Page 29 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I did check. I checked the whole house twice, and parts of the ruins to either side. I put another bolt on the door down into the maze. That didn’t mean no one could get in. It would have been easy to climb in through the windows, whose shutters we had to leave open to circulate some air through the house. I put broken pottery under them, though, so that at least it would be loud if someone did come. Across the outer walls of the house, ivy and honeysuckle rioted richer than ever. The goats from before were grazing on some fallen olives from my suddenly exuberantly healthy olive trees.

Meanwhile Dionysus was, like all witches, a terrible patient. I had to threaten to recite Athenian poetry at him before he settled down and let me bind up his wrist.

“What do you think happened today?” I asked at last, to give him a way to it if he wanted one; or a way away, if he wanted that.

His eyes ticked up. They looked black in the lamplight, except for the very edges of his irises, which hinted at deep water. Like she often seemed to if he sat still for long enough, his snake had found him, and she was coiling across his shoulders. There’s nothing like a venomous monster to make an already brittle-seeming man more fragile. “I didn’t do anything to the wine,” he said.

“I know.” I concentrated on tying the knot in the bandage around his wrist. “There’s a god in Thebes. I don’t understand what happened today, though.” I risked looking up, feeling like I was between those mirrors again. “He destroyed the garrison today. He could take the throne right now, there would be nothing to stop him. He could incinerate the Queen, pick up the crown, say, This is mine , and everyone would kneel. But ... nothing.”

He looked down at the snake, who was sitting in the crook of his elbow, and shook his head. Not much; it must have hurt. There were bruises around his neck in the shape of hands. “You’re seeing it like a soldier. You’re talking about destruction and ruin, and stealing crowns.”

“What else is it?” I said, nearly indignant.

In other languages—in yours too maybe—medicine and magic are different things. Perhaps like the Egyptians, you have physicians, and those are different to your witches; the one sets bones and the other sets minds, and rarely do they cross over. But in Achaea, no. They are the same, and that combined thing is what our witches do, and we have one word for it. I have to tell you that, because there’s no other way to tell you what he said without making it sound like something far longer than what he said.

“Pharmakeia,” he said.

“What?”

He was quiet for a second. “There are two kinds of pain. One is ...” He nodded at his wrist, where I was just tying off the bandage. “We all know what that’s for. It stops you doing things that kill you. If we couldn’t feel pain, we wouldn’t live long. We’d walk into fires because they look interesting and we’d have scratches that we don’t notice and that go bad and we still don’t notice; pain is useful.”

I hadn’t thought of it having a purpose before, but he was right. “Right?”

“The other kind is unhappiness. Not—passing discontent, I mean real unhappiness, the kind that lasts. And ... that’s for the same thing. It’s there because you need to stop doing the thing that’s making you unhappy, or it will kill you.”

I looked at him sideways. “It definitely won’t. Lots of things make me unhappy. I’m not dead.”

He laughed. “No, but you’ve been trying very hard.”

“What?” I said, wrong-footed.

“Your little knights say you called the prince a whiny little prick. You told the Queen she was being a crazed despot. All the Palace slaves think you’re hilarious because you told the ambassador from Egypt, who holds everyone’s fate in his hands, that you’d rather drown in a fountain than have breakfast with him. You were stabbed today and instead of sitting down you went straight into the fighting. You want to die.”

“No, I—”

“You didn’t care,” he said over me. “And what, you made friends with a witch because you like me? Of course you don’t. I’m a chronic liar and I’m dangerous, and for all you know, I did poison the wine today. You don’t care what happens to you. You stay in the garrison, you keep riding with the Hidden, you murder anyone you’re told to, you keep training children who are mostly going to die by the end of the year: all those things are tearing gouges in you—”

“They aren’t, I’m trained to do those things—”

“Your training isn’t armour, it’s anaesthetic!” He didn’t raise his voice, but there was rage under it, hot as the glass in the crater of the fallen star. He let his breath out and the fight seemed to go out of him at the same time. His focus slipped to the air somewhere between us. “So the function of the mad god is to break your mind, before your mind breaks your soul. Pharmakeia.”

