Page 23 of The Hymn to Dionysus

22

Despite the Hidden raid last night, there were people selling things at the roadside again when I made my way home just after sunset. Lots of wine in rough jars, and lots of straw masks now, cheap ones that didn’t need a potter, just string and some imagination. Where the hot wind stirred through the branches, the trees rattled with prayer tablets. The things were everywhere: they had crept through the trees all the way up to the maze. As I came round the corner, I saw someone had even put one in one of my olive trees, on a bright green ribbon.

I slowed down and had a little drop of happiness, because Dionysus was waiting by my gate. He seemed not to feel the heat, or anything else; he was unnaturally still and straight in the shade of the lemon tree, so still I almost didn’t see him. When I came up close enough to talk to him, he still didn’t move, and I had a strong feeling he wasn’t really there.

“Dionysus?” I said tentatively.

I saw him come back, and saw him feel the heat properly, for all the world as if he hadn’t been standing in it. I smiled, hoping he was going to tell me about something weird he’d done to an unreasonable census taker, but he didn’t smile back.

“So I need you to swear something,” he said, without any preamble.

“What?”

“Whatever you see now, you are not going to vanish into the Temple of Ares, because that won’t help anyone and you’ll die there.”

“Why?”

“Swear,” he said, with an edge in his voice I hadn’t heard before; or, not for a long time. There was pyre smoke in it, and hot ash.

“All right, I swear?”

“On your commander’s soul.”

“I swear on his soul,” I said, much more slowly.

Dionysus let his breath out. “Come inside.”

I followed him like it was his house, not mine, five paces behind him. He held the door open for me, and with dread pulling its bowstring tighter and tighter, I looked around for the triplets, surprised they hadn’t come out yet.

And then in the corridor: bodies.

The triplets.

Horror welled up in me, seawater in a boot print on the shore, and I felt it well too far and spill over the top of me, and I couldn’t breathe.

“Why did you make me swear not to go to Ares?” I asked, very quiet. Maybe this was it, maybe this was the revenge he had set out for me. Maybe he wanted to see it close up. It was difficult to lift my eyes and meet his, because I knew he was going to be smiling, ready to say, You know you deserve this .

But he wasn’t smiling.

In fact, he looked worried that I wasn’t shouting at him.

“Because there’s a mad person in the maze,” he said. “This could be my fault, not yours. I’m the one who said he’d probably not hurt anyone. So you and I are going to stay here tonight, and we’re going to see what happens.”

Yes, because then I’d got a little bit of hope, and it would be so much worse when nobody came and we had to agree it was me.

“But it wasn’t him, was it,” I said.

“Look,” he said, and took my hands. He frowned when I flinched. “No scratches. Look at them, they fought, but there’s nothing on you.”

“Stop witching me. Just let me go to Ares.”

“Phaidros! I’m not witching, why would I do that?”

I nearly laughed and listed all the reasons. Remember that time I stole you off a beach and meant to sell you into slavery in Egypt? Remember how my crew thought they should throw you off the ship? Remember how I didn’t stop any of it? Remember how I didn’t die with the rest of them?

Only, only, only, what if he wasn’t doing that, what if he really did think it was the mad person in the maze?

Hope is the death of valour.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

“Of course I don’t trust you!” A hilarious thing about me: I look horrifying, but my voice breaks high when I’m not happy and I sound about fourteen. “You tried to convince me it rains feathers in Scythia!”

He hadn’t let go of my hands, and ignored it when I tried to pull them back. He was strong. “Look ... I know you took a vow to tell the truth no matter what, and so I know what that makes me look like to you. But—please understand. I took a vow to lie no matter what, for the same reason . The honesty of knights helps people. The lies of witches do that too. When I say, ‘do you trust me,’ I’m not asking you if you trust me to tell you the truth; I hardly ever tell the truth. I’m asking if you trust that I want to help you, and that my help could be useful.”

My breath hitched on the way in, because I didn’t even trust that.

