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Her phrases flowed too quickly; the power of her rhetoric was lost, her painstaking words swallowed by her speed. Berenice, Tryphaena, Pieton—all stared at her blankly, as though she nattered on in some alien tongue. And her last phrase was met with deadened silence.

Tryphaena broke the quiet. “So she does speak, and rather prettily when she chooses, but that changes nothing. Her fate is sealed, Berenice. Her two bastard brothers live; you’ve no use for more pretenders to the throne.”

“Mother, you’d have me hack off the head of my own shadow.” Berenice smiled slightly, a flicker on her lips. “I am the only trueborn child of Ptolemy the New Dionysus. I have no reason to fear the second daughter of a lesser wife. His favored Cleopatra, perhaps, or the two little boys, whose tiny pricks may pose a threat, but not this girl.”

And there it stood, the unvarnished, devastating truth. She was no threat; she was nothing. Berenice wouldn’t have her killed because she wasn’t worth the bother. Arsinoe wasn’t sure whether she should be grateful or ashamed.

When she returned to her rooms, she saw that they had been disturbed. Her heart pulsed in her throat. A certain smell, a familiar one, greeted her as well. She wasn’t alone. Frightened, she rushed through her antechamber and into her bedroom. There stood the intruder, a figure shaking by her window. As the woman looked up, her face bruised, eyes red, it took Arsinoe a moment to recognize her nurse.

“Myrrine,” she called out tentatively.

“My dear child,” Myrrine whispered, and then she opened her arms to Arsinoe. “My dear, sweet child.”

“Where have you been?” she asked, accusing.

“Never mind that.” The woman’s voice shook. “Come here, and let me hold you.”

Arsinoe couldn’t resist, and she raced across the room to wrap her arms around her nurse’s neck. As she did so, her anger drained away.

“My dear, sweet child,” Myrrine murmured in her ear. “How I worried about you. Who tended to you while I was gone?”

No one,
Arsinoe wished to cry out.
No one at all.
But she held her tongue and wept only a few solitary tears.

Elder

B
erenice didn’t like the feel of the white band tight about her head. But it proved a valuable reminder of what she had accomplished. Pieton teased her for wearing it at all hours. “I know why you sport it in the audience hall, but here…among your trusted councilors…” What trusted councilors? Dio had helped deliver her the city, and Pieton had proved instrumental too. But each insisted that she should be wary of the other. The Alexandrian couldn’t abide any eunuchs, let alone ones schooled in courtly life. And the eunuch grew bitter whenever anyone drew too close to Berenice. He’d always clutched at these jealousies. Even when he’d been her tutor and she’d been no more than a disgraced girl, he’d hated when she’d confided too much in her companions. At the time, it had puzzled her, but now she understood: Pieton was alone. Why shouldn’t she be too?

The same questions plagued her, even in her solitude. What did her father mean to accomplish in Rhodes? How long would Alexandria lend her support? And when,
when
would the Nile rise? That was most worrisome of all. If the natives of the Upper Lands grew hungry, they’d turn defiant—and look to Memphis or even to Rome for relief. She herself should travel up the Nile, bearing Alexandrian grain to placate the populace. Besides, a voyage to the Upper Lands would give her the chance to rally Egypt’s far-flung soldiers. After years spent growing fat on their southern farms, they had to be reminded of their duty to their queen. She’d need them to launch her attack on Cyprus.

She heard a shriek outside. Her mother’s. The woman would never, it seemed, tire of stalking her. Berenice preferred her father as her enemy, remote and unequivocal. Tryphaena was too messy and too near. She knew every tender point to press.

“Have the guards let her in,” she told her herald.

The doors slammed in her mother’s wake. Hair torn, eyes wide and wild, Tryphaena refused to enter quietly. “Women like us,” her mother had often told her, “will forever be thrust aside when silent. We have no gift for meek beauty; that’s what concubines are for.” As a child, Berenice hoped, or feared, that her mother would diminish once the Piper swapped her birthright for a blushing mistress. Treachery had only ossified the old woman’s resolve; she was her most formidable in defeat.

“Explain yourself, child.”

The word irked her. She’d earned her victories, and she was weary of being treated as some girl.

“That’s no way to address your queen.” It was important to draw her lines now, even if they were in the shifting sand.

“You relish that unearned title, don’t you, daughter of mine? How you love to listen to your coronation name ring out. But there’s some small trifle that you seem to have forgotten amidst your celebrations.”

“And what might that be?” She feigned ignorance, though it sounded childish to her as well. She hated how her mother’s words reduced her to this. But she would not raise this issue, her mother’s obsession over what it meant to share the throne.

“Don’t be dull,” her mother answered, chafing. “You know why I’m here. We were to be co-rulers, you and I.”

“And so we shall be.” Berenice smiled. Here she wouldn’t give an inch.

“‘Shall’?” Her mother hacked, her body buckling in on itself. As she straightened, Tryphaena looked at her with fresh contempt. “You think I will content myself with ‘shall’?”

