Page 112 of The Hymn to Dionysus

The roar was like being deaf again—I could hear a portcullis of noise and not hear anything in it. It was cheering, but not the normal kind. There wasn’t any ceremony or any duty, or courtesy—it was a visceral relief, and belief, and disbelief.

“What have you done?” the Queen said close to me, sounding strange.

“Nothing!”

“Nothing with your witch.”

“He isn’t my witch, he’s left.” I sounded as though somebody had tried to hang me, and for a few seconds my neck had taken my whole weight, but the rope had snapped.

She gave me a sceptical look, one that was reassessing me, clicking through possibilities and risks, and calculating whether or not she had just made an enormous mistake.

I felt sick.

The feast had been an occasion anyway, and the Palace was filled with bright banners, but now it was about two hundred people bigger than we had planned, and no one cared; it was a laughing chaos and I’d never seen anything like it inside the Kadmeia. Usually, the court was an austere place. Sown nobility dressed well but plainly. Anything too extravagant was usually out, automatically, because the first thing anyone would say was, What are you doing, you look like an Athenian. But for some very special occasions—the Festival of Athena, coronations, big weddings—there was a certain willingness to let the usual rules slide. There were people here tonight who I’d never seen out of legion uniform wearing bright silk that must have come in all the way from Hattusa, and gold-embroidered cloth, and those gems from India that look like they’re on fire on the inside. Lord Halys had gone the whole way; he was wearing trousers, like a Persian dandy. I had to give him some credit. I’d have died of shame. Maybe they were ironic trousers. Apophis, all in gold, looked like a god.

All I could do was sit next to the Queen and stare into the middle distance. Nobody seemed to think it was unusual. Bridegrooms are supposed to be nervous, and probably people thought I was just trying to get used to the enormity of what had just happened to me. Scum of the earth in the garrison last week, king now. King consort—though that was not what people were saying. They were saying king.

On the Queen’s other side, Pentheus looked like I felt, and I didn’t blame him. He was seeing his future vanish. If the Queen had my child now, his claim was gone. He was going to Egypt. In twenty years, if there was a choice between some half-forgotten dilettante from a mansion in Memphis and a true-born Sown knight raised in the garrison—as all younger royal children were—who people thought was the grandchild of a god, then it was pretty clear who the Assembly would back.

People were coming up to talk to us. I must have said things and smiled and deferred to the Queen, but it all hazed together and the second each person was gone, I couldn’t remember anything. All I could hear was what the Queen wasn’t saying. What if the madness really was a curse that lifted once we gave him the crown? What if he gets rid of me? He could. The garrison will do anything he says now.

Horribly, it was clear that a lot of other people were thinking that too.

For me, power had always been fixed. You obeyed the Queen, and you obeyed the general, and your commander. That was the order of the world, and the only way it could go if you didn’t want it all to collapse into screaming chaos like Pylos. I’d never seen what it looked like when the foundations of power shifted.

I’d never really understood before that this was all it was: people deciding whose orders to follow. The only real reason everyone obeyed one queen or another was that it would be too difficult not to. But when it wasn’t difficult . . .

The Queen could see it too.

If I didn’t do something very fucking rapidly, I was going to be dead by tomorrow morning.

For a little while, I tried to decide if I cared. Dionysus was gone. I’d really expected to explode some time around now. I’d planned on it for so long now that the idea of living beyond that was a bit dismaying.

Along from me, Pentheus was staring unseeing into a cup of wine. His eyelashes were too dark. He wasn’t crying, but he was right on the edge of it, and tipping. On a ship, to gather in the sails when a storm is coming, you have to climb up the rig and edge along the top yard, which is about thirty feet off the deck. That’s hard enough in a strong wind. But it’s worse when you get to the sail. There’s a footrope under the yardarm, looped along, slack, utterly fucking treacherous, especially with five people moving along it, as they have to. If you’re slightly the wrong height—slightly too tall—then you can’t hold the yard very well as you go. It’s awkwardly at hip height, and in order to tie the knots to bind up the sails, you have to lean right forward, curling over it, so that your balance tips too far forward and you feel like you’re going to fall, and this always happens in dangerously strong wind, because that’s the only time you need to urgently take in sail. One wrong twitch of the rudder and you fall. More than once, Helios had clamped one hand onto the back of my collar at exactly the right second.

Nobody was holding Pentheus’s collar.

“Lady, can I ask for a wedding gift?” I said.

“If I can give it,” the Queen said slowly.

“Don’t send Pentheus to Egypt. Send me.”

“What?”

“This, all this, whatever just happened—it makes me a danger to the crown. I don’t want to be. I’d rather die. Maybe you’ll decide I should do that. But Apophis wants a royal hostage and now you have a choice of two. One, the heir. Two, some fucking idiot from the garrison who’s only worth anything because of a prophecy and a well-timed—” I couldn’t call it a miracle in front of her. “A well-timed easing of mass hysteria. Send me away, where I can’t do any damage.”

She didn’t say anything at first, but an invisible chisel was marking a frown deeper and deeper between her eyebrows. “Phaidros, you’re volunteering for exile.”

“No, I’m volunteering to be what buys you grain for the next decade. This is the only efficient solution, lady. I think Apophis will take me if I ask him to.”

She watched me for a long time. “This is the wedding gift you request, knight?”

“It is, lady.”

“Then . . . speak to Apophis.” She blew her breath out slowly. “You are a marvel knight.”

“Duty is honour,” I said.