Page 35 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“You have a vow?” I asked, intrigued despite everything.

He nodded. The air was finally clear. It smelled of green and pollen and moss, which was wrong, because for months it had smelled of dust. “I swear no living soul shall know me true. I swear to leave behind my family and my home, never to return.”

“Why?” I asked, because that was much harder than the Knights’ Vow.

He gave me an apologetic look. “I swear never to tell why I swore this vow.”

“That seems deliberately irritating,” I said. It came out more hostile than I’d meant it to.

He seemed not to care and answered what I’d meant, rather than the way I’d said it. “Witching doesn’t work if you know how it works. If I told you why I can’t tell you my real name or where I’m from or the rest, most magic would fail for you.”

I glanced up at him, wondering where he had learned to translate from Knight to Civilian, because he was doing it very well.

“The next time you’re wounded, the legion witches wouldn’t be able to take the pain away.” He looked down at me, and even in the starlight I saw his eyes catch on the scar on my face. Like before, he did it for too long. If he had been a knight, I would have pushed his temple to make him stop, but I could see already he would probably take that as a hilarious challenge and lick me. “And that seems shortsighted.”

I let that roll around my head for a few paces. “So it doesn’t work for witches?”

“No.”

“Then what happens if you’re hurt?” I said incredulously.

“Tough crackers really,” he said with a laugh under his voice, the same one I would have laughed if he had asked me if I thought it was unfair I wouldn’t live to see forty.

I didn’t mean to, but I looked up at him properly then, because hearing him say that, and say it like he had, made me think that knights and witches were more similar than either of us usually noticed.

The way was so quiet that even I could hear the trees creaking. No one seemed to be coming after us, even now. I wondered if actually, so many people had escaped that the Guards would pretend nothing had happened and never mention it again. It was better than admitting that over a hundred people had escaped, singing a forbidden song.

After a little while, because the road was steep here and we were both tired enough that it was difficult to climb and breathe and talk all at the same time, I said, “Why did you organise that dance? You knew it would end in the cells.”

Although his playfulness was still there, a veil of something like regret came down over it. “Witching.”

I gave up. I wasn’t going to try and wrestle a straight answer out of someone trained to tie answers in knots.

We were already at my side of the maze, by the gate under the lemon tree that never made any lemons. I bowed a little and meant to leave him to what was left of his night, but then stopped, because he was looking at something on the path through the gate, and his shoulders had just tacked back.

“What’s that?” he said.

It was a dead fox, in a fluffy heap on the ground just past the gate. It was the big vixen who I’d been feeding since the drought had begun; she’d been glossy and healthy yesterday. I looked fast to either side. There were wolves in the forest, but I’d not known them come onto my land before; they didn’t like humans any more than we liked them. But it was so dry. Maybe all the things they usually ate had died. I couldn’t think of anything else that could, or would, kill a fox. No tracks, though. I moved the fox, trying to see how it had been killed.

“That’s unusual,” I said slowly.

“What?”

“Its neck is snapped, but I can’t see any bite marks.”

Dionysus gazed up the steep dark path that led to his side of the ruin. Not afraid, but speculative. He should have been afraid, though. He was tall, but he was no knight.

“Walk you home?” I ground out, because duty is honour even when your duty is to keep an enraging witch alive after he’s landed you in a gaol cell for public debauchery.

The merry glow came back. “No, thank you. I think I’ll be better off with the wolves or wandering psychopaths.”

I sighed. He had made it sound like a joke, but it wasn’t. I was too near to the end of my tether. I had an unwilling spike of gratitude. No one had said it to me so politely before. “It probably isn’t psychopaths. It’s probably my slaves. This will just be the newest thing in their campaign of hexing me to death. You’ll be fine.”

He looked interested. “You don’t want to sell them to someone who they won’t hex, or . . .?”

“Can’t. They,” I said, a little bit deliriously, draping the fox over my arm to take it in, because the fur would make some useful things for winter, not that I could imagine being cold ever again, “were a royal gift. Oh, you fought so well at Troy, Phaidros, nicely done, Phaidros, first unit over the wall and everything, here’s a present for you: the pedigree triplets from Hades who will spend the next twenty years plotting to fucking kill you, there you go, son, enjoy, and guess who has to live alone with the creepy little fuckers on a drought-stricken mountainside?”

“Well,” he said, once again deploying his frankly astonishing skill for taking things as I’d meant them and not how I’d said them—seriously, this time, for all I’d tried to phrase it as a complaining joke, “you’re mine now. You’re subject to no curses but mine.”