Page 34 of The Hymn to Dionysus

A shout came from inside the Guards’ garrison, and I saw lights hurry back towards the prison doors, and then inside the corridor through the barred window. The torchlight hurled monster shadows everywhere, and still, everyone spun.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

All the drunken confusion was gone now. Everyone was silent, except for that ribcage-deep thump of the manacles.

“Get in there,” someone else said tightly. “If we have to whip them, we do.”

The manacles started to fall. The key must have been going around, it must have been, but even I couldn’t see it. One pair after the next, the manacles opened and slammed onto the floor, and still they danced.

Somewhere deep in the cells, some people started to sing. Even though it was impossible, even though there was no earthly way everyone here could have known it, it didn’t take me much by surprise that it was the mad knights’ song.

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance

Thunder-wrought and city-razing

King, king of the holy raging,

Rave and rise again.

The cell door opened, and everyone inside paced out. Then the next cell door, and the next. The Guards looked at each other, and I saw them realize they couldn’t do anything unless they wanted to start killing people. The dancers looked like they were sleepwalking, just like Amphitrion had looked. The song was shaking the whole square; it would be waking up people in the lower city. The would-be slaves had come to see, and there was already a little crowd at the edge of the marketplace. I went to the middle of the square so I could see the prison gates.

When the first prisoners came out, there was a ragged cheer. I felt it too, a brilliant lift to see the Guards lose, for once. It couldn’t last: the Guards were going to be furious the moment they stopped feeling so confused, and the gods knew what they would do next if they caught anyone they recognised, but just for now, it was fantastic.

Once people were out, the eerie song stopped and they ran and scattered, and then I was straining to try to find Dionysus in among all the deep moon-shadows and the smog of sacrifice smoke, and someone knocked me against the wall, but then he was there and we were running much too fast down the steps to the lower city, and struggling to breathe and coughing, and laughing, because it was so stupid.

At first, it was impossible to talk, because the smoke was too thick. With no lamps, we had to go slowly, and when we hit squares rather than roads, we kept losing each other. There was a brief negotiation in which he suggested we hold hands and I explained that I would rather walk into a furnace and explode, thank you, and so as a compromise, he tied our wrists together.

“Where do you live?” I asked, when we were finally on the path up the mountain. The air wasn’t clear exactly, but it wasn’t choking any more either.

“Along by you, where we were before. It was empty, so.”

Witches could live anywhere they wanted to, as long as nobody else was living there first. Anecdotally I’d heard that some witches didn’t take that last part too seriously.

I wished he could have chosen somewhere other than next door. It was a quarter of an hour’s walk back even from here and I couldn’t very well say, You go on ahead by yourself in the dark, I’ll sleep in this tree so I don’t have to talk to you any more. Now we were safe and I didn’t think he was a god who wanted to kill me, I was feeling more and more grumpy about having to waste most of my night on blasphemy and then being wrongfully arrested for blasphemy and breaking the sodding blasphemer out of sodding prison, and ashamed that really, the arrest had only been half wrongful.

“That was fun,” he said. He sounded genuinely cheerful, the prick.

I looked for a ravine to shove him into. “No, it wasn’t. Do not do that again,” I told him, pulling off the cloth that bound our wrists together.

“No, I saw you laughing.” He paused. “Actually that’s the first time I’ve seen a knight here laugh. You all go around looking like it’s worst day of your life; why?”

It was, in fairness to him, not a stupid question.

“Theban manners,” I explained. “The best compliment you can pay someone here is to say, you’re a marvel; as in a clockwork marvel. It means you function the same no matter what’s happening. We don’t smile much. It isn’t rude, but it’s . . . crass.”

He was looking interested; not, I realized, in the information, but that I’d told it to him. “You’re good at talking to foreigners,” he said.

I studied him, and he held my eyes, frank and unembarrassed, and very un-Theban, but still . . . “You aren’t a foreigner. You’re from here.”

He smiled slowly. It was increasingly bizarre to meet a grown man who let all his feelings go straight across his face. When I’d seen it before—on Athenians—it was flamboyant, but he wasn’t that at all. Just—honest. “What makes you say that?”

“Achaean,” I said, more and more sure the more I heard him speak, “is impossible to learn fluently as an adult. You were born here.”

“Or I’m half as clever as you and I made an effort.”

I shook my head. There are geniuses, and probably somewhere there was a foreigner who, with twenty years of pig-headed and unreasoning dedication, might learn an Achaean dialect as fluently as he spoke Theban, but the only people who had to learn Achaean from scratch were slaves, and a slave was rarely in a position to learn it well. “Why don’t you want people to know?”

“It’s part of the Witches’ Vow.”