Page 7 of The Hymn to Dionysus

The baby stretched out with his whole tiny self for the horse.

He wasn’t wrong. Tentatively, I climbed onto her back, and the second I had, she stood up again and shot away, after her family.

It was the most frightening thing I’d ever done, including being run over by a chariot. I had to hold onto the baby with one hand and clamp the other round the horse’s mane, scared I was going to hurt her and she was going to bite me, only just staying on her back as her gigantic shoulder blades heaved underneath us. And then even worse, she left level ground and charged down the steep steps to the lower city, and I was jammed up against her neck feeling like I was going to slip off at any second, and behind us, the Palace was a column of furious black smoke.

When the horse stopped, we were outside what looked like a temple. There were priestesses in bright red standing outside, watching the fire, murmuring the way people always do when something enormous has happened but nobody can do anything about it.

Very carefully, I let go of the horse’s mane and stroked her neck.

In my arms, the baby cooed like it was him I’d stroked.

I hesitated, then blew in the horse’s ear.

The baby squeaked and pushed one tiny fist against his ear.

I wondered what I was supposed to do about a baby who was sometimes a horse.

“Hello,” one of the priestesses said to me. “You look like you’ve had an interesting night.”

“I’m . . . I . . .” I trailed off, trying to think what Persephone would say, or at least, a grown-up knight, and whether I should run away. I’d never met a priestess before. I’d seen them, but only when they threw themselves off towers when city walls fell. In their bright robes, they look like shot birds when they fall, but up close, she was big, person-sized, much bigger than me, and what if she wanted me to jump off a tower? Helios had always been hazy about why they did that and I was worried it was a sort of inherent instinct that might overtake them at any moment. “I found this baby,” I said miserably, “and I don’t know where my commander is.”

“Ah, well,” she said, as if that was normal. She lifted me down. “You’ve done wonderfully, though, you know. You’ve come to exactly the right place. This is the Temple of Artemis. It’s where lost children come.”

“It . . . is?” I said, to her but also half to the horse.

The horse was already walking away, shaking her head as if she was trying to dislodge something annoying in it.

The baby laughed.

“He’s merry, isn’t he,” she said, tickling him. He laughed again, happy now. “You found him, you said?”

“I—yes—I don’t know where his mother is.”

“It’s all right. She’ll know to look for him here. Come in and we’ll get you nice and clean.” She held my hand and led me inside.

The temple was quiet inside, but as I sat there and drank a hot honey drink another friendly priestess made for me, people came in with more children. There were other babies, some girls my age, then a boy of about nine, tearstained and smoke-grey. I gave him the rest of my drink to have while someone went to make him one too. As frightening as it had been for me, at least I was brought up for all this, at least I sort of knew what to do, and I’d had help from a possibly magic baby and a horse. It would have been awful if I hadn’t. I showed him the baby and he cheered up before too long. The baby seemed like he was having a good time. I tried to concentrate on that, not on the dark pit opening up in my insides, the one that echoed with voices that said, What if Helios doesn’t know about the Temple of Artemis, what if he doesn’t find you, what if you just have to live here now?

In the middle of the courtyard was a great marvel of Artemis, holding a bow. Sometimes, She moved Her head, looking up at the sky, or down towards the temple doors. It made me feel better. Even the Queen couldn’t argue with Artemis.

The second I put him down, the baby crawled off to inspect a flower bed and sat in it, looking triumphant. I hurried over too to make sure he didn’t eat anything mad, but he didn’t. He gave me a flower.

“Thanks.” I stroked his head. “Did you—tell that horse where to come?”

It sounded stupid as soon as I said it, and for his part, the baby was more interested in some lemons.

“Phaidros.”

I looked up, not wanting to believe it in case I was mistaken, but Helios was there, kneeling at the edge of the flower bed. He held his arms out and I dived into them, and he hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe and the filigree image of Ares on his breastplate printed right into my cheek so that later I looked like I had a strange Ares tattoo, but it didn’t matter.

“How in the world did you know to come to the Temple of Artemis, tiny knight?” he asked me, sort of laughing, and sort of crying. He drew his hands over my face to smooth away the ash, rough from sword hilts and reins, and safe. “The priestess said you just turned up on a horse?”

“It wasn’t me, it was the baby, he knew, I think he told the horse . . .”

“A,” the baby put in, and gave Helios a flower too.

He took it slowly and brushed the baby’s cheek with his knuckle. “Who’s this then?”

I took a breath to say, It’s Semele’s baby, I took him out of the courtyard because you shouldn’t have left him there, what if he’d caught fire, it would be your fault, and how come you don’t recognise the same baby just because he’s got a different blanket now, but something stopped me. It was a strange kind of pressure inside my head, the kind I felt if I saw a dust plume moving on the road outside a sieged city, or when the ground juddered from chariot wheels.