Page 30 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I reached halfway down the olive grove before I had to buckle onto the grass, the newly lush grass, under the newly beautiful lemon tree.

As soon as he touched the grass, it died. It withered, like it was burning, shrivelling up, rippling out from us, to the bases of the trees, where, even by the moonlight, I could see that the olives were dying too, the lemons, the leaves desiccating half to dust.

He breathed in.

I started to cry. It was shock and relief and horror and fear all at once.

Dionysus punched my arm. “Fuckwit! Look at the fucking trees!”

I couldn’t speak.

He sighed. “It’s all right. Don’t ... we should be able to save the trees.”

“The trees ?” I yelled at him. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I ...”

He took my hand and held it in both of his against his chest. “No, I’m sorry. I made you do that.”

“You didn’t make me.”

He made a soft impatient sound. “I did.” He sighed. “I wanted to remind you it isn’t a choice.”

“I killed you.”

“Briefly.”

I touched his chest to feel his heart. Yes; going again. He was warm. I didn’t ask how. I could see how. The trees were dead instead of him, the grass, the vines. I didn’t know what to say. I had a stone in my throat. Distantly, I could feel I was still crying, my breath coming in shudders.

Dionysus put his hands through my hair to make me look up.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. He looked distraught now.

I hugged him hard. He was much stronger than I thought as he hugged me back. I could feel the muscle moving over his bones. It was such a paralysing relief that I had to drop my head against his shoulder and try to soak him in, the feel of him breathing and the glassy loop of his hair I had clenched through my hand. “My fist, my fault.”

“That’s stupid.”

I choked on a laugh. He guided our foreheads together. I had to keep hold of his wrists just to make sure he was really there and not a vision Apollo had sent to save me from the truth.

Dionysus really did seem all right. He seemed nervous, though, and with an anvil sinking through my insides, I realized we had circled back to where we had started.

“What are we going to do about him?” I asked, nodding at the house.

He bent his neck for a second. “Say he does turn back. He won’t thank you. He will turn slowly to clockwork, and you’ll have a marvel king who has no pity because no one ever had pity on him. Is that what you want running your city?”

“We have a marvel queen now and she’s working beautifully.”

“She’s killing you,” he said, simple and very soft.

“She’s heroic,” I said, flatter than I wanted to. I sounded angry. I always sounded angry when I was upset. “Thebes has held together this long because of her. And—I know what you think, but madness is not medicine.” I looked down at the ground. “I’m taking him back to the Queen. It’s for her to decide, not us. Turn me to dust or don’t.”

“ This is what you choose?” he asked, quiet. The way he said choose made it sound not only important, but the only important thing.

“I’m not choosing! I don’t have a choice, he doesn’t have a choice, that’s what I’m saying to you, we’re Sown!”

“No. You are choosing honour over a boy’s life.”

Something deep in my cellars said: Gods don’t care what’s in your heart or what compelled you. Gods care what you have done.

“He won’t die, he’s going to the Palace!”

“He won’t be living either.”

“Why is this the hill you want to die on?” I demanded, somewhere between infuriated and helpless, and betrayed, because he was choosing some obscure ineffable principle he had never properly explained over—

I caught myself.

We weren’t friends. I just wanted to be, for all I knew perfectly well he was going to kill me in the end. But that was just life, for him. I’d seen him dance. I’d seen dozens of people catching at him as if their lives depended on touching him. He probably thought everyone being a little bit in love with him was normal. It was just the air.

“No, all right,” I corrected myself. “Fine.”

He frowned. “You’ll leave him?”

“No, bizarrely,” I snapped. “I’m taking him without you.”

So I took Pentheus down the mountain, then up to the High City. Halfway, I had to take a horse from the public stable at the Temple of Poseidon and lash him to it, because I couldn’t carry him once he started to wake and kick. The stable master gave me a frightened stare, and I said—not that it made things any better—that the snarling kicking bundle was an escaped slave I was taking home. As I led the horse through the streets, people looked away, crossing over to get away from me.

All the way, what Dionysus had said churned angrily round in my head. Sometimes madness is medicine—medicine for who, for Pentheus? But not for literally everyone else. Everyone else would be fucked. The royal line would be broken; the Queen, the noble, clever, deinos Queen, would have to risk her life having another child; but no, that didn’t matter, he was in Thebes to watch it eat itself and call it pharmakeia—

“Phaidros, why have you got a person in a bag?” the Chamberlain asked me slowly. I was at the Palace steps.

