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No sign of Ganymedes, though Arsinoe was sure he’d told her to come at this hour. If Cleopatra had been here—or even Aspasia or Hypatia—at least she would have had someone to talk to. But Alexander took no interest in her, only in the scribbles that he dashed on his papyrus. It felt strange how everything had settled into some semblance of normality now that Berenice had forgotten her. Ganymedes gave her lessons, Myrrine her baths. Her days took on the contours of those that had come before, in every way except this: she had no friends. Her one companion ignored her, and a pit grew in her stomach that threatened to swallow up her innards.

Alexander’s scratching had sprouted fangs, black blood dripping from their tips. It looked alive, this creature, ripped from one of her dreams. And then, at once, talons seized its body; an eagle’s form budded from those claws. Alexander inked rapidly now, filling in the men’s faces staring up in awe.

“What are you drawing?” she asked.

“It’s nothing,” he murmured, and he put aside his quill, as though he’d been doing something shameful and had only now been caught at it. Her companions, Arsinoe recalled, had mocked him for his drawing. Hypatia, in particular, used to snatch away his papyrus and dangle it above the flames.

Arsinoe had shunned him too, in her way. Not that she’d been especially cruel—she didn’t have to be. There were other girls, lesser girls, eager to inflict what jabs they could against those lower down the chain. And so it had been Aspasia who had teased him, calling him Athena for his gray-green eyes. And little Diana, a girl Arsinoe scarcely even spoke to, had taken to suggesting that Alexander actually wasn’t a boy at all but a creature like Hermaphroditus of legend, neither male nor female, but some unnatural combination of the two. Arsinoe had never paid any of it much mind, but she wondered now if those whispers hurt him still. If that explained why he would hardly speak to her.

“Is that Agamemnon?” she asked Alexander, pointing to a man’s face, a diadem cutting across his brow.

“No, it’s Hector,” the boy snapped. And then he paused, as if he were embarrassed by what he’d admitted, by what it might say about him. “It’s the Trojan side, as they charge into battle, despite Zeus’s bad omen.”

Arsinoe nodded; that made sense to her. They were the better ones, the greater ones, the ones who had fought and died. The Greeks were cruel and pregnant with regrets, the Trojans merely doomed. “I like the Trojans better too.”

“They’re better fighters. Cleaner ones too.” Alexander spoke in bursts. “And besides, the only reason Achilles can best Hector is because he has the gods on his side—all of them, and he’s the son of a god himself. Hector’s the better fighter by far. And he’s the better man. The better man always loses.”

“But not Odysseus,” Arsinoe objected. The man of twists and turns remained her favorite of the Greeks. While Agamemnon and Achilles let the war drone on as they quarreled over their prizes of gold and women, the ruler of Ithaca put his mind to breaching Troy’s impenetrable walls. Without his brilliant horse, where would the rest of the Achaeans be? In her mind, Odysseus always emerged as the best of the Greeks. “He finds his way home in the end.”

Just as Cleopatra would,
she promised herself. And her father too. She clung deeply to that belief, even though it would turn her world on edge once more. Because she knew that her sister—wherever she was—would be fighting to come back to her. After all, she’d said, as the ship sailed from the docks, “I’ll return for you.” And Arsinoe had believed it. Cleopatra never lied to her. Except when she was teasing, and she would dare Arsinoe to do something foolish like sneak into the scholars’ dormitories. “No one will notice you—I promise.” But that was different. That was joking.

“Pupils.” Ganymedes interrupted her thoughts. She glanced up in surprise. She hadn’t even heard the eunuch enter the room. It still amazed her how quiet he could be on his toes, despite his clumsy size. He smiled at her, and nodded to Alexander as well. A small concession, that. “We return today to Polybius.”

Arsinoe sighed. She was sick of Polybius, of his tales of the Achaean cities falling one by one before Rome.

“It would behoove you not to lament your education, Arsinoe.” The eunuch’s tone was sharp. “You’re lucky now, under Berenice’s rule, to be receiving one at all. And I should think that
history
might interest you more than any other subject. Surely you can imagine some reasons why you should care about the story of Rome’s rise.”

