Page 33 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“So he should. He was there from the start, I can’t believe he isn’t more drunk,” Dionysus said cheerfully.

Maybe he thought it was funny. Witches have a dark sense of humour. I heard about one who turned some sailors into pigs when they were rude to her. Well; actually that is quite funny.

The Guard looked at me again. “You aren’t drunk.”

“No,” I agreed.

“And . . . he’s trying to stitch you up.” She turned to Dionysus. “He was there to tell you to stop, wasn’t he?”

No; he didn’t think it was funny. He was helping me. I wondered if it had any chance of working.

“What are you talking about?” Dionysus demanded. He was a wonderful actor. “I never heard a word from him.”

“Come out,” she told me wearily. “Why didn’t you say?”

I watched her, half certain she was joking. This was very irregular behaviour, for a Guard.

“No, you’re right, I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said as if I’d answered.

She cast a wary look at Dionysus. If he had been someone else, I could see she would have punched him, but the red tattoos on his hands stopped her. He could curse her. Perhaps he would anyway. Without even a glimmer of the ordinary, sensible fear normal people have for the Guards, he met her eyes and studied her too, but not in the way she was studying him. He was smiling a little, like he was waiting for other people to understand a joke, and I had an overpowering feeling he had only let himself be sent into the cells to keep the other prisoners company.

She slammed the cell door.

The noise was chaos; people were shouting to be let out, it was just music and some wine, most of them too drunk to see what a stupid idea it was to shout and swear at Guards. The air smelled of hot stone and alcohol and sweat, and it was like trying to breathe through a wet cloth. I moved through it feeling dislocated. I’d been sure I was going to end up in the slave market, and I like to have a solid itinerary: I felt indignant that things weren’t going as expected, for all this was much better than I’d expected.

I ghosted after the Guards. The one who had let me out smiled at me and then looked alarmed, and twisted the tips of my hair around her fingertip to show me a stray spark in it. I crushed it out.

“Gods, these sacrifices,” she muttered, suddenly a normal person now that she didn’t have her duty face on. We were moving through a haze of smoke, even just in the corridor.

I brushed another spark off her purple cloak and she nodded, and when we met each other’s eyes, there was one of those strange floating moments where we both realized we would have got on brilliantly if not for the circumstances, because we were the same age, and she seemed like the kind of person who probably had a pet chicken called Cassandra and a cracking sense of humour, and we could have been friends. But Guards and knights aren’t meant to be friends.

One of the officers hung the keys up outside the main door, which was solid bronze.

“The law says three days,” he said, sounding grimly pleased with himself.

In this heat, everyone would be dead in three days.

I looked at the other Guards, waiting for someone to say something, but no one did.

So I lurked in the corridor till they’d gone to their mess room, then stole the keys and looped straight back around above ground, at the edge of the market square, to the low, thin windows that were designed to let all the heat of the day into the cells, but none of the air. I counted along, then knelt down at the fifth one. It wasn’t difficult, and I didn’t have to be stealthy. The square was empty except for a few people sleeping rough at the far side so that, probably, they could be here first thing when the attendants of Sown lords and ladies came to the market in the morning.

“Dionysus.”

He was close to the window already. I gave him the keys through the bars.

He didn’t take them. “No,” he said. “They’ll know it was you.”

I made a not very patient noise at him, because it was boiling and I was so tired now I would have cheerfully murdered someone in exchange for an extra hour’s sleep. I caught his hand to put the keys into it. The red tattoos looked black in the moonlight. “Make it look like witching. And hurry up, I’m not sitting here all night arguing with you.”

He thought about it. “Will you want to see some magic?” He said it with a joyful sparkle that I’d only ever seen in small children before. Will you want, I thought to the side of everything, in the part of me that spoke what felt like a thousand languages. Why did that sound so ancient?

I didn’t know what to make of that sparkle in an adult man. It should have looked juvenile, but it didn’t. I didn’t like it: it was a lie, for a start. He didn’t know me. He wasn’t enjoying me, or the cell, or whatever mummery he was about to perform. “No,” I said. “But you’re going to do whatever the fuck you want anyway.”

I still have no idea how he did it. Even though I was watching, I didn’t see him pass the key around. He didn’t talk to anyone else, he didn’t explain what they had to do. Perhaps he already had. Perhaps he knew that I would take the key, but even so.

He started to spin. At the end of each turn, he knocked the manacles together, so they banged. It was an eerie thing to see, one slim figure with tattooed hands, the thin light catching on the chains. Maybe because he was tall, maybe because he looked so stark and so different, he didn’t quite seem like a person any more, but a thing who happened to have taken the same shape.

In that small room, I thought the other people would just look confused, or tell him to stop moving, there was no space, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, they began to spin too, and to crack the manacles together. With ten people doing it, rather than one, the noise was loud. I glanced to my left, anxious, because someone would hear, but that was clearly the point. It spread to the next cell; I could just make out people beyond the bars. Turn, bang, turn; it was louder with every spin, more people doing it, until I could feel ground under me shaking where the cells extended beneath the square. It was marching pace, but getting faster.