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And then Arsinoe waited. She knew she should lie in her bed, pretend this night was the same as every other. But she couldn’t trust herself to stay awake, and she didn’t dare sleep. Instead, she sat on the hard floor and stared out the window, willing Selene to climb the sky, to pass beyond the palace gates and up over the roof. Her eyelids grew heavy, but she stayed vigilant, blinking them open every moment or two.

The door squealed on its hinges. Arsinoe jumped up in fear, bundle clutched to her chest. She let out her breath: it was Ganymedes.

“Leave that,” the eunuch commanded. “I told you to bring nothing.”

She opened her mouth to object, but she held her tongue. Gently, she placed the blanket on her bed. “Farewell, Penelope,” she whispered. In silence, she followed the eunuch out into the antechamber. And there—there she met with horrors: Myrrine’s divan lay empty, and Agamemnon was sprawled across the stone, his head wrenched to one side and his lips stained with wine. Drugged or dead, she couldn’t tell. There was one goblet spilled, another upright, untouched. Her stomach turned and roiled, and she wanted to look away. He’d died. He’d died for
her.
And then she saw her other guard: Achilles stood upright, awake, alert. She gasped.

“It’s all right,” the eunuch told her. “You can trust him.”

Ganymedes led her past the royal chambers and into the servants’ passageways. Behind, her guard’s familiar step assured her. At each corner, the eunuch held his hand to bring their retinue to a halt until he’d peered around the end. She didn’t know how far they wandered through these lesser twists and turns.

The three fell into a marching step. Achilles, a soldier through and through, matched her eunuch’s stride; it took her three paces to equal each one of theirs. And so their drum sounded its quiet, bleating rhythm:
hard, soft, soft, hard, soft, soft…
A second
hard
cut between her two
soft
s. She strained her ears to listen. It was nothing, she promised herself, the chasings of a forgotten dream.

But then she heard the sound again—louder, closer, near at hand. And Ganymedes’s step quickened. She raced to meet his new stride, but Achilles did not. His footfalls halted. The false ones did as well.

“Ganymedes,” she breathed. A sword whistled through the night air.

“Don’t look back,” the eunuch whispered. Steel clashed against steel. She hurried on. A man groaned in agony—was it Achilles? Another clash. The squelch of metal into flesh. A body thudding to the stone. A second, darker moan. She turned—and there in the flickering candlelight lay her guard, her hero, her Achilles, twitching, a gash of blood spurting from his throat. The eunuch’s hand covered her mouth, choked her bile and her scream.

“Stop!” one of their pursuers cried out. “Hand over the girl, or we’ll kill you both.”

“Run, Arsinoe,” Ganymedes whispered.

And so she did. She ran through the servants’ corridors, on into the workrooms and the kitchens, and out again into the great courtyard. Blood stained these walls, and bile too, but she didn’t look at the faces of the dying men. She leapt over their bodies, and pretended they’d stir again in the light of day. But as she raced, a dark realization came to her: she didn’t know where to run. And so her feet carried her back along her steps, back to her family’s private plazas, back to her own rooms. Within: emptiness. Either Agamemnon had awoken or his body had already been cleared away. Discarded like refuse on the street. As though he’d never been a man, but some thing, some waste, to wash away. She almost wished that he remained; even a corpse was better company. And perhaps if his flesh lingered, his spirit would too.

Her bedchamber was in disarray. Her scrolls were strewn like so many corpses across the floor, and her bedclothes torn aside; her jewel box had been flung across the room, and her tunics tugged from their cypress chest. She searched for the bundle of her possessions, the one she had gathered with such care. But she could find no sign of it, nor of the riches she’d stowed within. Footfalls slammed behind her, and she slipped beneath her bed.

Shaking, she listened to the angry steps pace the colonnades. It sounded as though a thousand guards patrolled the royal halls. She’d been a fool to return here, a frightened, childish fool. She wondered what had happened to Ganymedes, whether the eunuch had lived or died. He lived, she reassured herself; he must. He was far too clever to be caught. He was the only one left to her. And he would come back. He had to.

The night was dark. The moon had sunk; only the gleam of Pharos, the great lighthouse of her forefathers, pierced the blindness. But Arsinoe refused to sleep.

The stale stench of urine stung her nose when she awoke. Stiff robes stuck to stiff limbs. With disgust, she realized she’d wet herself in the night, like some child of five. Even her brother Ptolemy hardly did that now, and he wasn’t even four. Twisting her slight frame this way and that, Arsinoe struggled to peer out from beneath the bed.

Dawn had peeled away the night’s terrors, painting the chamber rose. The nine muses danced along her bedside tapestry as they did each morning. She caught Kalliope’s eye, gray with hints of blue and green and wine. The goddess of epics and adventures, she stroked her lute, her gaze intense and clear. She’d been spun into the cloth before she’d learned of her son Orpheus’s death. No woman, not even one born of Zeus, could bear the loss of a boy. That’s why Arsinoe’s own mother had slipped her brothers away, and left her here alone. A daughter was disposable.

Still, that small part of her, the shrinking part, wanted to cry out for that woman who’d forsaken her. To weep and beg to be swept away as her brothers had been. To have the comfort of the warm embrace she’d known when she was small and sick, and her mother had not yet forgotten her. But more often, she knew, her nurse had been the one who had dried her tears and kissed her bruises. What good had a mother’s love ever brought?

“Myrrine?” Arsinoe said, testing. No soft shuffle came in answer.

“Myrrine?” she tried again, louder this time. Quiet.

And once more: “Myrrine?”

The name rebounded off the stone. She clutched her knees to her chest, hands to her ears; she would shrink away to nothing. The Ptolemy who disappeared. But the ground didn’t swallow her up. Soldiers didn’t come. Only her stolen voice broke the silence: “Myrrine, Myrrine, Myrrine.”

