Page 103 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“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.”