Page 50 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Will you not look at the knights, sir?” I asked.

He stretched past me to set a lamp on the next level of the fountain. He didn’t take his veil off, but the light made it translucent.

“They’ll still be just as scintillatingly mad in a few minutes.” He stopped. “I mean . . . tragically mad. I think it’s all dreadful and bad because I’m a normal person who doesn’t in any way enjoy mystery ailments.”

“In fact you’re unusually sensitive,” I agreed, disproportionately happy that he wanted to play. “Sometimes you struggle under the weight of human suffering.”

He looked delighted, and I had to fight not to laugh. “Drink that,” he said, and held the flask out to me.

“Hm?”

“You’ve a headache.”

I hadn’t been aware of having a headache, but he was right. I must have looked rough. I did as I was told, then tried to give the flask back. He hinged my elbow back to knock the flask into my chest. Tingles went up my arm. I was used to people bashing into me, but nobody was careful. I’d have felt it less if he’d punched me.

“All of it.” He was studying me in the new lamplight. I wished he would stop doing that. “How’s the search for the person who was lost?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “The census is tomorrow, though. Did you stay with the people from Pylos this afternoon?”

He nodded. “They stopped at the springs on the forest border, a lot of them. Five women went into labour at the same time; five. I don’t know why Apollo built humans to give birth if they’ve had a shock, it seems impractical, then you’ll be running away from a lion and having a baby, but he did.”

“Five,” I echoed, thinking what a wonderful time I’d have if my profession involved meeting five brand-new babies daily. “Were they all right?”

He showed me his right hand. There were new tattoos on his forefinger, where the red didn’t quite go to his knuckle yet: five rings, just below the density of the main tattoo. I hadn’t thought I knew what the tattoos meant, but some distant memory reported that yes, that was what it was: one ring for every delivery where the mother and baby both survived. Across both his hands, those tattoos represented hundreds of people.

“Good,” I said, much too stiffly in an effort not to sound envious. I looked across the knights and the witches to pry my thinking back to something useful, not daydreaming about starting an orphanage.

The witches were passing cups between themselves, and pouring out what I’d thought at first was medicine, but I could smell it now. It wasn’t. It was alcohol, and nothing so mild as wine; it was some savage kind of brandy. It smelled like it was supposed to strip paint. Maybe it was something ceremonial, but—no. They weren’t just taking a sip from the cups. They were draining them.

“It’s an old ritual,” Dionysus said, noticing me looking. “When you deal with madness like this, it’s dangerous to have a mind with clear hard edges. You need it to be fog. Far less easy to catch. It’s what those people from Pylos were trying to do, when they made you drink.”

“What does the catching?” I asked, uneasy.

“Your man in the song,” he said, a little concerned, as though it worried him that it hadn’t seemed obvious to me.

“You—think the mad god is real, then,” I said, so redundantly that Helios would have smacked me over the head. I seemed to be saying a lot of obvious things lately.

“Why, what do you think is happening to them?” he asked, about the knights.

“The Queen thinks it might be something churned up in the ground when the star fell. And the drought.”

Dionysus laughed, just the smoke off a blown-out taper, a few tiny embers floating on it. “That’s stupid.”

I kept my face neutral, because not far from us, a woman in plain clothes but who I recognised from the Guards’ barracks was making no particular secret of watching us. I had a bright flash of envy about how unembarrassed he was to say it, though. “No. She thinks it’s more dangerous to tell people it might be a god than not. You know the story about the lost heir, who’s supposed to be a son of Zeus? She says civil uprising is more dangerous than passing gods.”

“It . . . is not,” he said.

“No.” I meant to leave it there, but it was a relief to sit and talk to him. We weren’t friends, but enough strange things had happened to us when we were together now that it felt like being in the same unit. It didn’t matter if we liked each other. “It’s getting to me a bit. I just told her that she’s being a crazed despot and she threatened to kill me and I said bring it on.”

I thought he would laugh, but he went very still. He hooked his finger over the string around my wrist. “There is an agreement between witches and the Ferryman,” he said quietly. It must have been the angle of the lamp, but I thought his eyes were more blue than before, the blue of very clear water where you see can see fathoms down to where leviathans fin. “Do you know what it is?”

I shook my head.

“If you try to give Hades your life whilst it still belongs to me, the Ferryman will not take you. You will wait on the Black Shore until I come for you, and I bolt your soul back into your body, and it will not matter if your body was burned at a stake by the sea: you will become a puddle of sentient ash, until I say you can go.”

I tried to search him through the veil for any sign that this was a long joke, almost certain he was about to laugh and say, Ha, got you, but be more careful. He wasn’t smiling. “You made that up,” I said anyway, because even witches aren’t so deinos.

He inclined his head at me, then bent and held his hand close to ground. A snake writhed straight up his wrist. My heart thunked painfully, only half climbing over its next beat, because the snake was an asp, the poisonous kind that could kill you almost by looking at you. Dionysus straightened up and showed me the snake, too close, close enough for it reach me and bite, and when I leaned back, he snapped his fist shut and crushed it. I heard the crunch of its skull. The body went limp, and venom trickled between his fingers.