“Ganymedes?” she tried. But there was no sign of him either.

She sucked back her stomach’s bile. “Better up than down,” Myrrine always said. But the nurse had been taken from her too. No one would clean away her vomit or bathe her or dress her or change her coverlets.

Boots pounded beneath her bones. Each set kept a steady rhythm. None paused by her door. Her stomach growled angrily. Perhaps Berenice had forgotten her. After all, she’d never had much to do with her eldest sister. The daughter of Tryphaena, Berenice was already a woman grown. Too old to be her playmate, or even Cleopatra’s. Some days from now, Arsinoe would be found, her body stained and rotting beneath the bed.

She wondered who would mourn her loss. Cleopatra would weep, of course. But would the others? Would her mother regret not stealing her away? Would that cruel guard remember barring her from her father’s ship?

New feet shook the stone. A hand fumbled at the lock. The bolt screeched; the door swung wide to reveal a solitary guard. Her father’s man. Or so he’d been once, guarding the king’s person day and night. His beard bristled red; Arsinoe would have recognized it anywhere. Menelaus, she’d called him. She thought he’d sailed across the sea with Cleopatra and the rest. She couldn’t trust him now; her father’s men were turned or slain. Achilles’s throat split open, blood draining to the floor, his curls dashed against the onyx. She shook the image from her mind.

The guard’s gaze roamed from her writing table, to her hanging mirror of glinting silver, to her scattered scrolls, to her golden bed. Now was the time to scream. She opened her mouth but no sound escaped. She’d learned enough of war, of Troy, of Carthage, of Thermopylae, to know the fate of girls, even young ones, who met with men drunk on battle’s haze. She held her breath until she thought her chest might burst, until her eyes and tongue bulged and begged for mercy. And then she held it longer.

The fire-bearded man removed his helm, a red crown rimmed with redder hair. He lifted a corner of his tunic to wipe his brow. Bloodstained, the cloth returned to his side. He crouched low, balancing his elbows on his knees, and waited. She wouldn’t speak; she couldn’t scream.

Some part of her, a crazed and agonizing part, wanted him to find her. It would be easier that way, and someday, after all, she’d have to be found. She was so weary, so very weary of hiding. And then, as though she’d spoken the words aloud, his eyes seized on her. He breathed easy now, and so did she. There was a relief in being caught. He removed a small parcel from his robes and placed it on her dressing table. Then, glancing about the room one final time, he stepped outside, and the creaking sound of iron against iron bolted her in.

Once his footsteps ebbed, Arsinoe struggled free and raced to the table. Unwrapping the bundle revealed a loaf of bread, a pair of dates, a cluster of green grapes. Her mouth watered. How she longed to stuff herself with bread and fruit. But she didn’t dare. She’d never eaten anything that hadn’t been tasted first, except for a few berries she and Cleopatra had picked from the garden on their own. She remembered how Democrates, her father’s taster, had died, gasping and clawing at his throat. She wouldn’t bring on her own death, not when she’d already survived that first night alone. She should throw the gifts out the window. But she couldn’t do that either. Instead, she retreated beneath her bed, the guard’s poison clutched tight against her chest.

Elder

T
he crowds screamed. They screamed for her. For her, the least loved of Ptolemy the Piper’s daughters. The shunted child of the shunted bride. For her, the humble phoenix rising from Egypt’s smoldering ash. “Berenice Epiphaneia”—they cried her coronation name. “Berenice the Shining One.”

Even as she drank in their chants, she couldn’t shed her fears. Her coup had been too quick and too seamless. It had shown nothing of her strength. Her father had fled before real blood was drawn. The piping fool would have reached Rhodes by now.
And where to then, Father?
Even as her subjects shrieked for her, she knew that, in truth, they shrieked against him, against him and his brother, against their loss of Cyprus. That last, vanished vestige of her once great house.

Besides, it shouldn’t be Alexandria that stretched before her but Memphis, the Balance of the Two Lands, with its sandstone halls and sphinx-lined avenues. That coronation would yoke her dynasty to the ones that had come before, to the ancient pharaohs who had ruled these lands as gods.
In time,
she promised herself. Her father had sat the throne for four years before he’d sailed up the Nile to the white-walled city to be blessed by Ptah and assume the double crown. And it was his priest, his beloved Psenptais, his so-called first prophet of the Lord of the Two Lands, who held sway there. It was too soon; she knew that. Better to let the dust settle. To secure her power here. The white steps snaked up the hillside, above the adoring crowd that flanked the city’s sweeping boulevards. As she climbed, her breath ran thin and her heart pounded in her throat. Alexandria had seen kings, of course, who didn’t deign to ascend on foot. Her great-grandfather had been among them. Ptolemy the Benefactor—or the Potbelly, as he’d been less kindly known—had commanded his litter bearers to hoist him up on their shoulders when he’d been restored to the throne. One had collapsed beneath his weight, sending king and litter in a tumbled heap on the marble. Another example that Berenice was eager not to emulate. The Potbelly had been the first to entrust Egypt’s welfare to Rome, preferring to sign away his bloodlines’ rights in a will rather than see the wrong son inherit. No, she’d follow in the footsteps of her first forebearers, the ones who’d expanded the realm’s holdings, not stripped away the kingdom bit by bit.

Still, despite her plans, there was an emptiness to her victory. Now that she’d won, and easily, her hatred of her father grew worn, as though all the years of tending it had eroded the bile of his betrayal. When he’d cast her mother, cursing, into the streets, and turned his love to his younger, lesser children begotten on his concubine—then she’d thought she’d cling forever to her loathing. But what was left now, when she thought of him, was a mere man, not a monster—a foolish, selfish man who’d fallen in love with a woman who was not his sister. She almost pitied him.