Page 31 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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Lots of things happened at once after that. The news that Pentheus had come home was already whipping around the Palace, and with it, all the confusion I’d worried about when we first decided to have the funeral. I heard some slaves murmuring that it couldn’t be the real Pentheus, the Queen must have just found someone who looked like him. She took him to the throne room to show everyone, and to tell what was more or less the truth: he’d been found on the forest border without any memory, but by the grace of the gods, it had been restored. Skirting the edges of the hall, I noticed I was getting speculative looks.

“People think you might be magic,” Tiresias told me, appearing as usual from nowhere. I was starting to think that maybe they materialised when it was useful but spent most of their time floating around in the ether, eavesdropping. “Plenty of people were there when you turned him back.”

“It was just witchcraft,” I said.

“If I were you,” they said seriously, “I would not tell people it was witchcraft. If I were you, I would not say anything that makes you sound like anything more extraordinary than an honest knight.”

“I don’t ... understand.”

“Phaidros, you are about to marry the Queen, and you come from an unusual background in that nobody has any idea what that background is. It is standard protocol to consult the oracle at the Temple of Apollo in situations like this, so that we don’t have another Oedipus episode.”

“Who’s Oedipus?” I asked, increasingly at sea, and watching land bob further and further away. It was one of those old-sounding names from when people gave a child a brief once-over and said what they saw. Oedi-pos: sore foot.

“King of Thebes a long time ago, accidentally married his mother.”

“How do you accidentally—”

“That isn’t the point, the point is that as of at least an hour ago, but probably days ago given how clearly the Queen has been auditioning you for higher duties, the intelligence network of Apollo has been gathering information about you, and if you think I’m well-informed, you haven’t seen anything yet. You do not want to give them any reason to think you’re in any way magic.”

I still didn’t understand, but I’d fallen down a peripheral rabbit hole. “The Temple of Apollo has ... an intelligence network.”

“Has one? It’s the one. How do you think the oracles know what to tell people?”

“They’re possessed by Apollo.”

Tiresias rolled their head despairingly. “They are sometimes possessed by Apollo. He doesn’t come on demand; you don’t ring a bell and there he is. He’s a god, he’s wild and greater and stranger than anyone can ever know. But people need answers on demand. And so?”

“And so they ... have spies,” I said, feeling that same dull loss I had when the Queen explained the Apollo marvel to me, and understanding more and more why she was so flat about never even considering there might be a god in Thebes. Almost all the things most people could point to and say, There, a god working —none of it was anything to do with gods. It was clever artifice and good intelligencers.

“When someone says oracle to you,” Tiresias told me seriously, “read spymaster . There will be at least twenty people in this room who report to someone from Apollo, whether they know that someone is from Apollo or not. Do not tell them you brought Pentheus back with magic.”

After that, they left a significant pause, the one that means we both know why —even though they hadn’t given me nearly enough data for me to know why. I’d always hated the Pause. I’d heard it from generals again and again, and its only real function was to force you to do a mental uphill climb in order to look like you knew what was going on, the effect of which was put you off balance and make them feel all clever. It had been a point of honour for me, for years now, to force them to climb down and get me. The Pause never works if you’re clever enough to know that asking a pertinent question doesn’t make you sound stupid.

“Explain why, please.”

“Phaidros, you sound like a child. Go away and think about it.”

I tipped my head, about to ask why they were trying to make me feel stupid rather than just answering a straightforward question. But then I saw why. They were frightened of me. I was going to have a great deal of power soon. Tiresias had only survived this long at court because they were strange enough and right enough, often enough, that the Queen didn’t feel safe getting rid of them. They wanted to make me feel small, so that I would never feel safe enough either.

I hunted around for something penetratingly unfrightening to say.

I poked them gently. “Look, either you tell me, or I’ll tell everyone that your secret passion is Athenian poetry and if people want to get on your good side, they should insist, no matter your protests, on bringing you to special poetry-writing evenings where everyone gets together and talks about trochaic hexameters. And people will believe it, because you’re so sweary and pragmatic: they’ll all go, Aha, so it’s a front to hide the soft and fluffy soul within, we knew it all along, we shall henceforth communicate only in epic metaphor .”

