Page 82 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I stood up fast.

“Why didn’t it happen to you? Why are you different?”

I pressed my teeth together against a thirty-year instinct to report exactly what had happened. My friend wasn’t an ordinary person; he had snapped, just for a second, because anyone would lose their temper with Jason. And I hadn’t turned because I’d wronged him badly long ago, and he was saving me until the end.

“I don’t know why, lady.”

It was the first outright lie I’d told to anyone in seniority since I’d taken my vow. I wanted to scrub my skin off.

She shook her head once, then paused. “You’re hurt.”

“I’ve already seen a witch.”

Dionysus was still down there somewhere. I was probably never going to see him again.

“And you’re not . . . drunk,” she said gradually.

I blinked twice, wishing I could say, This is an astonishingly irrelevant thing to be asking me about when either we’re all about to die, or a lot of other people are. Of course I couldn’t say that. Even if she had asked me what I thought about the courtship habits of red badgers, I couldn’t have said it. “I’m never drunk, lady.”

“It’s a festival day, you didn’t want to relax?”

“I had half a cup of wine but then all this . . .”

“Half a cup,” she said thoughtfully.

“Lady?” I asked, desperate for her to say something that would explain why she seemed not to mind about the raging crowd, why she’d sent the Guard captain to the Sown estates, what anyone’s mother had to do with anything. The first rule of the legion is that you trust the orders of your commanding officer even if they seem openly crazy, but it had been a long time since I’d had a commanding officer whose reasoning I couldn’t follow.

She studied me for another second. Despite everything, and despite how everyone else in the courtyards was drawn and grey and anxious, she had a glow: she was full of energy, exactly like Helios right before a battle. It was that zing that great knights get right before they’re finally allowed, after weeks and weeks of paralysingly boring night watches and drills and being forced to care about stock-takes and ship maintenance, to prove that they are great.

I don’t know what I thought she was going to say, but it wasn’t what she did say.

“Have you ever seen inside the mechanisms of a holy marvel?”

I baulked, because that was really asking me whether I’d committed sacrilege. “No!”

“Come with me.”

On the roof the Palace is a great marvel of Apollo: lord of all Thebes, of marvels, of order and logic and everything we are. It’s about the size of the Herakles marvel at the Amber Gate, but you wouldn’t know, because the roof is high enough that it looks like it could be the size of a human. I’d always thought it was a statue, not a working marvel, because I’d never seen it move, and I’d never known that you could even get up to it. You could, though. Behind the throne, leading up from that complicated chamber full of the mechanisms that made the dragons run, there was a stairway. It was a narrow helix that coiled up inside the old watchtower, and at the top, a low door led outside, and a thin flat path went along the runnel of the roof to the feet of the marvel.

Covered by a roof but open to the air, except for its four posts, was a kind of cabin. Inside was machinery. There was a heavy lever, and something complicated that connected to the marvel, something like a flue.

“Only the royal family know what this is, and how it works,” the Queen told me. She leaned hard into the lever, which ground forward. Somewhere below us, steam surged and rattled, powering upwards through the pipes to the marvel. I stared up at it. I’d never been so close to one this big before. There was a hatch in the back of the left ankle that was big enough for a slim person to climb into. I had to fight the need to back away. Not because it was intimidating, though it was, but because I shouldn’t have been close enough to start guessing how it worked. That was sacred.

“Can he move?” I asked, thinking of all this gigantic weight of bronze right on the Palace roof.

“No. But he can speak. That’s what you’re going to do.” She held her arm out to make me come closer, and showed me the flue. “You’re going to speak into that. It will make him speak too.”

When you were younger, as a prank, did anyone ever do that trick where they put their fist on top of your head and smack it with their other hand, and then drag it down your neck to make it feel like they’ve broken an egg, and it’s slimily realistic and then because you were an irritating little prick, you immediately did it to all your other friends too? I felt like that. I felt like she’d done the egg trick—not just that she’d broken something nasty on me, but that it was inappropriate, a kind of stupid, childish prank close to this great thing that was holy. I waited for her to laugh and say, Ha, not really, of course you can’t make Apollo talk, that’s silly, nobody knows the real magic inside marvels. She didn’t.

“What you’re going to say, when I tell you, is: ‘This is not the work of a god, but a man, and poisoned wine. Justice is in the hands of the daughters of the dragon.’ ”

“Poisoned . . . wine.”

“Yes.”

“This is—lady, this is sacrilege, you can’t just make a god say whatever you want—”

“Phaidros,” she interrupted, almost laughing. “I’m not making Apollo say it. I’m making a machine say it.”