Page 91 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“I’m sorry,” he said again. He looked distraught now.

I hugged him hard. He was much stronger than I thought as he hugged me back. I could feel the muscle moving over his bones. It was such a paralysing relief that I had to drop my head against his shoulder and try to soak him in, the feel of him breathing and the glassy loop of his hair I had clenched through my hand. “My fist, my fault.”

“That’s stupid.”

I choked on a laugh. He guided our foreheads together. I had to keep hold of his wrists just to make sure he was really there and not a vision Apollo had sent to save me from the truth.

Dionysus really did seem all right. He seemed nervous, though, and with an anvil sinking through my insides, I realized we had circled back to where we had started.

“What are we going to do about him?” I asked, nodding at the house.

He bent his neck for a second. “Say he does turn back. He won’t thank you. He will turn slowly to clockwork, and you’ll have a marvel king who has no pity because no one ever had pity on him. Is that what you want running your city?”

“We have a marvel queen now and she’s working beautifully.”

“She’s killing you,” he said, simple and very soft.

“She’s heroic,” I said, flatter than I wanted to. I sounded angry. I always sounded angry when I was upset. “Thebes has held together this long because of her. And—I know what you think, but madness is not medicine.” I looked down at the ground. “I’m taking him back to the Queen. It’s for her to decide, not us. Turn me to dust or don’t.”

“This is what you choose?” he asked, quiet. The way he said choose made it sound not only important, but the only important thing.

“I’m not choosing! I don’t have a choice, he doesn’t have a choice, that’s what I’m saying to you, we’re Sown!”

“No. You are choosing honour over a boy’s life.”

Something deep in my cellars said: Gods don’t care what’s in your heart or what compelled you. Gods care what you have done.

“He won’t die, he’s going to the Palace!”

“He won’t be living either.”

“Why is this the hill you want to die on?” I demanded, somewhere between infuriated and helpless, and betrayed, because he was choosing some obscure ineffable principle he had never properly explained over—

I caught myself.

We weren’t friends. I just wanted to be, for all I knew perfectly well he was going to kill me in the end. But that was just life, for him. I’d seen him dance. I’d seen dozens of people catching at him as if their lives depended on touching him. He probably thought everyone being a little bit in love with him was normal. It was just the air.

“No, all right,” I corrected myself. “Fine.”

He frowned. “You’ll leave him?”

“No, bizarrely,” I snapped. “I’m taking him without you.”

So I took Pentheus down the mountain, then up to the High City. Halfway, I had to take a horse from the public stable at the Temple of Poseidon and lash him to it, because I couldn’t carry him once he started to wake and kick. The stable master gave me a frightened stare, and I said—not that it made things any better—that the snarling kicking bundle was an escaped slave I was taking home. As I led the horse through the streets, people looked away, crossing over to get away from me.

All the way, what Dionysus had said churned angrily round in my head. Sometimes madness is medicine—medicine for who, for Pentheus? But not for literally everyone else. Everyone else would be fucked. The royal line would be broken; the Queen, the noble, clever, deinos Queen, would have to risk her life having another child; but no, that didn’t matter, he was in Thebes to watch it eat itself and call it pharmakeia—

“Phaidros, why have you got a person in a bag?” the Chamberlain asked me slowly. I was at the Palace steps.

“It’s the prince,” I said, almost absently, more wanting to say, Listen to this ludicrous thing a witch just said to me, tell me if I’m being unreasonable.

“It’s the what?”

“There’s something wrong with him, he keeps . . . don’t undo that,” I suggested. “He needs priests. Or witches. He’s . . . not himself.”

After that, the morning was a chaos of priests and priestesses from half a dozen different temples, surgeons, witches, half the court. I had to explain to least twelve different people how I’d found him, where he had been, what he had been doing. I explained he had killed foxes and a wolf, maybe people, and that he had been foraging honey. It was horrible, because they had to chain him up, and though he kept fighting at first, he retreated into a corner in the end like a frightened animal and curled up in a miserable ball. Those great cuckoo wings were out, trying to mark out some space around him, the way birds of prey do when they’ve got food or chicks to protect.

“How did he get like this?” the Queen asked at last, after everyone had finished interrogating me, and all the theories exploded around her. The Egyptians have a saying: put six Achaeans in a room together and you’ll have twelve opinions. That it’s annoying and patronising doesn’t stop it being right. “Who put the mask on him?”