Page 32 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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We were supposed to go back to the Palace, but Pentheus took hold of my elbow and said with an authority I’d not heard from him before that we were going out for a little while. The Guards looked perturbed and four of them came with us, without the purple cloaks, so that they might have been slaves, not that they were fooling anyone. Pentheus was dressed like a king in waiting. He took a pair of horses from some grooms at the gatehouse of the city wall.

“Where are we going?” I asked, confused.

“To see a witch,” he said, and the second I was mounted too, he urged his horse away, to the mountain road, where there were no real houses. Only the maze.

“Pentheus, wait, this isn’t ...” I broke off coughing, because there was so much dust in the air from the horse’s hooves, and the wind.

All I could do was ride after him.

It was with a gathering dread that I followed his dust trail up the slim path. This wasn’t my usual way up—it was further east, and steeper. I went slower than he did, worried about the horse, who was a thoroughbred, but streaming sweat before we were halfway. It was the middle of the day, too hot to be moving anywhere fast. Before the end, I dismounted. I’d never run a horse to collapse and I wasn’t going to start now. Every extra second dragged like hours. I wanted to just get up there and get it over with. Whatever it was. I didn’t know any more. Fire, madness, an almighty row. The way I’d left, in such absolute pissing righteousness ... I wished I could melt into the rocks.

I’d never come up to the maze from this angle before, and I was surprised by how much of it there was before I reached the familiar riot of flowers that marked Dionysus’s garden. I tethered the horse in a shady patch where there was still some grass, and climbed the last, eroded stairway.

Pentheus must have slowed down at the end too, because he was just dismounting beside a huge spill of wisteria, and looking back for me.

“Pentheus, you’ve got it wrong,” I said, scanning around for Dionysus. The coward in me hoped he was out. “I’m not—”

“It doesn’t matter! They think you are—”

“—and the man here is not going to want to help me. I know him, I live along from here, he was with me when I found you. He didn’t want me to take you back to the Palace, so we fought, I mean really fought, I hurt him—”

“Probably you should apologise to him then,” Pentheus said, undisturbed. “We need advice, and not from anyone at court. Dionysus is new in Thebes, and he has deinos magic. Tell me who better to go to?”

“How do you know who he is?” I asked, because he hadn’t mentioned Dionysus when the Queen asked him what had happened after the star fell. “Or where he lives?”

“He saved you at the bull sacrifice ceremony, remember?”

“I remember, but I thought you didn’t.”

“Yes, well, you’ll learn it’s a good idea to curate whose name you give to the Queen if you want them to live for very long,” he said dryly. “And he told me where he lives. Hello?” he shouted across the ruin. For the first time since I’d met him, he put some power in his voice. He wasn’t afraid of being heard any more.

I jumped when something dropped out of the tree next to me. It was a basket of grapes. I looked up. Dionysus was sitting in the fork of a branch. The tree was wound about with grape vines, and he had been harvesting them. Even if I had looked straight up at him before, I wouldn’t have seen him. The shadows and the light made him look like he belonged to the tree. His hair was bound up with its green cloth, and around him, ivy writhed the same green.

He didn’t come down. “What’s this about advice?”

“Apparently the two of you have met?” Pentheus asked him.

Oh, gods, he was an apparently person now. I shouldn’t have noticed, it was the last thing that could ever possibly be important, but it was reflex.

Dionysus was resting his head against the tree trunk as though he was half listening to things the dryad inside was whispering. “You look different.”

“Phaidros took the magic away.”

Dionysus’s eyes slipped to me again. “Phaidros should take the Witches’ Vow soon, then.”

I let my breath out. “Phaidros is ... very much regretting all of it.”

“And you’re here to present me with a special Dionysus Was Right cake?” he asked, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking because he forgave me or because he didn’t.

“We’ve just come from Apollo,” Pentheus explained. “The Queen wanted to find out his blood lineage for the marriage, and the oracle said—”

“Marriage?” said Dionysus, sharp.

“She asked me,” I said, struggling against the need to apologise to him for agreeing. After everything he had said, it felt like I was doing it to spite him.