He seemed to see he wasn’t going to get much more out of me. He gave my hands a tiny squeeze and let them go. “I’m starving. Will you make some bread while I dig?”

“Dig?”

“To bury them. We can’t burn them, it will start a wildfire.”

“I should bury them.”

“Not good for you,” he said seriously. “It will hurt you more.”

“I should be hurt more.”

His eyes went up and down me twice, and then slipped past my shoulder. I thought someone was there, but when I looked back, there was no one.

“They don’t want you to,” he told me, as quiet and simple as everything else he had said.

“Bullshit,” I said, but my voice came out tight.

He smiled gradually, as if it were genuinely funny and he was trying not to. “All right, you do what you want if you’re so clever.”

I made the bread.

Dionysus did it all himself. He dug on the forest border, and carried them there, and he wouldn’t let me help. He made me sit down while I waited for the bread to prove, and by the time it was done, the corridor to the triplets’ rooms was just a corridor, washed clean.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked him. I was beyond confused now. There was horribly twisted revenge, but burying bodies was something else.

We were at the table in the shade of the shutters, the bread between us, and some of his amazing grapes, and olives, and cheese. The cheese was from the farmer across the way from us, because she was grateful Dionysus didn’t mind about letting her goats into his garden—they were yielding the best milk they ever had, she said, so he deserved the benefit. I had to stare at it before I touched anything. Everything on the table between us now was so much better than what was at the garrison. Even though it was only what I would have expected in an ordinary year, it seemed like a feast. I dipped a piece of bread slowly into the olive oil, watching the gold sheen cover the crust. When I bit into it, I could taste that it had grown near a lemon tree.

Dionysus had tied his hair up to work, and taken off the top half of his tunic, sleeves tied round his waist and tucked into his belt. He was sitting flat against the wall now, for the cold in the stone, not moving and breathing slowly while he waited to cool down. He had a deep patience for being uncomfortable I’d never managed to learn, even on the long day watches outside the walls of Troy.

“Because either it wasn’t you, or it was but it’s not your fault.”

“If it’s your fist, it’s your fault,” I said. “If I did kill them then I’m going to a sanctuary.”

“Let’s see what happens tonight before you decide,” he said.

I dragged my wrist over my eyes and didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what gods the triplets had, or what they needed. They had little figurines in their room, but I didn’t know if those were holy icons or just dolls they had saved from home. They were still little boys.

Maybe about the age Dionysus had been, when I stole him off that shore.

Dionysus poured a handful of water into his palm and dragged it down his arms, and pressed back against the wall again. I stared at the floor. He was a witch. Normally he wore a veil. It wasn’t right for me to see him like this, only half dressed; there might not have been a law, but that was only because nobody had thought it needed writing down. And it wasn’t right to notice how the light was turning him gold down one side, or how fragile-strong his collarbones looked, or how it would be if I could put my head on his shoulder.

If I had killed the triplets, then I shouldn’t be touching anyone ever again.

“You were a sailor, right?” he asked.

My throat locked. He was about to say, It’s nice how you care what you do to children now, because you didn’t ten years ago. “Yes.” I waited for the fire.

“So,” he said, with a little witching sparkle, “I was in Africa, beyond the desert, where there’s a great kingdom which sometimes trades with Memphis, and I was going south, because there are more kingdoms that way and I wanted to talk to their witches. Their magic is better than ours.”

“You were not, but all right,” I said, and my voice fissured with something between relief and frustration. How long was he going to play with me before he got bored?

“So I get on a ship, and as you know, you sail down the length of Africa with the land on your left and the sea on your right, due south, yes?”

“And the sun rises in the east and sets in the west ...”

He narrowed his eyes and closed his fist at me. “After about two months’ sailing, there’s a place where it all turns around. The sea is still on your right and the land is on your left, but now you’re going due north, and the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.”

“And then I expect you met a sea monster.”

“I’ve never met a sea monster. But.”

