Hermes is also, in Thebes at least, the god of witches: the best liars in the world.

When the Queen’s call for the witches went out, it went from the Temple of Hermes. It was simple. Each messenger was told only to say, Come at dusk.

I was there on the steps, waiting with the Palace herald and the Queen’s chamberlain, when they started to come. People got out of their way, fast; but some stayed to watch, too, pointing out the temple to children.

More were arriving now, always one at a time.

I’d never known a group of people with so much in common to be so silent. Even on battle lines, people talk. The little knights turn brash and hyena-cackly, to try and prove they’re not scared; the officers ask each other if anyone knows whether the slaves have got anything interesting in for dinner, because by the time you’re thirty on the line, it’s the same as bricklaying for a day. But here, no. Each witch was a solitary thing, never standing too near to another, sometimes nodding once, but not talking.

Most of them were women, but not all. Some of the youngest had only the tips of a couple of fingers marked with the red tattoos; some of the oldest had them right up to their elbows. All of them had their hair loose, which meant not a single one was married, and all of them wore the black veil. Nobody shifted or complained in the last of the ailing sun while we all waited. Other people kept away from them even more clearly than they would have from bloodstained soldiers. It was eerie, and after a while, I started to feel cold.

I didn’t catch myself doing it for a little while, but I was looking for Dionysus from the moment the witches began to gather. It was difficult to see in the smoke and the orange evening, and the witches’ black veils, which swam in the wind like shades trying to pull away to Hades. Sometimes there was a tall figure who could have been him, but then they turned and the set of the shoulders was wrong, or the tattoos. They were like spectres in the smoke, and the more of them came, the harder it was to tell them apart.

I had just begun to think that he wouldn’t come, when I realized he had been on the edge of things all along. I bowed where I sat, not sure he had seen me through his veil, but he lifted his hand to me too. Seeing him gave me a bolt of something between gladness and fear.

He was just a man with blue eyes who liked causing trouble and being kind. He was.

A gong sounded, and we looked up to the temple steps, where the herald came forward to explain that there were afflicted knights inside, and the purpose of the parliament was to devise a treatment.

They opened the gates of the temple, and the witches moved through without a sound. No one spoke, even when the locked wagons and the mad knights came into easy view in the torches of the main courtyard. Dionysus didn’t go anywhere near them, and only folded down on one of the stone benches by a fountain to fill up his water flask. I went over to him, slowly, in case he was thinking, but he put his hand out to me; it was the way witches showed you they were smiling under the veil. I took it and he pulled me to make me sit down beside him on the fountain edge.

“Will you not look at the knights, sir?” I asked.

He stretched past me to set a lamp on the next level of the fountain. He didn’t take his veil off, but the light made it translucent.

“They’ll still be just as scintillatingly mad in a few minutes.” He stopped. “I mean ... tragically mad. I think it’s all dreadful and bad because I’m a normal person who doesn’t in any way enjoy mystery ailments.”

“In fact you’re unusually sensitive,” I agreed, disproportionately happy that he wanted to play. “Sometimes you struggle under the weight of human suffering.”

He looked delighted, and I had to fight not to laugh. “Drink that,” he said, and held the flask out to me.

“Hm?”

“You’ve a headache.”

I hadn’t been aware of having a headache, but he was right. I must have looked rough. I did as I was told, then tried to give the flask back. He hinged my elbow back to knock the flask into my chest. Tingles went up my arm. I was used to people bashing into me, but nobody was careful. I’d have felt it less if he’d punched me.

“All of it.” He was studying me in the new lamplight. I wished he would stop doing that. “How’s the search for the person who was lost?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “The census is tomorrow, though. Did you stay with the people from Pylos this afternoon?”

He nodded. “They stopped at the springs on the forest border, a lot of them. Five women went into labour at the same time; five. I don’t know why Apollo built humans to give birth if they’ve had a shock, it seems impractical, then you’ll be running away from a lion and having a baby, but he did.”

