Page 96 of The Hymn to Dionysus

It wasn’t a question, so I kept my eyes on the floor.

“Gods, I’ve really upset you—Phaidros, this is just what being the ruler of a city is, it’s . . .” She let her breath out, frustrated. “I’m not used to seeing anyone have a genuine reaction to anything I do. The court is all calculation. You have to see it like a battle. Nothing anyone says here is personal, it’s all strategy.” She paused. “Usually you’re good at knowing when that’s happening. Is something else going on?”

I shook my head slightly. “Lady, you don’t have to pretend to care what I do outside the Palace in order to make me function better.”

She shifted, and it looked amazingly uncomfortable. “The other day, you said something simple, but it . . .” She hesitated. It was a brittle sort of silence, a glass one that someone had just tapped with a hammer, vibrating. “I’m not asking you in order to make you function better, I’m asking because you’re even more openly suicidal than usual and I’m worried about you.”

“Oh,” I said, and nothing else arrived, except a rock in my throat.

“So what happened?” she asked.

“My . . .” What did I call him? “There’s man who lives near me, he was a guest a long time ago so he’s kin, but we disagree about everything. We found Pentheus together. He didn’t want me to bring him back here. We fought. I hurt him, very badly. I don’t think he’s going to forgive me.”

“Why didn’t he want you to bring Pentheus back?”

I sighed. “He’s a witch. He thinks the madness is pharmakeia.”

“He sounds horrifying.”

“He’s . . .” I had to look fixedly at the floor. Being hit by a chariot is hard and sudden, and I wished that being hit by the truth was like that, but it wasn’t—it was hard and slow. I’d been angry, and then I’d gone numb for a while, but now what was smashing into me, very, very slowly, was that Dionysus really wouldn’t forgive me. Whatever game he had been playing with me, he would be finished with it now. It had been so good to see him again, and to have the chance to make things right, but instead of doing that, I’d done him even more wrong than I had the first time. “He’s like wine. If you describe what he does, he seems awful, but if it’s happening to you, it’s lovely.”

“There speaks an intoxicated man.”

“Yes,” I said greyly.

The glass silence was back.

“I wanted to talk to you about something else,” she said. She had taken off the pin that attached her cloak to her dress and now she was bumping her thumbnail across the design. It was ivory, and it showed a tiny image of Apollo and Artemis, holding their bows, with a dead lion between them.

“Lady?” All at once I was tired. I was so tired I could have tipped sideways on this couch, fully dressed and covered in dust and sacrifice smoke, and gone to sleep right in front of her.

Her focus tilted into the middle distance, which was where, I was learning, she tended to read strategy in the air. “With Pentheus going to Egypt,” she said, “my position here is difficult. An heir is what seals a crown. I have to marry again. I’m still young enough to have more children, just; probably.” She sounded like I did when I was gearing up for a battle I knew would be awful. I’d do it, because I had to, and I’d never even think of not doing it, but there was a good chance of ending up maimed or dead.

“Who will it be, lady?”

“I was thinking of asking you.”

“Oh. I don’t know anyone who could be king, everyone I know is fifteen.”

She was starting to laugh for some reason. “I didn’t mean I was thinking of asking you about it, I mean I was thinking of asking you.”

“What?” I said blankly.

“You’ve behaved with great honour, and distressing honesty,” she said. “I can’t think of better qualities in a king consort. Nor in a father. I’m older than you, but what do you think?”

Without meaning to, I stood up, and I realized it was because most of me had decided independently of the rest that it would be good to run away. I’d never more wanted to run away. I wasn’t safe to live with anyone yet. I’d hurt Dionysus and he was a head taller than me. More than hurt. I wanted to say, No, please, you don’t understand, I can’t do this, what if I kill someone who isn’t magic—you, or Pentheus, and what about the slaves, there are hundreds of people who have to overlap with the king in the palace, even if he’s just an ornamental king, but it didn’t matter. If I killed someone, I did. It would be a minimal price to pay for the security of the House of Kadmus, whatever my personal feelings about it were, because my feelings were irrelevant.

Can’t just meant, don’t want to.

And anyway, after what I’d done to Dionysus, I didn’t deserve to do things the way I wanted.

“Of course, lady. Duty is honour,” I agreed quietly, and knelt down.

She touched the back of my head like she was stroking a favourite dog. “Yes. It is.”

29

Lots of things happened at once after that. The news that Pentheus had come home was already whipping around the Palace, and with it, all the confusion I’d worried about when we first decided to have the funeral. I heard some slaves murmuring that it couldn’t be the real Pentheus, the Queen must have just found someone who looked like him. She took him to the throne room to show everyone, and to tell what was more or less the truth: he’d been found on the forest border without any memory, but by the grace of the gods, it had been restored. Skirting the edges of the hall, I noticed I was getting speculative looks.