I kept quiet for a while. It was the most fragile quiet I’d ever sat through. I wasn’t saying, I know it was you . He wasn’t saying, I’m trying to explain why I did it . I couldn’t tell why he wasn’t. I’d thought he was playing with me and he thought it was funny, but he didn’t think any of this was funny. “Savage kind of pharmakeia,” I said eventually.

He nodded once. “Kill or cure.”

He had set down three lemons between us. In one of those vivid, not sane bolts you get when you’re worried for someone else’s life or you’re waiting to hear if yours will be shorter than you expected, a thought that didn’t feel like my own used me as a lightning rod. It was that if you have three lemons, you have some lemons. But you’re also seeing the shadow of threeness , traced out in fruit. It’s an idea, three; but not one that needs a human to think it. It just is .

He was like three. I would never see him. Only his shadow, traced in a man, and sometimes in madness. He was ... somewhere else, as well as here. I couldn’t see in the right way to see him true.

I could see, though, that it was lonely.

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“About what?”

“Me. I do like you.” I had to look at the floor. It felt like heresy to just say that to him flat, even though it was exactly in accordance with my vow. “You’re not entirely unpleasant at least two fifths of the time.”

He smiled gradually against his hand. He didn’t believe me. It was written across him. He was doing what I had been too, all this time: enjoying it while someone was insincerely nice to him, because it was better than the Nothing. “I bet you say that to all the boys.”

He was hurt, and younger than me, and there was a chance I’d try to kill him in my sleep. Even if it was what he wanted, even if revenge had become a strange kind of precious to him, and even if I didn’t touch him otherwise in case I pressed a bruise—if I went around the table and kissed him to make him believe me, it would be dishonourable at best and dangerous at worst.

Only, the way he’d looked at me before, when I hadn’t taken his hands—it had put roots down in me, and it had turned out to be something I did recognise, with dark flowers I knew very well.

Helios’s death had hurt, but what had hurt much more, for years, was his chivalry. For years, he refused to touch me, because he was just such a fucking good knight, and I hated it, because after a point, chivalry like that is just cowardice.

Feeling like I was trapped in one of those bright weird Troy visions, and half expecting Dionysus to punch me and say, No, I didn’t mean that at all , I got up and leaned on the back of his chair rather than his shoulder, and kissed him once, very light.

He stayed exactly still, then put his hand around my throat to make me lean down again, not for much longer, his other hand set over my ribs to tell me not to bend too far. He was tall enough, even sitting down, for me not to need to.

I hadn’t thought as far as after , and now I was burning and hazing away and relieved and despairing all in one lovely, horrifying whirlpool.

He tipped his head at me, still holding my ribs; he was pressing slightly and somehow that dulled the pulsing ache in my injured shoulder. “You’re going to ask me to lock you in tonight, in case it was you, and not the man in the maze. Aren’t you?”

I nodded.

He didn’t argue, but he did stand up and put his arms around me. It felt like a way of reminding me that he was tall and strong, and I’d struggle to do him much damage. I put my head on his chest, not convinced. He was tall and strong, he could lift me without trying, but he didn’t like defending himself—not with the bull thing, not with Jason, who he could easily have just punched in the face, not with the knights at the stadium who had put him through such a wringer. “All right, my knight.”

I made Dionysus give me the strongest sleeping draught he had, then lock me in the front room to sleep on the couch with the storm shutters bolted from the outside, and himself in the bedroom. If Asleep Murder Phaidros really made an effort, it was possible to get through two locked doors or a set of storm shutters, but that would make a fuckload of noise. Dionysus would wake up far enough in advance to get out or hit me with something heavy. It was hot with the shutters closed, but whatever was in the sleeping draught, it was good. It knocked me out so quickly I didn’t make it to the couch; I was still blowing out the lamps and ended up curled in a heap on the floor.