“Five,” I echoed, thinking what a wonderful time I’d have if my profession involved meeting five brand-new babies daily. “Were they all right?”

He showed me his right hand. There were new tattoos on his forefinger, where the red didn’t quite go to his knuckle yet: five rings, just below the density of the main tattoo. I hadn’t thought I knew what the tattoos meant, but some distant memory reported that yes, that was what it was: one ring for every delivery where the mother and baby both survived. Across both his hands, those tattoos represented hundreds of people.

“Good,” I said, much too stiffly in an effort not to sound envious. I looked across the knights and the witches to pry my thinking back to something useful, not daydreaming about starting an orphanage.

The witches were passing cups between themselves, and pouring out what I’d thought at first was medicine, but I could smell it now. It wasn’t. It was alcohol, and nothing so mild as wine; it was some savage kind of brandy. It smelled like it was supposed to strip paint. Maybe it was something ceremonial, but—no. They weren’t just taking a sip from the cups. They were draining them.

“It’s an old ritual,” Dionysus said, noticing me looking. “When you deal with madness like this, it’s dangerous to have a mind with clear hard edges. You need it to be fog. Far less easy to catch. It’s what those people from Pylos were trying to do, when they made you drink.”

“What does the catching?” I asked, uneasy.

“Your man in the song,” he said, a little concerned, as though it worried him that it hadn’t seemed obvious to me.

“You—think the mad god is real, then,” I said, so redundantly that Helios would have smacked me over the head. I seemed to be saying a lot of obvious things lately.

“Why, what do you think is happening to them?” he asked, about the knights.

“The Queen thinks it might be something churned up in the ground when the star fell. And the drought.”

Dionysus laughed, just the smoke off a blown-out taper, a few tiny embers floating on it. “That’s stupid.”

I kept my face neutral, because not far from us, a woman in plain clothes but who I recognised from the Guards’ barracks was making no particular secret of watching us. I had a bright flash of envy about how unembarrassed he was to say it, though. “No. She thinks it’s more dangerous to tell people it might be a god than not. You know the story about the lost heir, who’s supposed to be a son of Zeus? She says civil uprising is more dangerous than passing gods.”

“It ... is not,” he said.

“No.” I meant to leave it there, but it was a relief to sit and talk to him. We weren’t friends, but enough strange things had happened to us when we were together now that it felt like being in the same unit. It didn’t matter if we liked each other. “It’s getting to me a bit. I just told her that she’s being a crazed despot and she threatened to kill me and I said bring it on.”

I thought he would laugh, but he went very still. He hooked his finger over the string around my wrist. “There is an agreement between witches and the Ferryman,” he said quietly. It must have been the angle of the lamp, but I thought his eyes were more blue than before, the blue of very clear water where you see can see fathoms down to where leviathans fin. “Do you know what it is?”

I shook my head.

“If you try to give Hades your life whilst it still belongs to me, the Ferryman will not take you. You will wait on the Black Shore until I come for you, and I bolt your soul back into your body, and it will not matter if your body was burned at a stake by the sea: you will become a puddle of sentient ash, until I say you can go.”

I tried to search him through the veil for any sign that this was a long joke, almost certain he was about to laugh and say, Ha, got you, but be more careful . He wasn’t smiling. “You made that up,” I said anyway, because even witches aren’t so deinos.

He inclined his head at me, then bent and held his hand close to ground. A snake writhed straight up his wrist. My heart thunked painfully, only half climbing over its next beat, because the snake was an asp, the poisonous kind that could kill you almost by looking at you. Dionysus straightened up and showed me the snake, too close, close enough for it reach me and bite, and when I leaned back, he snapped his fist shut and crushed it. I heard the crunch of its skull. The body went limp, and venom trickled between his fingers.

He opened his hand, and there was a horrible cracking noise that must have been bones resetting themselves, and the snake lifted its head as if nothing had happened. He let it go into the grass again.

I had heard of sorcerers in Egypt who had that kind of magic, but I’d never seen it, and never thought I would see it. I didn’t want to breathe.