“He’ll be a good king,” said Pentheus, as if that was a normal thing to say about a person. Dionysus was looking at me hard, and I wished we could have this conversation without a teenager between us. “Anyway, the oracle said to my mother, In marrying this man, you both condemn yourself to and save yourself from the prophecy of the boy who should have been king. It means Phaidros is the lost prince. The Queen doesn’t know, yet. I came to ask you: how do we keep it that way?”

“It doesn’t mean that,” I said wearily. “It’s just—”

Dionysus came down. He did it cat-silent. I don’t think he broke a single leaf. He looked exhausted. “Come inside and you can both say what you think.”

It had been years since I’d tried to speak and been this thoroughly ignored. “We don’t need to—”

Pentheus wasn’t going to be left out. “He is— ”

“You’re here now,” Dionysus said over us, and in another sharp, pointless apparently flash, I noticed that his accent was stronger when he was irritated. “I’m not standing out in the sun listening to a shouting match. Hurry up.”

I glanced at Pentheus and he looked as awkwardly chastised as I felt. We both bowed a little and did as we were told.

I had never been inside Dionysus’s part of the ruin, only the old stairways and gardens outside. I expected it to be much the same as my side, but I was wrong. The livable parts, here, were not above ground, but under. He led us down a stairway almost fully carpeted in moss, into a set of vaulted chambers where the light speared down through skylights, and the roots of the trees flooded down the walls. There were plants and flowers everywhere, some in pots, some growing through the walls. In comparison to the blazing afternoon, it was dim down here. As he came in, all the lamps—dozens, delicate glass things hanging among the flowers—lit themselves.

In the centre of the chamber was a fountain. It must have been fed by a deep spring, because the water was incredibly clear, and very cold. He gave us each a cup, and then sat down on the fountain’s edge to let Pentheus and me sit together on the couch opposite. What I’d thought was a cushion sat up and turned out to be a leopard, looking annoyed.

“She’ll not hurt anyone,” Dionysus said. She jumped up onto the fountain beside him and sprawled half in his lap, purring.

“How?” Pentheus said, looking daunted.

Dionysus didn’t smile. I had to shove down the need to turn straight back around and leave. It shouldn’t have mattered that he didn’t want to see us—I’d spent my whole life breaking into the houses of people who didn’t want to see me—but it was horrible to sit with him like this exactly because that was what I’d always done. I felt like a raider again, and like he was one of those rare people who, upon seeing the city burning and the priestesses falling from the tower, don’t run, but open their doors and say to the blood-soaked maniac outside, Come in, you must be exhausted, my house is your house . When I was young I’d thought those people were cowards, because nothing’s stopping you taking them into slavery and stealing all their things, but that isn’t how it goes, if they walk the line between unafraid and polite. It’s witchcraft. You end up sitting on someone’s couch and telling them how you grew up over a plate of cakes served with tiny silver tongs, not wrecking anything or kidnapping anybody, because after months and months of living in a tent and never being clean, all you want is to feel, briefly, like a human.

Even though you know, and they know, that you’re nine-tenths vindictive bloodthirsty animal by this point. There must be a word for that, somewhere: that weird double lie you both perform when you both know something terrible is true but you both pretend it isn’t because it makes life fractionally more bearable just now.

I felt like there was blood in my hair.

“Witching,” Dionysus said, with none of his normal joy in it. “So, what’s happening and why does it involve me?” He didn’t have to say, Given that you don’t give a fuck about what I think.

“Pentheus wanted to come,” I said, anaemically.

His eyebrow flickered. Again, he didn’t say, You didn’t care what Pentheus might want yesterday. I wished he would. Hearing what he wasn’t saying clang around in my head was much worse than hearing him say it aloud.

Pentheus didn’t seem to realize he was suddenly sitting in Arctic conditions.

“We went to consult Apollo about Phaidros’s bloodline,” he explained, “and the Oracle said to the Queen, in marrying this man you condemn yourself to and save yourself from the prophecy of the boy who should have been king. It means Phaidros is the lost prince. And now we don’t know what to do, because if she puts it together like that, she’s going to kill him.”

I took a breath to argue and Pentheus, preemptively, did as well.

“No, it means the Queen paid them to say that,” Dionysus said over us both.

“What?” Pentheus and I said together. It would have been funny on an ordinary day.

