Page 66 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I pushed him, trying to think when I’d last met someone so easily pleased who wasn’t also six. “Really.”

As soon as the honey cakes were out of the oven, I knew that the recipe was finally right. They smelled different. They were Helios’s cakes. When I bit into one, daring it to be wrong, I was eight years old again, on a beach somewhere around the Kind Sea, and Helios was looking mischievous while he hid cakes behind dead horses and twisted bits of armour. Every so often he’d point at me and yell at me to stop cheating, and I’d squeak from inside his stolen helmet that I wasn’t cheating, honest.

“Phaidros,” Dionysus told me, “you’ve missed your calling.” Then, because I was staring at him, “What?”

I shook my head, because the part of my mind that usually dealt with words had gone off somewhere else for a little holiday. For years, Helios had been hazing away from me, eroding at the edges, but I could see him again; quite small, laughing, not nearly as immortal as I’d always thought, my age now. It was as if I’d seen him an hour ago and he’d just stepped outside to do something nefarious to the sheep of someone he didn’t like.

“I wonder if you can die of cake overdose,” Dionysus said seriously to the plate. “Do you think I should see? I think I should see.”

“My commander used to make these,” I said. “Just like this. I think it must have been this honey. But—it must be rare?”

“He’ll have had it from a witch. We use it a lot,” Dionysus explained. “It’s very good for soldiers, and for mothers who had bad labours. The magic smooths down the edges of terrible memories, so you can think about those things without cutting yourself.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “You’ve made me drug myself with my own cake?”

“I have,” he confirmed, making no effort whatsoever not to look gleeful.

“Shut up and eat your cake overdose,” I told him, feeling stupidly happy.

Mortals can hurt gods. Aphrodite was wounded at Troy: an entire unit of knights from Mykenai swore they’d seen it, and people from Mykenai are serious. Ares is hurt all the time in fights, and even Zeus nearly died once. I was fast, and if I was up in the night sleepwalking and I caught Dionysus at the wrong moment, I’d do a great deal of damage or worse.

So I taught him some proper knots, and then he tied me to the bed; just by my ankle, but with the knot well out of my reach, looped over the other side. He put a cup of water where I could reach it and a lamp where I couldn’t. I saw him notice Helios’s helmet, and the bright side and the dull side. He didn’t say anything about it, and uncomfortably, I realized that meant he understood what he was seeing much better than I would have liked.

“Do you need anything else?” he asked. He didn’t look happy about leaving me that way for the night, but he must have known nothing he could say would change my mind.

“No. Thank you.” I was propped up against the wall, feeling like I was never going to sleep ever again. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“No, it’s none of my concern and I’ve plenty of other friends who bake much better cakes than you.” He sat down next to me, on the edge of the bed. If he came up close to anyone, I was starting to notice, he made an effort to make himself smaller. He didn’t spread out; he curled up, one knee folded under him. While he’d been digging, the sun had turned him an even more vivid shade of bronze. He was too bright for the drab room. “But for what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.”

I tested the rope, pulling against it hard. No. The knots were good. “Why?”

He half smiled. “Because if there were . . . you’d not be able to sit with me and stay calm.”

I felt like I’d missed a step on the stairs.

That was a confession.

“I’m infuriating,” he explained, with a rueful glimmer. “Show me an unthinking murderer who doesn’t dive on me straightaway and I’ll show you someone who isn’t an unthinking murderer.”

That was a double joke. You think I’m talking about being a witch, but ha ha, I could be talking about the other thing. He liked the ambiguity. Maybe he even liked that I could see it was ambiguous.

I almost told him that if all the humans you know well are fifteen and likely to hand you a kidney at any given moment of the morning, distantly sinister jokes were not only undisturbing, but a sparkling example of refined adult conversation.

“I’m sorry, but your own inability to imagine that you might be slightly shy of unbearable is not evidence of my continued health,” I said. “Go over there.”

He looked at me as if I’d said something immensely kind, and just for an instant, I wondered if I hadn’t got him wrong—if it hadn’t been a joke in the way I’d thought at all, but a kind of apology.

It took me a long time to go to sleep. The lamp had burned out by then, and the night had finally turned cool, the almost-full moon making Dionysus silver where he lay under the window. Standing up he was imposing, but lying down, he looked like one of those statues abandoned in the desert in Egypt, built thousands of years ago and forgotten, wearing down and down as the sand blasts by. I had to stare at the ceiling with my hand over my heart to try and calm down and convince myself there was no way I could hurt him. I’d tested the rope. I couldn’t break it. If I wanted to get at him, I’d have to snap my own ankle.

When I did sleep, I tipped into the most vivid dream I’d ever had. I was in a forest, the forest behind the house, but I couldn’t tell why I thought so, because it was different. The weather was different, and not just seasonally. It was cold. It was like Scythia, with that strange ice on the ground—what had they called it, frost?—spinning webs and white tapestries everywhere, and the trees weren’t my trees. They were giants, not the struggling olives and ash that I knew now, but massive oaks, the ground thick with acorns, and grazing through those acorns, the greatest aurochs I’d ever seen, twice my size, horns nocked and savage from fights, and more of them than I’d ever seen together. It was a vast herd, and somehow, even though I knew nothing about wild cattle, I knew that this was part of their great journey south for the winter. We were following, and the hunters were leaving diagrams and instructions about the breeding season on the rocks for Those Who Come After, and the going was hard, so hard that the witches said that if anyone fell pregnant now, we would have to give the child to the forest, because there wasn’t enough food.

There was a person among the bulls. It was insane, because the aurochs were wildly protective of the little ones at this time of year in these woods where the wolves would always follow, but someone was standing by one of the biggest all the same, tall and sparse, and wrapped in wolfskin. When they looked back, right at me, they were wearing a black mask, and a crown of auroch horn, but I knew the eyes behind it. They were the blue at the hem of the sea, where it turns indigo by the horizon.

He snapped his fingers at me; fingers tattooed red-black.

I jerked awake.

It was the middle of the night. Orion was hanging framed in the window, at an angle, like he was leaning sideways to look inside.