“It’s the prince,” I said, almost absently, more wanting to say, Listen to this ludicrous thing a witch just said to me, tell me if I’m being unreasonable .

“It’s the what?”

“There’s something wrong with him, he keeps ... don’t undo that,” I suggested. “He needs priests. Or witches. He’s ... not himself.”

After that, the morning was a chaos of priests and priestesses from half a dozen different temples, surgeons, witches, half the court. I had to explain to least twelve different people how I’d found him, where he had been, what he had been doing. I explained he had killed foxes and a wolf, maybe people, and that he had been foraging honey. It was horrible, because they had to chain him up, and though he kept fighting at first, he retreated into a corner in the end like a frightened animal and curled up in a miserable ball. Those great cuckoo wings were out, trying to mark out some space around him, the way birds of prey do when they’ve got food or chicks to protect.

“How did he get like this?” the Queen asked at last, after everyone had finished interrogating me, and all the theories exploded around her. The Egyptians have a saying: put six Achaeans in a room together and you’ll have twelve opinions. That it’s annoying and patronising doesn’t stop it being right. “Who put the mask on him?”

Some witches were murmuring. Someone tried a different mask on him, the mask of a young man; it didn’t do anything. He just tried to bite the lady holding it. Of course it wasn’t changing the mask on the inside; like Dionysus had said.

Like me. Visor down, spear out, even when a god was telling me I was wrong.

Pentheus was watching me over his knees, looking utterly betrayed and beaten under all the dirt. His eyes weren’t quite human, but they were his. He wasn’t looking at me like a young man looks at some older man he barely knows. Anyone seeing this would have thought I was a god he had worshipped for forever and who had then personally hurled him under the wheels of a chariot. I wanted to kneel down with him and ask why, when I wasn’t at all what he seemed to think, I had no power to change the mind of a queen, or to help an unhappy prince; I was just a used-up shadow of Helios, and he couldn’t expect me to be more than that. I couldn’t save him, I couldn’t clash with the Queen, I couldn’t do any of it.

Very useful that he thinks you can though , remarked a voice like Dionysus’s.

Something deep in me clicked into place then.

The more deinos the witch, the more deinos the magic. That was really just another way of saying that the magic of a witch works because people—or other things—believe in the witch.

Pentheus believed I was more than I was.

Nine-tenths sure it couldn’t ever work, I knelt down in front of him and held his hands. One was mostly talons, one was halfway a hoof. It was much worse, the boy-animal chaos, here in the bright light at the Palace. At least there had been plenty of good, ambiguous darkness in the maze.

“Pentheus. It’s time to remember who you are. Wake up.”

And he just—did.

He pushed his hands over his face and sat up without that terrible animal hunch, the one that said he was ready to bite if someone upset him enough, and all at once he was just a boy again, dirty and ragged, but a boy all the same.

I sat back, shocked.

“Phaidros,” he said, sounding confused. “Where ... what’s happening?”

“You’ve been asleep, sort of,” I explained, trying hard to sound normal. I knelt forward again and put my cloak around him. The wound in my shoulder stabbed me, but I felt it less than before. Distantly, I had a sense that something in me had shut off after fighting with Dionysus. “We’re in the Palace. You vanished for a little while. Your mother asked me to find you. It’s been eleven days.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, his eyes wide and glassy. He looked bewildered. “Eleven ... days, how? Where was I?”

“Out by the forest, in the maze.”

I should have been more relieved. No: I should have been relieved, generally. I wasn’t. I wasn’t anything. I couldn’t feel anything. Some lever had gone clunk in my clockwork and I was only half here. I was looking at a lost boy who had been through some kind of strange, savage curse, and I didn’t even feel happy to have him back. Just—blank.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you any trouble, I don’t know what ...”

Well, I’d have to fucking pretend.

I hugged him carefully. “It’s all right. I’m just happy you’re all right. Your mother’s here,” I added, nodding that way. Nobody else had noticed he was all right yet, still arguing.

His confusion dropped away, but not like I’d hoped. I saw the weight of the whole Palace sink onto his shoulders. He straightened up under it very slowly, and a neutral, adult veil came down over his expression. He looked like someone who had had a wonderful, convincing dream, but woken up in a prison cell again.

“Yes, of course.”

I unlocked his chains. “Let’s see her together. I’ll get in the way if she goes—you know. Full Medusa.”

