Page 118 of The Hymn to Dionysus

He smiled, not enough to show his incisors. “Look . . . however ill-advised I think it is, you’re in love with the Queen. I’m not going to snarl at you if you want to try your luck, going back.”

“I’m not in love with the Queen. I love her, but that’s different to in love. She is everything my duty is, but . . .” I struggled, and realized it was the first time in my life I’d ever said anything like this aloud. “If the choice were mine, if nothing else depended on it, if I could just . . .” It sounded utterly wrong and shameful and ridiculous and forbidden, but something was lifting too—there was a mask coming away. “I would never have gone anywhere near the Palace, or her. You’ve got it the wrong way around. I want to stay with you. What are you going to do now?”

“Leave. I can’t stay here, everyone will lose their minds.”

“You . . . don’t care.”

“No, but you do, and this is your home, I don’t want to wreck it any more than I already have.”

“This is not my home, I’ve lived here for six months and never before that. Let’s go together.”

“Really,” he said, not as a question. He wasn’t convinced I was choosing so much as appeasing the horrifying wild thing that had just destroyed half of Thebes.

I brushed a twist of grey-black away from his face. He was very still, and he looked afraid. It was the fear I had around anyone I could hurt by accident. “I’m not some boy you stole, strange one. I stole you, remember?”

He tipped his head a quarter inch, the barest kind of agreement. He had his hands clamped in his lap. I cradled them between mine and kissed his knuckles, then the red marks on his throat.

When he kissed me back, I felt like I’d finally been allowed to sail into a safe harbour after too long at sea. It was like I’d never managed to get home after that shipwreck. I’d come back to land, but there was no anchor, just wandering and waiting and watching the storms, and now—it all went quiet. Shelter. It made me cry, which made me worry he was going to think I was saying no, but he understood and just lifted me sideways into his lap. I felt strangely panicky. It was too long since anyone had done that, I was too old, there was something terrible about a beautiful witch worn down by the world to paying any attention at all to beaten-up knight who should have died years ago.

He set his hand against the side of my skull as if he’d overheard the thoughts, the way you put your hand to a glass to stop it ringing after someone’s smacked it. It worked the same way. I turned my face against his hand and listened to all the quiet come down in my head.

It was little by little that I started to notice I could hear things and feel things I didn’t generally. Not far from us, there were tiny, busy balls of thought, preoccupied with the logistics of dismantling what I knew was a crust of bread but for them was a mountain, and getting it home, and how nice it was to snug up close with the others in the nest, all brothers and sisters, and sleeping below somewhere was the Queen, who was good and gentle, and whose eggs made such strong soldiers.

I thought I was dreaming, and when I opened my eyes, it was weird to find that I was the size I was, with hands and elbows and eyelashes, and for a whole second, I had no idea what to do with any of those.

I wasn’t dreaming. I sat up in the dark, taking in the bedroom, trying to remember where I was. It only came to me slowly. Dionysus’s room: his side of the maze. We were down deep, at least three storeys. Moonlight came down through windows that were cut carefully to line up across the levels. We were well below my cellar, and it was cool enough that I could nearly have called it cold. Above the bed were the spectacular roots of a tree, alive with ivy and honeysuckle and some kind of trailing flower that swayed in the little breeze that came down to us from the stairway. Climbing vines with tiny white flowers hugged most of the far wall, full of the glass lamps he had used at the party—all alight, even though he hadn’t lit them and there were no slaves here.

My sitting up had made something else near the doorway jump, another mind that had thought nothing big was alive down here and that built its idea of the world with sounds, not light, and it called back to the others, mimicking the shape of what it had heard with the noise so the others would know what to look for. And somewhere above us: great slow ageless thoughts, not seeing or hearing, but delving in the earth, and feeling the hot wind, and keening quietly for water. Even though I couldn’t hear any sound at all.

“It’s the trees,” Dionysus whispered. “They cry when there’s no water.”

I was so aside from myself that I didn’t even find it odd, and I sat there wondering if there were some ants now who were having confused dreams about being a giant.

Dionysus seemed smaller than he was, lying down. He was curled up now. I touched his shoulder to ask if it was all right to lie back down where I had been or if he’d rather I stayed on my side. He held his arm out for me and pulled me back against his chest, and fitted his knee between mine. Somehow he didn’t have any difficult angles, even though I’d slept alone for years and I wasn’t used to another person any more. I held his hand where it rested on my waist. My fingertips were too rough to feel where the tattoos stopped, but just by my hip, I could. It was a tiny slight difference, and such a meaningless thing to know about him, but it was important, too.

I could feel him waiting, with genuine dread, for me to ask why I was suddenly hearing a lot more of the world than I had done a few hours ago.

I was happier not asking. It was here now. It wasn’t unpleasant. I didn’t need to know the clockwork of it; knowing wouldn’t change anything.

“Blue,” I said instead, shifting to face him. “I think I know what it is now. Wine, and stories, and the dance. Madness; masks, and . . .” I didn’t want to say it, because it was a kind of holy, the way I was feeling now: weightless, like when he’d lifted me, and the before-remembering moment of waking up. I pressed my hand very gently between his legs to show what I meant, though, and he made a tiny sound that sent a painful, lovely ache through my groin and up my chest. “It’s release. It’s all . . . things that take you away from yourself, and into something—truer, and wilder. Some of them do that a very small way. Some of them do it entire.”

“Yes.” He laughed the littlest ghost of a laugh and I understood why: he’d thought I never be able to see it, not really. “Yes.”

From up above, a knitting needle of daylight came around the window frame. I shut my eyes, not wanting to think about the next time we were going to be able to sleep. Out in the forest somewhere, hopefully on the far side of Harper Mountain, towards the border with Corinth. Maybe to keep me from saying anything horrifying about getting up and getting started, Dionysus gathered my hair into one hand, twisting it over his knuckles. I held his free hand.

I could feel that my hand felt small to him, and rough from sword hilts, and he could tell where the bones still weren’t quite right after I’d broken my last two fingers in an oarlock years ago. I’d been ashamed before because I was so used up and worn down, but that wasn’t how he was seeing me. He thought I looked the same as I had a decade ago on the deck of the ship as it turned to trees. He was holding, the way people hold moths rescued from candles, the memory of me looking puzzled—but not scared—about the ivy growing around my wrist. It was a little shock. I would barely have recognised myself.

He must have noticed me noticing, because he said, “You haven’t . . . you haven’t asked me what I am or where I came from.”

I shook my head once. “None of my business.”

He was quiet for a long time, his fingertips just moving to and fro between the vertebrae in the base of my back where my spine always hurt if I lay still too long. I’d twisted something after falling off a horse once and it had never entirely untwisted—except, now, it didn’t hurt. It made me want to laugh. Increasingly I had a sense that he just sort of tidied up as he went along, putting things right, growing things, healing old fractures, in the same way other people stacked crockery and folded blankets.

Yes: pharmakeia.

He touched our heads together. “I can’t tell you what I am, I don’t know that; but I can tell you how I came to be, and what I’m for.”

“You don’t have to.”