Page 20 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Why aren’t you married?” he asked abruptly, with a spark of irritation. “You must be thirty now, you’re breaking the law.”

“I punch people who make me jump,” I said, hoping he would make me jump.

“There’s no exemption.”

“What’s happening now?” I asked slowly, aware that some of the young knights around us were listening hard.

“Everyone’s so fond of telling me that what anybody wants doesn’t matter, but I do feel that many of those people might perhaps need reminding what it is to actually have to do something you fear.”

Telling a prince what you think of him is an efficient method of suicide, but on balance, execution was less inglorious than being bullied by an insectile boy with no sense of duty. “Have you considered that perhaps the Queen is sending you away because you’re a whiny little prick and nobody likes you?”

He stared at me and I had a sharp sense it was the first time anyone had ever said anything like that to him. “You can’t say that.”

“Off you fuck,” I suggested, and thought, Well, Phaidros, this is it. Probably just as well, it’s embarrassing to have survived this long.

And no boy with blue eyes was coming. Of course he wasn’t. Apollo doesn’t pass on messages, and gods don’t come when you call, even for revenge. His revenge was going to be to let me drag on and on like this. Watching my knights fight over eggs, listening to someone who would be king whine about the lightest duty, while the rations shrank and shrank.

“You were sworn to my uncle!” Pentheus burst out, voice cracking. Suddenly he seemed very small, and lonely. “I just—I thought . . .” He looked away. He was about to cry. “You could speak to the Queen.”

I sighed. It wasn’t his fault that he was irritating. Royal heirs are never sent to the legions. It would be idiocy. It was why Helios had served but the Queen hadn’t. One in three knights die before they’re eighteen. Half never make it past twenty-five. Of course he now imagined that he was having a dreadful time in the Palace surrounded by people who did everything for him. He had no idea what dreadful was. Everyone had worked hard to make sure he didn’t.

“I met the Queen once,” I said, more softly, “when I was a child. Nothing I say would matter.” I paused, because he was still Helios’s nephew, and I owed him what I could give, which was the advice Helios had always given me. “What you say will matter. Negotiate. Be Persephone. If you see Death coming, say, Fantastic, you’re coming with me, and I’m Queen.”

He didn’t laugh, only tilted his head, letting it move through his gears, expressionless. “I don’t think I can,” he said. “I don’t know how.”

I still had a primal urge to slap him and tell him to pull himself together, but that isn’t how humans work. The way you make a nervy mess of a boy into a someone useful is: you snatch him up in the corridor and pretend to steal him sometimes; you go and find him if he’s quiet and you make sure he gets some cake; you play Surprise Badger; and you let him get away with keeping a sacrifice lamb if he does big eyes at you and promises it will be a wonderfully house-trained lamb by the end of the week.

Nobody was going to do any of those things. He was too important.

“Try,” I said. “The worst she can do is shout at you.”

He gave me a doubtful look.

“Or drop you down a well,” I admitted.

“Pardon me if I don’t follow your advice,” he said gravely. “Only I get the feeling you’d enjoy seeing her drop me down a—”

There was a roar from the crowd.

People were pointing at the sky.

Something was there, a ball of fire and smoke screaming right at the city. For an irrational second, I thought we were under siege and it was something hurled out of a trebuchet, but there was nothing on the arid plain below us. Smoke tore across the dawn, and when I followed the arc, I could see exactly where it was going to land. Right in front of us.

They must have stopped the drums, they must have, but in my head I could still hear them, only it wasn’t the steady march of Apollo’s hymn any more. They were racing—running, then sprinting, and then faster and faster, and it wasn’t like any hymn any more, and if someone had told me that an army of the gods was riding to war I would have believed it.

The thing in the sky howled down and smashed into the parade ground.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a ship wreck: when the mast falls and the hull breaks, the water roars up higher than any palace, and you can see Poseidon raging in it. Whatever blasted into the ground then, it made the earth rise like the water would have, like it was nothing. Right along the lines, knights yelled and pulled their shields up overhead. I wrenched mine above me and Pentheus, dragging him with me onto the ground. In the stands, people dove for cover under the seats. I couldn’t see the Palace balcony any more. It was lost in the dust long after the burning earth had fallen down again.

Gradually, the dust clouds started to clear. I stood up and gripped Pentheus’s arm while I looked him over, but he seemed all right. So did the little knights. Shields came down and tipped dust and fragments of rock onto the ground. Up ahead of us, the priestesses were standing up too, grey. People in the public stands began to ease out from under the seats. The canopy that had been keeping the sun off them was on fire, shedding burning particles over the wall.

Only about fifty feet from us, there was a crater. It was glowing.

I could see the little knights asking each other things, and trying to ask me, but I couldn’t hear. I held my hand out to tell them to stay back for another few seconds. Along with some of the other older knights, I slid my shield back onto my arm and climbed over the rubble to the edge of the scar in the earth. The heat was so strong I could barely face into it.

Glass boiled at the base of the crater. Some patches were still white-hot, some making an unearthly crackling noise as it cooled and splintered and broke straightaway.

Leading from the centre out to the edge, quite close to me, there were shapes pressed into it. It was difficult to see properly through the heat, which hazed and writhed, but they were clear enough all the same.