He didn’t laugh. “You can’t say that.”

“No, you can’t say that.”

A very thin smile.

Sometimes madness is medicine.

I tried to kick Dionysus’s voice out of my head, but it wouldn’t go.

“Up you get.” I helped him up, and put my arm round him as a partial shield when everyone went quiet. Not because I was worried about him; it was because in a cold dead clockwork way, I’d assessed him, and concluded that the course of action most likely to end in the objective, his eventual transformation into a functioning king, was a strategic display of protective kindness.

Part of me thought: This is it. This is what being a marvel is.

I hated it.

People got out the way so that he had a clear path to the Queen. He bowed stiffly.

“Lady.”

“Sown.” She smiled, bowed back, and there, in her, I saw exactly what was happening in me.

She didn’t care either. She had learned not to, because it would have been agony, all the time.

“Come on,” I murmured, less and less sure I’d done the right thing. “Let’s get you away from all the audience.”

The way he gripped my arm, he might have been drowning.

As the Queen’s attendants began to see people out, Apophis clipped up the steps and, because he was six feet tall and twice their size, brushed by them without seeming even to see that they were there. His own retinue of slaves was behind him, half a battalion of them, all just as immaculate and polished as he was, most of them far taller than any of us, gleaming with turquoise and gold worth more than most Sown estates. I must have been more tired and more hungry than I’d really known, because seeing them made me think about a story I’d heard a bard sing at one of the wayside places on my way from Troy. It was about a great knight, dead in Hades, and what he said to a living man who was visiting. Better to be the meanest slave in heaven, than a king in hell. I’d tried not to remember it because I needed it not to be true, because if it was true than Helios was miserable, but the echoes of some stories echo around inside your head long after the lyre strings are quiet. I couldn’t tell why I’d thought of that. No; Pentheus, going to Egypt to be nobody, but getting away from being a king in a madhouse.

“What,” Apophis said to me, enunciating precisely, “in the name of Ra is this supposed to be? You held a funeral and now you appear to have resurrected your prince? Or was he never dead, and you were trying to avoid your agreement with the Pharaoh? What?”

“He was missing,” I said. I put my hand on his chest and pushed slowly to make him stand further away from me. “And we didn’t tell you because people here are already starving to death and we need your grain. We were hoping to find him. We didn’t: we assumed he was dead, hence the funeral. But we’ve found him. I know it’s stupid and messy, but that’s what it is.”

“People will think you’ve swapped in another boy.”

“When you say people, do you mean you?” I asked.

“Yes,” he snapped.

“There he is, you can see him.”

“You know you all look the same to me.”

“Apophis ... we just held some extremely expensive funeral games. If we’d swapped him, there would have been no funeral. You’d never even seen him. It would have been easy. This is just what a giant fucking cock-up looks like.”

He did seem to think about it at least. When he spoke again, it was quieter. “It’s a marvellous narrative. A young prince back from the dead to save his city. It will combat these superstitions of a lost prince and a mad god coming for the throne.”

“Sir,” I said, “I have no doubt that’s what the Palace will say happened, you’re right, but it isn’t what anyone planned. He went mad, we lost him, we’ve found him. It is very embarrassing; it is not a conspiracy.”

“Either way, you’ve all been lying to me. According to you, the prince was in a sanctuary all this while. I am astonished; the duplicity is shameless. I am inclined to leave, and let this—insane city eat itself with its mad god and its vanishing princes!”

I looked up at him for a few seconds, not seeing his face, but the future where I had to take my little knights into battle, and see how well they could manage that left turn against Egyptian soldiers who outnumbered them. “Then ... the next time you’ll see me is when I’m killed on the deck of one of your ships.”

“Don’t be absurd, I have three thousand men guarding those ships, you can’t possibly mount an attack, you’ll lose your entire garrison.”

“I know,” I said. “But we’ll have to anyway. All this green? Even that can’t save us now.”

Something opened in his expression. He touched my shoulder, tilting me away from the Queen and Pentheus, and the Guards. Unlike me, he was clean. Somehow his white clothes had stayed white, even with all the sacrifice smoke. “Are you swearing to me that that boy is indeed the prince, and all of this was just—a mistake that got out of hand?”

“I swear, sir.”

“Then ... I’ll take you at your word, knight.”

That caught me out. “Why?”