For a burning flash of a second, I thought: No one has ever been this kind to me . Helios had an obligation, commanders and wards are kin, but this was something else. This was ludicrous, painful kindness. Obviously it was a trick and it was going to end with some kind of fresh horror for me, but it didn’t matter. I wanted it anyway. I cut another slice of bread, thinking of all those Athenians I’d known at Troy who knew the alcohol would kill them one day and agreed the Theban companies were right to ban it entirely—but drank themselves into oblivion all the same.

“At a port on the coast in Africa, there were ships from another kingdom. They said they had come from beyond India. The ships were ...” He lifted his hand high above the table. “Fully the size of towns. The people on them look different to us, they’re taller and paler and they sing to each other instead of speaking. While I was there, it was one of their holy days, and they made shapes with fire in the sky.”

“No they didn’t,” I said, a laugh breaking through even though I hadn’t expected it. “You’re worse than the bards. Oh, by the way, I met a cyclops on the way home, he ate my crew, I definitely didn’t lose them on that tricky wrecking shore round by the Cyclades.”

“If you say so,” he said happily.

It should have been maddening. Usually I couldn’t stand it if I wasn’t sure whether someone was lying to me, but this was different. He didn’t expect me to believe it any more than the bards did. He was just showing me bright things.

But the way he was glimmering at me: I had a creeping suspicion that actually, the joke was that everything he had just told me was true. The idea that it might be, and the world really might be that brighter, more deinos version of the one I thought I knew, made me sit back a little, feeling small but in a good way. I was one person with insignificant problems on a rocky barren plain at the end of the world. Maybe, in a kingdom beyond India, there were people who sang instead of talking and painted with fire in the sky.

“You’re a good witch,” I said at last.

He rested his head on his hand, looking far too pleased with the compliment for someone who was going to murder me soon. “All flowers, cakes, and other tokens of adoration gratefully accepted at the end of the show.”

I got up.

“Where are you going?” he asked, wariness inking into his voice.

“I have eggs; I have your honey. I’m making you a cake.”

He looked delighted. “Really?”

I pushed him, trying to think when I’d last met someone so easily pleased who wasn’t also six. “Really.”

As soon as the honey cakes were out of the oven, I knew that the recipe was finally right. They smelled different. They were Helios’s cakes. When I bit into one, daring it to be wrong, I was eight years old again, on a beach somewhere around the Kind Sea, and Helios was looking mischievous while he hid cakes behind dead horses and twisted bits of armour. Every so often he’d point at me and yell at me to stop cheating, and I’d squeak from inside his stolen helmet that I wasn’t cheating, honest.

“Phaidros,” Dionysus told me, “you’ve missed your calling.” Then, because I was staring at him, “What?”

I shook my head, because the part of my mind that usually dealt with words had gone off somewhere else for a little holiday. For years, Helios had been hazing away from me, eroding at the edges, but I could see him again; quite small, laughing, not nearly as immortal as I’d always thought, my age now. It was as if I’d seen him an hour ago and he’d just stepped outside to do something nefarious to the sheep of someone he didn’t like.

“I wonder if you can die of cake overdose,” Dionysus said seriously to the plate. “Do you think I should see? I think I should see.”

“My commander used to make these,” I said. “Just like this. I think it must have been this honey. But—it must be rare?”

“He’ll have had it from a witch. We use it a lot,” Dionysus explained. “It’s very good for soldiers, and for mothers who had bad labours. The magic smooths down the edges of terrible memories, so you can think about those things without cutting yourself.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “You’ve made me drug myself with my own cake?”

“I have,” he confirmed, making no effort whatsoever not to look gleeful.

“Shut up and eat your cake overdose,” I told him, feeling stupidly happy.

Mortals can hurt gods. Aphrodite was wounded at Troy: an entire unit of knights from Mykenai swore they’d seen it, and people from Mykenai are serious. Ares is hurt all the time in fights, and even Zeus nearly died once. I was fast, and if I was up in the night sleepwalking and I caught Dionysus at the wrong moment, I’d do a great deal of damage or worse.

