Page 27 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Why?” I asked, trying not to let her hear the lump in my throat. “I’m no one.”

“You’re family.” She smiled Helios’s smile. “Go and find your nephew, Heliades.”

10

The slaves were all frightened. They also had no idea what was going on. Some of them even said they needed to hurry because they would be late for the prince. I sat them down one by one, separate, and made sure the steward saw them away through another door so they couldn’t talk to each other on the way out.

The scribe who monitored Pentheus’s spending said nothing unusual had moved from his accounts. That seemed more ominous than a great haul of silver missing from the treasury. If he had been running away, he would surely have made some provision for himself. To just vanish, with nothing; it was possible, but I couldn’t see that Pentheus would have known how.

Even though I asked upwards of twenty people, from personal attendants to tutors, none of them could think of anyone he knew well enough to run to. No older man at the garrison, no Sown lady with an estate outside the city walls—everyone laughed at that and said he was too young for women—nothing.

So I sent people out to the lower city brothels to check if there were any new additions. I could well imagine someone snatching a worried-looking boy dressed too nicely: they’d be delighted with the opportunity to ransom him if they thought he was from a Sown family, but if they realized he really was the prince, they could have sold him on to Sparta or Athens. He was definitively not sensible enough to lie about who he was.

In case the Queen was wrong and he had been taken somehow, I sent the Hidden. Not my unit, but Polydorus’s, with the blessing of the general, who put it about that we would be doing daytime rides now too, since so many field slaves were risking the full heat of the day as a kind of cover.

“Have we found the witch he spoke to at the ceremony?” I asked finally, watching the black-armoured unit split up outside the city walls, fifteen or so knights each riding down the seven roads out of Thebes. The dust billowed in their wakes. “He could be the last person to have seen him.”

“Nobody knows who he is,” the Chamberlain said. “I’ve enquired already.” She was chilly, and annoyed, I thought, that the Queen hadn’t asked her to do this. She managed to project the suspicion that there was no witch, I’d made him up, witches were never men anyway, I was battle mad and unqualified, and if I wouldn’t mind too terribly, would I perhaps bugger off to a temple to convalesce or die at my convenience?

“Sir?” someone said, and when I turned around, he pointed to the garrison. I thought he looked nervous. “A witch sent me to find you? He’s waiting for you at the garrison.”

I smiled at the Chamberlain. “Would you like to come?” I said, with evil in my heart.

“No,” she said coolly. “And be polite to him. It will be administratively inconvenient if he turns you into something sticky.”

Usually, you wouldn’t just know if there was a witch in the barracks. You’d Know. Knights are superstitious and witches are lucky, and so generally, all the little knights would be asking for amethyst charms or well-meant-but-actually-quite-sinister spells to set on whoever they’d fallen in love with lately, and people would be bringing her things, and being uncharacteristically inarticulate because of nerves, and all in all, it would look like the Queen was visiting.

The witch who had saved me from the bulls was sitting alone at our Herakles fountain, unnoticed, in the shade of the dying pomegranate trees. People were walking past him—little knights, kitchen slaves, another polemarch—as if they had no idea he was there. It was like he had magnetised all his matter a certain way and now, to most people, from most angles, he was only fractionally more there than the shadows.

Even doing something ordinary, leaning over the water and holding the fountain edge like anyone else, he looked eerie. Maybe it was the red tattoos that cut off at his knuckles, as if he had dipped his hands in blood and not water, or maybe it was the fineness of that black veil, writhing in the hot wind, which he seemed not to feel; or maybe it was the black snake lying across his knees, watching me.

“Sir?” I said.

He looked back, but he didn’t stand or bow. Witches don’t bow to anyone. “Hello again.” Slight accent, one I couldn’t trace properly over two words. “Someone said you were looking for me.”

It was odd to be recognised. He could only have seen me for a few seconds by the crater, in all that pouring smoke. “Yes. My name is Phaidros Heliades, I’m a polemarch here. I need to ask you some questions about the prince.”

He was very still for a second. I wished witches would wear their veils like desert people did, showing their eyes. If you can see someone’s eyes, you can see the whole human. Not witches, though.

“Yes,” he said. He had one of those voices I could hear very well, even though he wasn’t loud; it was low and strong, all smoke and embers, the kind of voice that could sing, or call over a battlefield. “After what he said, I’m not surprised.”

“Would you mind telling me what that was?”

Whatever I’d expected, it wasn’t what he said. “He asked me whether there is magic that could make someone forget everything.”

I sat down beside him to make certain I was hearing properly. “Is there?”

He hesitated, long enough for me to wonder if I’d accidentally asked about something that was sacred or forbidden. “There is,” he said eventually, “but it’s brutal. I lied, I told him no.”

I wondered if Pentheus had hoped to do something to the Queen. He was exactly the right kind of sulky little spider to resort to something terrible the second he didn’t get what he wanted.

“What did he say then?”

“He left. But he might have had a different answer from another witch.”

Or been kidnapped and sold to a foreign power. If he had stolen out to speak to an unscrupulous witch who’d recognised him, then he could be halfway to Sparta by now, drugged and chained in the back of a wagon. Maybe the Hidden really did have a chance of finding something.

They would have had a much better chance if the witch had said something an hour ago.