“Apollo doesn’t go around having opinions about the blood lineage of Theban knights,” Dionysus said, looking tired. “It’s in her interest. Lost heir restored. End of debate. No civil war required.”

“No,” Pentheus said, “because if it’s true then Phaidros owes her a blood debt. She murdered her sister. Everyone knows she did. And anyway, he wouldn’t need to marry her to be king, he could just be king!”

I realized suddenly that he sounded more excited by that than afraid. I stared at the leopard to keep from staring at him. If he hated her this much, no wonder she had decided to send him to Egypt. He was seventeen and coltish now, but in two years, or five?

I saw Dionysus catch it too, and I saw him—thank the gods—decide to pour cold water on it.

“Phaidros would have to believe he was the lost prince for that to matter, and he doesn’t,” Dionysus pointed out. “All this does is consolidate power. It’s fine. Go home.”

“You’ll bet his life on it?”

“Sure,” said Dionysus, quite slowly, with a lift that could have meant either Trust your witch, please or I don’t care that much about his life lately.

“No, but he could be the prince,” Pentheus pushed. “He could be. He looks just like Helios.”

“I’d have to be twenty-seven,” I said. “That’s silly. Look at me.”

“And since when can any of us accurately judge ages to within ten years?” Pentheus said, with enraging placidity. “You’ve been through a war and famines and you’ve had a horrendous life, you could easily be twenty-seven. Who’s that poor knight in the garrison with grey hair who always looks like he’s seeing the gates of Hades? He looks a decade older than he is. As for you,” he said to Dionysus, sort of laughing. “Gods alive, you could be twenty or forty.”

But probably twenty-seven. Or at least, the man was; Olympus knew how old the god was. I wondered how that worked. Was it dying and rebirth, or did he just flit between humans in the same way he could flit between animals? Had he been born exactly, or had he just, well, arrived for a look around in a form that didn’t have its own soul yet, and then stuck with this particular body because interesting things kept happening around it and probably he wasn’t going to find a better one anyway?

“Helios did not lie to me for fifteen years,” I said. “Come on, Pentheus, we’re leaving. Witches have more to do than talk to idiots like us, there will be mothers in labour waiting.”

Pentheus ignored me, and I let my neck bend, frustrated, because I couldn’t just drag him down the mountain this time. Dionysus’s eyes caught across me with a flint-strike spark. He was not, of course, going to help me.

“My mother told me,” Pentheus said, clear and level, “that Helios came to see her on the night of the fire, when the lost prince vanished. You were there. Or, his ward was.”

Dionysus looked interested. “You were there?”

Fantastic. He wasn’t even going to be neutral; he was going for active sabotage.

I sat straight and tried to set my mind into its night-watch gears: the ones that let you sit and wait, usually in the rain, for hours. And I would just have to sit here and wait. I couldn’t leave without Pentheus. There were no Guards with us. All of Thebes knew what he looked like, and an increasing portion of Thebes was desperate. Everything we had thought had happened to him before—kidnap, ransom—could still happen. From here to the Palace was about three miles. That was a long way, for a young man alone and untrained.

“Tiny Phaidros met the new prince, who was a baby. You played, it was funny.”

“I remember,” I said to the far wall.

“You don’t think that’s odd?” Pentheus said, tipping his head. “Nobody clearly remembers being four. Are you remembering what happened, or just what Helios told you?”

“If you call Helios a liar again,” I said, something very deep down in my clockwork creaking and hurting, “I will hit you.”

Dionysus shifted uneasily.

“He was a liar,” Pentheus said, laughing a bit. “He was known for it. Even my mother calls him Helios Polytropos.”

I was just going to have to stare at a wall until it was over. Helios laughed in my memory. Find the lady, tiny knight! Round and round she goes ... I’d loved that game.

“That night, the lightning struck,” Pentheus ploughed on, “and Princess Semele conveniently exploded. My mother made sure she did. The baby belonged to the King.”

“Did she tell you that?” I asked.