So I taught him some proper knots, and then he tied me to the bed; just by my ankle, but with the knot well out of my reach, looped over the other side. He put a cup of water where I could reach it and a lamp where I couldn’t. I saw him notice Helios’s helmet, and the bright side and the dull side. He didn’t say anything about it, and uncomfortably, I realized that meant he understood what he was seeing much better than I would have liked.

“Do you need anything else?” he asked. He didn’t look happy about leaving me that way for the night, but he must have known nothing he could say would change my mind.

“No. Thank you.” I was propped up against the wall, feeling like I was never going to sleep ever again. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“No, it’s none of my concern and I’ve plenty of other friends who bake much better cakes than you.” He sat down next to me, on the edge of the bed. If he came up close to anyone, I was starting to notice, he made an effort to make himself smaller. He didn’t spread out; he curled up, one knee folded under him. While he’d been digging, the sun had turned him an even more vivid shade of bronze. He was too bright for the drab room. “But for what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.”

I tested the rope, pulling against it hard. No. The knots were good. “Why?”

He half smiled. “Because if there were ... you’d not be able to sit with me and stay calm.”

I felt like I’d missed a step on the stairs.

That was a confession.

“I’m infuriating,” he explained, with a rueful glimmer. “Show me an unthinking murderer who doesn’t dive on me straightaway and I’ll show you someone who isn’t an unthinking murderer.”

That was a double joke. You think I’m talking about being a witch, but ha ha, I could be talking about the other thing. He liked the ambiguity. Maybe he even liked that I could see it was ambiguous.

I almost told him that if all the humans you know well are fifteen and likely to hand you a kidney at any given moment of the morning, distantly sinister jokes were not only undisturbing, but a sparkling example of refined adult conversation.

“I’m sorry, but your own inability to imagine that you might be slightly shy of unbearable is not evidence of my continued health,” I said. “Go over there.”

He looked at me as if I’d said something immensely kind, and just for an instant, I wondered if I hadn’t got him wrong—if it hadn’t been a joke in the way I’d thought at all, but a kind of apology.

It took me a long time to go to sleep. The lamp had burned out by then, and the night had finally turned cool, the almost-full moon making Dionysus silver where he lay under the window. Standing up he was imposing, but lying down, he looked like one of those statues abandoned in the desert in Egypt, built thousands of years ago and forgotten, wearing down and down as the sand blasts by. I had to stare at the ceiling with my hand over my heart to try and calm down and convince myself there was no way I could hurt him. I’d tested the rope. I couldn’t break it. If I wanted to get at him, I’d have to snap my own ankle.

When I did sleep, I tipped into the most vivid dream I’d ever had. I was in a forest, the forest behind the house, but I couldn’t tell why I thought so, because it was different. The weather was different, and not just seasonally. It was cold. It was like Scythia, with that strange ice on the ground—what had they called it, frost?—spinning webs and white tapestries everywhere, and the trees weren’t my trees. They were giants, not the struggling olives and ash that I knew now, but massive oaks, the ground thick with acorns, and grazing through those acorns, the greatest aurochs I’d ever seen, twice my size, horns nocked and savage from fights, and more of them than I’d ever seen together. It was a vast herd, and somehow, even though I knew nothing about wild cattle, I knew that this was part of their great journey south for the winter. We were following, and the hunters were leaving diagrams and instructions about the breeding season on the rocks for Those Who Come After, and the going was hard, so hard that the witches said that if anyone fell pregnant now, we would have to give the child to the forest, because there wasn’t enough food.

There was a person among the bulls. It was insane, because the aurochs were wildly protective of the little ones at this time of year in these woods where the wolves would always follow, but someone was standing by one of the biggest all the same, tall and sparse, and wrapped in wolfskin. When they looked back, right at me, they were wearing a black mask, and a crown of auroch horn, but I knew the eyes behind it. They were the blue at the hem of the sea, where it turns indigo by the horizon.

He snapped his fingers at me; fingers tattooed red-black.

I jerked awake.

It was the middle of the night. Orion was hanging framed in the window, at an angle, like he was leaning sideways to look inside.