I couldn’t tell when, maybe soon after that or maybe hours, but I woke up just enough to notice it when he came in and lifted me up off the floor. That was an odd mix of humiliating and nice, being carried; I wanted to stiffen and get up and walk myself, but I was too asleep. It occurred to me after a little while that it seemed to be going on for a long time. I was sure I’d only been a few yards away from the couch. Maybe he was stealing me. Gods steal people.

Well, that was fine. I didn’t mind being stolen.

It was cold.

There was a thunking noise as well, like something hard and heavy on flagstones, and something ... breathing. An animal, something big, lungs like bellows.

Tap. Tap tap.

Where had I felt that before? Honey, that was it, I’d thought it was blood but it was just honey. I didn’t want to be covered in honey again, though, it was sticky and it took ages to wash off. Oh, and the sodding bees. I shifted, trying to wake myself up enough to say, No, no more bees, I don’t think I like the bees .

He put me down on something soft—moss—and put a cloak over me. I curled up under it, shivering now, because it was freezing in the maze.

The maze.

What?

“Phaidros!” Phaidros, Phaidros, Phaidros? Phaidros ...

That was Dionysus’s voice, slung weird by the echoes. He sounded frantic.

And far away.

So who had carried me?

Then I was awake , and the sleeping draught was holding me down like a swamp and it was the most muscle-wrenching effort to haul myself out of it and even halfway free, and fuck, there were bats , blasting through the corridor, keening in their strange high voices as they looked for their way, and something big snarling at them, swinging its horns, hating the noise and the rush of webbed wings that made the moonlight through the fissure in the cavern strobe.

I pressed back against the wall. The bull thing was almost as tall as a real auroch. It was stamping, snapping at the bats. All I could do was stay out of the way of those hooves, which scarred the ground. I eased upright, waiting for it to turn more away from me. If I was fast then I might be able to run. I’d have no idea where I was going, but lost in the maze alone was much better than not lost with this—thing.

There were handprints on my tunic, made in dark honey. They weren’t right. The fingers were fusing, maybe into something like hooves, but I thought maybe it was talons. I eased along the wall, not thinking about it, watching the bull man. I had to strangle down a yell when he jumped to snap at a bat, and what I’d thought was just the hump of his bull-spine snapped open into wings. The pinions brushed me, massive things, as long as my arms. I stared. What else was he? Was he going to turn out to be like the bats too, did he even need to see me to find me in the maze, or could he just shriek and coo and find the shape of me in the sound?

I could only see him clearly in flashes, and only then by the draining moonlight. I watched, willing him to turn away just a few degrees more to take me out of his peripheral vision, which had to be restricted under the mask. He was covered in weeds and—no, they were flowers, he had taken vines and made a kind of cloak from them, some old and wilted, some new. Under that, he was still wearing ordinary clothes, honey-grimy now, with a ribbon of what was still quite clearly Hatti embroidery around the hem. In places it winked with silver thread.

Only two people in Thebes could wear Hatti embroidery.

He turned just far enough, and I could have run then; only, I couldn’t. The last of the bats flapped away.

“Pentheus,” I tried, very quiet, to keep the echoes from hurling it everywhere and startling him.

The bull thing paused, and twitched. It huffed to find that I was awake, then took me by the shoulders and put me back where it had left me to start with, on the cloak on the ground, like I was a little clockwork doll that had wandered off. He had hands, still, but they were something like hooves and claws too.

Be Persephone. Always negotiate.

“Hello again. What have you stolen me for, hey? I’m ugly. You didn’t want Dionysus?”

The bull huffed twice, and under it, as though the air were passing through some extra chamber, there was a soft, birdish twitter; I thought it might be a kind of laugh. Gods, so he was human enough, even now, to understand. Very gently, one massive hoof-claw-hand patted me on the head. Don’t be silly. You stay there. It was sticky from old honey, and strands of my hair stuck and pulled. It was absolutely not the worst thing that ever happened to me, but I’d never more powerfully wanted to yell and run away.