“No, but I’ve met my mother,” he said. He turned back to Dionysus; that was who he was really talking to, which was grating on me, because it made it seem like he didn’t think I was bright enough to understand. “Then, the baby disappears. So does Helios, and his ward. My mother always thought Helios took the baby. She thought he took it to a temple somewhere, and she had all the temples searched for a child of the right age. They were all brought to her, about a hundred boys, but she never found the right one. Eventually, she realized he must have taken it back to the legion with him. She sent people after him, but they never found anything, and he never said what he’d done. When he came back to Thebes—I was six, I suppose this was just before Troy—they had a huge row about it.”

I frowned. “They did?”

“She said he had undermined the royal line. He swore to her he had no idea what had happened, and that he’d fled Thebes because he didn’t want to be caught up in any of it. I mean he got down on his knees and swore on his oath,” Pentheus said, looking hard at me, and I realized he was daring me, now, to say that Helios wouldn’t have lied. “I don’t know how he did it or how he hid you, but Phaidros, you look like him. I can remember him as clear as the morning.”

“Or are you just remembering what someone else told you?” I said vengefully.

“Nobody tells me anything about my childhood,” Pentheus said. It could have sounded plaintive, but his tone was dry and factual. “I’ll always remember him. It was spring, there was apple blossom everywhere. I’d never seen armour like his. I was scared of him at first, but he saw my tutor getting angry with me, and he rescued me, and we stole some pomegranates from the orchard together, and he told me fairy tales.” He tipped his head. “I remember I asked him why he was being nice to me, and what he did want, and he looked at me like—I don’t know. Like he’d just seen me lose an arm. When he took me back to my tutors, he told them I’d said that, and he was furious . He put the fear of Zeus into them. Still not sure why,” he reflected. “I was getting a perfectly reasonable education, and my mother told him he was being hysterical, but ... I felt like Ares himself was on my side for the day.” He delivered that in the same slow, thoughtful way as before. “So yes. I remember him very well indeed.”

I’d wanted to find something inaccurate in that to pounce on, but there was nothing. In fact, it dovetailed very well with what I remembered.

Helios had still been furious when he came home again. We had been posted on the Nile, and it was swampy and cold and I’d never been so overjoyed to see anyone—I’d convinced myself he had died at sea—and that night, even though we were already hovering around our you’re-too-young-for-me fight, I snugged up next to him at dinner and he let me, his cloak around us both.

“Something wrong?” I’d asked, because he seemed honestly glad of it.

“No. Nothing.” But he’d winced. “I’m lying. Sorry. It’s just—Agave’s little boy. It’s horrible. He’s going to kill someone one day.”

In the context of a legion encampment getting ready to siege an Egyptian fortress, that had sounded odd. “He’ll make a good knight then.”

“Knights are a nemesis to our enemies and a blessing to our friends,” he said seriously. “But the way they treat that little boy ... he’s going to be a nemesis to everyone.”

I frowned then, because I didn’t understand, but I was getting good at knowing how to not understand things. I spoke bits of four languages by then, and that gives you a long, long patience for what you don’t understand. It would make sense eventually, once I’d been in it enough. Instead of asking him to explain something he probably couldn’t, I poured him some water and fetched us both some more bread from the clay ovens, and when I came back, he hugged me so hard it hurt along the scars from the recent Delicious Phaidros incident. Helios had killed the crocodile to get me back, but unspoken between us was that he’d left for Thebes when he had because he needed a few months of not being responsible for a moron who, upon finding a log with eyes, poked it with a stick.

“I love you, dore.” Blessing.

“Are you having a stroke?” I’d said.

In Dionysus’s chamber under the maze, the leopard lashed its tail to and fro and snapped at a tiny bird that had flown through the gap in the ceiling to drink from the fountain. Dionysus was giving me one of those long looks that I was still wasn’t used to, the ones that read all my thoughts etched onto the inside of my skull.

“Do you remember anything about the baby?” he asked, and I had that weird between-two-mirrors feeling again, because I would have sworn he was daring me to say, of course I do, and you know, he had blue eyes too .

“Helios did take him,” I said, still partially stuck back on the Nile in the camp with that bread still too hot from the oven and one knee cold where Helios’s cloak didn’t cover it. “But he didn’t bring the baby with us to the legion. He vanished for a while, he left me at a temple, but he came back, and ... I don’t remember the journey. I just remember being at home in our tent. That was in Phoenicia somewhere. Where there was definitively no baby.”