“I can make it so that you don’t remember,” he said, nodding to the snake, “or so that you do. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling warm and gold, and safe.

I wondered what you had to do, to forge an agreement with the Ferryman. Something deinos. Perhaps more than an ordinary witch could do.

He has blue eyes, and wherever he goes, people lose their minds ... and I had invited him here, and there had been footsteps in the glass.

“How do you know about the mad god?” I asked.

Sometimes, you have a conversation between two mirrors. Instead of talking to just one person, you talk to versions and versions of them, reflected back and back. Maybe I was talking to a good witch. Maybe I was talking to a thing that had screamed down from the sky and made itself into a man from the cinders. Maybe he knew I was wondering about it, and maybe he didn’t, and maybe he would laugh if I asked him, or maybe he would lose interest and I’d be a pillar of fire. Among all the reflections, I couldn’t tell which one was really him.

“Everyone knows, except here.”

“But you can’t just—not notice a god.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean—I know Zeus is here, I’ve seen lightning. I was a sailor, I know Poseidon; I’ve been in love, I understand the Lady. I’ve fought justly, so I know Athena, and I’ve fought in a blind rage; I know Ares. Wherever I go, they have gods, but those gods are the same as ours really. They have the Mother in Egypt, but they call her Isis, and in Persia she’s Ishtar. Everyone dies: everyone has a name for the Unseen. But I’ve never come across a god we just ... don’t have.”

Dionysus was smiling. “You’ve seen him. You know him well. Knights know him as well as any sailor knows Poseidon.”

I looked up slowly.

“On battle lines, sometimes people go blind, don’t they? Or they run away, and everyone thinks they’re cowards, but later they don’t remember. Or they seem like a great fighter, for years, but then one evening, something snaps, and in their sleep they murder fifty cattle thinking those are soldiers; or fifty people. Herakles killed his family. That’s the mad god.”

He was right. I did know all that, very well indeed. I’d seen people hauled off the line blind for no reason. We all knew it had to be a god, but nobody knew which one. And battle madness: I’d always conceived of it as a kind of generalised weakness of soul, not a god taking a hammer to anyone’s mind.

His function is to guard the border between the clockwork and the wild.

“The royal prophet said something about how he’s to do with wine as well,” I said. “That’s—a different sort of madness, I can see that, but ...” I was struggling to say what I meant. “But it’s very specific. Battle madness and drunkenness? It’s not like the sea, or death. They’re not important enough to be a ... to be a god.”

Dionysus was watching the other witches finishing their ritual, the figures in black moving straight and slow now through the mad knights in their cages. “Well. They’re two things of a great many, none of which people here put together into one idea. There are plenty of others. Stories. Dancing. Masks.” A dry wind moved his veil, ghosting it against one of side of his face. “And the trance of prophets, and the bees, and the auroch. He is what makes a beaten wife murder her husband, and slaves kill their owners, and citizens burn palaces.” He moved his fist very slightly, miming an upward punch.

None of those things felt to me as if they had anything to do with each other, and I was about to say so, but I recognised the feeling suddenly. It was how I felt when I was learning a language that marked the borders of its ideas differently to ours.

In our language, we have a colour that is the sky, and also the colour of a shield, and we say that’s bronze. Then there’s a colour that’s wine, and the sea, and we call that purple: but that doesn’t make sense to anyone from the Tin Isles. If you sail into the north, where the nights are long and you can be fog-bound for days ten ship lengths from shore, and you pull in at Tintagel, by the great mines, people don’t understand calling the sky bronze and the sea purple. It doesn’t matter if you say, Well, before you treat bronze it’s greenish and where the sun is strong in the south, the sea really is the colour of wine in the afternoon : they look at you like you’re mad, because for them, the sea and the sky are one colour. We aren’t seeing different things, but we are thinking of them differently.

The mad god was like that. I was seeing him: but the way I thought meant I didn’t put all his parts together into one thing.

