Page 108 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I thought maybe I’d burst into flames on the steps up to the surface, but I didn’t. Nothing happened except that I came out into the daylight, and the heat, and the faint smell of sacrifice smoke. I had to stand there and try to remember what I was doing and why I’d come, and what the point of anything was.

Pentheus was still trying to persuade his horse to let him put the reins on, but the horse was a battle charger and Pentheus was a Pentheus. When he came too close, it snapped at him. I guided its head away. It tried to bite me, like any self-respecting horse, but grumbled around in the right direction as I clipped Pentheus’s reins back onto the bridle.

The garden was already dying. The leaves of the vines already looked dull and dusty, the grapes starting to wither in the sun. As though they knew something was happening, the birds that had been taking the nectar from the honeysuckle and jasmine lifted into the air and flew away, like they were one thing that had made one decision.

What did that mean? Dionysus wouldn’t just have gone. If you could make a god drop a revenge oath just by telling them to go away, then the world would be a much more populous place.

“I was trying to help you,” Pentheus said tightly.

“I know,” I said to the bridle.

He glanced at me sideways as I swung up onto my horse. I recognised it from the garrison; it did whatever it wanted, including murdering the unwary, but usually only when nobody was looking. “You would have broken my neck if he hadn’t stopped you.”

“If I’d said to you what you said to me, and you didn’t try to break my neck, I would think you were a worthless little cockroach.”

“You’re not going to apologise, are you.”

I looked over at him. “Do you want me to push you off that horse?”

He paused. “You’re—really angry with me.”

“I . . .” I had to push my hand across my face. It was like trying to be angry with a holy calendar. It was going to click around on its mechanisms no matter how badly timed. “No. It’s all right. Do you want to hit me back?”

“Will it help?”

“Mm.”

Part of my thinking lit up and said: Blue, that’s blue actually.

He did, quite hard.

“See?” I said.

“That was good,” he admitted.

“Brief and concentrated violence is very therapeutic, I always find,” I agreed, quite enjoying how the ringing in my head and the lovely muted pain in my cheekbone was drowning out everything else. “I recommend it generally. Get in at least one fight a month, or you go neurotic and peculiar.”

He snorted and I relaxed. He sat rubbing his knuckles for a little while. “What did Dionysus say?”

My throat closed up and I had to stare at the road. I wished I could stop seeing an imaginary future where Dionysus wasn’t lying or playing games, and the sun rose in the west.

Already too dry, some leaves cracked off their vines and fell on the ground.

Maybe it was what happened when Dionysus was angry, in the absence of hundreds of knights to run mad. Only—he hadn’t looked angry. He had looked . . . what?

Tired. Very tired, the kind of tired you can only be after centuries of being tired.

Pentheus touched my shoulder. “Phaidros. Why did you say yes to the Queen? I . . . can see she must remind you of Helios, but that isn’t a good reason to marry a marvel who just thinks she’s a person. If she doesn’t kill you for this, then she’ll do it for something else. It won’t even be execution, she’ll just throw your life away on whatever seems worth it at the time.”

“Why does no one listen to me when I say that doesn’t matter, because I’m Sown and this is what I’m for? Our duty is part of us, we can’t just leave it on the side of the road.”

Pentheus thought about it for a little while. He had his hair over his shoulder on his sun side to keep his neck from burning, and with the gold beads threaded through into their half-crown, he looked like Helios. “I thought that too. But then . . . when I was in the maze, duty didn’t feel like a part of me at all. It was just chains. I suppose if you’re born in chains and so is everyone you know and you never, ever see them come off, then you would think they were part of you and something awful would happen if you found the key, but it didn’t feel awful. I felt like I could breathe.”

“We can’t think like that and be Sown at the same time,” I said.

He gave me a look then that would have been strange on a grown man, but it was eerie coming from someone who had so recently been a child. It was pity. Not the patronising kind people sometimes aim at relatives who only appear when there’s free food. The kind you have for a beautiful war horse wounded past saving—something glorious and brave, and almost dead.

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