Page 107 of The Hymn to Dionysus

No no no, shut up shut up shut up.

“No. But I think you have a story that could be convincing in very dim light.” Dionysus put his head against mine. He was holding my wrist now over the red string and the bee charm. His fingers were a joint longer than mine and he could circle it comfortably, which made me look—despite all the scars that went up to my elbows, and the sword hilt calluses on my hands—strangely delicate. “I think the Queen approached you because of it. If you can’t stop people making up rumours about a lost prince and the son of a god, channel them towards someone whose loyalty you already have. It’s what I’d have done.”

I was finally breathing more normally again, and the horrible blind rage was almost gone. I felt like I was coming up from a fever. I had to squeeze my eyes shut, though, because now I could think again, I couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with me because he thought I was right, or because he just wanted me to calm down. “You don’t think she’s going to kill me then?”

“Not over this.”

I went slack so he would know he could let me go. When he did, I sat away from him, and put my hands over my face. “I’m sorry,” I said. Fuck, what had I done? Pentheus wasn’t a knight. A punch in the eye wasn’t a normal way of saying “I disapprove” for him. For him it was . . . what even was it? How was he translating that? Probably that I really did mean to stab his eyes out with his tunic pins.

Dionysus was straight and still, though the leopard came around to nudge itself between my knees to make me stroke it again. I did. After a little while, Dionysus poured us both some wine and gave me a cup. I took it and touched the cups together. The wine was cool, and a mouthful of winter.

“Thank you,” I said. That I was supposed to refuse seemed like a very long ago, distant thing now, and strangely childish.

“Phaidros . . . you’re sitting here asking me if I think she’s going to kill you. This is not what a marriage should be.”

“For gods’ sake, Dionysus, duty is honour.”

“When you say duty is honour,” he said, “it always sounds amazingly like suffering is honour.”

“Oh, fuck off,” I growled.

As always, he ignored what I’d said in favour of his unshakeable, unevidenced, unhinged, but completely correct belief that I didn’t mean anything bad. “Suffering doesn’t make people good or noble. A little bit gives them perspective. A lot turns them cruel, and too much—you get a murderer or a marvel, and neither of those are really people any more.”

“I know what you think, but I don’t know how to explain to you that it doesn’t matter,” I said, ragged now. “I can’t leave behind my duty any more than I can leave behind my arms, it’s part of me. That’s just what this is, it’s what being Sown is—”

“It matters to me,” he said over me, but not loudly. He could cast the smoke in his voice under and around anything else.

I looked across at him. “You don’t need to witch me.”

He kissed my cheek, so light it was just a scratch. I couldn’t move at first, honey-suspended again, and when I could, it was only just enough to do the same. When he touched my throat and guided me closer, it wasn’t the kind of kiss I was used to. I was used to the rage-lust you get from battle and from being covered in blood and frost and dirt, and zinging with victory. It was the most careful anyone had ever been with me.

He drew his thumb across my cheek. I didn’t know I was crying until he did that.

“Don’t go back,” he said. “Come away. We can go. Now, together.”

I understood. This was it, the revenge he had waited for. I’d made him hope, on that ship, that I would help, and then I’d betrayed him. This was the same. He had just been waiting until I hoped enough. If I said yes, he was going to laugh and I’d be a pillar of fire.

Which would be an end to it. If he’d had his revenge, he would have no reason to stay in Thebes. The madness would lift, the magic of the masks would stop. The terrible pressure leaning and leaning on the Queen would be gone, and whatever the holy raving was, whatever had happened to Pylos . . . would not happen here. Thebes might just scrape through.

Down in the city, the horns were calling. That was Apophis’s grain coming into the city, escorted by soldiers. The horn meant make way. Tomorrow, Pentheus would go to Egypt.

Fuck, but I had been such a coward. How many people could I have saved if hadn’t played this stupid game with him? What if, right after we realized that the madness was spreading out of control and the masks were wreaking their weird changes, I’d tapped him on the shoulder and said, Look, enough’s enough?

“If I said yes,” I said, knowing I must have turned grey and halfway to stone, “would you make all this stop? Is that the trade? You let Thebes go if you get me?”

I thought he would half smile and say, Well, do you really think that’s so unreasonable? I thought I’d have to admit that no, it was entirely fair enough.

He didn’t do that.

I didn’t understand what he did.

He tilted right back from me, then got up and stepped back too. Someone coming in just at that moment would have thought I’d punched him.

“No,” he said.

“Then what do you want?” I demanded. “What do I have to give you, to make it stop? I’m here, Dionysus, just take it and then for fuck’s sake, fuck off!”

He didn’t say anything. He stood for a second, then nodded once, and then walked away into the maze, to do what I had no idea, but the leopard stalked away too. I waited, but nothing happened; except that slowly, I started to notice that the room was different. There was no water in the fountain any more; no ivy; no jasmine surging and flowering up the walls. It was all dead. There was dust in the fountain, dust on the ground. The wine cups we had drunk from just a few minutes ago were still there, but they were dry, and cracked, and they looked old, as if someone a hundred years ago had abandoned them here.