The room was still. Dionysus was exactly where I’d left him. Trying to breathe normally, I sat up and started counting down from two hundred. It was something Helios had used to do; it worked, sometimes. I could feel it wasn’t going to work now, but there wasn’t much else to try.

I was on a hundred and fifty-nine when, opposite me, the cupboard door opened and someone climbed out, monstrous in the bull mask.

The front of my mind tried very, very hard to convince the back of it that I was asleep and having a nightmare, because there was no possible way someone could have been sitting in that cupboard, but there they were, standing in the middle of the room, just out of the moonbeam. They were looking at Dionysus, standing too bent. It looked painful. Very quietly, they drifted towards him, not quite into the light, and sniffed. It was the way that the bulls studied a thing before they crushed it. And—I could hear hooves. I could hear the thunk of them on the floor, so heavy I was sure I’d see scars on the stone if I could just twist far enough to look, and I could smell that dense, green animal smell of cattle, and now, the way the moonlight was just catching those horns, which I was certain had been straw before, just part of a mask—the shine was the shine of bone.

I had to be asleep. I had nightmares all the time.

The bent figure swung slowly away from Dionysus and thudded across to me. It was so much heavier than it should have been. I could feel the floor shaking through the frame of the bed. The man, the thing, was keeping to the left of the moonlight, so that all I could see was a shadow with the suggestion of limbs and clothes. My sword was in the corner, as far out of reach as the Nile. I couldn’t do anything except keep still, and hope that would work on a man-bull like it did on real bulls.

The man-bull was right next to me, leaning down beside the pillow. It sniffed hard again, then powered out the same breath so hard it moved my hair. I still couldn’t see it fully, but I would have sworn on my armour that that head wasn’t a mask any more.

Fuck’s sake.

“Dionysus!” I yelled.

Dionysus sat up fast, and at the same time, the person, the thing, let out an animal snarl and ran away, thundering into the next room, and then there was a bang that was the door down into the maze smacking into the wall. I tried to get up but the rope round my ankle pulled me back. Dionysus had stopped in the doorway, hunter-motionless, looking out, into the kitchen, and towards the darkness of the stairs.

“Where did it—untie me? Where did it go?”

“Into the maze.” He cut the rope rather than wait around wrestling with the knot. The knife must have been very sharp indeed, because the rope gave with just one slice. Yes—it was my knife, the one I’d given him in the wagon with the people from Pylos. He gave it to me, then took the flints out of my tinderbox. Crack, crack, the tiny flashes strobing across us both, eternities between each one, and then one caught on a coil of sawdust, which he held to the wick of the lamp. The orange glow made the room feel safer, even though of course there was no difference at all.

“It was ...” I pointed at the cupboard. “It was in the house all the time we were. It must have been. I was cooking all evening. I would have seen. Gods, don’t go down there!”

“Just to lock the door,” he said, fading into the dark at the bottom of the stairs. There was a clank that was the lock. He came back up, fast, and helped me pull off the last loop of the rope. “Are you all right?”

I had to look away, at the open cupboard. “Dionysus, that was ... in the maze, I thought it was a man in a mask, but— was that a mask?”

“I don’t know,” Dionysus said. “Perhaps not, any more.”

From somewhere outside, or perhaps down in the maze, I couldn’t tell, there was a weird, eerie scream. It wasn’t a person. Dionysus sharpened.

“What?” I asked, uneasy.

He inclined his head and gave me a strange look. “I ... think he’s defending his territory. He doesn’t understand why we’re in it.”

I thought, Well, if there’s anyone left who understands the Hunt, it’s you .

And then I thought, Where the fuck did that come from?

“Then why didn’t it try to hurt us?” I asked.

“We’re bigger than your boys.”

I breathed out slowly. “I need to catch it, once there’s daylight. See if it can talk. I want to ask it if it killed the triplets.”

He had been tying his hair up, but he stopped halfway through the last turn of the green cloth, his elbows still bent above his shoulders so that his shadow looked like it had wings. “You can’t still think it was you.”

