Page 106 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“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.