Page 86 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Lemon cake, then, strange one?” I said to him. Maybe I should have been demanding answers, and even a cessation of hostilities, but he was the boy from the sea; my boy from the sea, and whatever he’d done and whyever he’d done it, being a guest is the same as being kin, and kinship doesn’t stop just because someone has done something terrible. There are laws older than the laws of a city. Taking him up on the right or wrong of it all could wait.

He did laugh, at least, and let me put my arm around his waist. I had a vivid memory of helping Helios, fuming, off the battlefield after he got someone’s javelin through his thigh. Being injured had always made him furious: he took it as a mark of personal incompetence. I couldn’t help feeling glad that Dionysus didn’t seem to.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, suspecting that if I didn’t ask directly, I wouldn’t hear about it until he collapsed again.

He was shaking with the effort of standing, but he managed to make his voice easy. “I’ll be happy as long as no one’s living in your cupboard.”

28

I did check. I checked the whole house twice, and parts of the ruins to either side. I put another bolt on the door down into the maze. That didn’t mean no one could get in. It would have been easy to climb in through the windows, whose shutters we had to leave open to circulate some air through the house. I put broken pottery under them, though, so that at least it would be loud if someone did come. Across the outer walls of the house, ivy and honeysuckle rioted richer than ever. The goats from before were grazing on some fallen olives from my suddenly exuberantly healthy olive trees.

Meanwhile Dionysus was, like all witches, a terrible patient. I had to threaten to recite Athenian poetry at him before he settled down and let me bind up his wrist.

“What do you think happened today?” I asked at last, to give him a way to it if he wanted one; or a way away, if he wanted that.

His eyes ticked up. They looked black in the lamplight, except for the very edges of his irises, which hinted at deep water. Like she often seemed to if he sat still for long enough, his snake had found him, and she was coiling across his shoulders. There’s nothing like a venomous monster to make an already brittle-seeming man more fragile. “I didn’t do anything to the wine,” he said.

“I know.” I concentrated on tying the knot in the bandage around his wrist. “There’s a god in Thebes. I don’t understand what happened today, though.” I risked looking up, feeling like I was between those mirrors again. “He destroyed the garrison today. He could take the throne right now, there would be nothing to stop him. He could incinerate the Queen, pick up the crown, say, This is mine, and everyone would kneel. But . . . nothing.”

He looked down at the snake, who was sitting in the crook of his elbow, and shook his head. Not much; it must have hurt. There were bruises around his neck in the shape of hands. “You’re seeing it like a soldier. You’re talking about destruction and ruin, and stealing crowns.”

“What else is it?” I said, nearly indignant.

In other languages—in yours too maybe—medicine and magic are different things. Perhaps like the Egyptians, you have physicians, and those are different to your witches; the one sets bones and the other sets minds, and rarely do they cross over. But in Achaea, no. They are the same, and that combined thing is what our witches do, and we have one word for it. I have to tell you that, because there’s no other way to tell you what he said without making it sound like something far longer than what he said.

“Pharmakeia,” he said.

“What?”

He was quiet for a second. “There are two kinds of pain. One is . . .” He nodded at his wrist, where I was just tying off the bandage. “We all know what that’s for. It stops you doing things that kill you. If we couldn’t feel pain, we wouldn’t live long. We’d walk into fires because they look interesting and we’d have scratches that we don’t notice and that go bad and we still don’t notice; pain is useful.”

I hadn’t thought of it having a purpose before, but he was right. “Right?”

“The other kind is unhappiness. Not—passing discontent, I mean real unhappiness, the kind that lasts. And . . . that’s for the same thing. It’s there because you need to stop doing the thing that’s making you unhappy, or it will kill you.”

I looked at him sideways. “It definitely won’t. Lots of things make me unhappy. I’m not dead.”

He laughed. “No, but you’ve been trying very hard.”

“What?” I said, wrong-footed.

“Your little knights say you called the prince a whiny little prick. You told the Queen she was being a crazed despot. All the Palace slaves think you’re hilarious because you told the ambassador from Egypt, who holds everyone’s fate in his hands, that you’d rather drown in a fountain than have breakfast with him. You were stabbed today and instead of sitting down you went straight into the fighting. You want to die.”

“No, I—”

“You didn’t care,” he said over me. “And what, you made friends with a witch because you like me? Of course you don’t. I’m a chronic liar and I’m dangerous, and for all you know, I did poison the wine today. You don’t care what happens to you. You stay in the garrison, you keep riding with the Hidden, you murder anyone you’re told to, you keep training children who are mostly going to die by the end of the year: all those things are tearing gouges in you—”

“They aren’t, I’m trained to do those things—”

“Your training isn’t armour, it’s anaesthetic!” He didn’t raise his voice, but there was rage under it, hot as the glass in the crater of the fallen star. He let his breath out and the fight seemed to go out of him at the same time. His focus slipped to the air somewhere between us. “So the function of the mad god is to break your mind, before your mind breaks your soul. Pharmakeia.”

I kept quiet for a while. It was the most fragile quiet I’d ever sat through. I wasn’t saying, I know it was you. He wasn’t saying, I’m trying to explain why I did it. I couldn’t tell why he wasn’t. I’d thought he was playing with me and he thought it was funny, but he didn’t think any of this was funny. “Savage kind of pharmakeia,” I said eventually.

He nodded once. “Kill or cure.”

He had set down three lemons between us. In one of those vivid, not sane bolts you get when you’re worried for someone else’s life or you’re waiting to hear if yours will be shorter than you expected, a thought that didn’t feel like my own used me as a lightning rod. It was that if you have three lemons, you have some lemons. But you’re also seeing the shadow of threeness, traced out in fruit. It’s an idea, three; but not one that needs a human to think it. It just is.

He was like three. I would never see him. Only his shadow, traced in a man, and sometimes in madness. He was . . . somewhere else, as well as here. I couldn’t see in the right way to see him true.