Page 100 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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.”