Page 70 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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We were still awake to see the dawn come in past Harper Mountain. All night, we sat watching the front door, expecting to hear something bang into it, but everything was quiet. When I tilted it open, I eased out first and looked to either side in the glow of the sunrise, the blade of my sword tinted pink and violet. No one was there, and nothing looked out of place. I went out a little way to see up to the roof, waiting to see a horned shadow crouching up there. No.

Dionysus pinned back the doors to let the air in. There was no reason to think the danger was gone just because it was morning, but it was hard not to feel like we’d reached a safe border wall. At least now if the thing came back, we would see straightaway.

Like it was an idea that had travelled a long way to arrive in my head, I realized I was going to have to put on the red cloak and go to the Kadmeia again, because despite everything, I hadn’t found the prince, and I was no closer to anything useful.

It was only gradually that I noticed what Dionysus was doing. He was cutting up some oranges.

“Where did you get those?”

He pointed with the knife. “Your trees.”

“But they’re dead,” I said, twisting around, and then blinked twice, because in fact the twin orange trees that marked the way through the olives weren’t dead. They were very much alive, verdant, and full of oranges. Not quite believing what I was seeing, I strayed out to look, and it was only when I’d picked an orange and peeled it and found it was real that I turned back to the house and saw the ivy and the honeysuckle surging up the old masonry. There were bees looking into the flowers, and tiny bright birds perched in among it all. Two days ago it all been as barren and beige as everything else.

“They must have found some water deeper underground,” he said, doing very good work of seeming distracted. “Eat that, you need something alive, you can’t be living off bread.”

I didn’t say anything, because I was too puzzled. He could have said, Yes, that was me, you’d better get used to it, but don’t worry, you won’t have to live with it for long. In fact, he could have done that all along. When he first saw me with the bull on the edge of the crater, he could have said right to my face, Watch this: I’m going to make you like me, and I’ll only kill you once you do, and it will be satisfyingly terrible. There was no need to hide behind witching, or pale excuses about underground water. That was bizarre. He hadn’t cared, years ago, whether anyone realized what he was, and I couldn’t see why he cared now.

And, and: half of Thebes was looking for a god to give the crown to. It was his for the taking, but he wasn’t taking it. If he had done something huge and deinos, and turned the Queen into a deer or the Palace into a great tree, then he could have been king by now.

But no. He was in my kitchen.

He noticed the silence.

“I do not,” he said, “get in trouble with the Temple of Hermes for frivolous witching, and I’m not in the least worried about what would happen if you report me to them.” It was one of those lies he lit up like a signal for an incoming army.

I was starting to notice that whenever he did that, there were actually two lies involved: the one he was lighting up, and the one that fell into shadows that were much deeper because of the light. The first one, you were supposed to catch. I was supposed to sit here and laugh and think, Ah, well, so there is a rule at Hermes. But the second one . . .

I pretended not to have seen the second one. “I won’t tell anyone. This is lovely. Thank you.”

He looked pleased and sat down around the angle of the table from me. I watched him as well as I could without staring, filling up with a honey happiness. For years, I would have given anything to have him back and see if he was all right. And here he was. Grown-up, healthy, vengeful maybe, and a bit crazy, but not broken. He was the least broken person I’d ever met.

“May I ask you for more advice?” I asked.

He snapped some grapes off a bunch where each grape was fully the size of a plum, and as dark. I didn’t ask where the grapes were from. Probably there were brand-new vines growing out of my bedroom wall. “You stayed up half the night calming me down about a mad person in the cupboard, I think you can ask me for as much as advice as you like.”

I nodded slowly, feeling confused about that now too. I’d just accepted it last night, but in the clearer thinking of the morning, it seemed bizarre that any of it could have frightened him. He hadn’t been frightened of being stolen by pirates: one madman in a cupboard was startling, but that man could have been ash floating on the breeze by now if Dionysus had been genuinely worried. So what: he was pretending to be frightened? I didn’t think so. I’d spent my whole life around frightened people and he hadn’t been acting, last night.

All the odd things—that he seemed not to want his crown, that he was finding excuses for his miracles, that he had been scared yesterday—they were starting to make the outline of a shape. I was missing something, and it was sizeable. I felt like I always had done when I did a cargo stock take and found myself staring at a big empty space where something was supposed to be, but it wasn’t on the manifest.

“Why were you afraid?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t mind now in daylight when he could see any monsters coming. “I don’t mean you shouldn’t have been but—you can tame real bulls, never mind a pretend one.”

He watched me for too long, and I had a creeping sense of having said something stupid. “For sure, knight: why would I have been afraid when I think it was fifty-fifty that you almost didn’t shout. I think you almost lay there while he tore you apart. Never did a witch struggle more to keep a healthy person alive, Phaidros, I swear it.”

“I—right,” I said, because that wasn’t what I’d been expecting at all. Me, he’d been frightened for me, and that had been real fear, the way he’d gone so cold; it wasn’t soldierly irritation that I’d been careless, nor witching. He cared what happened to me. To me.

Because he was the one who needed to kill me, and it would be enraging and rending if someone else did first. The gods knew I’d felt like that about Andromache. I’d once shot at my own knights to keep her alive towards the end—anyone watching the way I was in those last few battles would have thought I loved her, the way I protected her—but I still felt like he had just taken me in from the winter and wrapped me in a blanket.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said.

“Ah, so,” he said neutrally, sinking back in his chair and still watching me over the rim of his cup, which put pressure on a part of my brain that hadn’t been built for pressure. It creaked dangerously. I looked down and tried to think about something reassuring and boring that wouldn’t make me want to choke into humiliating grateful tears, like how we used so differently. For him, it was more like “then”—it was a ghost of some rhythm in an older language, but I couldn’t trace how I knew until suddenly, uncomfortably, I realized I knew that in the same way I knew about the Hunt, and the god in the mask, and the Ones Who Come After.

Fuck, pull yourself together.

“The census didn’t work,” I said. Yes. Reporting. I knew how to do that. “The person I was looking for is still missing. It’s going to cause problems. He’s crucial to a deal for grain from the Egyptians, but it won’t work if he’s fucked off to fucking Sparta. I really thought he was still in the city, but I just don’t . . . know any more.”

“An alliance,” Dionysus said. “We’re not just talking about a nobleman, are we?”