Page 89 of The Hymn to Dionysus

With the new light, it was easier to see. There was a pair of wings fastened to either side of it, smallish, bluish brown, maybe a pigeon’s. And there were teeth—a whole jaw. The original bull mask was only the upper half of the face, because all the witches’ masks were designed to let you talk, but someone had used tough dried grass to graft on the bone. It was parched, probably from something that had died in the drought.

“Cuckoo,” Dionysus said softly, about the wings, and then he touched the teeth. “Lion.” He lifted his eyes. “Phaidros, he’s been making his own spell. He’s been . . . experimenting. I think he’s trying to make himself into what he needs.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, but I did understand there was something unholy about that mask, even to Dionysus. He was holding it slightly away from us both. On my knee, Pentheus sighed, and there was the echo of birdsong in it again. Cuckoo; cuckoo.

“An auroch is strong,” Dionysus said, touching the horns of the mask, which had been mostly destroyed by the real horns growing up through them. “But quiet, and—if it isn’t near people, it’s not aggressive. This should have been a good mask for someone who wanted to forget and to hide. It should have kept him to the forest, made him able to defend himself if he needed, but otherwise he’d have been no harm to anyone. But—then—maybe he didn’t like strong and quiet.” The lion’s canines shone yellow-white, nearly as long as my hand. “Phaidros, the dead things in your garden. He’s been courting you. Leaving you presents, things with nice pelts ready for skinning.” He looked up. “Like cats do.”

“But the triplets said that was me.”

“You walked at night and they found carcasses in the morning. But did they see you kill anything?”

I shut my teeth. I didn’t know. Dionysus was right, though; it was what cats did. The lion tail tickled over my leg. The part of me that still wore its bronze helmet visor down stood between the rest of me, and believing it. Dangerous to believe it.

“Why a cuckoo?” I asked instead.

“I doubt he knows it’s a cuckoo, do you know what one looks like?”

“No, I thought it was a pigeon.”

“He just found a thing with wings. Maybe he was just trying to fly away, but . . . it is a cuckoo. You know what cuckoos do? The young ones?”

I thunked my head back against the wall. “They’re put in another bird’s nest, and they throw out any chicks that are already there”—Ares alive, fucking hell—“Dionysus, the triplets—”

“Right.”

It should just have been sad, but I had huge rush of relief and joy and hope, because if it wasn’t me, then I was so much safer than I’d thought, and it wasn’t dangerous to stay in the same room as someone else overnight—it wasn’t dangerous to stay with him.

When I looked at him, he was looking at me too, with that same unspoken half-promise as he had at the stadium.

Pentheus sniffed and, like a cat, ranged over me and bumped down to claim Dionysus as well. He was smaller than he had been with the mask, but he still wasn’t small.

We both sat looking down at the thing that might still be a boy; spoilt and undutiful and determined and lonely. If I had the Fates’ view of time and all the ways it could go, and how the warp and the weft wove; to what extent had this happened because I hadn’t taken him seriously when he asked me for help? I’d thought he could learn to be stronger, but what if he was just made brittle, and he couldn’t, and he’d . . . what? Bought a mask from a witch to hide his face and accidentally ended up like this? Or had there been a witch who realized what the star was, and what the magic would do, and who had said, Choose one of these masks, and decide what manner of thing you would like to become?

“We can’t stay down here,” I said. “If anything happens with the bees I’ll lose my fucking mind again, and he’s one startling bat away from eviscerating us both, I think.”

“Yeah,” Dionysus murmured. “Let’s see if he’ll come up with us.” He stroked the place between the horns. “Pentheus, sweetheart. Let’s go. Phaidros is cold and he doesn’t like the bees. This isn’t a good place for knights, they need quiet. Will you help me take him back?”

The answer was a snarl and teeth snapping at his hand, and claws sinking right into my leg.

I pushed my hand over my face. Of course, Pentheus wouldn’t be doing anything that would help anybody except him. “Right. Pass me that rock.”

Dionysus led the way and I carried Pentheus. I was only just strong enough, and I had to stop halfway up my cellar steps, shoulders on fire, before I could make the last lurch to the top. I put him on the couch—there were hoof marks on the floor beside it now—and once that was done, I felt disconcerted, because moving him had seemed like such a titan task that anything beyond it had had a bit of a fairy-tale quality, not worth thinking of, and now it was here. My back hurt.

Now—ugh—I’d have to tie him up and slog over to the Palace, and give him back to the Queen, and try to explain that yes, he had been living under and sometimes in my house all along but I was much too stupid to have noticed, and hope that there were witches who could turn him back.

“Could you turn him back?” I asked Dionysus, who was standing next to me and looking down at Pentheus in exactly the same logistically troubled way I was.

He frowned, like that was an odd thing to say, and because I knew him enough now, I had a pricking sense that we were coming up against something else we saw so differently we couldn’t reconcile. Madness, pharmakeia; blue. I could feel the shadow of it. “Why?”

“He’s got to go back to the Palace. It was would much easier if he was coherent and boy-shaped?”

“No, he doesn’t have to go back to the Palace,” Dionysus said, quite slowly. “He—Phaidros.” His voice dropped into deeper smoke than usual, as if I were suggesting taking him to a torture chamber. “We have to take him to another part of the forest, where he can’t hurt anyone.”

“What?”

“He asked for help. He asked both of us for help. He asked to forget everything. He found a way. He put the mask on, and he made adjustments to it, he chose this.”

“Yes, because he’s a useless spoilt coward and now it’s time for him to be a prince again,” I said, confused.