Page 80 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Watch where you’re going,” he said.

“You watch where I’m going,” the young knight snapped, vicious out of all proportion, and yanked Dionysus’s head backwards by his hair. “How about you come with me, kalos?” Kalos had never been more of a threat.

It was Feral Jason. Of course it was Feral Jason.

All the people around us went instantly, deeply silent.

I broke his nose, then caught him by the strap of his cloak, meaning to drag him down to Polydorus. Later, I couldn’t decide if Jason realized that it was me before he pulled the knife. I did hear his friends scream at him to stop, but then it was too late, and the nasty little blade was hilt deep in my shoulder. I lifted my eyebrows at him, meaning to say, My gods, assault of an officer, you little fuckwit, let me see your rich uncle talk you out of that one, but I didn’t have the chance.

“Stop,” Dionysus said, not loudly, but he had stopped bulls, and it stopped knights too.

If someone else had said it, perhaps even if I had, Jason and his friend would have been on them like wolves, but they went still. It looked involuntary. It looked like what had happened to the knights at the Temple of Hermes, when they began to recite their prophecies.

I pulled my red ceremony sash off and shoved it against the wound, then pulled out the knife. The sash soaked straightaway, and blood sheeted down my arm. Because it was so hot out here, the blood didn’t feel warm, just wet. I had a bleak vision of the next few weeks. I wouldn’t be able to lift a shield properly. I’d be twitchier than ever, seeing knives everywhere, I’d have a string of thoroughly entertaining panics in the middle of the night, and I’d feel ashamed and useless and like I’d left all my dignity on the floor of this stadium.

“Sit down,” Dionysus said, so soft and controlled that it couldn’t have been anything except almost-panic. It was how I talked when I knew someone might die. “Lying down would be better—”

I saw Jason realize that I was hurt badly enough that he might actually stand a chance of killing us both, running down to Polydorus and telling his story first, before anyone else could say that he had started it. If he could say I was drunk and I’d grabbed him—it would only work if I wasn’t alive to defend myself but even so it was better than what would happen to him now, if I lived—

“Diony—”

He didn’t even turn around. “I said stop.”

Even though Dionysus spoke no louder than he ever did then, I felt his voice whiplash through everyone in that stadium. It was the way that lightning will strike an officer on the end of a front line, but then blast through the whole shield wall, hurling the knights backwards, burning inside their armour before they even hit the dust: Zeus’s last resort if the generals ignored signs from the augurs not to fight.

Something vanished from inside Jason’s eyes.

Tiresias had said that humans are clockwork welded onto a soul. Jason’s clockwork smashed, and all that was left was something wild.

It went from the boys behind him too.

Down closer to the arena, there was a weird stir that sounded like the bees had sounded when I crashed into one of their hives, and I looked back, knowing something was wrong but not able to pin down what I was hearing. Around the Queen and the Egyptian delegation, a swathe of red and purple was vivid against the white crowd, because all the knights and Guards were sitting together; now that swathe was writhing. People were standing up, reaching for swords . . .

Jason tore into the boy next to him from nowhere. One of his friends screamed and went for him teeth first, and down by the arena, there was a roar, because it was happening down there too. One after the next, the knights were—snapping, like invisible lightning was tearing through them, rippling out around the stadium, and then the air was made of yelling and screaming, and the whole crowd in white was abandoning everything and running for the gates in a human surge, and everything closer to the arena was heaving mass of red and bronze.

I waited for it to happen to me too.

Dionysus levered me down on the closest seat. Chaos howled around us, but no one touched us; nobody even came near. He pulled the veil out of his hair and bound it around my shoulder, leaning hard into the knot until my arm went numb.

I stared at him, waiting, because surely if he had cursed all the knights then I was soon to follow, and any second now he was going to say, Well, you know what you did, and my mind would snap.

“Just stay still,” he said, as people hurtled past us. Down by the arena, the shocked Guards had got themselves into some order, and they were pushing back against the heaving mass of the mad knights.

I took a breath to demand that he stop this, right now, and I didn’t fucking care who he was and what I’d done to him, because this was insane.

But he had gone; he was four rows down from me now, helping up a woman who had fallen in the crush and whose arm looked broken. She looked relieved to see a witch. Once he had bound her arm against her chest, he moved on again, to a boy who was bleeding. It was happening around the stadium now; that first river of people was gone, leaving just tributaries now, and witches ghosting around the fallen.

Down where the knights were, the Guards were locked into place around the Queen, and there was a different quality to the madness. People in red cloaks were losing interest in the strange, absent way that distracted animals sometimes do. Some were leaving. Some might have been coming back into their minds. I saw Jason straighten up suddenly, blood on his face, paralysed for a second, and then he ran for the south gate.

I picked up my sword, because my sword arm was still fine, and started down.

“Phaidros,” Dionysus said when he saw. “Don’t.”

He’s playing. This is it. This is where he kills everyone and you watch, and then you’re last.

Strapping my shield on, the weight of it pulling against the new wound but duty is honour, I ran down to help the Guards move the Queen.

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