Tiresias laughed as if they hadn’t expected to. I saw their shoulders sink a little as they relaxed. “You’re a monster, knight, that’s the worst thing anyone’s ever said to me. Come on.”

They took my arm and tilted me away from the crowd, towards the cloister and Semele’s shrine, where the ivy was out of control. Offering candles and sacrifices were nestled through it everywhere. The slaves were still out there, trying to collect it all up, but—actually, no. They were pretending to collect it up. They were putting things in hessian bags, but then taking them out again and setting them down in different places, expressions tight with the knowledge that if anyone noticed, they would die; they must have decided it was worth dying for. I didn’t blame them. They looked very thin indeed. They would die soon anyway.

I wondered if Dionysus knew about this. What did it feel like, to be a god when someone sacrificed to you? He had heard my prayer, or felt it, or something. Was it like someone talking to you? Could he hear an increasingly loud crowd of voices behind everything now, all the time?

“Phaidros,” Tiresias said softly, “if anyone thinks you can do magic—even if you and I both know it was very standard witching—then some people will say, you know what else was magic? What happened in the stadium. The masks. The ivy. And who is this Phaidros person anyway? We don’t know who his parents are. All we know is that the Queen’s brother was his commander and they look rather alike, in some lights. He’s young. What if he’s the lost prince?”

“What?” I said. It was true, we did look alike, but that was because we were both medium-sized dark-haired dark-eyed explosively swearing men in the same armour. “That’s stupid.”

“And the Queen would still kill you for it,” Tiresias said quietly, “because if the lost prince is indeed alive, then he owes her a blood debt for the murder of his mother.” They looked towards the courtyard too, and the light fell strangely across them, so that I could see what they’d looked like when they were Pentheus’s age. Slim, sharp, long-necked, one of those swan people who never hurried. “I’m not trying to tell you I think it’s credible. I’m trying to tell you that if someone were to feel resentful of your frankly meteoric rise at court, that is an efficient way to shoot you down. Be very careful.”

They were right. I’d been an idiot not to think of it. “Thank you. For warning me.”

“I serve the crown,” they said, looking exhausted.

“Come and sit with me for a bit; let’s pretend to be talking about important things.”

“Why?”

“So they won’t talk to us about anything else?” I said, feeling increasingly like a real prick for having made them stand up all this time. I was hungry and tired, but I was trained to be hungry and tired, and I was only thirty-one. They were leaning on their cane, and for all they weren’t old, they weren’t going to see fifty again either. “Tiresias, this news has been in circulation for about an hour and I’m already up to here in people asking me for favours and money and jobs; please just tell me something fun about tortoises?”

Tiresias laughed. “You are a ludicrous outdated piece of chivalry that ...” They trailed off, and something in their expression went glassy.

“Prophet?” I asked, wary.

When they spoke again, it was their voice, but it wasn’t them. “Sweet knight, do not lose your faith in holy devices. The messages might have been bought and paid for, and manufactured by human beings, but there is yet holy transmutation in the great machines, and the god will speak true, even when he has been paid to be false.”

Tiresias blinked twice. “Right, so, something funny about tortoises. You’re in for it, Phaidros. I know a lot of tortoise jokes.” They paused. “I feel like you’re looking at me funny.”

“I—no,” I said, not daring to touch it. “Nothing.”

The Temple of Apollo was just outside the city. It sat in what was usually a lake, on an island, but there was no water left. The lake bed was baked, and strewn with the bones of fish and eels, and even birds. What had used to be banks of reeds were more like coarse straw heaps now. Around the struts of the ancient causeway, coins and brooches and tiny messages in tiny bottles gleamed dully in the sun: old offerings. The temple itself was so white it was hard to look at in the morning glare. Beyond it, the plain was blasted, and swimming with dust trails. No one, and nothing, was on the road. The green that was engulfing the city inside the walls wasn’t here. I watched the Queen. She must have been talking to her advisers, even Tiresias, about why that was and which god they thought had been appeased. An attendant was carrying a basket of pomegranates that had grown overnight in one of the Palace courtyards to give the priests. I wondered what would happen if even the Oracle said, Sorry, that’s the Raver .

