Page 104 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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?