Page 78 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Oh, Tiresias is ahead of us both,” she said, with an absolute absence of urgency. “I’ll show you, it’s interesting.”

I hinged a couple of inches into a bow, too tired to be curious, just relieved she’d already thought of it.

“Sleep well, knight.”

“And you. Though—lady?”

“Mm?”

“What you said, about how no one came, and what your mother told you. I hope she’s eaten by wild fucking dogs in Hades for the rest of eternity.”

At first, she started to nod, which was a response to whatever bland good night she’d thought I was going to say, and then she stopped and looked at me properly. Different things went over her face then. It was hard to track them, but when they stopped, the one left closest to the surface was something very brittle. She didn’t say anything, but as though I were the king and she were the knight, she took my hand and kissed my knuckles, and turned away into the dark.

25

On the day of the funeral, the knights marched in the procession through the city, just behind the Queen. The roads were frosty with scraps of cloth cut into the shape of flower petals, in the absence of real ones. They were everywhere, piling up in drifts on the waysides and spinning in little whirls where the hot wind played with them, catching on laundry lines and along the spokes of cartwheels, and in the high plumes and horns of the generals’ helmets.

Some of my little knights looked glassy and strange. I found myself counting heads over and over, to make sure nobody had drifted off to dance in an alleyway. Two units ahead, I saw Polydorus, obvious because of his grey hair, turn back often, clearly checking exactly the same thing. He looked even more exhausted than he always did. I didn’t blame him. If anyone was going to go mad soon, it was Jason.

The people lining the roads looked just as bad.

Usually, important funerals are like dark carnivals. I could remember sitting on Helios’s shoulders to see the parade when a famous king was killed in battle, excited because they were giving out free food and a state funeral is the only time you’ll ever hear the Hymn to Hades, which felt special and magical, and in a way specially for me, because of our line’s words—be Persephone, always negotiate. All the children had learned it the night before so we could be part of the choir and we’d all loved it.

There weren’t any excited children today. There were children, but they were standing quiet and dusty with their parents, some slumped on the ground where there was a bit of shade, but mostly just stuck in full sun. Everyone had scarves crossed under their collars so they couldn’t burn worse than they already had. The heat was a sledgehammer. Some people looked upset, perhaps to see the royal line broken, and all the uncertainty that brought—or perhaps just that it was miserable to stand out for so long, breathing the ash. When the Hymn to Hades began, some people did sing it with us, but some just stared at nothing.

Everything still sounded dull and woolly. I could hear a little bit more than yesterday, enough to function, just—but still not even as well as I had done before Dionysus cured me.

Someone, not that far away, wasn’t singing to Hades. I would have sworn I heard—raving wild and riot raving in one of the pauses, but though we all looked, it wasn’t obvious where the voice had come from.

In the alleyways between houses, there were people sitting, avoiding the procession, and they had gone still in the dead-eyed way people do when there’s nothing left to do except sit there and die.

The gods willing, Dionysus was right: if Pentheus was officially dead, then the Egyptians couldn’t be offended, and perhaps we’d have to pay more for the grain, but we would still be able to have it. If they turned around now—I’d really hoped to hold onto my little knights for longer than this.

I kept scanning the crowd for any more masks that looked like a god, but so far there was nothing. The Guards were searching people, just in quick scuffles lost in the crowd. I wasn’t sure because I couldn’t hear, but I thought it was those masks they were looking for. I didn’t think there would have been an official proclamation. If it were announced that putting on a god mask turned you into a god, everyone would try it. The Queen had seemed so calm about it yesterday, though. I still couldn’t tell if that was because she was pretending to be calm, or because something about that experiment of Tiresias’s had given her a good reason to be.

When Dionysus met me at the stadium gate after the parade, waiting to the side of the streams of people, he was lifting linen petals out of his hair, the fall of it pulled over his shoulder so he could see. The grey in it made him look—now he was in funeral white—as though he had been standing close enough to a pyre for the cinders to have settled on him.

“Good morning, sir,” I said, trying hard not to let it show that I’d just had a gigantic burst of happiness to see him. There was part of me that was writhing like molten iron after yesterday, but the sight of him poured water on it and in all the steam, I could breathe properly again. I couldn’t tell why.

“Good morning, knight, how strange to see you upon the road,” he said, and fell into step beside me. He was giving me a witching study and I thought he was going to say that he’d heard I’d lost my hearing again, and was I all right, and I’d feel stupid and humiliated all over again. But he didn’t. Instead he put his arm around me and pulled me close. “I’m so happy to see you,” he said against my hair.

He had on a silver bracelet, and it clinked against my armour. It was oddly unsurprising to find that I could hear that now. Around us, the world turned loud and clear. I was out of my box. I could hear people talking, actual words, not just a distant buzz.

He hadn’t done it on purpose. I doubted he even knew. It was just a function of—what?

Calming down. Feeling safe. Something—easing.

Blue, maybe.

I put my arm around his waist and squeezed. “Why?”

“I was lonely.” Like we had been married for years, he took my shield for me. It was a relief, because it meant I could pull my helmet off and carry it.

“You see people all the time,” I protested, wondering what it must be like, to be so unembarrassed and so open that you could just say that to someone. I unclipped the helmet’s visor and put it down the front of my tunic, where it stayed in place because my breastplate was buckled on close. I’d been doing that for years. Things get stolen. If someone wanted that visor, the only image of Helios ever made, they’d have to take it off my corpse.

“You can be lonely in a crowd,” he pointed out.

“Well. Not today, strange one,” I said.