“Apollo above, I know what happened,” Pentheus said suddenly.

“No, you don’t,” I said, my springs starting to shriek.

The leopard sprang down and pushed its head against my knee. Dionysus trying to make sure I didn’t murder anyone. I stroked the leopard’s head and its purred and batted companionably at the leather strips that made up my kilt, though it was Dionysus who half-closed his eyes.

“He swapped you,” Pentheus exclaimed. “Of course he wouldn’t make it across the country with a child and a toddler, not with the Hidden out looking for him! He left his Phaidros at Apollo, and took the baby. The baby was his nephew, it was his duty to protect his own blood, not to mention the royal line.” He was all alight. “Phaidros, that’s why you don’t remember the journey! You were too tiny to remember much at all! And that’s why the priest at Apollo has Helios’s knife!”

The leopard shoved its head under my hand again.

Worse than unwanted, the memory of that terrible row I’d had with Helios when I was nineteen came back. You’re too young! You’re too young ...

What if I really had been? What if I hadn’t been nineteen at all?

“But the legion would have noticed,” Dionysus said, and with a distant sort of smugness I realized he was regretting having started all this. “That he left with a child of four and came back with a baby of ... how old?” he asked me.

“Eighteen months maybe,” I said, staring into the past.

I’d been small for my age for so long. It was why he’d kept me off the line. I’d always thought it was because of the famine years.

No, it was because of the famine years.

“No, but that’s why it’s clever!” Pentheus insisted. “He went back to a different unit! He came here from Egypt. You just said you went back to Phoenicia, Phaidros. That’s the other side of the world! Think about it: it would have taken him about three months to get there at that time of year, and even when he did get there, who was going to know? They would have said, ‘Goodness, your ward’s a bit young isn’t he,’ and all he would have had to say is, ‘Tell me about it, society is broken,’ and that would have been that—”

“Pentheus,” I ground out. “Please shut up. That didn’t happen.”

“But think about—”

“I was not married to my uncle .”

Pentheus gave me a shining, tone-deaf look full of triumph. “There were never going to be children, though so ... would it really have mattered?”

I slapped him so hard it snapped his head to the side. The leopard jumped, startled, and Dionysus lunged across to catch me in a bear hug before I could do anything worse, which was just as well, because I would have.

“All right! It’s all right,” he said, I think to both of us. He had got behind me, his arm locked over my chest, pressing me back against his. “Enough. Pentheus—anything broken?”

Pentheus was silent, and very still. The side of his face was bright red. Nobody would ever have hit him before. He pulled his sleeve over his mouth. Nothing was broken. He wasn’t even bleeding.

“Are you going to apologise?” he asked me stiffly.

“No. I’m going to gouge your eyes out with your fucking tunic pins,” I explained.

Pentheus snatched up his horse’s reins and ran back outside.

I didn’t care. He fucking deserved it and frankly I would have felt better if I could have catapulted him off a building.

Dionysus didn’t let me go, sensibly. “He was just trying to help you, knight, he’s worried his mother will kill you.”

“I could live with him expressing his concern some other fucking way ,” I snarled, rising towards the end so Pentheus would hear it where he was running up the steps.

“And he will, you’ll teach him, but not if you beat him into sludge first. Sludge is generally a slow learner.”

It should have been stifling, but being trapped against him with his arms crossed over my ribs was—safe. All the razor edges of everything were dulling down again. “Helios didn’t,” I said. “He didn’t do any of that.”

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 no no, shut up shut up shut up.

“No. But I think you have a story that could be convincing in very dim light.” Dionysus put his head against mine. He was holding my wrist now over the red string and the bee charm. His fingers were a joint longer than mine and he could circle it comfortably, which made me look—despite all the scars that went up to my elbows, and the sword hilt calluses on my hands—strangely delicate. “I think the Queen approached you because of it. If you can’t stop people making up rumours about a lost prince and the son of a god, channel them towards someone whose loyalty you already have. It’s what I’d have done.”

I was finally breathing more normally again, and the horrible blind rage was almost gone. I felt like I was coming up from a fever. I had to squeeze my eyes shut, though, because now I could think again, I couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with me because he thought I was right, or because he just wanted me to calm down. “You don’t think she’s going to kill me then?”