“Thank you, for this,” I said about the cloak he had put me on. It was much cleaner than he was.

Behind the hollow eyes of the mask, serene bull eyes watched me.

“Were you lonely?”

Thump. He had sat down, more like an animal than a person, his spine wrong for sitting upright now. He made a very, very deep sound, a kind of croon, with a whicker of birdsong behind it; it wasn’t a noise anything in the world had made before.

Those enormous wings were folded up now. And there was a tail, a lot longer and stronger than a bull tail. More like a lion. The mask—what was it? I was sure it had been a bull when I saw it first, but it had feathers on it now, and sharp, sharp teeth. I couldn’t see. There was hardly any light.

“I wonder,” I whispered, “if I could take this mask off you. They’re dangerous. There’s a god here, and ... we’re all turning into our masks.”

He only blinked at me. He let me take the mask and set it aside.

In the dark with only the moonlight to see by, I couldn’t make out much of what was underneath, except fur and eyes that were too golden to be human. I forced myself to look, because I had a feeling that if I flinched, the spell would break, but I let my eyes blur so I wouldn’t see, because if I saw I’d never unsee. I could cheerfully look at someone with all their insides on the outside, and I’d watched witches dissect hearts, that was all normal, but this—I didn’t want to dream about this.

The heavy head went down in my lap, which pinned me, and there was a clack of teeth meeting. I rubbed the patch of fur between the horns, trying to sing the hymn to Ares in my head, because it was so slow, and it made you breathe. A minute, five, ten. Be a marvel, just slice out the hour. If he was like the others, he would change back into a boy soon. Ares, golden-helmed, bronze-clad ...

There was less weight than before. At first, the tip of the nearer horn had been right by my eye, but it was smaller. He was changing. It was about the speed the flowers round his neck were wilting.

Steps, from the maze. Light.

“Here,” I whispered, which as much noise as I dared to make. Pentheus wasn’t asleep, just resting, liking having some company. “It’s the prince.”

Dionysus came around the last turn with a lamp. My heart tried to lunge right out of my chest. “Oh, Phaidros,” he breathed. “Are you hurt?”

“No. No, it was like—he wanted a doll. I don’t know.”

He knelt down next to us. Pentheus stirred and rumbled a deep sound at us. Maybe I was impatient, but I didn’t think he was changing any more, or not nearly as quickly. Dionysus touched the back of his head and it seemed to settle him.

“What—has happened ?” Dionysus whispered, taking in the horns, the wings, the tail—the teeth. “The mask was a bull.”

The tail lashed playfully over his throat.

“He’s not changing any more,” I said, sure now, and worried, because my idea had been to walk out with him once he was himself again.

“Masks go on the inside too,” Dionysus murmured. “Where is it? The mask, do you ...”

I gave it to him.

Dionysus flinched when he saw it. As though he didn’t want to see, he tilted it to the light of his lamp, and what went over his face was about the same as what went over mine if I’d just seen a spider skating around the rim of a wine cup.

With the new light, it was easier to see. There was a pair of wings fastened to either side of it, smallish, bluish brown, maybe a pigeon’s. And there were teeth—a whole jaw. The original bull mask was only the upper half of the face, because all the witches’ masks were designed to let you talk, but someone had used tough dried grass to graft on the bone. It was parched, probably from something that had died in the drought.

“Cuckoo,” Dionysus said softly, about the wings, and then he touched the teeth. “Lion.” He lifted his eyes. “Phaidros, he’s been making his own spell. He’s been ... experimenting. I think he’s trying to make himself into what he needs.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, but I did understand there was something unholy about that mask, even to Dionysus. He was holding it slightly away from us both. On my knee, Pentheus sighed, and there was the echo of birdsong in it again. Cuckoo; cuckoo.