The Queen’s retinue was flying the black flag of the royal house, and once we were close, the temple’s bronze gates swung open by themselves. As we passed the bronze panelling, I felt the heat ricocheting off it. The edge of my armour was already burning my neck, even though it had been barely a quarter-mile walk under the shade of the canopies eight slaves had kept over us the whole time.

I kept two paces behind her, the same as Pentheus, so that the three of us made a moving triangle with her in the lead. We weren’t married yet, and even when we were, I wasn’t going to be a reigning king, and I didn’t want anyone to imagine for a second that I thought I would be.

She glanced back at me. “Ready?”

I bowed a little and stepped off to the side with the stewards and the Guards while she went on into the sanctuary.

The way it would work, she had explained, was:

The Oracle would receive her in the sanctuary. That was a place only for the supplicant, to hear the official question to the god. That was the theatre side of things.

But there was backstage, too, and I was it. If I waited in the courtyard for long enough, someone would come out—a priest who didn’t look anything much to ask me inside for some water, and we would talk, and the point was that he would find out what exactly was behind the official request, and if I could remember how to be amenable enough and charming enough, he might be the way I could find out what the temple knew, and maybe even how they knew it, and what their answer was likely to be.

Like all supplicants had to be, the Queen was dressed in white. As she climbed the steps, the wind pulled at her dress and tugged her hair sideways over her shoulder.

Flash, headache, and I was at Troy again, struggling to put up the tent with Helios in the wind, which was pulling at his hair too. There had been storms and everything had fallen down in the night, and everyone was nervous, because now was the perfect time for the Trojans to raid us while we were in such disarray. And I swear that he looked at me then like I wasn’t the child I’d been at the time, but who I was now, staring at him down the passageway of the years.

Although the lake was dry, there were working fountains in the courtyards, and shady cloisters, and trees that were still alive. I sat down on the edge of a fountain, beneath an ancient olive tree, and scooped up a handful of water. I was so thirsty it tasted sweet, as if someone had put honey in it. I let my head bow until the ends of my hair brushed the fountain rim, grateful for a few minutes by myself. I’d been surrounded by endless people since going into the Palace—gods, that was only yesterday morning—and it was amazingly wearing, after being alone for so long. It wasn’t the same as the tight-packed total lack of privacy in the legion. There, no one cared about me particularly, or what I was doing. Now, people were watching me all the time.

Pentheus came to have some water too and shot me a look that was full of apology for existing. I flicked some water at him. He flinched and didn’t laugh—he didn’t understand I was playing, he was reading it as fuck off —so I got him in a headlock and wrestled him sideways across my lap, and then he did laugh. I pushed him gently upright. Then, a bit brilliantly, he splashed me back.

“That,” said a cheerful voice, “is a superb scar.”

I looked around. There was a man sitting not far from me. He was about my age, maybe, but not sea-battered or worn out from living in camps and ships, and light like you can be only when you work indoors. He was dressed in blue; a priest here, then. Short hair. And he was smiling, because there was a scar across his face too, different to mine but just as noticeable.

“So is that,” I said, full of approval. I don’t like priests who haven’t been in the world but he had clearly, thoroughly been in it.

“How’d you get yours?”

“Run over by a chariot. You?”

“Dunno, I had it when the temple got me. I want to think it’s something good like a chariot but probably I just annoyed a cat.”

I laughed. “I’m Phaidros.”

He gave me a sideways look and smiled. “Very appropriate,” he said, pointing upwards to the sky.

We give our gods titles. Apollo is almost always called Phoibos Apollo, “Shining Apollo,” which comes from the same word as Phaidros. Anything that’s phai or phoi is to do with light.

“Me too,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“Phaidros. Is my name as well. That’s why the temple adopted me. Would you like to come inside? It’s a bit cooler.”

“Can I bring this other unobtrusive and manageably sized human also?” I said about Pentheus, who smiled.

“Of course.”

I followed him gratefully. He was right, it was cooler inside, and when he showed me to a marble table inside the cloister, the surface of it was nearly cold. I put my arms flat to it and felt like I might die happy. Pentheus sat down silently in the window, which was wide and unshuttered, just one step up from what had used to be a flower bed below. It made him look like he wanted a straightforward escape.

