Page 111 of The Hymn to Dionysus

It was well to the side of what I’d expected him to say, but maybe he was grasping at the nearest thing that wasn’t to do with the betrothal. “Yes,” I said, not knowing how to explain. “He was my guest a long time ago.”

“But—I thought he only recently came to Thebes?”

“I wrote to him,” I said, which was kind of true. “I invited him.”

When I blinked, I saw Dionysus in the maze again, and how exhausted he had looked. Not angry. That was what made it horrible.

I needed to go back. I needed to apologise. I needed to get on my knees like I should have done all along.

After the feast.

Pentheus stared at me with raw pain across his face.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I—nothing,” he said, but he turned inward and glassy, and strange. He turned away and walked ahead of us.

I looked helplessly at the Queen. I taught people his age all the time, and usually they were clay tablets: all their unhappinesses were easy to read, and easy to sweep smooth and write over. Pentheus’s was there too, but it was another language.

She shook her head once, no wiser.

I didn’t have any more time to think about it, because one of the Queen’s secretaries ran in. Ran, even though none of them ever moved at a pace more urgent than an elegant glide, and not the earth shaking nor a god falling would make them sign their beads at anything other than a dead ninety-degree angle.

“Lady! Lady,” he gasped, and he was laughing. I’d never seen any of her secretaries laugh. “Lady, it’s the knights, you have to come and see—”

“What’s happened now? If we need to summon the Sown mothers again—”

“No! They’re coming in from Ares and Hermes, they’re all—they’re cured!”

She looked at me with the same wariness of good news that filled me up then too, and then we both started after the secretary, joining a quickening stream of people all going the same way. Pentheus let himself be left behind and ignored me when I put my hand back for him.

Around the pillars, the ivy was dying.

When we poured through to the Knights’ Court, along with an interested comet tail of Egyptians soldiers and people who had come for grain, it was already crowded. There were sudden overjoyed yells when wards recognised commanders who had vanished into Ares days ago, laughing, little knots of people thunking together, crying. I saw Polydorus’s commander, looking sunburned and worse for wear but very, very sane, scoop him right off his feet and spin him around. Even the Guards were looking happy.

I stared over everyone, at the sky, waiting for something else, something as terrible as the howling madness at the stadium or a star hurtling right at us, but the sky was only the sky.

It smashed into me very, very slowly. Whatever minds have instead of bones, I could feel mine splintering.

Dionysus was gone.

No. He couldn’t be.

What?

That wasn’t how any of this worked. A god didn’t scream down from the heavens for revenge and then just leave when you told him to.

Where are you, where are you, where are you?

“Phaidros,” Pentheus said beside me, as though I’d missed something urgent.

People had noticed us where we were standing at the top of the steps in our red and black and gold. A strange quiet was falling. It wasn’t until people started to kneel that I understood what was happening.

None of them knew about Dionysus. All they knew was that the Oracle had made a prophecy that made me sound like the lost prince, and now, the hour a crown was going on my head, the madness was gone.

The Queen was looking at me with a reserve that had not been there earlier when she told me it was just a trick. She didn’t have her war-joy glow. She was thinking. Really thinking. I saw her clockwork click around to the only workable solution, for now. She took my hand and lifted it over my head.

“Sown: your king!”