He smiled. “Among ourselves we have been calling you Honest Heliades.”

“You ... might not be entirely a prick,” I admitted.

“Isn’t it nice when we get on?”

“No. I still don’t like you, you loom and you’ve got pretentious earrings.”

He laughed. “You’re a wonderful, wonderful man,” he told me, and walked away looking cheerful, followed by his retinue of increasingly confused slaves.

“Well done,” the ubiquitous Chamberlain said to me, with an unusual failure to broadcast her normal suspicion that I was a wild pig in a clever disguise. “That was ... very good.”

I looked around. “Are you feeling all right?”

“The Queen wants you to stay,” she added, signalling the last of the slaves to leave, and to close the chamber doors.

“What happened to you? Do you remember?”

The audience hadn’t gone, just shrunk. Now, we had a priestess and a physician, and in the background, Tiresias, standing in the archway that led outside to the shrine to Semele, which was crowded with candles and offerings; slaves were out gathering it all up in hessian rubbish sacks.

Beyond that, down on the plain, the dead land beyond the Fury marvels and the last outpost of green that was the Temple of Apollo looked strange: like a god had combed ash into the air in slim tines, much smaller and much more numerous than the titan pillars of sacrifice smoke that still poured into the sky.

Funeral pyres. It was hundreds and hundreds of funeral pyres.

The Queen was watching Pentheus intently. I’d tried to say that it might be better to give him an hour, but she had looked at me like I’d spat.

“No. The last thing I remember is seeing the witch enchant the bulls, with Phaidros.” He was sitting very straight, hands clamped into his lap to hide the grazes and the grime under his fingernails. They hadn’t even let him wash yet, or eat. I looked at the Queen, wanting to say that if a beggar sought hospitality here then they’d be treated with more ceremony, but I already knew what she would say. Princes have more duties than beggars .

“Why had you gone to see Phaidros?” the priestess asked.

He didn’t look away. There was a strange calm to him now. It was the one I’d had after Helios had been killed. The worst had happened: there was nothing to be afraid of any more. “To ask for help. I didn’t want to go to Egypt. But he said I needed to do my duty.”

The Queen caught my eye and tipped her head ruefully.

“Then what happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Lord,” the priestess pushed, “you ended up in the woods running wild in the mask of a bull: something happened. Someone gave you that mask. Did you see anyone, did you talk to anyone?”

“No, just Phaidros.”

That wasn’t true; he had spoken to Dionysus, they had walked away together. Still, if he didn’t remember, then he didn’t. I pushed my hand over my face—thought to the side of everything else that I needed to shave—and wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me, given that anyone even a little wobbly in their own mind completely lost it anywhere near Dionysus, it could have happened to Pentheus too.

Dionysus could have spoken to Pentheus, sent him away, and never known that Pentheus’s mind had shut down straight after that.

No; that didn’t explain the mask. Pentheus had had his before anyone else—before the witches tried it at Hermes, before everyone else tried it.

Gods, had he just ... picked it up at the dance? The servers there had been in animal masks. Was this just a horrendous mishap?

“And how did you turn him back?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. I just said wake up and he did.”

“But what made you think that would work?”

“I ...” I sighed. “I know a witch. He says things with authority and I always believe him even when it’s stupid because he’s deinos; it seemed worth a try.”

“That’s enough,” the Queen decided. “Madness overtook dozens of people who saw the star fall; Pentheus too, clearly, and the only mystery is how he ended up so far from the Kadmeia.”

That felt like missing a step on the stairs at night, because now I’d heard her say it, I could see that it was true and it wasn’t. Whatever had seized Pentheus, it was a very different kind of madness. Everyone else sang the song and danced, but he had run wild, killed things, maybe people, and he’d been conscious enough to eat and to drink, and take shelter in the maze from the heat. And if anyone else could have been cured with an order from someone believable to wake up, then the witches would have done that.

“You can go,” she said to the priestess. “Not you,” she said, when I started to get up.

I sat down again and looked across at Pentheus, who was still straight and stiff, gazing at something in the middle distance now. Because someone needed to, I caught his shoulder and scooped him sideways. I was surprised when he let me. He just dropped his head against my collarbone and stayed there, motionless. He still smelled of the forest, all crushed grass and honey.

I still wasn’t relieved or happy, and I still didn’t feel sorry for him. I just knew it was important to pretend I felt all those things, because if I didn’t, then ...