When I’d found out about the special Tin Isles colour, I’d spent a week gathering up bits of old glass and jewellery and corroded bronze and thread and asking miners, Is this right? Is this? Is this? and eventually, I’d got an idea of the band of things they put together as their sea-sky colour.

It had a been an uncanny thing when the idea had soaked into me enough that one morning, I looked out at the sky and the sea and thought: Yes. That’s blue .

“I know they all look different,” Dionysus said, and I could see him hunting around for ways to explain, but I cut my hand across the air. I didn’t mean to, but it was my sign for it’s all right. It was almost impossible to explain things like that, when you could already see what linked them up.

“I’ll see it soon,” I said, and explained about blue.

He tilted back a little then, as if I’d said something extraordinary. “That’s a graceful way to see a group of things you hate,” he said.

“How I feel about things isn’t very relevant to understanding what they are and why they’re driving half the garrison mad,” I said. “You didn’t say he was a good thing, just that he’s a true thing.”

“Yes,” he said, and looked away again. He wasn’t, I noticed suddenly, drinking. Maybe he had had some of that lethal brandy before he arrived, but I didn’t think so. He was glacially sober.

“Do you want to get on?” I asked awkwardly.

“You still haven’t drunk all that,” he said to the flask.

I’d forgotten what I was supposed to be doing. I drank more water.

Bakhos, the Raver, lord of the dance, and madness, and wine, and blasphemous music, and whatever that animal, auroch fury it was that built and built in you when you’d been wronged and one day you just—snapped. Whatever colour it was that ran through all those things, it was something to do with chaos. It was everything we hated here, and everything we outlawed. Wasn’t it? Bees, the trance of prophets ... there was nothing wrong in those. Stories; Helios had told me stories.

“Do you think he’s offended, that he’s been forgotten here?” I asked.

I thought he was going to say, Yes. Obviously. He’s calling in his debts .

“No,” Dionysus said. He sounded strangely muted now, as though he had found something sad in what I’d said about blue. I hoped not. I liked the blue story; I’d only meant it as an interesting curiosity. “Belief never made a god, and nor did sacrifice. They just are.”

“What do you mean?” It sounded close to heresy.

“Well—Poseidon is the sea, and the tide won’t stop rising just because no one sacrifices to him. Time is there, death is there, the earth, war, love. Even if there is some terrible place three thousand years from now where nobody remembers any gods at all, there will still be the sea and love ...” His eyes slipped to the knights again. Even behind the veil, they were starry with the lamplight. “And madness. People will have just forgotten how to talk to them.”

It had the ring of prophecy. Even after I’d thought about it later, I couldn’t tell why. The words of oracles are delivered in verse—that’s why bards sing in verse, because it’s the Muse talking, not them, or so they like to say—but Dionysus hadn’t spoken in poetry. It still prickled the hairs on my arms. “Then ... why would he do this?”

He was watching the other witches and the mad knights in their cages now, not me, his shoulders loose and his red-tattooed hands in his lap, trapped between his knees. For such a tall man, he took up almost no space. “Maybe he’s like anyone, maybe he’s just visiting. Maybe he’s trying to make sure some idiot doesn’t commit suicide by tyrant.”

Either he was reminding me he couldn’t possibly know, or it was a way of saying, Well, you asked me to come . Back between the mirrors again.

Maybe it was because I was turning feverish from hunger and the strangely comfortable headache, but it didn’t feel terrible, to be between the mirrors. It was disconcerting, but sometimes ... I liked being disconcerted. And I didn’t like that I’d made him sad. I hunted around for something that would spark him off again.

“Don’t call the Queen a tyrant,” I said. “Tyrants seize power, monarchs inherit it; if you call her a tyrant it sounds like you’re saying there’s another rightful heir. I don’t think you could make her think she’s a swarm of bees, or whatever it is you normally do to people who vex you, before she has you shot. So just—be careful.”

“It’s squirrels,” he said seriously, “I really like squirrels; it’s because they have tiny hands and their tails are silly.”