“How are you finding it at the Palace?” Other Phaidros asked as he poured us both some wine. I passed my cup back to Pentheus, and Other Phaidros held his hands up to say he’d just realized that of course knights couldn’t have wine. He gave me water instead. “It must be a change from the legion.”

“It is a change from the legion.” I paused, because I did understand what he was asking: whether I was happy to tell him a few things about the Palace, on the understanding that he might be able to tell me a few useful things back, now or later. Whether it would be worth my while for us to be intelligence friends. “I’m worried about this grain deal with Egypt. If it falls through, then we’ll have to go raiding.”

None of that was secret. That Pentheus didn’t want to go to Egypt was public knowledge, at least at court: Other Phaidros would have heard it before, but it was still true. All I had to do here was be honest without handing over unnecessary information. His work now would be to try and edge me towards more, and mine was to push back, politely. I liked things like that. It was subtle and delicate, and it was the nearest to dancing I could decently go.

In the window, Pentheus had tightened as if I’d pointed at him and said, This useless fucker won’t do as he’s told . I made an internal note to give him some translation lessons. He was right, people didn’t always say what they meant, but assuming that they never did, and that when I spoke about factual strategic problems I was criticising him personally, was just as counterproductive as taking everyone precisely at their word.

“Go to Athens,” Phaidros suggested, “Athens is a hell pit.”

I love priests who don’t talk like priests. There are two kinds, in my experience: boys made of elbows who spent a lot of their time being bullied, and who signed up with the nearest sanctuary to talk loudly about How I Am Growing Under the Eye of Apollo in order to convince everyone they weren’t doing it purely because they’d given up on trying to interact with other humans; and priests who were genuinely cut out for it, and managed to be holy but ordinary at the same time in that fine balance that always reminded me of a well-made sword. “My first choice too. Have you been?”

“I don’t know.” He looked into his wine like he was hoping to consult it for helpful images. “I think maybe I did once, before I was given to the sanctuary. I remember ... being somewhere with no women on the street. It was scary.”

“That’s the one. Better off if it was a hole in ground.”

“Khaire,” he said, and touched our cups together. “Well, good luck.”

“Thanks if you don’t tell their Temple of Apollo.”

“Bunch of bastards,” he said easily. “So. The Queen is here to ask the god about your bloodline. There’s no record of it?”

“No. I’m from the Furies, they were all over the place. Sometimes my commander said I was the son of a noble lady but I honestly I think he found me in a swamp somewhere in Egypt.”

He snorted, and so did Pentheus. “So your commander was Helios Artemiades. The Queen’s brother. Do you think you could be his son? I mean his blood son.”

“No, he didn’t have any children, even unofficial ones. He was a real knight. I’d stake my life on it.”

“Mm.” He was looking at my armour as if something about it was troubling. He didn’t say what. “Did you ever have siblings—other knights, whose commander he was?”

“No, there’s only ever one.”

“Sorry. I meant before you, boys before you.”

“He ... no, I don’t think so. He was only fifteen when he got me, he wouldn’t have been assigned a ward before then—fifteen was pushing it, even in those days. I was the first. Or he never mentioned anyone else.”

Other Phaidros was quiet for what felt like a long time. “And that’s his armour.”

“Yes.”

“Ares on the front. Persephone on the back,” he said. “Be like Persephone. Always negotiate.”

“Yes,” I said, more slowly, wondering how he knew that. It was a known thing in the legion, but I wouldn’t have expected a random priest to know it any more than he would have expected me to speak Old Cretan.

“How did he die?” he asked abruptly.

“He was killed in battle ten years ago.”

“But how?”

“He was shot by a Trojan general. Andromache.”

Recognition ghosted over his face, the puzzled kind. “There’s a Princess Andromache the bards mention. But she was just the prince’s wife.”

I shook my head. “Our generals ordered the bards never to tell the real story, it was too demoralising. She hunted Achaean officers, she killed dozens. It’s in the name. Andro mache, fighter of warriors? That isn’t her real name, that’s just what we called her. Her real name was something Hatti.”