“If that thing thinks it’s a bull, then it’s bad-tempered but it’s a herbivore.”

I should have gone after it then. It was stupid to sit around and wait for it to come back, but I was too tired. I’d been tired for days. I hadn’t slept properly since before the Hidden ride, and although I could function well enough for ordinary things, beginning a hunt for a wild—monster—would be idiotic. I was the kind of tired that makes wrong decisions, that catches on little worries but ignores real threats, that hesitates when you should never hesitate. I’d catch nothing in this state. I’d only hurt myself, or worse, get Dionysus hurt.

“Right.” Dionysus hinged down on the windowsill again, and something about the way he said it made me think he hadn’t really heard me. Now that everything was over, he didn’t seem at all as collected as he had a minute ago. My heart was thumping too. It was good that neither of us was hurt, but I kept having to look at the cupboard and check nobody was on their merry way out of it again. Maybe there was a secret tunnel. Maybe there was more than one. Maybe we should move to Italy.

“ How is he a bull now?” I asked, or maybe it was more of a demand. “Have you cursed someone?”

“No!” There was more force in that than I’d expected. “This is old magic. It’s the mask.” He was saying it to his own knees, not me. “Even in normal times, if you give a person a mask, the mask changes the person. When there’s a god close by, everything is ...”

“More,” I said dimly. Jasmine racing up the mast of my old ship. Knights like me who had been seeing things and wandering at night anyway but functioning, just, now swerving into madness. It was as though something of the god was in the air always, in the way the vapours of the great volcanoes must always be in the air, all across the world, but now—we were all on the edge of the volcano, staring into the caldera, but instead of making people dizzy and faint, these vapours made miracles.

He nodded, very slightly, as though he still had a strong instinct not to move.

Too late, I noticed that he was shaking. It was subtle, but even in the moonlight, he had the tight paleness that everyone does after they come off their first battlefield. It’s what happens when you stare right down the spear-shaft of being murdered. Not generally, not like when you feel ill or you realize that there’s going to be an imminent supply problem, or even something dangerous but impersonal like the dust storm. It’s different when the Unseen is in the doorway and you’re so near to the Ferryman that you can hear the creak of his oar.

Even gods must be afraid sometimes.

I held my arm out, in case that would help.

He went very still for a second, then dropped down next to me and put his head against my shoulder. He was fear-cold. I snagged my cloak from the other chair and put it around him. He stayed quiet, not moving except how my breathing moved him. I shut my eyes, trying not to think about what I’d done next, the last time I’d held him wrapped in my cloak.

I rubbed his hair. It was warm, and I could feel the difference between the black and the grey. Despite everything, it gave me a little glow of joy.

“Drink time,” I said. “I’ve got some wine. It’s not as good as yours, but I mean, medicinally ...”

“Yes please,” he said. “Yes. Hold on, you aren’t meant to have—”

“It’s emergency wine, all right?” A few days ago, I would have thought that drinking with a witch in the middle of the night was one step away from turning into a slob who spent all his time beating his wife and staggering home at dawn in yesterday’s clothes. I’d never met anyone who had poise without austerity. I hadn’t thought that was possible, but here he was, spun of poise, and not a thread of austerity. “You don’t know about it and I never mentioned it.”

“Yes please.” He pressed his hands over his face. “Sorry.”

“No, that was frightening,” I protested, not liking that he thought he needed to be sorry.

I’d never thought I’d see him look ashamed. I’d thought shame would just ping off him. But he did look ashamed now. “You’re not frightened,” he said.

“The ...” I shook my head as I poured out some wine from its slim little jar, because the cups were distracting. I only had four, one for me and one for each of the triplets, and I felt like I was robbing them to use one. It paralysed me for a second and then I had to switch them round, so he had mine and I had the old one we normally kept spoons in.

I brought a plate of the honey cakes from yesterday too, because he was right about his honey: it did help. Anything sweet did, but this all the more so. The bees must have been a special kind. Maybe they were witch-bees.