I looked away so he wouldn’t have to see me grinning. I was still caught up in the novelty of meeting an adult who liked to play and joke and who didn’t seem to worry at all about his dignity—and the strangest thing was that he wasn’t missing dignity. He had plenty, but it was like quicksilver instead of armour. You couldn’t put a dent in it.

He refilled the water cask and gave it to me again. “How’s the headache?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and I was. I had a feeling it was less to do with being made to drink enough as sitting down and talking to someone who minded so much about what happened to me that he would threaten, convincingly, to go down to Hades and drag me back if I was too careless. “Thank you. Is there anything I can do to help?” I nodded at the mad knights.

He shook his head as he stood up. “I doubt it. Go home, get some rest.”

“No, I’ll wait for you. The road isn’t safe, neither of us should be walking alone at night any more.”

“You really think so?” he said. Earlier, with the people from Pylos, I’d thought he was oblivious to danger because he was too tall to come up against any most of the time, but I had a scritching feeling now that it might be because he really, truly never was in danger. I almost asked him. Only almost. If I was wrong, he’d laugh at me, which would be a relief, but if I wasn’t ... I didn’t know what he would do. But sure as the Acheron is cold, we wouldn’t talk again like we had just now. That was the most I’d talked to anyone in ten years, about anything that wasn’t to do with how to smash a city wall open. I could live between the mirrors for a while longer.

“The Guards are arresting people to order, to go into slavery and get the harvest in,” I said instead, quiet, because you don’t need to be told when some things are secrets. “I don’t think they’re going to be strict about whether anyone’s committed any real crime or not. I think they’re going to take whoever’s an easy target. Anyone alone on the road.”

As soon as I said it, I was acutely aware of the people around us, and how many of them were near enough to listen. If someone tried to drag him away, maybe they would turn into a tree—or maybe he would die in the fields. That hurt to think of.

Dionysus said nothing, but he nodded once and turned towards the mad knights. I did too, wanting to see what the witches would do differently than the priests.

Already, they seemed more precise. None of them were trying to stop the knights dancing or singing with brute force, and not just because it would have been hard for them to. When a priest tried, one of the witches stopped him, fast, and I heard her say it would hurt the knight more than letting him get on with it for now.

I blinked twice when one of the witches took out a mask, one of the ones—or very like them—from Dionysus’s dance. It was sculpted and painted to look like an old man, gaunt, with cheekbones that were too sharp and sunken eyes painted dark to make them more sunken still, mouth open so the person wearing it could still speak clearly, beard as grey as the skin, silver hoops pierced through the alabaster ears to suggest a sailor. It looked like a horrible caricature of a person while the witch was holding it. She held it up in front of a knight so that he could see it as he turned through his dance, and then, fast because she had to catch him in one of those turns, she pressed it over his face.

The man stopped turning. He didn’t bring his hands up to hold the mask, but he let the witch hold it in place while she tied the cord of the mask behind his head. He just stood there, not moving, not dancing. Then ... all at once, he seemed to feel the heat of the evening, and how tired he was, and probably how hungry and thirsty, and he buckled down onto the ground. One of the witches gave him a flask and he drank from it.

“How did she do that?” I breathed. There was silence from everyone who had seen. Other witches were moving away purposefully now, opening up their medicine satchels, taking out other masks—masks of beautiful married ladies with short hair and golden coronets, masks of satyrs with wicked grins and tiny horns, masks of old men, but never, I realized, anyone of fighting age. No unmarried women with long hair. No young men. But all the witches had some, as though a mask was an ordinary kind of medicine everyone knew about.

“Do you want to guess?” Dionysus asked me. It should have been irritating, but he said it carefully, and after what we had talked about just now, I understood why. He was trying to show me what blue was, and that worked far better if I had to look for myself. I brushed his elbow to tell him not to worry I was about to swear explosively and demand real answers. He skimmed his hand over mine and I almost said, Please, please don’t , because I already liked him too much for it to be knightly.

