Page 26 of The Hymn to Dionysus

Not coming.

“Not blood relatives, lady,” I said. “But I had plenty of Helios’s legion sisters.” I paused. “I don’t think I would have dared try to incinerate them. They were terrifying. They’d say, Oh, Phaidros, how nice to see you, you haven’t grown at all, bring Helios honour or we’ll behead you behind the curing shed.”

“Did you? Bring him honour.”

I thought about it. “Briefly,” I said, and waited to see if that was enough, and if she would decide to ask me whatever it was she had brought me here for, or send me away.

“What did you tell Pentheus to do?” the Queen asked me.

“Negotiate,” I said, then glanced down, because I’d put my hands on the stone balcony rail and brushed something alive. Ivy, more ivy—growing up around the bannister, which was crazy, because even up here, everything was parched. I’d called him Ivy. He—no. Fuck’s sake. Ivy is just ivy. It grows everywhere and it never dies. “With you, about the marriage.”

“You told him to challenge me.”

(Penalty for treason: twenty years of slavery.)

“Yes, lady,” I said.

She smiled and lifted her eyebrows at the crater. Unlike Pentheus, she let all kinds of things skim over her expression, but I had clear feeling it was because she had such perfect control over her own face she could tell it to do whatever she wanted, whereas all he could do was keep it blank.

“No one can find him,” she said.

I lifted my eyes properly for the first time, trying to search her for some sign I’d misheard, but I hadn’t.

“You will not repeat that to anyone. Officially, the prince is well and cloistered at the Temple of Athena for a short while. Find him, please.”

“Me,” I said, confused. She would have people for secret things like this. She didn’t need me.

“You. You’re his uncle by oath.” She lifted her hands, precise and slight and marvel-calibrated. “He went to you. He might come with you willingly when you find him.”

Willingly. “You don’t think he’s been taken?”

“No, or we would have had a ransom demand and a trail of distressed slaves reporting being knocked out by now. I’m sure someone could successfully abduct him from the Palace, but not secretly. And significant timing too, don’t you think, just when it’s on his mind to escape his marriage and everyone was distracted by a fallen star?”

I did have to agree.

“He’s hiding with someone. You will ask your questions quietly. If this spreads through the city, I will execute you.” She was looking away from the courtyard now, over the lower city, and towards the Amber Gate and the road to the sea. I wanted to ask if we could go back inside. The heat was punishing; sweat was creeping down my back, sticking my tunic to the inside of my armour. She seemed not to feel it. “The Egyptians are here bringing grain, and in return, they’ll take Pentheus. No Pentheus, no grain.”

Finally I understood the marriage. It wasn’t a real marriage. Pentheus was going to Egypt as a hostage.

“The Pharaoh is willing to disguise it as a marriage to save the dignity of a royal house,” she added wryly, and I could imagine very well what the Pharaoh thought about Achaean royal houses. Queen of what, was it? Oh. Yes. That’s a lovely rock, with really excellent huts—temples?—I see, temples. And that’s a wonderful . . . hat? Crown. Apologies. Of course.

She finally turned back for the cloister. “Thank you, Sown. Speak to my chamberlain. She’ll gather up Pentheus’s slaves. He doesn’t particularly have friends.”

She stopped then, and looked at me for a long time, her eyes tracking over my armour, which was Helios’s armour. It was beautiful; in the sun, the filigree Ares blazed across the chest, and the rubies that dripped from his shield shimmered. On the back, stark and silver against the bronze oxidised to look much darker than the ordinary tone, Persephone would be bright on the throne of the Unseen. It was armour made for a prince only a few breaths too young to be king. I tried to get ready to hear her ask for it back.

“I should have spoken to you before now,” she said.

The way she was looking at me was the way Helios had on the evening he had finally agreed to swear his oath to me and let me fight on the front line with him, four whole years after the legion had expected him to do it.

Arranged marriages, which those battlefield unions are, sound like they should be straightforward. Ours never was. Helios was hammered out of old-fashioned chivalry, and he had always hated the age gap. In the old days, he said, commanders were only five years older than their wards, and young knights didn’t even enter the army until they were twelve. Then, it made sense for them to swear to each other once the ward was fifteen. It wasn’t an equal partnership—it wasn’t meant to be, it was meant to control insane teenagers—but it wasn’t ludicrously unequal. Ours, he insisted, was. Constant wars and emergencies meant the legion wasn’t using the system properly any more. He was ten years older than me and I’d known him since I was tiny. That was sticky, at best. Saying I loved him didn’t matter: his position was that I only thought I did, because I’d grown up with everyone around me insisting it was the right way to live. On my nineteenth birthday I’d cracked and snapped that that was patronising. He hid in the officers’ mess for a month. At my end, a lot of crying and rebellious drinking with the Athenians ensued.

It wasn’t until the Athenians said he must have sustained some kind of penetrating cranial injury and gone mad (what sort of man wouldn’t tear like a hound after a handsome nineteen-year-old?) that I realized he had a point. You’re never on the moral high ground if Athenians are agreeing with you.

So I went home at last and knelt in the cold sand outside his tent, where he was polishing his armour in the extremely silent way he had when he was upset, and said I’d stay off the front line until I found someone my own age to swear to if it meant he would be happy, and then he would be free of me. Listening to the Athenians had made me realize how trapped he probably felt. I wouldn’t have wanted to be stuck in an arranged marriage to one of me: I was a mix between Feral Jason and a truffle pig.

When he came out, he had looked at me like he’d been expecting a child and found a man he didn’t know.

The Queen might have been him, just then.