Arsinoe nodded slowly. She thought of Cleopatra, across the sea, and her father carrying his business there. Now suddenly, palpably, she knew that they were en route to Rome.
That
was why Ganymedes was forcing her to read Polybius: to point her in the right direction. But what reception would they find? The Romans had no respect for the customs of others, and no qualms about inserting themselves in affairs abroad. She remembered being borne through the streets in the days after Cato had taken her uncle’s island. The chants and curses hurled at the royal litter. The etchings that sprang up on the city’s walls: her father beheaded, his genitals cut off as well—an echo of how the pharaohs of old had dealt with enemies.

“Alexander,” Ganymedes snapped, and her friend glanced up from his scroll. “What is it that distracts you from the task at hand?”

The boy covered his sheet with his hand, trying to hide his markings from the eunuch’s eyes. Ganymedes was no admirer of drawing; Arsinoe could scarcely count the times that he’d lectured her and her friends on how literature was the highest form of art: “Paintings are for the unread masses.” But Alexander wasn’t quick enough. Her tutor snatched away his page.

“What’s this?” Ganymedes sneered, examining the lines on the paper.

“It’s a sketch,” the boy muttered, shamed.

“He drew it while we were waiting.” It wasn’t fair for Ganymedes to punish Alexander for that.

“And yet the boy dwells on it now.” The eunuch held the papyrus over the oil lamp, the same one he’d carried to guide their way the night she had fled. The night she’d tried to flee. The flames licked its corner. Alexander winced as the yellow climbed the Trojans’ backs, leaving only ash in its wake. The snake succumbed to fire too, and then the spark devoured the eagle’s claws, its body, finally its wings. The bird exacted its revenge as the burn rushed up to meet the eunuch’s fingertips. Stung, Ganymedes dropped the crumpled remains on the table, shaking his hand as though motion might rid him of the hurt.

“There,” her tutor announced. “We’ll have no more distractions as we learn of how Rome overcame the Greek cities, and the kingdom of Macedonia as well. You should pay special attention to that, Arsinoe.” The eunuch glowered. “Perseus might have been the first of Alexander’s heirs to surrender to Rome, but he was most assuredly not the last.”

It sounded like a threat—against her, against Cleopatra, against all the Ptolemies and their blood. And so Arsinoe shivered. And she listened as Ganymedes read and lectured on the story of Perseus, and how his empire fell to Rome.

When Ganymedes left, Arsinoe comforted Alexander. He didn’t understand what it was to be a Ptolemy. Though he was older, he still grew angry over childish things like drawings being burned to cinders. She knew better. But she felt glad for once to be the wiser one. And she even forgot for a moment or two how her heart ached for her sister.

As time drew on, if she ran fast enough, she could forget her longing for Cleopatra for whole afternoons. Even days.

She and Alexander raced, a pair of cruel and careless winds toppling saplings and unsuspecting brush. She pulled ahead, her stride stretching over grass and stone; he fell behind, lost among the trees. Her hand, caked with dirt, slapped against bark.

“Beat you again.”

Alexander’s head hung between his knees. “Because I let you.”

“Liar.”

It’s because I’m nine now,
she wanted to add as she slipped onto the ground. As though naming some difference would make it stick. All day, she’d been searching for some change within herself. Perhaps birthdays brought transformations only when they were celebrated. No one remembered whether she had seen eight winters, or nine, or twelve. They all assumed—Ganymedes, Myrrine, Alexander—that this was an afternoon like any other.

Did her mother remember what day it was? Arsinoe bit her lip to stop the tears. It seemed unlikely, anyway; even when the two were in the same palace, her mother hadn’t always made note of the date, though Cleopatra never once forgot. What good were mothers, anyway? Hers had never cared for her, not after the boys were born, and Alexander’s had little enough to do with him, even though he was a boy. “Our mother is jealous of us,” Cleopatra would whisper, “because she doesn’t have the Conqueror’s blood.” Only that didn’t make sense. “Why isn’t she jealous of Ptolemy, then?” Arsinoe would ask, but that would only make her sister laugh.