“The masks aren’t knights,” I said slowly, not quite there.

There was a frustrated shout from not far away, because on another knight, it hadn’t worked, and she was still turning and singing. On another, a man from Polydorus’s unit now in a married-lady mask, it seemed to slow him down enough for one of the witches to get some water into him, but he didn’t stop, exactly; he was still rocking and mumbling, and when she let go of him, he went back to a small, more shuffling version of the endless spinning of the dance.

I couldn’t see Dionysus’s face any more, and so he was only a tall spectre beside me, but I knew his angles and posture well enough to know he was watching me, though he hadn’t moved his head. “Warm,” he said.

“What’s happening?” the first knight in the old man mask asked, but he didn’t sound right. He was about twenty-five, but his voice was cracking and high. He sounded elderly.

“The masks make them ... what the mask is,” I said slowly. “Or, it—confuses them? Just enough, to ... what, to not be knights, and so the madness doesn’t quite—stick, in the same way?” I stopped. “Is this why witches wear veils?” I said it at the same time I thought it, without being able to trace the reasoning properly, but the moment it was out, I knew I was right. It was witching thinking, I could tell that much at least, and maybe even blue. “You can only be a good witch if you’re not entirely a person at the time. You have to be something ... blank.”

Dionysus’s shoulders went back and he looked down at me with a disconcertion that showed in all his bones. “Gods, Phaidros. If the knighting ever falls through, the witching is waiting.”

It was hard not to feel pleased with that, even though I shouldn’t have cared what he thought.

It was working on perhaps a third of the afflicted knights. Some were sitting down now; some were even eating, slowly, as though they were struggling to remember the last time they had done it. A girl from my unit in the mask of an older lady was even talking to her witch, almost normally. With a fizzy hope rising and rising inside, trying to crush it down so I couldn’t be too disappointed if it all stopped working, I went across to see if she would recognise me, and she lit up.

“Phaidros,” she said. Her voice was lower than usual, but that was all. “I haven’t seen you for an age.”

She had seen me two days ago. It sounded mad, but it was so much better than the singing madness that I could have cried with relief. I hugged her and she laughed, and I asked her if she wanted to see her commander, and she looked a little bit puzzled and asked me if her commander was still alive—she was talking as though twenty years had passed—but when I said that yes she was, she was at the garrison, very worried, the girl beamed and said she’d like that a lot if I really wasn’t winding her up. When I gave her some bread, holy of fucking holies, she ate it. I held her masked face in both hands for a second, torn between joy and dismay, because if we had asked the witches sooner, maybe Amphitrion wouldn’t be dead. The girl smiled and held my wrists, and told me to calm down, young man, which only made me laugh more. I sounded hysterical; it wasn’t knightly, to laugh like that, but just for now, I didn’t care.

Not a cure, not exactly, and not for everyone, but so, so much better than a death sentence in the cellars of Ares. Feeling like you feel when you walk into the sea and a wave lifts you and tides you to the shore, I went back to Dionysus and, not caring that it was improper, or that I shouldn’t touch a veiled witch, or that I didn’t even know any more if he was just a witch, I slung both arms around him, dragging him down to that he had to bend forward against me.

“Thank you,” I said against his hair. “I would never have asked the Queen for this parliament if it weren’t for you and all your—fucking peculiar ways.” I was still laughing while I said it and it made me my voice sound completely unfamiliar, even from the inside.

He hugged me back just as tight. I couldn’t see through the veil, only the sheen of the strange, liquid fabric in the torches. I kissed him through it, just a scratch against his cheek, playing really, but he went still.

I did too, suddenly needlingly aware that there were people watching us, and why wouldn’t they, because probably Tiresias had been a child who knew nothing of Apollo the last time a sane knight had forgotten himself so far as to snatch at a witch in public. I had a searing realization that I’d crossed an unmarked, crucial border.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I managed, staring at the ground and wanting to vitrify. I’d always thought I had a great curtain wall in my head between me and anything like that, and there was a chthonic horror in understanding that actually, it was just a tiny moat I could trip over if I didn’t look where I was going, and there was evil on the far side, whickering at me through the fog. Helios would have had me flogged. Forget yourself a little, and you’re far closer to forgetting yourself altogether than you ever want to think.

