Page 64 of The Hymn to Dionysus

Horror welled up in me, seawater in a boot print on the shore, and I felt it well too far and spill over the top of me, and I couldn’t breathe.

“Why did you make me swear not to go to Ares?” I asked, very quiet. Maybe this was it, maybe this was the revenge he had set out for me. Maybe he wanted to see it close up. It was difficult to lift my eyes and meet his, because I knew he was going to be smiling, ready to say, You know you deserve this.

But he wasn’t smiling.

In fact, he looked worried that I wasn’t shouting at him.

“Because there’s a mad person in the maze,” he said. “This could be my fault, not yours. I’m the one who said he’d probably not hurt anyone. So you and I are going to stay here tonight, and we’re going to see what happens.”

Yes, because then I’d got a little bit of hope, and it would be so much worse when nobody came and we had to agree it was me.

“But it wasn’t him, was it,” I said.

“Look,” he said, and took my hands. He frowned when I flinched. “No scratches. Look at them, they fought, but there’s nothing on you.”

“Stop witching me. Just let me go to Ares.”

“Phaidros! I’m not witching, why would I do that?”

I nearly laughed and listed all the reasons. Remember that time I stole you off a beach and meant to sell you into slavery in Egypt? Remember how my crew thought they should throw you off the ship? Remember how I didn’t stop any of it? Remember how I didn’t die with the rest of them?

Only, only, only, what if he wasn’t doing that, what if he really did think it was the mad person in the maze?

Hope is the death of valour.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

“Of course I don’t trust you!” A hilarious thing about me: I look horrifying, but my voice breaks high when I’m not happy and I sound about fourteen. “You tried to convince me it rains feathers in Scythia!”

He hadn’t let go of my hands, and ignored it when I tried to pull them back. He was strong. “Look . . . I know you took a vow to tell the truth no matter what, and so I know what that makes me look like to you. But—please understand. I took a vow to lie no matter what, for the same reason. The honesty of knights helps people. The lies of witches do that too. When I say, ‘do you trust me,’ I’m not asking you if you trust me to tell you the truth; I hardly ever tell the truth. I’m asking if you trust that I want to help you, and that my help could be useful.”

My breath hitched on the way in, because I didn’t even trust that.

He seemed to see he wasn’t going to get much more out of me. He gave my hands a tiny squeeze and let them go. “I’m starving. Will you make some bread while I dig?”

“Dig?”

“To bury them. We can’t burn them, it will start a wildfire.”

“I should bury them.”

“Not good for you,” he said seriously. “It will hurt you more.”

“I should be hurt more.”

His eyes went up and down me twice, and then slipped past my shoulder. I thought someone was there, but when I looked back, there was no one.

“They don’t want you to,” he told me, as quiet and simple as everything else he had said.

“Bullshit,” I said, but my voice came out tight.

He smiled gradually, as if it were genuinely funny and he was trying not to. “All right, you do what you want if you’re so clever.”

I made the bread.

Dionysus did it all himself. He dug on the forest border, and carried them there, and he wouldn’t let me help. He made me sit down while I waited for the bread to prove, and by the time it was done, the corridor to the triplets’ rooms was just a corridor, washed clean.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked him. I was beyond confused now. There was horribly twisted revenge, but burying bodies was something else.