Page 69 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I did, and then looked up at him. It was gorgeous. It was his wine now, the black honey-wine that fizzed. “How did you do that?”

“Witching,” he said, with a muted spark.

I’d never been so happy to have such an annoying answer.

He turned my cup around in his fingertips. It was painted with figures of knights in formation, with Athena watching from the end of the line. At first I thought he was going to ask if it was strange to end up in a marriage to someone who raised you, and I got ready to say that goats are strange if you don’t grow up with them; and then I thought he would say something about the war, and whether anyone really did see Athena there like so many of the stories said. He didn’t. He looked sad, as if he were holding the relic of something precious that had been stolen from him long ago.

“You must have a hundred of those,” I said. Even Feral Jason probably had a kalos cup, either from poor suffering Polydorus or some ill-advised lord who didn’t realize what he was getting into.

He sort of laughed. “Not one.”

I had a vivid impression then that I was missing something important. I felt like I’d boasted about winning the Oracle Games to someone who had lost a leg.

“Witches don’t marry,” he said. “If you have a family . . . you’re not strange enough for witching to work properly.”

“It only works if you’re strange?”

“The more deinos the witch, the more deinos the magic,” he said. “Be deinos enough, and even the snakes believe you.” He smiled just enough to show his teeth. “Even the Ferryman.”

I had a dangerous, crossing-No-Man’s-Land feeling that according to his vow, he probably shouldn’t have told me that.

“Isn’t that lonely?” I asked, quiet.

He inclined his head. He was thinking about it, really thinking, which meant he hadn’t said it before, or at least, not recently. I was afraid to move in case he remembered he wasn’t supposed to tell me. “It is. But it is the vow.”

“Is it worth it?”

“Is yours?”

I smiled, because that felt like a really beautiful, deft uppercut that he pulled so well it didn’t even knock my teeth together. “Fuck, no, it’s fucking dreadful, but it’s who I am and I can’t be anyone else now.”

He touched his cup to mine.

A howl came from outside. His eyes ticked to the window. The shutters were open, because it was far too hot to close them no matter the danger. Anyone outside would be able to see the little lamp between us from way up the mountain. There was nothing between us and everything else except the agreement that a door requires permission to open.

“The Palace needs to stop people wearing masks,” I said, only level enough to think it out properly now. “They’re everywhere. They’re selling them in town as a kind of medicine against the madness, and—” I stopped. “And you did that too.”

“What?”

“Before the madness really began,” I pushed, shocked now that I hadn’t taken him up on it before. “The first night after the star fell, you brought people here to that dance, and you gave them masks, and wine. You did it before anyone, you knew something was coming.” Stop, stop, stop, of course he knew something was coming: he was the something. I pulled it back as much as I could. “Didn’t you? But—you . . . knew that masks could be . . .” I trailed off. “Why? The masks make it worse. This is so much worse; that man . . .”

“No, it isn’t.” He looked wrung out in a way that was nothing to do with needing to sleep. He let his arms unhinge slowly across the table, his hands open, wrists facing up, so that he was almost touching me. “The song, the one the Furies are singing, and the knights; they’re singing about the holy raving. That is . . . how . . . cities fall.” He said it slowly and with great care, his eyes flicking up to mine and begging me not to hear it as hyperbole. “The holy raving is what happened in Pylos. The only medicine for it is what you’ve seen. Wine, and masks, and the dance. A little madness can keep away great madness.”

Exactly like it had with Tiresias, the well-greaved and garrison-trained part of me snorted and said, Don’t be ridiculous. Only Athenians and hysterics talk like that. That made me fall still. I’d always listened to that voice. It had been armour against so many things: idiot decadences and superstitions, laziness, the urge to abandon duty when it was inconvenient. It was my favourite part of me. I was proud of it. Nothing could get through it. Now, though—it was getting in the way. A god was talking to me, and I couldn’t understand, because of that bronze helmet that I’d forgotten how to take off, and the visor that wouldn’t hinge up.

“How does that help? How does being drunk and partly a bull help anyone, at all, in the face of a thing that eats cities?” Even as I said it, I could tell I was trying to see it through the bronze helmet, with no peripheral vision. “That sounds as arbitrary as saying we need to befriend a hedgehog and then put three pebbles on the doorstep.”

He took a breath, and then shook his head a tiny fraction. “It’s blue,” he said softly.

And there was yet another thing I didn’t understand. He was talking about trying to prevent this city-burning madness that was coming, but he was the madness, so what was he doing?

Somewhere deep in the maze, the thing screamed again. Dionysus flickered. His hands were still open in front of me. I didn’t take them, because of what he had just said about his vow, but he gave me an impatient look then, like I was being cruel, and took mine. It was like how a cat would have got cross I wasn’t paying it enough attention and shoved its head under my palm. I didn’t know what to say, because what I really couldn’t do was say that that tiny thing had made me a lot happier than it had any right to, and that I’d never met a person more confusing. I wanted to say, But what do you mean?

“Do you really think it was that thing that killed the triplets,” I asked in the end, “or are you just witching me so I won’t panic and go to Ares, and then you won’t have anyone to wind up with your sheep-and-feather-rain stories?”

“I’m witching you,” he said. Some of his usual spark flashed back to life. “There’s not another soul in Thebes I could delight with my fascinating and educational and extremely true stories. You’ve gone irredeemably nuts, and we should be careful about the legions of squirrels coming for you as we squeak.”

Which was another could-mean-something-nice, could-mean-something-terrible joke. I was tempted to start scoring him out of ten for them. I gave up on answers and ate my honey cake. If he was back to his double-edged jokes then he felt better, and that was all I’d wanted.