“An auroch is strong,” Dionysus said, touching the horns of the mask, which had been mostly destroyed by the real horns growing up through them. “But quiet, and—if it isn’t near people, it’s not aggressive. This should have been a good mask for someone who wanted to forget and to hide. It should have kept him to the forest, made him able to defend himself if he needed, but otherwise he’d have been no harm to anyone. But—then—maybe he didn’t like strong and quiet.” The lion’s canines shone yellow-white, nearly as long as my hand. “Phaidros, the dead things in your garden. He’s been courting you. Leaving you presents, things with nice pelts ready for skinning.” He looked up. “Like cats do.”

“But the triplets said that was me.”

“You walked at night and they found carcasses in the morning. But did they see you kill anything?”

I shut my teeth. I didn’t know. Dionysus was right, though; it was what cats did. The lion tail tickled over my leg. The part of me that still wore its bronze helmet visor down stood between the rest of me, and believing it. Dangerous to believe it.

“Why a cuckoo?” I asked instead.

“I doubt he knows it’s a cuckoo, do you know what one looks like?”

“No, I thought it was a pigeon.”

“He just found a thing with wings. Maybe he was just trying to fly away, but ... it is a cuckoo. You know what cuckoos do? The young ones?”

I thunked my head back against the wall. “They’re put in another bird’s nest, and they throw out any chicks that are already there”—Ares alive, fucking hell—“Dionysus, the triplets—”

“Right.”

It should just have been sad, but I had huge rush of relief and joy and hope, because if it wasn’t me, then I was so much safer than I’d thought, and it wasn’t dangerous to stay in the same room as someone else overnight—it wasn’t dangerous to stay with him.

When I looked at him, he was looking at me too, with that same unspoken half-promise as he had at the stadium.

Pentheus sniffed and, like a cat, ranged over me and bumped down to claim Dionysus as well. He was smaller than he had been with the mask, but he still wasn’t small.

We both sat looking down at the thing that might still be a boy; spoilt and undutiful and determined and lonely. If I had the Fates’ view of time and all the ways it could go, and how the warp and the weft wove; to what extent had this happened because I hadn’t taken him seriously when he asked me for help? I’d thought he could learn to be stronger, but what if he was just made brittle, and he couldn’t, and he’d ... what? Bought a mask from a witch to hide his face and accidentally ended up like this? Or had there been a witch who realized what the star was, and what the magic would do, and who had said, Choose one of these masks, and decide what manner of thing you would like to become ?

“We can’t stay down here,” I said. “If anything happens with the bees I’ll lose my fucking mind again, and he’s one startling bat away from eviscerating us both, I think.”

“Yeah,” Dionysus murmured. “Let’s see if he’ll come up with us.” He stroked the place between the horns. “Pentheus, sweetheart. Let’s go. Phaidros is cold and he doesn’t like the bees. This isn’t a good place for knights, they need quiet. Will you help me take him back?”

The answer was a snarl and teeth snapping at his hand, and claws sinking right into my leg.

I pushed my hand over my face. Of course, Pentheus wouldn’t be doing anything that would help anybody except him. “Right. Pass me that rock.”

Dionysus led the way and I carried Pentheus. I was only just strong enough, and I had to stop halfway up my cellar steps, shoulders on fire, before I could make the last lurch to the top. I put him on the couch—there were hoof marks on the floor beside it now—and once that was done, I felt disconcerted, because moving him had seemed like such a titan task that anything beyond it had had a bit of a fairy-tale quality, not worth thinking of, and now it was here. My back hurt.

Now—ugh—I’d have to tie him up and slog over to the Palace, and give him back to the Queen, and try to explain that yes, he had been living under and sometimes in my house all along but I was much too stupid to have noticed, and hope that there were witches who could turn him back.

“Could you turn him back?” I asked Dionysus, who was standing next to me and looking down at Pentheus in exactly the same logistically troubled way I was.