Then his mind would kill his soul, now that I’d taken away the mechanism that had been stopping that.

“How did you find him, exactly?” the Queen asked me. She had made everything seem less formal now, but the question was as precise as any of the others.

“He broke into my house,” I said. “He was in the maze underneath. He was there all along, I knew someone was—we talked about it, when you were making chain mail—but I didn’t realize.”

She only inclined her head, which made her hair fall over her shoulder. Helios’s had used to fall in the same way. I had a sudden painful vision of combing it out for him, after a battle and he couldn’t move his hands. Hold a shield for long enough and you can’t open and shut your fingers.

“I’m sorry I broke into your house,” Pentheus said to me. “I don’t remember.”

I hesitated. “Do you remember me bringing you here? You fought.”

“No.”

I rubbed his shoulder, not knowing what else to do. He was still too thin, but it wasn’t as bad as before. He felt stronger. He had run around out there, at least. “I’m glad. It wasn’t very nice.”

The Queen was watching us. I had a feeling she found it distasteful, that I was being gentle with him. I watched her back, and wondered how different she would have been, if someone had just been kind to her at the right moment. I wanted to say, Trust me, I know how to build a human. This is how Helios built me .

“Pentheus, what made you go to Phaidros in the first place?”

“He was sworn to Helios. I’d heard he was honourable. The knights my age all like him. I thought he might honour an oath-bond, even though we’re not blood.”

“Yes,” the Queen said. “So why didn’t you?” she asked me.

“Because I couldn’t help,” I said. “I’m in no position to negotiate for anything from the crown.”

“But,” she said, steady and gradual, “you live above the maze. You know very well how to get someone out of the city in secret, because you police it. Why didn’t you say, well, come home with me, no one will look for you there, and even if they do, no one will find you in the maze, particularly not in a mask, and even better, the Queen is likely to ask me to help find you, and I can make sure she never does? As soon as the weather cools down, you can be in Corinth, or Sparta.”

“Oh, fuck off,” I said wearily.

“I beg your pardon?”

“If I wanted him out of the city, he’d be gone, I wouldn’t be keeping him incriminatingly in the fucking maze for the first fucking poacher to find, fuck me.”

She blinked twice.

“He’s fun, isn’t he?” Pentheus said. He sounded, now, the way he had been trying to sound when he spoke to me on the parade ground: clear, cool, lightly interested in a way that said he was here talking to us because it was an acceptably engaging way to pass half an hour, and certainly not because anything important rested on it. He didn’t care about the outcome. She could execute me if she wanted. Or him. He was free for the rest of the afternoon anyway.

“My lady, I can quote what Phaidros said to me when I asked him to help me. I said, ‘I’m scared she’s sending me to Egypt to start again,’ and he said, ‘Are you certain she isn’t sending you away because you’re a whiny little prick and no one likes you?’ Half the regiment heard him say it. Ask them.”

The Queen frowned. “Did you really say that?” she asked me.

“Nope, I am famously mellifluous, ask anyone,” I said. Usually I had a lot of patience for her let’s-kick-the-mooring-lines-and-see-if-anything-comes-loose approach—it was only wise—but today I was tired and upset, and I had growing feeling, like mould, that Dionysus had been exactly right after all.

“I know you didn’t help me,” Pentheus said, “but I think I might love you.”

“Oh, thanks,” I said, wondering how long I’d have to enjoy that. Maybe even a whole hour.

Pentheus shook his head once. “We all know what happens to kings and queens who make a habit of accusing those most loyal to them of treason. Generally they that find nobody wants to be loyal any more. I assure you, lady, if it had been my choice, I would have stayed mad in that maze. The only reason I’m here is Phaidros’s unquestioning and unswerving loyalty to you, which I think he should reconsider before you kill him for no reason.”

“I think you’re aiming for louche and rakish, but the note you’re hitting really is more towards whiny little prick,” she remarked.

“Needs work,” he agreed, and smiled a bit at me.

She looked more puzzled with that small show of level-headed maturity than anything he had said before. She almost smiled. “Get yourself cleaned up. The Egyptian ambassador is here and we need that grain yesterday.”

Pentheus got up without arguing, bowed precisely, and left. I stared after him, and then at her, completely unable to tell if she was about to send me home, or send me to be executed just in case. I wanted to say, You can’t make him go to Egypt now, he needs some time to recover at least , but I didn’t, because if I was about to be executed, then anything I said to try and help Pentheus would only achieve the opposite.

