Page 32 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“I understand, but I’m not going to,” he said.

I let my head drop. I couldn’t hurt him now, or even drag him off so someone else could do it. He had saved my life today, with the bull. I owed him his. And—and. He had just been kind when there was no need. “You’re going to end up in a cell. It won’t be very nice. They won’t let you go just because you’re foreign and you didn’t know.”

“I did know,” he said.

I waited to see if he was going to explain. He didn’t.

I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing about me, but I’m one of those people who could have a tablet marked ABSOLUTELY DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES TURN THIS OVER on my desk for years, and never turn it over. It isn’t that I’m not curious; it’s that I’ll put up with the curiosity just to spite whoever thought they had such a flawless understanding of humans that they could force me to do anything. Not explaining his spectacular breach of the law struck me as very do-not-turn-over tablet-y. For all I was grateful to him, a deep-down part of me decided I would stand here and die before I asked what he meant.

“Well, good luck,” I said, turning away and not even sure that I was going to make it home. Maybe I’d crumple on the roadside in a patch of grass. That would be fantastic. It was still hot. Possibly I would be eaten by wolves, but even that was more attractive than trying to argue with a witch.

“Wait,” Dionysus said.

He was studying me, which was uncomfortable, because I spent my whole life around knights who were careful not to do that. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had looked at me square for whole seconds at a time. Helios, probably; in bed. It was orders of magnitude too intimate from a stranger. “Dance with me,” he said.

“What?” It came out flinty.

He took my hands as if we’d known each other for years. I’d forgotten what it felt like. Just for a second I was twenty again. You think you grow out of things, but it’s that the world changes around you, not that you do.

“Come on,” he said, with no impatience. “It will help.”

I smacked him off me. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Did your commander not teach you to listen to witches?” he said, but gently. When I put my hand on my sword, he just threaded his fingertips through my knuckles and lifted it away. I let him, because he had judged right; I wasn’t going to use it. “Please, knight. You’re here now.”

I didn’t decide. I hung suspended over not deciding like a dead wasp in honey, and time just moved on around me; and so did he.

Until that moment—I think because he was so still—people hadn’t noticed him. But when he danced, everyone saw him, and he could dance like I’d never seen. It wasn’t the way that the priestesses danced. It was as far from that as the sea is from a still lake. He didn’t have to concentrate, or count, or think in angles and inches. He just danced, and his hair spun and his clothes, which were made of fabrics lighter than I’d known you could weave, coiled and shifted like water, sometimes making half-shapes of their own, sometimes pressing to his shoulders or his spine, and it gave him a charge—I could feel it snapping and sharp in the air, and other people could too. It was pulling them towards him and suddenly everyone close to us was touching him and catching his hands and it was hungry: there was something dangerous about it, and with a weird unpleasant spike I had a sudden certainty they would have dragged him down if he had been slower, because it was unthinking rapture. I didn’t feel it; maybe it was because I could have had that alluring tablet on my desk for years and never turned it over. I was glad I didn’t. It looked horrible, and with a nasty bolt, I wondered if I was going to have to pull people away from him before someone hurt him.

He had a way of melding with the lamplight, and for all he was tall, I kept losing sight of him, and when he came around again, he was usually behind me somehow, but the tide of people always brought him back. Masks flashed by, some strange, some horrible, all different. It was good and it was dangerous as well, and in equal parts I wanted to join everyone else and feel that trance too, and I wanted it to stop.

The music lifted and he lifted me too.

It stopped all my thoughts, because it was frightening. I’d been a child the last time anyone had been strong enough to do that.

But it wasn’t bad. It was a comfortable, ghost-story fear; a mask over being entirely safe.

Just for a few seconds, I wasn’t a knight who was supposed to work like a marvel. I didn’t have duties or children to turn into marvel knights too, or strange songs, or a lost prince; I hadn’t outlived everyone worthwhile I’d ever known, I hadn’t all but murdered Helios myself. I was just me, without a past or a future, the same as those few glorious seconds after waking up, and just then, there was nothing to me except the lamplight and the music and a stranger’s hands round my ribs.

When he set me down, he did it so softly I might have been made of glass. Then he was still, just holding me by the hem of my ribcage, and people seemed to forget about him again. Part of me, shut off from the rest inside a Sown helmet that stayed on even when I wasn’t wearing the real thing, could see that this was very, very bad: alcohol and excess are the death of honour, and if I stayed here for even a little longer, I was going to end up doing things knights should never do, because the pull of it was riptide strong, which was appalling—things like this had always seemed dirty and ridiculous to me, I’d never even distantly wanted to be part of them, but I didn’t want to leave now. I wanted to get that memoryless feeling back. I wanted to see him dance again.

Dionysus looked down at me for a hanging second, and I thought he wanted to say something, but he didn’t have the chance, because an arrow sang between us and then the garrison night watch were shouting for everyone to stand still and shut up.

In a way, it was a relief.

12

I’d never seen so many people in the cells. Each one was made for five or six prisoners, but the Guards crammed twenty into each one, all of us dusty and sweating from the long slog at sword-point back into Thebes, and covered in a fine layer of ash from the sacrifice smoke that still rose from every temple in the city. When I pushed my hand across my forehead, it felt like cement.

I slumped back against the cell wall. Everyone knows that fortunes turn, but I’d always thought I’d have more warning than this. Enemy soldiers would be camped outside the city for ten years. I’d have time to get used to the idea. I’d never thought I would just come home one evening and an hour later I’d be staring slavery in the eye.

It was all very underwhelming. Still; at least it would be cold in Hades.

Someone recognised me.

“Really, Heliades? You’ll go to the galleys for this.”

I nodded once. There was no point trying to say why I’d been there. Helios had always told me to be like Persephone, always negotiate, but Death is much more open to debate than the Guards.