Page 110 of The Hymn to Dionysus

She smiled with the same joyful gleam she’d had on the roof during the riot, and I stayed very, very still, because for the first time now, I could see just how finely calibrated a game she was playing. Dionysus was right: the best thing she could do for the safety of the crown was make everybody think the lost prince was already wearing it. But if I thought I was him—then I had a legal obligation to murder her because she had killed my mother, and I was infamous for paying my blood debts. I was the psychopath who had waited nine years to hurl a Trojan princess off a balcony and burn down her palace. The Queen was balancing between the benefit of everyone else thinking I was the prince, and the risk of tipping me into believing it.

And she was enjoying every pace of it, because this was her battlefield, and nobody else was as good as her.

“No,” she said. “Me neither. He would never have done that to you. Yes, there’s a priest at the temple who he sponsored, but he sponsored hundreds of children, he was a prince. I paid the temple to make that prophecy. It solves our god problem, see? I can hum and say the meaning is obscure, everybody else will put it together and feel clever, they’ll rally behind you; meanwhile, we both know it’s not you, we all win, and Thebes survives. Hurrah. Do people say hurrah?” she added pensively.

“Only Athenians say hurrah,” I said weakly.

Even if she had bronze-clad evidence that I was the prince—she wouldn’t tell me. That would be idiotic. Of course she was going to say . . .

I couldn’t hold onto all of it properly any more. I couldn’t do what Dionysus did, and lean back and see it all from far enough away that he could see what was coming. I was jammed right up close to it, and there was nothing left to do except decide if she was doing it all for a good reason or not.

“Phaidros,” she said. “Lovely knight . . . if I genuinely thought you were the prince, you’d be dead. I loved Helios, I love that you talk like he does and that you even look a bit like him, but that wouldn’t stop me. I think—you know that.”

Or you realized I was harmless as long as I didn’t know, and you kept me in reserve for a crisis. Like Pentheus vanishing, or a god falling . . .

Did I really look like Helios? I was actually the least qualified person to know. I didn’t have a mirror, only rich idiots in Persia had real mirrors. I saw myself reflected in armour or water sometimes, but not clearly.

Sometimes you just have to admit you’re in a storm and stop trying to make any difference to where you’re going. The wind is the wind, and Poseidon is mighty.

“I . . . gods, I wish you’d said,” I said, and it was a sort of relief to stop trying to strain against that internal rudder and just let myself spin into the current. “Pentheus and I were just having an Olympic crisis about it.”

“I would have told you both if you hadn’t buggered off straightaway,” she said, laughing. “What were you doing?”

“Uh,” I said, half laughing too now. “We went to see a witch for advice.”

“Is this your kinsman witch who thinks that madness is medicine?”

“Yes.”

“Glorious, and what astonishing piece of insanity did he say this time?”

“He told me to get out of Thebes.”

“I’m glad you don’t listen to him,” she said, patting my shoulder. “He sounds fun though. Should we invite him to the wedding and enjoy the inevitable fireworks?” Her eyes lit up. “What if we introduced him to Tiresias?”

I hugged her. It was the first time I’d touched her rather than just standing still if she touched me, and she stiffened, so that it was like holding a statue with real clothes on, but then she put her arms around me, holding the back of my head. I shut my eyes against her shoulder, breathing in incense. It was a miniature crack in the edifice of my certainty that Dionysus was going to kill me soon, but he had let me go, and now I could see a tiny snatch of a future beyond next week. It was family, and there was someone I belonged to. I shouldn’t look, it was dangerous to look, but . . .

“Phaidros.” She sounded shocked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, lady. I’m just—I didn’t think I’d ever have a family again.”

She drew her thumbs under my eyelashes. She was smiling, or almost, caught between that and something much sadder, the same as me. “Me neither.”

I held her wrists. She didn’t wear bracelets, just little sword-slash marks up her arms from garrison training when she was young. Even though I was happy, something deep down in me locked up, because we were close enough for her to kiss me and I didn’t want her to, really powerfully, involuntarily didn’t want her to, because I was still getting used to the memory of Dionysus doing it, trying to cradle it close and hold it for later, and if she did, one would blur into the other, and somehow that would be worse than being shipwrecked.

She didn’t, and only bumped our heads together.

I’d never been more grateful for anything. “Shall we go?” she asked with a carefulness that took me off guard, one that felt like she wasn’t just talking about whether to leave the room. I almost said that the way this worked was that she decided and then I followed, but I stopped, because she was watching me in a way that made me realize I was wrong. That wasn’t right, not any more. She would decide, and then, mindful of the terrible gravity of the crown, she would ask me if I was going to follow, instead of wrenching me into orbit.

It was like when Dionysus lifted me up at the dance. She was much stronger and greater than me, but courteous. It was frightening and safe at the same time.

“Yes.”

Around us, the slaves were smiling, and not even trying to hide that they were. It wasn’t until I looked beyond them I realized Pentheus had been waiting in the doorway, looking awkwardly at the floor. He was freshly dressed in feast clothes too—he must have gone and come back again in the time it had taken them to dress me. Just in time to contemplate the full bleakness of his mother remarrying and starting again while he was sent away.

“Didn’t see you,” I said to him, holding my arm out, in case that would help.

He didn’t come. “Did you just say Dionysus is your kinsman?” he asked.