Page 28 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Why didn’t you report it straightaway?”

“You mean because the garrison is so reasonable and helpful, and so unlikely to imprison or murder people who interrupt at the wrong moment?” he asked, unflustered.

“Careful,” I said, because I had to, though he was right.

He actually laughed. He had a laugh like a campfire in winter, smoky and welcoming. “You be careful.”

I caught myself smiling and stopped, because even if it weren’t unseemly for a knight, it was fairly horrible on me personally, given that half my face wasn’t the way Apollo had made it.

“Well, thank you,” I said, having one of those moments where I could hear, in contrast to his, my own accent. It was Sown, which is different from general Thebes: flatter than the full dialect you’d hear in the markets, because we sailed and we had to be understood everywhere. His was something I still couldn’t place. It sounded—old. I couldn’t trace why I thought that. “And thank you for what you did earlier, sir. I owe you my life.” I held my hand out.

He tipped his head slowly, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that I was getting a long stare through the veil.

“Be careful of offering your life to a witch,” he said. “You never know what we might do with it.”

“It’s all right, I’m hardly using it,” I promised.

When he took my hand, a static shiver went up my arm. He was cool despite the sun. The tattoos on his fingers looked even stranger next to my skin. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was looking down at the difference too. The way he was holding his head now, the light was coming through the veil on one side, and I could see the shadow of his cheekbone. I looked away: seeing him without permission was a kind of trespassing. I tried to take my hand back, but he caught my wrist and looped something round it. Red string, the same red as his tattoos, with a silver charm on it in the shape of a bee.

“Do not,” he said, “take that off.”

“Why?” I asked, uneasy.

“So that if you stray, another witch will know who to return you to.” He waited for me to look at him again. “No matter how far that might be.”

It should have been sinister, but it wasn’t. Instead I filled up with a strange of sort relief. What he was saying, really, was that if I vanished, he would look for me. I hadn’t expected it to be such a good feeling, but it was, and so good that for a ridiculous second I thought I might cry. Mortified, I got up and bowed and said something about being busy. He stayed where he was, motionless except for the wind coiling ghost shapes in the veil. The wind gusted black sacrifice smoke between us and I half expected him to have vanished by the time it cleared, but he hadn’t.

“Look after it, knight,” he said after me.

“The charm?”

“Your life. It’s mine now.”

We didn’t find anything: not in the brothels, with any other witches, nor on the road. By the time we had finished the search, the sun was setting. On the steep steps down from the High City to the low, the smoke was so dense that even in the blazing gold of the sunset, it was dark, and half the people going up and down were carrying lamps. The other half clapped when they reached corners, so people coming the other way could hear that someone was there. People were wearing cloth masks. I couldn’t tell if that was just because of the smoke, or if it was because news about the madness had already spread beyond Ares.

I was going deaf, but I wasn’t blind, and after I’d reached the lower city, I was sure: someone was following me. He wasn’t making a particular secret of it. I didn’t recognise him, but he was from the Guards—you didn’t look that healthy otherwise. He saw me notice him and motioned for me to carry on my way. I didn’t, and went back to him.

“Why?” I said, once I was close enough.

“You work for the Queen now,” he said. “You can expect some scrutiny. On your way, Sown.”

I bowed, and decided to take him on a lovely long walk to the night market for the honey I’d been meaning to buy all week. I was tired, but being able to spite an annoying person is an amazing source of energy.

A lot of traders were opening their shops at night now, because the day was too hot. Apollo Square was starry with their lamps, and full of people and steam from cooking stands. Normal traders weren’t allowed to sell sacrifice meat, so I had a feeling that this had something to do with how there were suddenly no stray cats or dogs left in town. People were selling all kinds of things: the last of the olive crop, kittens, wax tablets, bolts of cloth, even ice from the mountain. It was chaotic and strange and sometimes you were chased by an angry goat.

The Nothing that used to be Helios came too. It had a weird alchemy. It didn’t make bad things or annoying things any worse; but if I came across something that should have been good, or funny, the Nothing warped it. I didn’t feel happy. I felt more lonely than I would have if there had been no good things, because I had no one to tell. The worst thing was festivals. I turned into a properly miserable prick at festivals.

It would have been better to just go home, but I wanted the honey, and I wanted to irritate the Guard. When I glanced back for him, I was pleased to see he was looking much more grumpy than he had earlier.

The honey seller knew me quite well now and asked me how I was while she rolled my ration bead onto a tablet smoothed over with warm wax, so she could use it as an invoice for the Palace, which would reimburse her from my account in equivalent goods. The print from the bead showed my name, as well as the sigil of my combat lineage, which was a tiny image of Persephone leading Hades by the hand, all etched mirrorwise onto the bead, which was about the length of the first joint of my forefinger. I still liked using it: you don’t get one until you’re eighteen, when you come off your commander’s accounts, and it still made me feel important and grown-up, even though I was still half convinced I was only pretending about being grown-up. She put her seal over my tablet too, as a receipt. Behind the trader, in tall vases, were bundles of iron money, each spar as long as a javelin. Not for the first time I felt glad I didn’t have to lug those around.

“So no luck yet?” she said.

Ever since I’d come home from Troy, I’d been trying to make the honey cakes Helios had used to hide on battlefields for me. I still couldn’t do it. It was bothering me a lot more than it should have, because it wasn’t really about the cakes. It was that I couldn’t remember what he looked like any more. Taste makes you remember.

“Not yet. Are there different kinds of honey?” I asked. “He was using something . . . richer.”

“Plenty of different types. Maybe it was something Hatti, if you were at Troy? I can see what I get from the port?”