“Did you get revenge?”

“Yes. Nine years later, but—yes.” I felt like I was lying to say it, though it was true. “I said, ‘You killed my commander,’ and she said, ‘If you say so,’ I threw her off a balcony, and that was anticlimactically that. You sound like you knew him. Helios I mean.”

He didn’t seem to hear the last part. “I see.” He sounded tight and strange, and not at all as though he had asked from general interest. “I need to show you something.” He put a knife on the table.

It was a fantastic piece of work. Like my armour, the bronze was worked with a scene in silver: Hades leading Persephone down to the underworld, Persephone holding a pomegranate. Down the length of the blade, lost souls wandered, and right at the end was the hint of the Ferryman’s boat.

“Is that his?” Other Phaidros asked.

“It is,” I said, delighted, and perplexed. I looped the cord of my seal bead over my head and held it out so he could see. It was exactly the same design. “That’s the sigil of our combat lineage. But I don’t think I’ve seen—where did you get this?”

“I don’t remember. It was left here at the temple with me, when I was little.”

In the window, Pentheus looked over properly for the first time. I held the knife out so he could see.

“It is, right?” I said, because he knew all the sigils of all the Sown lineages as well as I did.

“Yes,” he said, then gave it back. “How strange. Maybe it was stolen.”

“Or maybe he picked up a foundling on the road and left that to say who to ask about it all, later,” I said. Helios was a prince: it was just part of his duty to sponsor temple orphans—although maybe not to leave something so valuable. It was odd the temple hadn’t sold it. “Did you ever go and find him?” I asked the priest.

He shook his head. “No. No, the Oracle ... I was advised against involving myself in the House of Kadmus.”

“Probably sensible,” I said, disappointed. I’d wanted a story about Helios I didn’t know.

“Well. Thank you.” He stood up. Talk over.

I stood up too, uncertain, because I still didn’t understand why he had asked me those questions, none of which seemed to have anything to do with who my parents might have been. He saw me to the door, and I thought he might do that old trick where he asked his last and most vital question after an “oh, by the way, before I forget ...” He didn’t, though. I’d been prepared for a lot, but not just to leave with no idea what was going on. The way Pentheus twisted his nose at me, though, said that this was only normal.

As we left, I looked back, and I was sure the priest—sitting at the table again, the lovely knife between his hands—was crying.

The Queen was outside again by the time I came out, facing into the wind, towards the Fury marvels. We couldn’t see them from here, but they were audible. They were still screaming their warning.

“How was it?” she asked me.

“I think I upset him,” I said bleakly.

“Is it because you told him you were going to make him eat his own lungs?”

“I told him about murdering a Trojan general,” I mumbled.

She wrinkled her nose. “ Murdering is a strong word; is it murder, at war? What did you do? Is this Andromache?”

“I ... threw her off a balcony and left the body outside the city wall to be eaten by wild dogs.”

“Gods, Phaidros.”

“I know! I know—”

“What had those dogs ever done to you?”

“Ah,” I said, basking in relief. On my other side, Pentheus made a snorking noise. “What happens now?”

She nodded slightly. “We wait. It’s usually an hour or so.”

We all looked at the holy calendar ticking on its waist-high column in the middle of the courtyard. They were the most sophisticated marvels I’d seen, and it had been a bit of a revelation to me when I came back to Thebes and first realized that they were how people knew when the festivals were going to fall, and how the hours were measured. I’d always thought an hour was just a shortish spell of time that meant “a little while,” but it didn’t at all. It was exact, and these were the machines that said so. This one was a cube, filled with clockwork that you could see through the patterned fretwork in the sides, and dials, and jewels, and little figures and spinning bands etched with constellations. It measured hours, and days, and months, and years. It could tell you what time the Oracle Games should begin fifty years from now.

The hour marker seemed like it was moving very slowly.

“You asked me a few days ago about what happens if someone puts on a god mask,” the Queen said. “Would you like to see?”

I looked at her properly. “That—lady, tell me there isn’t someone in a cellar in an Apollo mask,” I said softly. “What if—”

She was shaking her head. “It’s all right. Come and see.”

