Page 114 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“The Palace has stood a thousand years, I think it can stand another few hours,” he was saying tiredly.

There was a stony but nonetheless concerned shifting under the purple cloaks.

“When the god goes before the Queen, the High City shall fall?” he guessed, quite gently.

He sounded like he had grown up since I’d last seen him an hour ago. The last of his childhood was gone. He had stood up and fought, and now he knew how strong he was . . . he was being careful of other people.

“There’s no god here. As my mother said, there was a witch with some poisoned wine and some tricks, and an ambitious knight. It’s just an earthquake.”

“Pentheus,” I said.

The Guards tightened and looked like they wanted to stop him going near any walls, but he waved them off.

“Phaidros.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “I didn’t take you.”

He came closer to the bars, but not very. The torchlight slung gold over him. He looked older, and harder. “What’s more likely? That I spoke to a witch, who knew a knight with a very convincing claim to being the lost prince, and who just—didn’t mention it? And then that knight just stumbled over me, and in the line of his duty, because he’s just that fucking dedicated to his vows, happened to take me back at the opportune moment?”

“Pentheus—”

“Or,” he said over me, “I spoke to a witch who knew a knight with a claim, and he said, I have an idea. You both hid me. You took advantage of the madness and the drought. He kept me drugged in the maze. He poisoned the wine at the stadium. You brought me back when you were certain the Queen would reward you as she did. You tell me, Phaidros. What would you believe?”

“You know if you’d waited another quarter of an hour, it would have been me going to Egypt and not you?”

“What?”

“That’s what I was talking to the Queen about. She had agreed. You were to stay in Thebes.” What was so fucking aggravating here was that there was no objective obstacle. There was no god any more, there was no army at the gates, nothing clear and clean to fight against. It was just politics, and a broken boy, and a piece of flamboyantly terrible timing. If someone had put all this in a report about some other kingdom and told it to me, I’d have said, Don’t be so stupid, no group of thinking humans can misunderstand each other that badly, go back and find out what really happened. “Sometimes people aren’t out to screw you over.”

He looked at me like I’d slapped him, but then he shut that down and half laughed. “You know there’s a story doing the rounds at the moment? It’s new, it’s everywhere, you’ll have heard it. It’s about a prince whose father went away to the wars when he was a baby, and his mother ruled for a long time alone—but now the wars are over, and still no king has returned, suitors are closing in to marry the Queen and take over the kingdom. You’ve heard it?”

“No,” I said.

“Her suitors—lords from all the kingdoms all around—make everyone’s life hell. They take and take, they all assume the kingdom is theirs. She’s holding them off, but really it’s the prince’s responsibility to do something, but he’s too young to know what to do and he thinks he’s going to be killed. Yes?”

“He sounds like a useless little prick, doesn’t he,” I said flatly. I didn’t like monologues even when the setting was a nice campfire on the shore.

“And then . . . his father comes home, and says, it’s all right, I’ve got you now. Leave it to me. The boy doesn’t believe him, because there are dozens of suitors and they’re all pigs. But then his father kills them all. He just walks through the Palace with a longbow, like Apollo. And after that, the king and the queen and the prince are a family again. Nice, right?”

I waited, though I did wonder what the fuck kind of queen wouldn’t have just poisoned them all by then. I suspected an Athenian story.

“I hate that story,” he said flat and hard. “It’s fantasy. Fathers don’t come for you when you need them. Fathers are wolves who only don’t hurt you for as long as you aren’t inconvenient.” He inclined his head. “So don’t try to tell me you came to save me.”

Dionysus had told me this would happen. Take him back now, and he’ll become merciless, because nobody ever showed him any mercy.

I had to thump my fist against the bars, very slowly. I’d never met a single soul who got in his own way so much. “Gods, Pentheus. Even if there was a father who adored you trying to get into the Palace, even if he was knocking down the gate and offering to kill anyone who had ever wronged you, you wouldn’t fucking hear him for crying that no one is coming.”

Horrible pain went over his face. He thought I was saying it just to hurt him. “I hope the knife is blunt,” he told me, with a knot in his voice.

Rancid ghost pain shot right through me.

You can know someone turned out bad because nobody loved them enough, and you can understand, and empathise—and you can still hope that a building falls on them.

Obligingly, the ground shivered again. One of the Guards came to guide him away from the building, out into the open again. He didn’t look back. I thunked my head against the bars.

The tremors had disturbed some bats. Now, they were chittering right through the empty prison, just like they’d gone through the maze when Pentheus stole me. A couple even got through the bars on the door and ricocheted around the cell. One crashed into me. I had to pick it up and edge it outside through the window bars. It didn’t try to bite me; it just sat in my hands, looking strangely happy, and when I put it outside, it just sat there too, wings folded and fur fluffed up. It made a little squeaking noise so it could see me, and I had an odd feeling that I was getting a good-natured bat survey. Then it flapped away.

The ground heaved, and I fell over. There was a collective yell from the courtyard as everyone else did too.