Page 115 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I pulled myself upright by the window bars; snatched my hands back, because they felt wrong; then stopped.

Ivy was forcing its way up through the flagstones outside, vivid and green and impossible. I had to stand there with my hands still out, a few inches off the bars. I could see the ivy growing.

Terrible, terrible hope swelled up inside the chambers of my heart, enough to hurt.

A stream of purple cloaks flowed down the steps from the throne room, surrounding the Queen. They Guards had their shields raised overhead, covered in dust.

Another tremor, and the flagstones rippled. I swayed with the quake, riding it, and feeling crazily as though I wasn’t really there: I was just watching or dreaming, and my pulse was going where are you where are you where are you.

“Let’s evacuate the Palace,” the Queen called. She sounded calm, like she always did if things were getting dangerous. “Everyone out, into the courtyards. Make sure the fires are out in the kitchens. No lamps left burning inside. Where’s Pentheus?” It was hard to see by the torchlight and the confusion of people hurrying away from the buildings.

“Here,” Pentheus said. “I’ve got Apophis and Lord Halys too.”

I only saw him then because I was looking for him.

Dionysus was sitting on the edge of the great fountain of Apollo. He had been all along. He was wearing witch black, but unveiled, still as a tomb. Ivy and jasmine had exploded over the Apollo marvel already, the shape of it lost under the density of the vines. No one had noticed. He was there and not there.

“What about Phaidros?” Pentheus asked the Queen.

They both looked towards the cells. They could see me. There was a torch above the barred window.

“Leave him. It’s up to the gods.”

Dionysus stood up. Nobody seemed to see him cross the courtyard. People got out of his way, though—slaves, Guards, knights, right out of it, leaving empty space around him, as though they did know on some level that something was there. A few puzzled looks fell onto the ground where, in his wake, flowers were blooming up through the cracked flagstones. Even though they couldn’t really see him, even though he was only there like three is there in three apples, the Guards looked dazed. One of them started to spin.

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance . . .

“What’s happening?” Pentheus snapped suddenly. He wrenched a coil of ivy out of a crack in the ground.

“Shouldn’t have lied, should you,” Dionysus said in passing, and somehow I heard it even though he was still fully forty feet away.

Pentheus heard it too and spun around, but Dionysus was already gone, and all around them, the Guards were going mad, turning into the dance, singing. So were other people. Looking hypnotised, a Guard handed Dionysus the prison keys.

The Queen had seen. She stood in his way. “Stop. Who are you?”

“I’m the one who took your son. He asked me to. He asked to forget everything, so that’s what I did.”

“Why?”

I thought he would explain, because she was the Queen, and even gods listen to kings and queens. I thought he would tell her about how he had been ancient before Zeus was even thought of, and how these forests had been his long before Kadmus and the dragon, and maybe even threaten her, to try and make her remember the old ways of the Hunt before it was too late. In the bards’ stories, he would have. They do a thing called an aristea, in stories—it’s where the two people who are at odds but equally matched meet. It’s always long. They always talk to each other. It’s always clear that neither of them are wrong or right: it’s just that circumstances have forced them to fight. One always dies heroically; usually, the other one goes mad. It’s always huge, and sad, and lovely.

He didn’t. He didn’t care about her. He had seen the passing of a hundred queens.

He just switched her off.

Her and everyone else. They all just fell. Everyone in the courtyard, every Guard and slave, the Queen, Pentheus . . . they all collapsed. I stared. He couldn’t have just killed them. Surely he hadn’t . . .

He knelt down outside the window and gave the keys to me.

“Are they dead?” I rasped.

“Oh, fuck off, Phaidros, of course they’re not fucking dead, they’re asleep,” he said, his voice smoking crossly. “Meet me round the other way.”

I was shaking nearly too much to get the keys into the lock. Just as the lock gave, the ground bucked and I staggered against the wall, half running and half falling into the corridor.

I knew he was coming before I saw him, because the wooden door into the Guards’ common room was splitting, the dryad inside stretching, growing, turning back into an oak tree. She was already as tall as the room, branches creaking across the ceiling. Acorns rained across the floor. Something in my chest tied itself into one of those monkey’s fist knots we had used to put on the end of heaving lines to give them more weight, because what had he come back for, after what I’d said to him?

Then there he was. I thumped into him and thought, There, that’s fine, set me on fire now, but he didn’t. He crossed his arms over my back, both hands clenched over my shoulders. He curled forward over me, and around us, all the doors turned back into trees, the branches shielding us both, locking together, battening out the torchlight and the falling chunks of stone from the ceiling. We would never have been fast enough if we had tried to run anyway, but I wasn’t even sure I could have. I was crying, not just crying, a horrible wracking kind of sobbing, and I couldn’t stop, because it was raw relief. I’d never cried like that before. No galley. No hot irons, no knife. All the horror was tearing its way out of me and all I could do was grip onto him like he was jetsam after a wreck.