Page 117 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“You were a child too. You—we took you.”

“No, you didn’t. I let you take me. I wanted to see what it was like on the interesting pirate ship.” He laughed, or he started to, but it made him cough, after all the smoke and the dust. “I only meant to be aboard for a few hours, I was going to leave you all alone once I’d looked around, but . . . then you started talking to me like I was a real person and not a pretend ghost thing that used to be a person.” He paused. “And you still did that, even when the ivy grew and the slaves went mad.”

“You didn’t . . . feel . . .?”

“As though a boy with a sword should have protected me, when I’m older than Zeus and I run people mad even if I just sit quietly and do nothing, and I wasn’t in danger, or frightened?”

“That isn’t the point.”

He paused. “Are you sure?”

I had to hunch forward, because I hadn’t expected to laugh. When I raised my head again, he was watching me in the way I always watched a shore as I was leaving when I knew I wouldn’t see it again for a long time.

“I . . . am sorry, about—earlier,” he said. “I would have spoken to the Queen instead of . . . all that, but there was nothing I could have done to prove Pentheus lied.”

“Oh, well; I don’t think he thinks he is lying.”

“Oh, he knows he is,” Dionysus said with unexpected acid.

“You—did you say you took him?” I asked, trying to tell if I remembered that or if it was just something I’d half-dreamed in all the chaos.

He put his hand over his own throat. I saw him squeeze—enough to hurt. I knew the feeling; the truth was a thing with pincers clawing its way out. “I can’t turn down someone who asks for help, it’s the Witches’ Vow. I told him what he was asking for. Then I gave him the mask. I put him into the maze.” He shook his head once. “Then I went back up to the High City and lied to you. I’ve been lying to you all along. The census, the funeral, all of it, I was trying to steer you away from him.”

I had to laugh. It came out very low, from a lot deeper down than my normal voice did.

He looked at me with so much dread I stopped. It knocked me sideways, that he minded so much about what I might say. I could have forgiven him anything then, because he minded.

“You’ve never made a secret about lying,” I said. “You told me from the start.”

“Phaidros—”

I had to take his wrist and move his hand, because I couldn’t watch him do it any more. There were red marks around his neck. “If there is anything I understand in atomic fucking detail,” I said, “it is the upholding of a vow.”

We sat quiet for a little while. Behind us, the fountain chattered. The room was cool. Little by little, I started noticing ordinary things, like how there was a pin in my hair sticking into me, how there were anemones growing in the moss between us, and how yellow the leopard was, more yellow than any other sort of yellow. How the soot felt gritty under the neck of my tunic.

I looked around for a bowl and pitcher—yes, he had a bronze set, burnished so well I could see the two of us in it, and yellow of the leopard—then drew us both some water to wash with, and watched him from under my eyelashes as he rinsed through the length of his hair. It was such a normal, homely thing; it made him look like a boy at a laundry pool. Around us settled all the things we hadn’t said yet.

“Why did you come back for me?” I asked. “After what I said to you.”

“It was a reasonable thing to say,” he said to the water. The leopard was looking at me worriedly. I stroked its ears and it put its paw over my wrist, unexpectedly heavy. Dionysus swayed. “Things like me . . . snatch at people all the time. It’s always terrible and it’s never a choice, for you. Hades stole Persephone and Zeus stole a king’s son and Aphrodite stole that poor man from Troy. I shouldn’t have touched you. I came back to apologise.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” I said, hating that he could ever think I’d think that, and dismayed, because it was a bitter way to see those stories. Stories are stories, and they’re brief, because they have to fit into the amount of time a reasonably drunk person will listen by a fire, so they leave out things, like whether the young prince was frightened or whether the Trojan man had a choice—but the way I’d always heard them, the way Helios had told them, was with a kind of gentle wryness. These things were phrased as seizing and thefts, and violence, because the people being stolen could hardly turn around to their families and their kingdoms and say, Look, I’m terribly sorry, but you can all shove it, thanks, all your duty and your honour: I’m off. So Zeus said to the prince’s father, No, I stole him; and the Unseen said, Well, she had the pomegranate seeds.

“I thought you were drawing out a revenge quest. I was telling you to get on with it. I thought you were just . . . I thought,” I said, trying hard to say it in a straight line, “that the only reason you were being kind to me was to make it worse when you murdered me.”

He lifted his eyebrow a tiny fraction. “You’re fucked up, Phaidros.”

“I’ve been noticing that lately.” I put my hand over his and squeezed. He let me, though he didn’t touch me.

“I’m not going to be angry,” he said, “if you don’t want to stay here. I’m a hell of a thing to stay with. There are other parts of the maze, or . . .”

He let it hang, but I knew what that or was.

It was my duty. That was to go back up to the Palace and see if the Queen was alive, to negotiate, to persuade her it hadn’t been me, there really was a god, there had been no plot, nobody wanted her crown; it was to go and help, because the High City was in ruins and they would need all hands to move the wreckage, to find places for people to stay, and then the long slog of salvage and rebuilding. I had sworn my oath to Thebes and the call of duty meant I should go back, even if Thebes had wanted me half dead by now and sent to the sea.

“No,” I said.

It was much too unobtrusive and quiet for what it was, which was the cracking of a shackle I’d always worn.