Page 105 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“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.