“Not over this.”

I went slack so he would know he could let me go. When he did, I sat away from him, and put my hands over my face. “I’m sorry,” I said. Fuck, what had I done? Pentheus wasn’t a knight. A punch in the eye wasn’t a normal way of saying “I disapprove” for him. For him it was ... what even was it? How was he translating that? Probably that I really did mean to stab his eyes out with his tunic pins.

Dionysus was straight and still, though the leopard came around to nudge itself between my knees to make me stroke it again. I did. After a little while, Dionysus poured us both some wine and gave me a cup. I took it and touched the cups together. The wine was cool, and a mouthful of winter.

“Thank you,” I said. That I was supposed to refuse seemed like a very long ago, distant thing now, and strangely childish.

“Phaidros ... you’re sitting here asking me if I think she’s going to kill you. This is not what a marriage should be.”

“For gods’ sake, Dionysus, duty is honour.”

“When you say duty is honour,” he said, “it always sounds amazingly like suffering is honour.”

“Oh, fuck off,” I growled.

As always, he ignored what I’d said in favour of his unshakeable, unevidenced, unhinged, but completely correct belief that I didn’t mean anything bad. “Suffering doesn’t make people good or noble. A little bit gives them perspective. A lot turns them cruel, and too much—you get a murderer or a marvel, and neither of those are really people any more.”

“I know what you think, but I don’t know how to explain to you that it doesn’t matter,” I said, ragged now. “I can’t leave behind my duty any more than I can leave behind my arms, it’s part of me. That’s just what this is, it’s what being Sown is—”

“It matters to me,” he said over me, but not loudly. He could cast the smoke in his voice under and around anything else.

I looked across at him. “You don’t need to witch me.”

He kissed my cheek, so light it was just a scratch. I couldn’t move at first, honey-suspended again, and when I could, it was only just enough to do the same. When he touched my throat and guided me closer, it wasn’t the kind of kiss I was used to. I was used to the rage-lust you get from battle and from being covered in blood and frost and dirt, and zinging with victory. It was the most careful anyone had ever been with me.

He drew his thumb across my cheek. I didn’t know I was crying until he did that.

“Don’t go back,” he said. “Come away. We can go. Now, together.”

I understood. This was it, the revenge he had waited for. I’d made him hope, on that ship, that I would help, and then I’d betrayed him. This was the same. He had just been waiting until I hoped enough. If I said yes, he was going to laugh and I’d be a pillar of fire.

Which would be an end to it. If he’d had his revenge, he would have no reason to stay in Thebes. The madness would lift, the magic of the masks would stop. The terrible pressure leaning and leaning on the Queen would be gone, and whatever the holy raving was, whatever had happened to Pylos ... would not happen here. Thebes might just scrape through.

Down in the city, the horns were calling. That was Apophis’s grain coming into the city, escorted by soldiers. The horn meant make way . Tomorrow, Pentheus would go to Egypt.

Fuck, but I had been such a coward. How many people could I have saved if hadn’t played this stupid game with him? What if, right after we realized that the madness was spreading out of control and the masks were wreaking their weird changes, I’d tapped him on the shoulder and said, Look, enough’s enough ?

“If I said yes,” I said, knowing I must have turned grey and halfway to stone, “would you make all this stop? Is that the trade? You let Thebes go if you get me?”

I thought he would half smile and say, Well, do you really think that’s so unreasonable? I thought I’d have to admit that no, it was entirely fair enough.

He didn’t do that.

I didn’t understand what he did.

He tilted right back from me, then got up and stepped back too. Someone coming in just at that moment would have thought I’d punched him.

“No,” he said.

“Then what do you want ?” I demanded. “What do I have to give you, to make it stop? I’m here, Dionysus, just take it and then for fuck’s sake, fuck off !”

He didn’t say anything. He stood for a second, then nodded once, and then walked away into the maze, to do what I had no idea, but the leopard stalked away too. I waited, but nothing happened; except that slowly, I started to notice that the room was different. There was no water in the fountain any more; no ivy; no jasmine surging and flowering up the walls. It was all dead. There was dust in the fountain, dust on the ground. The wine cups we had drunk from just a few minutes ago were still there, but they were dry, and cracked, and they looked old, as if someone a hundred years ago had abandoned them here.