It wasn’t a cellar. It was a pretty room inside the sanctuary, one where a priest must usually have lived. There was a desk and a chair and a wide window with a nice view of an inner courtyard, and a huge stripey cat that said hello to us as we came in, and an indigo cloak draped over the back of a couch, and scrolls everywhere. And, reading one in a sunbeam, was someone in a bronze mask of the god. The mask had a laurel crown and curly hair worked in gold. Under it, the man’s hair was gold too, the kind of gold nobody has really. Not red, like the north islanders, and not that drab grey colour people had in Scythia and the Tin Isles: it glowed in the sun. I stopped, wanting not to go one step closer, but the Queen squeezed my elbow.

“Good morning, sir,” she said to the masked figure. “How goes it today?”

“Oh, good morning, lady,” he said, and I jolted backwards, just by a tiny fraction, because he didn’t sound like a person. He sounded like Dionysus did when he wasn’t pretending not to be who he was: like harp strings, and whole choirs. It was beautiful, and frightening. He lifted his head and saw me, and seemed interested even through the mask. “Ah. Who’s this?”

“Do you think you can guess?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’m still no prophet, lady. Although—you do look awfully familiar.”

“He looks like Helios sometimes,” Pentheus offered.

I wondered how he knew what Helios looked like.

“No ...” the masked man said, sounding a little frustrated he couldn’t place me. “Never mind.”

“We’re waiting to see if the mask will bring any deeper qualities of the god,” the Queen explained. “He started to look like Apollo very quickly. Tiresias put the mask on him immediately after the witches had their success with the knights. So far, there’s been nothing else. No ability to prophesy, no particular affinity with a bow, nor a lyre. Any change at all?” she added to the masked man.

“Not that I’m aware of,” he said, and under the eerie Apollo voice, I could hear the scholar he really was. “I keep trying with the bow, but I couldn’t hit a target to save my life. Lots of dreams, but I think all of us have been having strange dreams. A forest, and a great Hunt, and ... a man who’s also a lion.”

Pentheus looked uncomfortable.

“The Hunt, of course, is sacred to the Raver,” Not Apollo added.

“Artemis is the god of the Hunt,” the Queen said.

He tilted up a scroll. “Of hunting, now. I mean the Hunt. The old way, before cities. Before the taming of the herds, and farming, and harvest. Very old god, this one. Tends only to appear when things are terrible anyway. You know. Famine, drought, falling cities; he isn’t, contrary to what you might imagine given the alcohol business, a god for good times.” He shrugged, and somehow it was clear he was smiling a bit even under the mask. “Hard to tell what he is, really; the collection of things is quite strange. Music, dance—but not music like Apollo’s—holy trances, stories, masks, wine, madness, bees, ivy, the auroch. I’ve got a scrap of an old manuscript here that calls him He of the Trees, and Polyeidos.” Many-formed . “Difficult to pin down, isn’t he?”

All that was blue. I could see it but not quite grip onto why.

“General chaos,” the Queen said.

“Chaos, yes,” Not Apollo murmured. “But not always. A cup of wine isn’t chaos, and nor is a nice story. It’s more to do with ... what ... all of those things do. For people, I mean.”

Yes. Gods care what’s happening .

“The position of the crown,” Pentheus said carefully, “is that there is no such god.”

“No, well, I see why you have to say that, what with usurpers and the lost prince and so forth,” Not Apollo said. “But ... you can’t deny any more that he is here. The Kadmeia is so bound in ivy that it grows faster than the slaves can cut it back, everyone says. That isn’t Apollo, I’m afraid. Nor is the magic of the masks, nor the madness.”

There was a certain freedom, I thought, in being locked in a room with four Guards. Nothing he said would leave, so he could say what he liked.

“What does he want, do you think?” the Queen said quietly.

I made an effort not to look at her, and not to show that I’d noticed this was the first time she had even come close to admitting that there really might be a mad god.

“Want?” He sounded sceptical. “I couldn’t speak to his desire , but what he does will become more and more intense, because it’s like drinking more and more wine, until what comes is the holy raving.”

“Would sacrifice stop it?”