“I’ve not had any monsters climb out of my cupboard before, but midnight ambushes are ordinary after-dinner fare, you know? We used to make it into a game. We had a scoreboard and everything.”

“A scoreboard?” he repeated, his voice smoking. He sounded like he was trying hard to calm down and I wanted to tell him to try less, because it would go away faster, but instructions wouldn’t help. Distraction was better.

“You earned points for acting stupidly,” I explained. I set the cups down and lit a lamp. The tiny light made everything seem safer. Everything in the room had been grey and silver before, but now, there was a pool of colour, and it was reassuring. “Five for dropping your sword, twenty for letting someone take it off you, thirty for being asleep on watch, fifty if you let someone burn your tent down. And then we had a special Moron of the Month ceremony. The prize was a jar of really old cheese. You had to keep it in your tent the whole month. So, when some Hatti cavalryman rode screaming at you, you didn’t freeze, which is normal; you went, oh fuck, what if they give me the Cheese of Shame? ”

It was a relief when he laughed.

I touched our cups together. “To eventful evenings.”

He smiled, but it was pretend. He was looking at the cup, the one that was usually mine. Helios had given it to me. It was supposed to be a special-occasion wine cup, because it was fantastically made, the glaze flawless, and it was inscribed for me. It said kalos Phaidros . Kalos means “beautiful.” At the time I’d assumed it was my due and I fully deserved a commander who had things specially made to toast how lovely I was, because as I’ve mentioned, I was vigorously unlovely. Now I had to wonder if, not at all unlike Dionysus, Helios had been telling useful lies. He wasn’t blind, he hadn’t failed to notice I was about as kalos as a homicidal pig, but I’d never fought better than I had when I knew he was watching.

“Don’t laugh,” I said, about the cup.

Dionysus glanced up at me, not laughing. “Are you sure it’s all right for me to use it?”

I almost asked why he said so, but then I saw it. I clearly didn’t live with anyone, but I wouldn’t have kept it if Helios had left me. He had seen the helmet in the other room too. “Of course it’s all right,” I promised.

He held it carefully all the same, in both hands. “This wine is so bad,” he said, but he was smiling.

“Witch it into something better then. Come on, what’s the point of you?”

“All right,” he said. “Will I show you some magic?”

“Yes please,” I said, curious, because I’d expected him to pour it in a plant pot.

He held the cup in both hands and closed his eyes for a second, then held it out to me.

“Piss off,” I said.

“Taste it.”

I did, and then looked up at him. It was gorgeous. It was his wine now, the black honey-wine that fizzed. “ How did you do that?”

“Witching,” he said, with a muted spark.

I’d never been so happy to have such an annoying answer.

He turned my cup around in his fingertips. It was painted with figures of knights in formation, with Athena watching from the end of the line. At first I thought he was going to ask if it was strange to end up in a marriage to someone who raised you, and I got ready to say that goats are strange if you don’t grow up with them; and then I thought he would say something about the war, and whether anyone really did see Athena there like so many of the stories said. He didn’t. He looked sad, as if he were holding the relic of something precious that had been stolen from him long ago.

“You must have a hundred of those,” I said. Even Feral Jason probably had a kalos cup, either from poor suffering Polydorus or some ill-advised lord who didn’t realize what he was getting into.

He sort of laughed. “Not one.”

I had a vivid impression then that I was missing something important. I felt like I’d boasted about winning the Oracle Games to someone who had lost a leg.

“Witches don’t marry,” he said. “If you have a family ... you’re not strange enough for witching to work properly.”

“It only works if you’re strange?”

“The more deinos the witch, the more deinos the magic,” he said. “Be deinos enough, and even the snakes believe you.” He smiled just enough to show his teeth. “Even the Ferryman.”

I had a dangerous, crossing-No-Man’s-Land feeling that according to his vow, he probably shouldn’t have told me that.

“Isn’t that lonely?” I asked, quiet.

He inclined his head. He was thinking about it, really thinking, which meant he hadn’t said it before, or at least, not recently. I was afraid to move in case he remembered he wasn’t supposed to tell me. “It is. But it is the vow.”

