Page 25 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I’d never been so close to it. The steam was everywhere, and to my surprise, it was cold—not steam, but vapour, somehow. I tried to see through it, worried I was close to the Queen, and I jumped when just up the steps, one of the great dragons slid its claws inward and folded its wings, as if it had decided I was safe. I had to stare at it, because there’s a strange twofold thinking that happens when you’re near holy devices. On one level, you know that people made them: there was a human smith, once. But on another, you know that that smith was guided by a god, and what you’re seeing, what you’re really seeing, is an echo of what Hephaestus could make for Zeus—a shadow of something divine.

Then there she was, Queen Agave, coming out of the haze, and all my insides twisted, because she could have been Helios’s ghost. For all she could have afforded to clad herself in wonders from Africa, she dressed well but plain, her hair long like a knight’s, even though married ladies—even widows—usually had it short. It made her look like a man from behind. I could only look at her in little snatches, so that she wouldn’t burn onto my eyes.

“Pentheus spoke to you this morning,” she said, without preamble. She sounded exactly like Helios, her voice strong from making herself heard over halls and crowds. Like mine, his had been light, but hers was low. If I’d closed my eyes, she could have been him. It was unearthly. A kind of sorrow-joy came up through the flagstones. “What about?”

“He mentioned his coming marriage, lady,” I said from on my knee on the floor.

“Why you?”

“I was sworn to your brother.” To either side of the throne, four Guards were watching me hard, the hems of their cloaks vivid purple on the stone floor. The dragons breathed vapour again. For the first time all year, my hands were cold. “The prince asked me if I would talk to you. I said I couldn’t, since you don’t know me.”

She came down from the steps and took my elbows to guide me upright. She did it gently, as if she was worried about being careful of me, not anxious that I should be careful of her. She was much taller than I’d thought: my height. Taller than Helios had been. Of course she was. She had grown up in the plenty of the Palace. He had grown up in sieges. “I know you, knight. You came here once with Helios when you were little. We played in the fountain. You probably don’t remember.”

“No, I do, lady, I just thought you wouldn’t.”

She was quiet at first. I thought she would tell me why I was here—I suspected it was because Pentheus had complained about me, and she was about to tell me I needed to apologise to him before I was flogged or sent to be a galley slave. I got ready to say that time was, people had been encouraged to tell princes the truth. I had a distinct recollection of a polemarch years ago calling Helios an ungrateful little fuckwit. Helios had not had anyone flogged or enslaved. Helios had thought it was funny, because Helios was a real knight and not an unpleasant little weasel that just thought it was.

“Come and see where the star fell,” she said.

She took me towards the open colonnade. The Guards followed, flinty. As we passed outside, everything had the fever brightness reflections do in a bronze shield, and the air shimmered. Away from that cold vapour from the marvel dragons, the heat rammed us. Ash wavered in streams above the flagstones. From the lower city, the columns of sacrifice smoke rose black and huge. It was what the architecture of Hades must have looked like. Everything smelled of burning bone.

Then we were in the courtyard, the courtyard, where we had played in the fountain with Helios, and Semele had been there with the baby and the King. I hadn’t realized where it was: my memory of the Palace was a child’s, everything all gigantic and inexplicable. It hadn’t occurred to me it was even possible to find the same place again.

It was empty now, and overgrown with ivy, which was madly green and bright, in spite of the drought. There was a new shrine there, a marble statue of a woman holding a baby; everything else around it was ruined, the old columns still saw-toothed, the flagstones smashed. To the side of the shrine was a twisted mess of bronze that must once have been the Poseidon fountain.

Although Helios had told me the story a thousand times—or maybe because he had told it to me a thousand times—the wrecked courtyard looked unfamiliar. I couldn’t remember the open end of it giving way to the balcony; I couldn’t remember being able to see the parade ground from here, and even the colour of the stone seemed wrong.

With an uneasy shift, I wondered how much I really remembered, and how much I just thought I did.

We reached the balcony slowly. The sun was high over the plains now, and the light was that violent kind that hammers off armour and crowns. Anyone looking up from the lower city would probably be able to see us lit up here.

The crater, much bigger than I’d thought, was still steaming, though the glass in it was solid now, cracked in shards that had been forced upward into spikes. Some had formed into weird, person-sized loops. The whole parade ground was full of slaves shovelling up the blasted flagstones, loading them into wheelbarrows, sweeping up the dust, cleaning the public stands and the walls.

“Half the Palace thinks that was the Lost Prince coming down to take his crown,” the Queen said. “Which is odd, because you’d think that if you could howl down from Olympus in a ball of fire, you could see your way to climbing up to the royal balcony and shoving me off it.”

Ah. Maybe she had found out I was the one who had taken the baby, and then she was going to have me strapped to a table until I explained what I’d done with him. What a rubbish way to die.

Completely stupidly, I found myself scanning the people down by the crater in case one of them looked up and he had blue eyes. He wasn’t coming, and this thing, the star, the whatever, wasn’t him—it couldn’t be or I’d be dead now—but I wanted him to be there all the same.

The more I lost my hearing, the more I could hear my own heart. It was loud now.

Where are you, where are you, where are you.

“I was trying to make you laugh but I’m worried I’m less witty than I think,” the Queen reported frankly.

I breathed in deeper. No table with straps then. “I was thinking about how odd it is to hear people saying you’re a god’s aunt. Do gods have aunts?”

“I suppose they must do. Or perhaps the aunts tend not to survive the process. I’m sure if I could incinerate people at will, then family Harvest dinners would have looked different. Do you have aunts?”

That, I thought, was a real knife-edge joke, given that she had incinerated people.

Behind that, I thought: She doesn’t care if you have aunts. She’s trying to hear you talk over more than a couple of monosyllables. This is an interview.

Hm.

Even though the sensible thing would have been to grunt and pretend I’d been hit over the head too often to manage sentences any more, I couldn’t. I could almost see Helios, standing here with her. It didn’t matter about what she had done to her sister. This was dangerous, but dangerous with Helios’s twin was much better than safe with the Nothing, and his old helmet sitting beside my bed, dull on the far side and bright on the nearer where I touched it every night and every morning.

Where are you, where are you, where are you.