Page 92 of The Hymn to Dionysus

Some witches were murmuring. Someone tried a different mask on him, the mask of a young man; it didn’t do anything. He just tried to bite the lady holding it. Of course it wasn’t changing the mask on the inside; like Dionysus had said.

Like me. Visor down, spear out, even when a god was telling me I was wrong.

Pentheus was watching me over his knees, looking utterly betrayed and beaten under all the dirt. His eyes weren’t quite human, but they were his. He wasn’t looking at me like a young man looks at some older man he barely knows. Anyone seeing this would have thought I was a god he had worshipped for forever and who had then personally hurled him under the wheels of a chariot. I wanted to kneel down with him and ask why, when I wasn’t at all what he seemed to think, I had no power to change the mind of a queen, or to help an unhappy prince; I was just a used-up shadow of Helios, and he couldn’t expect me to be more than that. I couldn’t save him, I couldn’t clash with the Queen, I couldn’t do any of it.

Very useful that he thinks you can though, remarked a voice like Dionysus’s.

Something deep in me clicked into place then.

The more deinos the witch, the more deinos the magic. That was really just another way of saying that the magic of a witch works because people—or other things—believe in the witch.

Pentheus believed I was more than I was.

Nine-tenths sure it couldn’t ever work, I knelt down in front of him and held his hands. One was mostly talons, one was halfway a hoof. It was much worse, the boy-animal chaos, here in the bright light at the Palace. At least there had been plenty of good, ambiguous darkness in the maze.

“Pentheus. It’s time to remember who you are. Wake up.”

And he just—did.

He pushed his hands over his face and sat up without that terrible animal hunch, the one that said he was ready to bite if someone upset him enough, and all at once he was just a boy again, dirty and ragged, but a boy all the same.

I sat back, shocked.

“Phaidros,” he said, sounding confused. “Where . . . what’s happening?”

“You’ve been asleep, sort of,” I explained, trying hard to sound normal. I knelt forward again and put my cloak around him. The wound in my shoulder stabbed me, but I felt it less than before. Distantly, I had a sense that something in me had shut off after fighting with Dionysus. “We’re in the Palace. You vanished for a little while. Your mother asked me to find you. It’s been eleven days.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, his eyes wide and glassy. He looked bewildered. “Eleven . . . days, how? Where was I?”

“Out by the forest, in the maze.”

I should have been more relieved. No: I should have been relieved, generally. I wasn’t. I wasn’t anything. I couldn’t feel anything. Some lever had gone clunk in my clockwork and I was only half here. I was looking at a lost boy who had been through some kind of strange, savage curse, and I didn’t even feel happy to have him back. Just—blank.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you any trouble, I don’t know what . . .”

Well, I’d have to fucking pretend.

I hugged him carefully. “It’s all right. I’m just happy you’re all right. Your mother’s here,” I added, nodding that way. Nobody else had noticed he was all right yet, still arguing.

His confusion dropped away, but not like I’d hoped. I saw the weight of the whole Palace sink onto his shoulders. He straightened up under it very slowly, and a neutral, adult veil came down over his expression. He looked like someone who had had a wonderful, convincing dream, but woken up in a prison cell again.

“Yes, of course.”

I unlocked his chains. “Let’s see her together. I’ll get in the way if she goes—you know. Full Medusa.”

He didn’t laugh. “You can’t say that.”

“No, you can’t say that.”

A very thin smile.

Sometimes madness is medicine.

I tried to kick Dionysus’s voice out of my head, but it wouldn’t go.

“Up you get.” I helped him up, and put my arm round him as a partial shield when everyone went quiet. Not because I was worried about him; it was because in a cold dead clockwork way, I’d assessed him, and concluded that the course of action most likely to end in the objective, his eventual transformation into a functioning king, was a strategic display of protective kindness.

Part of me thought: This is it. This is what being a marvel is.