“No.” He laughed. “You might as well pray to wine not to make you drunk, it isn’t the nature of wine.”

“Well,” she said. “Thank you, sir, it was interesting to speak to you.”

We left in silence, and in his sunbeam, Not Apollo went contentedly back to his manuscripts. I looked back at the door, though, and as I did, I caught him looking at me. There was something quizzical about the tilt of his head.

“Oh, that’s right,” he said, to himself, not me. “The steersman. No wonder.”

The Queen was waiting for me a few paces ahead. “Phaidros? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I felt cold and prickly. “What he said about the holy raving.”

She paused. “I know. I know. But ... here’s ... what I think. The madness began when the rations went down. I think it might lift once they go up again. And once we have that grain—which will be tonight—we can supply ships. There can be raiding again. Whatever this is, whether it is this old god of madness and the Hunt, or just the displeasure of our own gods—it seems to be a function of crisis. Get rid of the crisis, and the rest will go too. Is it now?” she added, because an acolyte in indigo had stopped near us and bowed.

“It is, lady. The Oracle will speak to you now.”

I looked back for Pentheus, who was giving me a speculative look. He didn’t say why, though, and only fell into step with me behind the Queen.

We walked slowly down the length of the long hall, towards the altar; the Queen ahead, and Pentheus and me behind. He looped his arm through mine, more like a grown-up—more like a knight—with every passing hour.

He smiled at last. “You know, you do sound like Helios. Not just distantly, I mean really like. If I shut my eyes I’d think you were him.”

“When did you meet Helios?”

“He came back to Thebes when I was little. He was kind.”

“Oh, right,” I said, not convinced Pentheus could possibly remember him properly, given that I barely did, but not wanting to say that. “Tiresias said that. I can’t hear it.”

“You even look like him.”

“Dogs look like their owners,” I agreed.

He pushed me, and laughed when I pushed him back.

The Queen glanced back, and although I had argued with her before, she looked at least halfway to pleased, and I realized that even if she didn’t feel she could act on it, she did prefer it a great deal when Pentheus was happy. As we drew near to the altar, I looked between the two of them. I hadn’t had any family for ten years, and I’d forgotten what it was like. I didn’t know them, either of them, but it didn’t matter. I belonged to someone and although it wouldn’t last for long, I was glad to have it for now. Despite that, I could hear my heart again.

Where are you, where are you.

On the dais behind the altar, the sacred fire flared, and a glorious marvel of Apollo, twice life-sized, opened its hands, and the moving bronze was silent even as the joints and hinges worked. When it spoke, its voice was echoey and golden from the chambers of the holy devices hidden inside, not human, though somewhere, of course, it would be the Oracle talking. I stared up at the marvel. A few days ago, this would have been holy. It was older than the Furies outside the walls, older than Thebes, probably, maintained down the centuries by priest-smiths sworn to never to tell anyone outside their order how the mechanisms worked, if they even knew themselves. And somewhere in that clockwork, sometimes—or I’d thought so—moving those fine bronze springs in the same way he had once moved matter to make human beings, would be Apollo. I’d used to feel that sometimes there was something mighty here in these holy machines.

Tiresias’s voice came back to me. There is yet holy transmutation in the great machines, and the god will speak true, even when he has been paid to be false.

No; they must have just said that to make me feel better. They must have, because the alternative was that Apollo was actually talking to me, and that was ... somewhere between ridiculous and cosmically arrogant.

Whoever was speaking through the marvel breathed in, and it sang through the mechanisms.

“ Agave of Thebes, Shining Apollo greets you, and answers your question. In marrying this man, you both condemn yourself to and save yourself from the prophecy of the boy who should have been king. ”

The silence was so deep I could hear the slaves behind us breathing. When I looked at the Queen, trying to tell if she understood, I caught her giving me exactly the same look; and the slaves; and the Guards. But you can’t ask the Oracle what the message means.

The only person who didn’t look confused was Pentheus.

“Did you understand that?” I asked him.

He was quiet at first, and then he leaned up, close enough that he had to hold my shoulder. “They mean it’s you,” he whispered. “They think you’re the lost prince.”