He frowned, like that was an odd thing to say, and because I knew him enough now, I had a pricking sense that we were coming up against something else we saw so differently we couldn’t reconcile. Madness, pharmakeia; blue. I could feel the shadow of it. “Why?”

“He’s got to go back to the Palace. It was would much easier if he was coherent and boy-shaped?”

“No, he doesn’t have to go back to the Palace,” Dionysus said, quite slowly. “He—Phaidros.” His voice dropped into deeper smoke than usual, as if I were suggesting taking him to a torture chamber. “We have to take him to another part of the forest, where he can’t hurt anyone.”

“ What? ”

“He asked for help. He asked both of us for help. He asked to forget everything. He found a way. He put the mask on, and he made adjustments to it, he chose this.”

“Yes, because he’s a useless spoilt coward and now it’s time for him to be a prince again,” I said, confused.

“He is a maltreated and neglected child who ran away.”

“Maltreated and neglec—he’s Sown!” My voice was doing its breaking-too-high trick again. “His function isn’t to do what he likes, it’s to do his fucking duty.”

Dionysus was breathing in slowly, and I recognised the way he looked, because it was exactly the way Helios had looked when he realized he was going to have to fight someone a lot bigger and stronger than him, but he would do it anyway, because he would die of shame to retreat. It put me on edge. I didn’t want to fight. I already hated arguing even this much. If he tried, though, he was going to crush me.

“His duty was hurting him, and this is the medicine, and the only reason you think that’s unreasonable is that your duty has hurt you much more, there never was medicine for you, and you don’t see why other people shouldn’t be hurt the same way.”

I wished he had hit me. It would have hurt less than hearing what he thought I was like, and how embittered and terrible. “No,” I ground out, “the reason I think he should do his duty is that it is necessary. I don’t want to make anyone suffer, I don’t take some foul joy in it—”

“That isn’t what I said—”

“Yes it is. You can think what you want about me, you can think I’m some vengeful cruel monster, but I took a vow. Duty is honour. My duty is to return him to the Queen, so that he can do his.”

He was shaking his head. “And I took vows to do what was best for the patient, not for someone else.”

“So it’s fine to just let him go on the odd murderous rampage?” I demanded. “The triplets’ lives don’t matter? He’s dangerous like this, and he is required as he was. How can you possibly think that it’s better to just leave him be?”

“For the same reason,” he said, and this time there was a flint edge in his voice, “that I didn’t chain you to a wall when you thought you were killing things.” He picked up a pomegranate and held it out, close to me. It turned to dust in his hand. “Because it wouldn’t help you. Only me.”

It wasn’t what he was saying, exactly, that grated so badly. It was the way he was saying it. It was that—absurdly—he had wasted a pomegranate, and that that little trick was clearly meant to show I could have been dust by now if he had wanted. It was patronising, and it was hammering a nail with a sledgehammer, and worst of all, it scared me in a sharp immediate way I hadn’t been scared since I was little and staring at certain death under the hooves of a Hatti charger. My whole body only knew one thing to do when I was scared like that, because anything else, all my life, would have meant going down under that charger.

I punched him so hard he collapsed in front of me, and instantly, I realized it was too hard. He didn’t move, and nor did I. I had to just stand there, staring at the window, because if I looked at him, it would be real. A child-part of me was convinced that if I didn’t look, he would get up.

He didn’t get up.

I sank down on my knees and pressed my temple against his chest, trying to find his heartbeat. Nothing. No thump; no lift of his ribs.

Reasoning insanely that it wasn’t too late, I could find another witch in town who might still be able to help him, I lifted him up. Dead weight is so much heavier than you ever think it could be. Carrying a dead person is like trying to carrying the same weight in sand. I knew what that felt like and it felt like that now, but I had to be wrong, because I couldn’t have just murdered the last of my family for no reason except that he had argued with me, I couldn’t be that .