Page 48 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“No time,” snapped the priest. “There are two hundred others up there and we’re trying to keep them alive. None of us has slept. Tell that to the Queen.”

“What do you need?” I asked.

“More space. More people. Quarantine measures, for fuck’s sake. Now get out, before you catch it too.”

I must have been thinking about it behind everything else, but I hadn’t be aware of it, so the thought felt like it flew out of nowhere.

There was a very simple way that this could be the god from the ship. I wasn’t dead yet because he was going to make me watch everyone else die first.

When I arrived back at the Palace, the Queen was in the cloister, talking to the Guard captain about arrest numbers. Someone else was there too, the abbess from the Temple of the Mother, which was strange, because it was hard to see what she could have to do with the Guards. I stayed back, but like before with the Egyptian prince, the Queen saw me and held her arm out for me to come closer. Once I was in reach, she shepherded me nearer by the small of my back and gave me a little interrogatory look that was asking if that was close enough for me to hear. I could have kissed her hand. Because I could mostly read lips, and partly hear, and I was decent at guessing, most people completely forgot I had any trouble.

“—should get at least a hundred people,” the Guard captain was saying. “Our informants in the lower city have reported that the song is already everywhere, even among people who aren’t mad.”

“And the temple’s fields have lost how many slaves?” the Queen said to the abbess.

“Two hundred to starvation, and another two hundred have tried to run,” the abbess said.

“That many,” the Queen murmured.

“In the last week,” the abbess said grimly. “And the rations will only get worse. We’ll lose a lot more next month unless the Egyptian grain comes through. What crops we do have will rot in the ground without people to farm them.”

“Arrest four hundred people,” the Queen said to the Guard captain. “At least. We get them transferred to the fields as quickly as possible. No holding cells: straight into chains, straight out to the estates. Preferably men. Rowdy ones who we can do without anyway. Anyone talking about a new god.”

“For those numbers, it would be best to have use of the Hidden.”

I twitched. A Hidden ride was difficult enough when you were hunting hardened murderers. To go after ordinary people—there were knights dead enough inside to follow that order and lose no sleep, but not my unit of little knights. They were only fifteen.

“Yes. Inform the duty officer at the garrison.”

He bowed briskly. “Obedience is strength, lady.”

“Thank you, Captain,” she said, and he clipped away. The abbess bowed slightly too and went more slowly. “Heliades, that was quick.”

I almost didn’t hear. Arrest quotas: I’d grown up with restricted rations and rules, I was used to someone in a palace somewhere deciding how much I was allowed to eat or how much of my time was really mine, but I’d never heard of innocent civilians being arrested for a non-crime just to fill a labour shortage.

“We can’t get workers into the fields any other way,” the Queen said, as if all my thoughts had etched themselves right across my face. “We can’t haemorrhage money paying day labourers to do it. The payments to Egypt for the grain are crippling the treasury. This is the only fast, cheap way to get the harvest in.”

“They’ll all die,” I said, as if she wouldn’t have thought of that already.

“If they don’t, then all of us will.” She caught my eye. I’d been staring at the ground. “Your report from Ares?”

I had a nasty thought. Was she truly worried about sedition, and someone making a false claim to the throne—or was she making the mention of a new god a criminal offence literally just to fill the fields? It was ruthless, and it was flawless marvel-thinking. If you didn’t consider misery, yours or anyone else’s, a reason not to do something, which was the real heart of being Sown . . . it was a good solution. I had to box my thoughts around to what she’d asked me. “The madness is real. It’s contagious; there are hundreds of knights there now, the whole place is chaos. They’re starting to die from it. Four deceased, so far.”

She frowned. “They’re dying?”

“Yes. They don’t eat or drink, they won’t stop dancing, so the heat kills them quickly. The priests are trying to restrain the rest, but it’s not going well. They’ve requested help. More people, more space, quarantine procedures.”

“What’s your assessment, do they actually need it or can they get by with what they have if they just dig in?”

“They need it if we don’t want hundreds of knights to die by tomorrow evening.”

She was gazing across to the shrine of her sister, in the lightning-blasted courtyard where the ivy was claiming back all the broken, blackened masonry. More ivy than before. Something in its roots had woken up. “So it’s something in the ground. Zoe was right.” She sighed. “But the more people we involve, the more people will see what’s happening to the knights and call it the doing of the lost prince.”

I tipped back slightly, because I had been about to say, Look, what’s more important, the lives of knights or the suppression of rumours about the lost prince, but that was stupid. I had just watched her order the arrest of innocent people because it would be cheaper than paying day labourers. She would absolutely let a few hundred knights die. I caught myself wringing the red string with the bee charm on it round my wrist, as if it could magically tell me what Dionysus would say, because the gods knew he’d have a cleverer answer than just begging her uselessly not to do it.

“Witches,” I said, before I really understood what was behind the thought.

“What?”