Page 79 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“What does that mean—strange one?” he asked.

I heard it from his point of view and realized how odd it was. The word is daimonios; like a daimon, a spirit. It was another one of those words like deinos, that means several things—“inexplicable” and “wondrous,” “uncanny” and “precious.” “It’s like ‘my dear,’ ” I explained.

Inside, the stadium was much bigger than I’d thought. Around the outer edge, marvels of nymphs held up a canopy that covered the sun-side half, and everything smelled gloriously of wine—his wine, all black and honey—because there were stewards taking it round to everyone, free.

“You must have sold your whole stock to the games master,” I said.

“Me and every vintner in the city,” he agreed.

Although everyone was dressed in white and it was still broiling, people didn’t seem so grim now as they had on the parade route; there were people laughing, groups of girls taking turns trying to juggle apples—for some reason everyone was learning to juggle this year—and old men clustering together to compare news, and I had to take it in bit by bit, because I’d not seen so many people all in one place before since Troy, but it wasn’t like seeing battalions form up. There was no one giving orders or directions. Everyone seemed to know where to go, and it was strange watching them, because from a distance, they made patterns, a lot like bees.

The seats were stone, and they’d soaked in the sun all morning, so they were warm, and everything must have been scrubbed clean yesterday or this morning, because it all looked brand-new.

Dionysus lifted two cups down from a steward’s tray and gave me one.

I hesitated, feeling uncomfortably like I was rule-breaking even though I wasn’t. In the story, they always said, don’t eat anything; don’t drink anything. If you take something, you owe something. I’d always wondered why Persephone ignored it, or forgot it, but I was starting to see. It wasn’t that she was ignoring or forgetting anything.

I took the cup and tapped it to his, and for all it was blazing out here, his wine tasted of winter. It made me remember that dream about the frozen forest and the man in the mask and the crown of horns.

It made me even warmer too.

“Can you help me?” I asked about my armour. Theban armour laces tight down the back: you can’t put it on or take it off by yourself. It’s a way of making sure commanders and wards overlap twice a day, in theory. In practise, for me, it meant I inconvenienced a lot of a slaves.

He nodded and undid the lacing, which was straight, designed not to be tugged open fast. I looked at my knees, trying not to feel it too much as his fingertips skimmed the nape of my neck, but I did; much more than when one of the Palace valets had laced it up for me this morning. When the two sides opened out, I eased out of it, clipped Helios’s mask against my belt instead, and set the breastplate down on the ground, along with my sword. I’d propped that against the seat, but a little girl in front of us lunged for it, wanting the shiny thing and Dionysus had to catch it awkwardly just as she knocked it over. It tilted partly out of its sheath on the way. I tensed up, because it was honed so sharp it could cut falling cloth, but of course that was stupid: he knew knives, and he held it safely. I swallowed, waiting for him to ask about the inscription. He was looking, but he didn’t say, Why is your sword named after a Trojan princess?

“Can you read?” was what he actually said.

I could have crumpled onto the floor and put my head on his knees. “Mm. All senior officers have to.”

“I can’t.” He was still looking at the letters. “Is it worth the effort?”

“I don’t know how I lived without it,” I said, a lot more effusive than I would ever have been if I weren’t bathing in relief at not having to explain how Helios had died. “It would be brilliant for you. If you wrote down your magic it would be much easier to keep track of everything, and to teach new witches, and . . .”

He looked uncomfortable. “But it could last longer than me. I haven’t anything to say that should be around longer than the time it takes me to say it.”

“That’s silly,” I told him. “You’re silly.”

“Look at Pylos. You think you’re just an accountant noting down someone’s tax payment on a bit of clay you’ll wipe clean at the end of the day, but oh no, everyone goes mad and riots, the archive is on fire, the clay all bakes, and suddenly Achilles the shepherd, fourteen oxen and three barrels of apples to Poseidon will be all that’s left of you and the entire city.”

“Well—”

But he wasn’t finished. “And after all our world is gone and there’s no trace of us or marvels or Pylos and nobody knows if the war in Troy even happened, there it’ll fucking be, and priests thousands of years from now are going to have huge gatherings about whether or not their ideas about us are supported by fourteen oxen and three barrels of apples to Poseidon!”

“Or,” I said, concentrating to keep a straight face, because I couldn’t just burst out laughing in public like a little boy; it was probably conduct unbecoming. “When you go shopping, you write down what you need and take it with you, and the writing remembers for you, and you’ll never forget the milk ever again.”

“Oh, that is clever,” he admitted.

All at once it occurred to me that he absolutely could read, and all that had been a way to make me stop being afraid of questions about Andromache. I felt like an old candle that had sat forgotten on a shelf for years, frozen into the same lumpy awkward shape, dull with dust, but now here was the fire again, and I was softening and changing and finding I didn’t have to be that cold shape forever, and the wax was turning warm and bright again. He’d burn me away altogether before long, but it was worth it.

A horn sounded to warn everyone the games were about to start. Dionysus scooped me sideways so I could rest back against him, one arm across my ribs. I held his wrist, wondering how this factored into what he had said about his vow. No family; no name; no one who knew him true. Well. I didn’t know him. I never would. Maybe that was why this was all right.

He put his cup on the ground and held my knee instead. It felt like a glimmering half-promise that maybe there was more that would be all right too, maybe later, after more wine, after walking back up to his garden in the dark.

The quality of that half-promise was a lot like the half-promise of xenia I’d made to him on the ship.

He was lying to me, of course he was. That was fine. It was a lovely lie.

There were some young men behind us, knights, making their way down to the patch of red around the Queen, and not being very quiet; they were already drunk and making a lot of effort to be more drunk, all of them carrying wine cups, one with an entire pitcher at the ready. I geared up to telling them to keep it down, but I was too slow. One of them knocked into Dionysus, hard enough to jolt him forward.