Page 31 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I smiled and felt the old scar stretch. “Why don’t I make you eat your own kidney?”

He seemed to sober up quite fast. “Up there.” He pointed up to a terrace that overlooked everything; two storeys above the sunken part of the labyrinth, the same level as my house way at the other end. There was a stairway. Lamps lit the way up, two on every stair.

I climbed up slowly, weaving through drunk people and laughing people and someone playing with a happy-looking monkey making its way through half a coconut. The music snaked and coiled around everything. It was vile. The more I saw of it all, the more angry I felt. If I didn’t find Dionysus soon, I was going straight back to the High City to report it and send in the night watch.

At the top, you could see down into the labyrinth below.

I’d never known there was an open part, but there was, in stretches and starts. Sometimes it vanished under rocks, but most of it was visible, and if you stood here, you could watch the people inside getting lost and doubling back. And couples in not very hidden away corners, pretending they were hidden away.

There was a man standing alone on the edge, watching. He was dressed in dark colours, all blues and greens. Although it was still hot and everyone else here wore tunics with only one shoulder, he had his arms covered. He was the first person I’d seen here not holding a wine cup. His mask was different too. It was silver, and it didn’t distort his face, although worked into that silver, I could make out figures in gold, people and animals and trees, polished so smooth the surface looked like you could have run your hand across and it felt nothing; it was a piece of metalwork to inherit, not to buy, and only then for queens and princes. Everywhere else, people were dancing, but there was a perfect stillness to him, and it was making him half-invisible. People were going by him, not seeing him, even though he was standing under a string of lamps. In all the spinning and colours, they seemed primed only to see moving things. He looked the way lighthouses look on a churning sea.

Part of me said: You’re supposed to avoid lighthouses.

“Are you Dionysus?” I asked, judging the distance between us with my hand on my sword, and where the right place on the back of his neck was.

He looked over and smiled. He took the mask off, and I saw the red tattoos that stained his fingers to the second joint. The witch. Tonight, his hair lay heavy over his shoulder, black clouded with ashy grey, barely moving in the hot breeze, and wound through with bright ivy that I thought at first was enamelled bronze, but it wasn’t.

He had blue eyes; the indigo blue at the hem of the sea, full of stars from the lamps.

“I thought you’d not come,” he said, and this time, his voice had pyre smoke in it.

I waited to go up in flames.

I’d never known that you can be overjoyed and terrified at the same time, but you can.

Something in his expression turned urgent, and he caught my arms as I sank onto my knees. I hadn’t meant to. All my strength vanished. He knelt down with me too.

I stared at him, uncomprehending, and still not on fire.

“This is very unusual,” he said, with something between cheer and rue. “Knights don’t usually swoon at the sight of me.”

I wanted to say, Why aren’t you killing me? but it seemed stupid.

He put a cup into my hands; water, not wine. I drank it slowly, watching him, trying to understand what was happening.

“Phaidros?” he asked, not as if he were certain I could hear him.

Maybe it was a joke. Maybe he was pretending to be concerned, and in a few seconds, he would laugh that weird smoky laugh and say, hah, got you, and I’d be a hole in the ground.

He gave me his hands to help me up.

Slowly, I was starting to see that nothing was going to happen, at least not now, this second. Even more slowly, the possibility gleamed that perhaps he wasn’t who I thought; he was just a witch with blue eyes and a charcoal voice.

Something like my normal thinking staggered back up to the surface, breathed at last, and suddenly I felt very, very tired. He hadn’t come, the boy from the sea. He wasn’t listening to prayers. Of course he wasn’t. The world wasn’t like that.

“I—thought you were someone else,” I explained, insufficiently.

His remarkable eyes slipped over me again, all the way down and all the way up. “Well, I . . . hope you never meet him,” he said at last.

Up close, he was taller than me, almost a head taller. Now I was looking at him properly, I couldn’t tell if he was the boy or not. Ten years ago, that boy had been somewhere between fourteen and eighteen. Men change so much in that time—much more than women do—and maybe it was him, but anyone about the right age with blue eyes would probably have seemed right. Was he even the right age? I couldn’t tell. Sail long enough and you become terrible at judging the ages of people on land, who all look uniformly youthful and glowy. Sailors age twice as fast. Maybe Dionysus was twenty-five or maybe he was forty. The grey in his hair didn’t make him seem any particular age; it just made him look like he had walked through a fire.

“I heard you’re from Hattusa,” I said, feeling like I was stuck in the moment about five seconds after waking up. At first, I always forgot Helios was dead and my whole unit was at the bottom of the sea, and it was a lovely weightless feeling, but then I woke up all the way and the Nothing took up the whole room. “Or India.”

“Or Memphis,” Dionysus agreed, without saying if any of them were right, and looking like he hoped I was going to take him up on it.

Of course he was just a witch. I had just collapsed stupidly in front of a witch who had been kind enough to make a joke instead of demanding to know what in Zeus’s name was wrong with me and would I mind taking it elsewhere.

“I came to say,” I said, “wherever you’re from, I’m sure music like this is normal there, but it’s forbidden here. And so is wine. Sown knights can’t drink, for . . .” I watched bleakly as the boy who’d spoken to me before got in a tussle with someone else and they both fell in a fountain. “Obvious reasons. You need to stop.”