Page 113 of The Hymn to Dionysus

My hair was fastened up with some complicated gold things, and when she touched the back of my head, her signet ring clinked.

“Can I tell Pentheus?” I asked, still very quiet.

Beyond her, Pentheus was still looking his wine. He had no colour, and now, I thought he was sweating; he looked ill. I went round to his chair. He flinched when I put my hand on the back of it.

“I need to tell you something,” I began.

He stood up suddenly. “Everyone, I have something to say on the occasion of my mother’s betrothal.”

The long table went quiet.

“I’ve tried to keep my silence, for the good of the kingdom,” Pentheus said. He wasn’t holding back the strength of his own voice any more. He was talking like he had in the maze with Dionysus; like I did, I realized suddenly, pulling the sound from low in his chest to give it the strength to carry over a room, or a training yard. “But I can’t. I vanished because I was kidnapped and drugged, and brought back to the Palace when the benefit would be greatest for the man who took me.”

I stood back from his chair. Someone had spilled some wine and a little of it soaked dark into the hem of my cloak.

“I didn’t understand why he did it, but today at the Temple of Apollo, we were given the answer. The Oracle said to the Queen, In marrying this man, you both condemn yourself to and save yourself from prophecy of the boy who should have been king. I don’t think the meaning could be clearer. Twenty-five years ago Princess Semele’s son vanished from the Palace during the lightning strike. Twenty-five years ago, my uncle Helios joined a new legion with a child of unknown origin, and now, everyone who might have known who he was is dead. And then in a time of crisis, I was taken, and given back only once my return would assure my captor great rewards from my mother. The oracle means that Phaidros is the lost prince. And it was Phaidros who stole me, and Phaidros who brought me back.”

Someone dropped a spoon. The little clang sounded like an explosion.

“No,” I said. “What? Pentheus—”

“No,” Pentheus said doggedly to his mother. “They did this together. Phaidros and his fucking witch. He wants to be king and when I asked him for help he saw an opportunity, and handed me over to the witch to be enchanted out of my mind. He just said they’ve known each other for years. It was a trick.” His voice sounded like his throat had locked. With a levee-breaking rush, I realized he wasn’t lying: he thought he was telling the truth. I’d told him I knew Dionysus, and he’d thought that meant we had planned it together. “The witch took me and together they worked out how best to put Phaidros on the throne.”

The silence was dead, like the entire room had taken an opium overdose. I looked at the Queen, because there was nothing I could say. Either she believed Pentheus or she believed me: there was no evidence to give her. Or—no. It wasn’t even about who she believed. It was about choosing who was least dangerous now. Everyone else watched her too.

The Queen stood up slowly. She looked utterly weary of the whole thing, and with a sort of fever flash, it went across my mind that this was how brilliant monarchs were pulled down. Bad luck and people reacting just a few minutes too soon, and witches trying to protect their friends, and king consorts who couldn’t find a way to make an angry, frightened prince less angry and frightened.

“Arrest him,” she said to the Guards, about me. “And find the witch.”

As she said it, she watched Pentheus, and this time, I recognised what she was doing. Kicking his mooring lines. She was seeing just how sure he was, waiting for him to say, no, stop.

Pentheus only stared straight back at her.

For the first time, I understood what Dionysus had been trying to tell me all along. I’d seen what happened in the stadium when he smashed everyone’s clockwork and all that was left was the wild thing at the heart of a human, but this was what happened when the wild died, and all that was left was the clockwork. It looked different—the opposite, absolute blank calm, oceans from the madness of the knights—but it was horrible in equal measure. I felt like I was seeing someone who had been mutilated past all repair.

The Queen lifted her eyebrow, but that was all. She didn’t change the order, and only nodded at the Guards. It was fractional, but I just caught it: she looked approving. She wanted Pentheus to be ruthless.

Ruthless is Sown.

32

Traditionally, kings and queens have to be healthy and whole in order to serve, because they’re reflections of their kingdom: if the king is sick, the superstition is that the kingdom will soon follow. It’s a stupid law. There are generals with one leg or one eye, or with the falling sickness, and I always preferred them, because someone who’s been wounded or who’s grown up struggling knows a lot better than some hale brash giant what it’s like to be scared. But, it was the law. So, the traditional way to rule someone out of the kingship is to blind him, castrate him, and shove him on a galley to be a slave at the oar until he dies, probably about three days later. It’s bad luck to execute a king. I don’t know why they think it’s less bad to do the other thing, but there you are.

I had a cell to myself. It was a dark oven. I could stand on tiptoe and see, just, through the long narrow window into the market square, where slaves were picking up empty grain sacks and people were out in the sunset with freshly baked bread and jugs of wine, and the jubilant ease of people who weren’t going to starve any more. Knights newly reunited sat out on the steps together, talking about what the madness had been like. And I could hear the heralds everywhere, yelling that at dawn, Phaidros Heliades was going to be blinded and sent to serve at the oar for high treason.

I’d never been this afraid before. It wasn’t like the fizzy energy you get before a battle, the one where you have to bounce up and down and make unfunny jokes. It wasn’t like anything. I would have been less scared of being straightforwardly executed, but this was dread stacked on dread.

Be Persephone. Always negotiate. See Death coming, see him leaning against the door, and say, aha, you’re coming with me, thank you very much. Only there was no negotiating any more. The Guards had been told not to come even within shouting distance of me. The whole prison was silent. The Queen knew all about Be Persephone.

The ground juddered; Poseidon smashing his fist into it from far away. I put my head against the wall, hoping I could die in an earthquake before they got the knives out.

A few minutes after the little earthquake, some people came out of the Palace, grumbling about old ceilings. When another tremor came, this one big enough to make the ground look like it was breathing, a lot more people arrived, carrying lamps, still—gods, it felt like a thousand years ago—in their feast clothes, some with cups and plates. It still wasn’t enough to really alarm anybody. Achaea is earthquake country. I’d been getting used to it since I came back to Thebes. I watched, grateful to have some people to look at. It was a good distraction from how horribly fucking alive I felt, now I was on my way to dying.

Not like invigorated. Just—healthy. All my joints were working strong and smooth, the stab wound in my shoulder was healing wonderfully. I was working like I was supposed to, I was the strongest I could be and probably had ever been. Like Helios, laughing that day on the line, before—before.

I wasn’t even going to get that kind of death. What was going to happen in the morning was unsayable. Some things are so poisonous than even the names are poison, and anyone who understands the word ends up sick just from the knowing of it.

There was a knot of Guards, escorting Pentheus.