“Don’t be so stupid,” Dionysus said. He sounded shocked.

“I know, I’m sorry—”

“Phaidros! I’m telling you not to be sorry, not—this—where is this rancid shame coming from, who did this to you?” His voice was a broken lamp, smoking and full of shattered glass, and I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t understand, and it was so far away from what I’d expected him to say that the sounds of the words hardly hung together into any meaning at all.

He had no time to say anything else, because right through the temple courtyard, there was a sudden, perfect silence. The witches had stopped murmuring. And the knights—the knights, masked and not, were marvel-still, and as if they had heard a command roared across the field, they all turned the same way. It was towards us. No; towards him.

Something took hold of them then. They started to talk. Not to each other. They aimed it at some point in the middle distance, and they all said different things. I slipped past other people until I could catch some words.

“—and they shall rave on the mountainside—”

“She will murder her sorrow—”

“Dance!”

“The High City shall fall when the god goes before the Queen ...”

Close to me was a scribe from the Palace with a clay tablet. I apologised, stole it, pushed the heel of my hand across the clay to erase the marks, and started to take down what they were saying. It didn’t take long before I realized each knight was saying the same thing again and again, but all of them were saying different things.

When the god goes before the Queen, the High City shall fall

She shall murder her sorrow in a crown of ivy

They shall break free and rave on the mountainside

Into ruin shall fall the House of Kadmus, into ruin all Achaea

Flee, children of the dragon

Sing

Dance

Flee.

“It’s prophecy,” the scribe said quietly.

Dionysus touched my wrist, just over the red string and its bee charm. “Don’t write it down,” he said, soft but urgent.

He was right. It was treason. Into ruin shall fall the House of Kadmus , that was bad, but She shall murder her sorrow— Pentheus’s name meant sorrow. When the god goes before the Queen ... There was supposed to be no god.

A crown of ivy. I’d called him Ivy.

“I think it’s too late,” I said, because there were too many people here. Not just the witches, but the priests from Ares who had helped to bring the mad knights across town, administrators from the Palace, the Chamberlain’s staff. Some of them would be reporting to the Guards.

The knights kept on, though, all of them staring into the middle distance with something horribly like joy in their faces.

Dionysus was just at the right angle with a lamp for me to see his face through the veil. I don’t think he knew I could, though, because when I turned to him, he didn’t look concerned or unsettled, or even confused about what the prophecies might mean. He looked annoyed. As I watched, he clenched his hand, the way I always did at Jason to say stop that fuckwittery right now .

The knights went silent.

Then they started their ordinary song again. The ones who had been partially cured with the masks went back to eating or talking to the witches as though nothing had interrupted them.

I stared at Dionysus with what felt like gravel in my throat.

Of course it was him.

“Are you all right?” he said. I must have looked bad.

I almost laughed.

Pretending to be friendly, making me feel like maybe I wasn’t quite so alone, that someone would be angry if I got myself killed, and that sometimes there were miraculous enraging strangers who came along and saved you from an auroch—that wasn’t revenge. That was—

Haha.

Madness.

“Yes,” I heard myself say, “I’m all right.”

He didn’t look convinced. “Let me take you home.”

“No,” I said, “I can take myself.”

“But you just said—”

“I can take myself,” I said sharply, just to get away from him, and not even sure why. He knew where I lived. I made sure I vanished into the crowd. On the way, I found a herald and sent a report to the Palace, as dry as I could make it so the Queen wouldn’t take it as a frayed knight overstating.

But once I was on the road, I slowed down. The Nothing was there with me again, keeping pace. Like always, it took up the air, and tinted the world darker.

Someone coming for you on a revenge quest is much better than nobody coming at all.