I thought maybe I’d burst into flames on the steps up to the surface, but I didn’t. Nothing happened except that I came out into the daylight, and the heat, and the faint smell of sacrifice smoke. I had to stand there and try to remember what I was doing and why I’d come, and what the point of anything was.

Pentheus was still trying to persuade his horse to let him put the reins on, but the horse was a battle charger and Pentheus was a Pentheus. When he came too close, it snapped at him. I guided its head away. It tried to bite me, like any self-respecting horse, but grumbled around in the right direction as I clipped Pentheus’s reins back onto the bridle.

The garden was already dying. The leaves of the vines already looked dull and dusty, the grapes starting to wither in the sun. As though they knew something was happening, the birds that had been taking the nectar from the honeysuckle and jasmine lifted into the air and flew away, like they were one thing that had made one decision.

What did that mean? Dionysus wouldn’t just have gone . If you could make a god drop a revenge oath just by telling them to go away, then the world would be a much more populous place.

“I was trying to help you,” Pentheus said tightly.

“I know,” I said to the bridle.

He glanced at me sideways as I swung up onto my horse. I recognised it from the garrison; it did whatever it wanted, including murdering the unwary, but usually only when nobody was looking. “You would have broken my neck if he hadn’t stopped you.”

“If I’d said to you what you said to me, and you didn’t try to break my neck, I would think you were a worthless little cockroach.”

“You’re not going to apologise, are you.”

I looked over at him. “Do you want me to push you off that horse?”

He paused. “You’re—really angry with me.”

“I ...” I had to push my hand across my face. It was like trying to be angry with a holy calendar. It was going to click around on its mechanisms no matter how badly timed. “No. It’s all right. Do you want to hit me back?”

“Will it help?”

“Mm.”

Part of my thinking lit up and said: Blue, that’s blue actually .

He did, quite hard.

“See?” I said.

“That was good,” he admitted.

“Brief and concentrated violence is very therapeutic, I always find,” I agreed, quite enjoying how the ringing in my head and the lovely muted pain in my cheekbone was drowning out everything else. “I recommend it generally. Get in at least one fight a month, or you go neurotic and peculiar.”

He snorted and I relaxed. He sat rubbing his knuckles for a little while. “What did Dionysus say?”

My throat closed up and I had to stare at the road. I wished I could stop seeing an imaginary future where Dionysus wasn’t lying or playing games, and the sun rose in the west.

Already too dry, some leaves cracked off their vines and fell on the ground.

Maybe it was what happened when Dionysus was angry, in the absence of hundreds of knights to run mad. Only—he hadn’t looked angry. He had looked ... what?

Tired. Very tired, the kind of tired you can only be after centuries of being tired.

Pentheus touched my shoulder. “Phaidros. Why did you say yes to the Queen? I ... can see she must remind you of Helios, but that isn’t a good reason to marry a marvel who just thinks she’s a person. If she doesn’t kill you for this, then she’ll do it for something else. It won’t even be execution, she’ll just throw your life away on whatever seems worth it at the time.”

“Why does no one listen to me when I say that doesn’t matter, because I’m Sown and this is what I’m for? Our duty is part of us, we can’t just leave it on the side of the road.”

Pentheus thought about it for a little while. He had his hair over his shoulder on his sun side to keep his neck from burning, and with the gold beads threaded through into their half-crown, he looked like Helios. “I thought that too. But then ... when I was in the maze, duty didn’t feel like a part of me at all. It was just chains. I suppose if you’re born in chains and so is everyone you know and you never, ever see them come off, then you would think they were part of you and something awful would happen if you found the key, but it didn’t feel awful. I felt like I could breathe.”

“We can’t think like that and be Sown at the same time,” I said.

He gave me a look then that would have been strange on a grown man, but it was eerie coming from someone who had so recently been a child. It was pity. Not the patronising kind people sometimes aim at relatives who only appear when there’s free food. The kind you have for a beautiful war horse wounded past saving—something glorious and brave, and almost dead.