“Is it worth it?”

“Is yours?”

I smiled, because that felt like a really beautiful, deft uppercut that he pulled so well it didn’t even knock my teeth together. “Fuck, no, it’s fucking dreadful, but it’s who I am and I can’t be anyone else now.”

He touched his cup to mine.

A howl came from outside. His eyes ticked to the window. The shutters were open, because it was far too hot to close them no matter the danger. Anyone outside would be able to see the little lamp between us from way up the mountain. There was nothing between us and everything else except the agreement that a door requires permission to open.

“The Palace needs to stop people wearing masks,” I said, only level enough to think it out properly now. “They’re everywhere. They’re selling them in town as a kind of medicine against the madness, and—” I stopped. “And you did that too.”

“What?”

“Before the madness really began,” I pushed, shocked now that I hadn’t taken him up on it before. “The first night after the star fell, you brought people here to that dance, and you gave them masks, and wine. You did it before anyone, you knew something was coming.” Stop, stop, stop, of course he knew something was coming: he was the something. I pulled it back as much as I could. “Didn’t you? But—you ... knew that masks could be ...” I trailed off. “Why? The masks make it worse . This is so much worse; that man ...”

“No, it isn’t.” He looked wrung out in a way that was nothing to do with needing to sleep. He let his arms unhinge slowly across the table, his hands open, wrists facing up, so that he was almost touching me. “The song, the one the Furies are singing, and the knights; they’re singing about the holy raving. That is ... how ... cities fall.” He said it slowly and with great care, his eyes flicking up to mine and begging me not to hear it as hyperbole. “The holy raving is what happened in Pylos. The only medicine for it is what you’ve seen. Wine, and masks, and the dance. A little madness can keep away great madness.”

Exactly like it had with Tiresias, the well-greaved and garrison-trained part of me snorted and said, Don’t be ridiculous. Only Athenians and hysterics talk like that. That made me fall still. I’d always listened to that voice. It had been armour against so many things: idiot decadences and superstitions, laziness, the urge to abandon duty when it was inconvenient. It was my favourite part of me. I was proud of it. Nothing could get through it. Now, though—it was getting in the way. A god was talking to me, and I couldn’t understand, because of that bronze helmet that I’d forgotten how to take off, and the visor that wouldn’t hinge up.

“How does that help? How does being drunk and partly a bull help anyone, at all, in the face of a thing that eats cities?” Even as I said it, I could tell I was trying to see it through the bronze helmet, with no peripheral vision. “That sounds as arbitrary as saying we need to befriend a hedgehog and then put three pebbles on the doorstep.”

He took a breath, and then shook his head a tiny fraction. “It’s blue,” he said softly.

And there was yet another thing I didn’t understand. He was talking about trying to prevent this city-burning madness that was coming, but he was the madness, so what was he doing?

Somewhere deep in the maze, the thing screamed again. Dionysus flickered. His hands were still open in front of me. I didn’t take them, because of what he had just said about his vow, but he gave me an impatient look then, like I was being cruel, and took mine. It was like how a cat would have got cross I wasn’t paying it enough attention and shoved its head under my palm. I didn’t know what to say, because what I really couldn’t do was say that that tiny thing had made me a lot happier than it had any right to, and that I’d never met a person more confusing. I wanted to say, But what do you mean ?

“Do you really think it was that thing that killed the triplets,” I asked in the end, “or are you just witching me so I won’t panic and go to Ares, and then you won’t have anyone to wind up with your sheep-and-feather-rain stories?”

“I’m witching you,” he said. Some of his usual spark flashed back to life. “There’s not another soul in Thebes I could delight with my fascinating and educational and extremely true stories. You’ve gone irredeemably nuts, and we should be careful about the legions of squirrels coming for you as we squeak.”

Which was another could-mean-something-nice, could-mean-something-terrible joke. I was tempted to start scoring him out of ten for them. I gave up on answers and ate my honey cake. If he was back to his double-edged jokes then he felt better, and that was all I’d wanted.