Page 76 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I nodded slightly, though I didn’t think it was about better or worse at all. It was the wild, taking back Thebes, and it wasn’t doing that to benefit or hinder anyone. Dionysus was brandy, and these miracles were the fumes, and the longer he stayed, the drunker we, and all the land, would be. I couldn’t say that.

The Guard was coming back with a witch who moved like she was very old. The Queen was talking to her, and I couldn’t tell if the witch spoke back because she was wearing her veil. She came to sit on the next step down from me, directly in front, so I could see her properly. The red tattoos on her hands came almost up to her elbows. I wondered how many mothers and babies that was. She’d seen whole generations into the world.

The Queen said something else and the witch took her veil off. She had bright black eyes.

“My name is Circe,” the witch said to me, “and I am ninety years old. I’ve served in the courts of queens and kings from Tintagel to Memphis, and my magic is far greater than the power of any of them. What’s happening to you now is a blessing from the mad god. He’s taken part of your mind away to keep you from doing anything else that’s going to hurt you.”

“Can we perhaps not invoke imaginary gods,” the Queen murmured.

“Just because you don’t know him in Thebes doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t,” Circe said, unmoved. “Drink this.” She gave me a bronze cup of that feral brandy.

“No,” I said, because I couldn’t do that in front of the Queen.

She put it aside, but gave me a look that said she couldn’t do much to help me if I wouldn’t accept any help. “You’re going to go home, and eat something, and see your family, and sleep like the dead, with no dreams. When you wake, you will hear again.”

No; I wouldn’t. I could see the trick. It was the way she’d told me who she was. The more deinos the witch, the more deinos the magic. She was trying to make sure I knew she was deinos. She was doing exactly what he had done, she was telling me I was safe, only it wasn’t going to work, because I didn’t believe her.

If you know how the witching works, it stops working.

“You can come home with us,” Polydorus said to me. He had knelt down on my other side. “We’re much nearer than the maze.”

“No,” I said, because he didn’t like me, and because he had a wife who would surely not enjoy a whole extra human in her house when she already had to put up with Jason—especially not a deaf battle-mad one she wouldn’t even be able to communicate with. And they had children: two little girls still too tiny to join the garrison. Polydorus had married the second he was eligible to on his mother’s orders, and his wife was . . . I thought she was a knight too, invalided out of service because she’d lost an arm, and now something influential to do with the Temple of Athena. And his commander was still alive: he was an official in the Assembly. I had a distant feeling that they were all one household. I knew the house, on Copper Street—it was one of a row of beautiful Sown mansions, built for exactly that sort of extended family. They all had courtyards with orange trees, and if you looked down at them from the Palace, you could see them because of the oranges that fell in the gutter channels in a bright line.

“It will be worse by yourself,” Circe told me, severe.

I nearly told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. I didn’t have it in me to stay with a family. Even if it turned out Polydorus’s wife and commander didn’t mind me at all, they would still be one thing, all joined together and belonging, and I would just be me. When I tried to go to sleep, the Nothing would be there, filling the room, where my little boy and Helios and his wife and children, and mine . . . weren’t. It would be worse than going home by myself. That was good, dark loneliness, not the kind horribly illuminated by someone else’s happiness.

“All right, everyone get out,” the Queen said, to put an end to it. She looked tired. “Not you, Heliades.”

“Come to Copper Street after,” Polydorus told me urgently.

“I’m fine,” I said again. “But thank you.”

The Queen watched them leave. She seemed like she was struggling with something. “They’re right, you shouldn’t go home by yourself. I imagine you’d be easy to steal. You’re very manageably sized.”

I snorted without meaning to and mimed punching her in the head. She caught my fist.

“Come on. You’re staying here. Where there is not a lovely family you don’t belong to,” she said over me when I started to argue.

I must have looked taken aback, because she shrugged slightly.

“I don’t like visiting families either,” she said. She looked like she’d wrenched it out from under a grindstone.

If she had handed me a fistful of rubies it would have felt less important. I couldn’t think that she said anything like that more than twice in ten years.

She tipped her head towards the long cloister to point out where to go. I followed her. We had to walk carefully, stepping over vines—ivy, wisteria, things I didn’t know the names of—growing right across the flagstones.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s an injury, it isn’t your fault,” she said. She seemed muted—she was too restrained to complain, but I knew why. Before now, she’d talked to me as though we were more or less made of the same stuff. Now . . . she was being careful of me, because it was obvious that we weren’t.

I wanted to punch something.

“How are you like you are, lady?” I asked. “Like a marvel?”

“I didn’t spend twenty years at war and raids, for a start,” she said, smiling a bit. It was regret, that smile. She wished she had served. She was ashamed she hadn’t.

I filled up with a sort of helpless devotion then. Nobody had expected her to stay with the garrison. It would be idiotic for a queen to die in a field a thousand miles from her city and hurl the succession into disarray. She knew that too, I knew she did, but if she was so deep-down Sown that she felt ashamed anyway, in the face of all reason, then we hadn’t had as true-hearted a knight on the throne since Kadmus.