Arsinoe’s mind wandered to her father, his blurred face bent over a flute, fingers kneading sweet notes from the instrument. She recoiled at the memory. Now—now she knew the truth: that other title, Auletes, the Piper, was never meant as a compliment for his songs. “A king,” Ganymedes had growled at their latest session, “should be called the Savior, or the Thunderer, or the Great, not distinguished from his forebearers by his penchant for playing flutes.”

Arsinoe peeled away these sticky remembrances. Her father was gone, her Cleopatra gone with him. Remembering changed nothing about that. She lay back against the scorched earth. The sky was bright and blue and cloudless, as it had been for months. The time, the time of her birth, the final days of Inundation, should bring rain to Alexandria, marble splattered with pregnant drops at dawn. But not this year. This month had been dry, dry as high summer. She squinted up at Alexander, silhouetted against the sun.

“Do you know what day it is?”

Her friend chewed his lip in thought. “The twenty-sixth day of Choiak.”

“The twenty-seventh,” she corrected him. Arsinoe studied his face for some recognition, but she could see that her words had no effect. “It’s the day I was born.”

“Oh,” Alexander replied.

“I’m nine.” She spoke the words with satisfaction. It was the first time she’d named her new age aloud. “How old are you, Alexander?”

“I was born in the middle of Emergence. I’ll be eleven then, in Mechir.”

“You are almost exactly of an age with Cleopatra,” Arsinoe told him eagerly.

“I don’t much care for Cleopatra,” the boy said, shrugging. That bothered her. He might be her friend, but he didn’t have the right to speak against her sister, a Ptolemy and an heir to the double kingdom.

“Why not? Why don’t you like Cleopatra?” The thought wounded her, that anyone shouldn’t like her sister.

“She wasn’t very kind. At least not to me.”

Tension tugged at Arsinoe. She should defend Cleopatra—she always did. But this was the freest thing she’d ever heard Alexander say. More often than not, the boy shut off his thoughts from her, as though he was frightened of what she might do, how she might react. And she wanted—desperately—for someone to be frank with her. As Cleopatra had always been. So she asked a question instead, one that plagued her from time to time. “Am I kind to you?”

“Kinder,” he teased.

“Did you really let me win before?” This, too, had weighed on her. The question of who treated her differently—and for what reasons.

“No.” He shook his head. “You beat me that time. I hadn’t caught my breath.”

“I’m accustomed to winning.” Arsinoe used to think that was something to be proud of; now she didn’t feel so sure.

“You wonder if the game is rigged.”

She propped herself up on her elbows to take a look at this new Alexander, this daring one. What made him bold? she wondered. Was it because she’d let his words about Cleopatra slip? “I know the game is rigged. I’m not stupid. I know that people let me win because I’m the daughter of King Ptolemy.”

“And why would I let you win now? Your father’s in exile, and so is mine. What difference is there between them?”

Arsinoe sighed as she dropped back in the dirt. “Alexander. I was being serious.”

“I was too.” He lay down beside her. He rested his head on his hand and stared at her. Her cheeks burned but, brown with sun, wouldn’t betray her. She didn’t like it when people looked directly at her. She’d rather imagine she could disappear at any moment, and no one would be the wiser.

“Why are you still alive?” Alexander asked quietly. “You know the real reason. And it’s not because of your father. It’s because of you. You’ve proved what sort of blood courses through your body.”

His finger traced the purple vein that twisted across the back of her hand. It tickled, but she didn’t laugh.

“Sometimes I am still frightened, though.” She said it so softly that she almost hoped he wouldn’t hear.

He did, though. And his eyes widened. “You? Frightened? You’re the bravest person I know. Braver than Antigone, even.”

“I’m not so brave as all that,” she whispered. “I’m frightened all the time. I’m frightened every morning when I wake up, and every evening when I go to bed.”

Alexander studied her. Perhaps she’d said too much, and he would think her dull and stupid, a girl who jumped at the sight of her own shadow.