She studied me for a long time. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to see what your reaction was.”

It wasn’t a question, so I kept my eyes on the floor.

“Gods, I’ve really upset you—Phaidros, this is just what being the ruler of a city is, it’s ...” She let her breath out, frustrated. “I’m not used to seeing anyone have a genuine reaction to anything I do. The court is all calculation. You have to see it like a battle. Nothing anyone says here is personal, it’s all strategy.” She paused. “Usually you’re good at knowing when that’s happening. Is something else going on?”

I shook my head slightly. “Lady, you don’t have to pretend to care what I do outside the Palace in order to make me function better.”

She shifted, and it looked amazingly uncomfortable. “The other day, you said something simple, but it ...” She hesitated. It was a brittle sort of silence, a glass one that someone had just tapped with a hammer, vibrating. “I’m not asking you in order to make you function better, I’m asking because you’re even more openly suicidal than usual and I’m worried about you.”

“Oh,” I said, and nothing else arrived, except a rock in my throat.

“So what happened?” she asked.

“My ...” What did I call him? “There’s man who lives near me, he was a guest a long time ago so he’s kin, but we disagree about everything. We found Pentheus together. He didn’t want me to bring him back here. We fought. I hurt him, very badly. I don’t think he’s going to forgive me.”

“Why didn’t he want you to bring Pentheus back?”

I sighed. “He’s a witch. He thinks the madness is pharmakeia.”

“He sounds horrifying.”

“He’s ...” I had to look fixedly at the floor. Being hit by a chariot is hard and sudden, and I wished that being hit by the truth was like that, but it wasn’t—it was hard and slow. I’d been angry, and then I’d gone numb for a while, but now what was smashing into me, very, very slowly, was that Dionysus really wouldn’t forgive me. Whatever game he had been playing with me, he would be finished with it now. It had been so good to see him again, and to have the chance to make things right, but instead of doing that, I’d done him even more wrong than I had the first time. “He’s like wine. If you describe what he does, he seems awful, but if it’s happening to you, it’s lovely.”

“There speaks an intoxicated man.”

“Yes,” I said greyly.

The glass silence was back.

“I wanted to talk to you about something else,” she said. She had taken off the pin that attached her cloak to her dress and now she was bumping her thumbnail across the design. It was ivory, and it showed a tiny image of Apollo and Artemis, holding their bows, with a dead lion between them.

“Lady?” All at once I was tired. I was so tired I could have tipped sideways on this couch, fully dressed and covered in dust and sacrifice smoke, and gone to sleep right in front of her.

Her focus tilted into the middle distance, which was where, I was learning, she tended to read strategy in the air. “With Pentheus going to Egypt,” she said, “my position here is difficult. An heir is what seals a crown. I have to marry again. I’m still young enough to have more children, just; probably.” She sounded like I did when I was gearing up for a battle I knew would be awful. I’d do it, because I had to, and I’d never even think of not doing it, but there was a good chance of ending up maimed or dead.

“Who will it be, lady?”

“I was thinking of asking you.”

“Oh. I don’t know anyone who could be king, everyone I know is fifteen.”

She was starting to laugh for some reason. “I didn’t mean I was thinking of asking you about it, I mean I was thinking of asking you .”

“What?” I said blankly.

“You’ve behaved with great honour, and distressing honesty,” she said. “I can’t think of better qualities in a king consort. Nor in a father. I’m older than you, but what do you think?”

Without meaning to, I stood up, and I realized it was because most of me had decided independently of the rest that it would be good to run away. I’d never more wanted to run away. I wasn’t safe to live with anyone yet. I’d hurt Dionysus and he was a head taller than me. More than hurt. I wanted to say, No, please, you don’t understand, I can’t do this, what if I kill someone who isn’t magic—you, or Pentheus, and what about the slaves, there are hundreds of people who have to overlap with the king in the palace, even if he’s just an ornamental king , but it didn’t matter. If I killed someone, I did. It would be a minimal price to pay for the security of the House of Kadmus, whatever my personal feelings about it were, because my feelings were irrelevant.

Can’t just meant, don’t want to .

And anyway, after what I’d done to Dionysus, I didn’t deserve to do things the way I wanted.

“Of course, lady. Duty is honour,” I agreed quietly, and knelt down.

She touched the back of my head like she was stroking a favourite dog. “Yes. It is.”