“You’re sick, Mother, and you’re tired. Sit down and rest. Alexandria has seen enough changes these past few days. Let the people adjust to one queen before we foist a second on them.” Berenice tried to bring warmth into her words. Her mother
was
old and weary. And the woman had tried to protect her. Hadn’t she, in her twisted way?

Tryphaena refused to sit, even as her veiny legs bent under her weight. “So, you imagine my illness makes me weak? You think I’ll slink off in silence?”

“Mother, no one expects you to do anything in silence.”

“My words don’t shock you. A pity. With time, I’ll overcome such disappointments. After all, they don’t rank against the most disquieting discovery: that my daughter is a cowardly cunt.”

Her mother’s venom could not sting her; she wouldn’t let it.

“Keep a civil tongue,” Berenice ordered. “I might grant you leniency as my mother. My guards won’t be so kind.”

In truth, her men looked unperturbed. The thick-bearded one whose belly threatened to burst through his toga picked under his nails with a knife; the other, with a younger face marred by a crooked nose, stared blankly across the atrium, over Dionysus on his leopard and at the pair of gold leaf lions carved into the great ebony door. She wondered if he saw anything at all.

“Respect isn’t earned in a day. Even if I grovel before you, they’ll know what you are: a frightened child who dares not do what she must to protect her rightful seat.”

“Enough,
Mother,
” Berenice cracked. She should be planning her next moves, not arguing with her ailing mother who’d outgrown her usefulness. “You test my patience. I’m no longer that child of nine; I don’t need to listen to your yapping.”

“And you do not. Each day you seek to flout my will with your every move. For instance, that
girl
”—Tryphaena pronounced the word with disgust—“the one you call sister. What madness has possessed you to let the Piper’s bastard daughter live? Surely you haven’t forgotten what that creature’s mother did to me—to us?”

No, she hadn’t forgotten, but she would not twist herself with hatred. She would not murder for murder’s sake.

“She’s but a child, Mother.” Stripped of sentiment, the endearment had become an incantation.
Mother, Mother, Mother.
She clutched at that lingering notion of her girlhood: that this phrase, this reminder of her mother’s single act of womanhood, might lure Tryphaena back to calm.

“A
child
who presents the most pressing threat to your rule.”

“That distinction belongs to her brothers.”

“Whom, I’ve no doubt, you’d welcome with open arms should that concubine leave them soiled and sobbing at the royal gate.”

They were babies, nothing more. Babies who shared the distinction and the curse of being born a Ptolemy. In time, she realized, she might be forced to have them killed. The thought wormed its way around her stomach, and there it purred as though she’d always known the cold truth of it.

“You grow hysterical, Mother.”

Berenice cast a second eye at her guards. His nails picked clean, the first had returned his hands to his side. His thumb drummed against his thigh. The second, to her surprise, had taken some interest in their conversation. That worried her.

“Leave us,” she told them. “She’s only a weak and weeping woman. She’s no threat to me, or anyone. Make sure no one disturbs us.”

As the soldiers filed through the lion-flanked door, her mother’s lips curled into a crooked smile, sharp and wide. Berenice winced; she recalled the last time she’d seen that expression. A child of five or six, she’d stumbled upon her mother cooing over a blanket. When she approached, she saw that it was stained scarlet, and within its folds lay not a babe but a scaly creature with shrunken limbs. She shrieked, and her mother looked up at her with the same grin. “Do you think you’re any less hideous?” Tryphaena had hissed. “That is no way to speak to my beloved son, you useless girl.”

Berenice shunted the image from her mind. “Does it please you? To mock me before my men?”

“It would please me if you slew the rat that creeps beneath your roof, growing fat on your misspent kindnesses. She may be young, she may not have the cleanest claim, but she’s still a Ptolemy. Though you’ve forgotten what that means, I assure you that bastard girl has not.”

“We hunt the boys. The girl means nothing. To kill her would be a needless act of cruelty.”

“To kill her would show your strength. To do otherwise proves what your citizens already suspect: that you are a weak-willed woman.
Never show them you are soft.
”

This was her mother’s anthem, the words she’d whispered over Berenice’s cradle. Enfeebled, Tryphaena clung to them now, these straws of her once formidable self. And it nearly made Berenice weep.

“I’ve already sated the people’s taste for blood. I’ve killed two dozen men, the closest compatriots of my father. I don’t think anyone suspects me of softness. Not anyone but you.”

“I see. You wish for me to coddle you. To soothe your fears with lies. You have a wet nurse and a eunuch for that. I’m your mother, and I won’t shrink from that role. I raised you as I would have raised the boy I should have borne: to rule.”

The boy I should have borne.
What did her mother think of when she spoke those words? Did her heart ache for the lizard child she had cradled in her arms? Or the other stillborn boys she’d whelped each spring before the Piper banished her from his bed and palace? Beneath all her furies, did some tenderness linger? Perhaps Berenice gave Tryphaena too much credit for feeling. Her mother raged on, unperturbed, as though that reference to the sons that she might have had held no more weight than any other. “After all my years of sacrifice, I won’t pale with meekness.”

Berenice stoked herself with a deep breath. Even as queen, she remained subject to her mother’s rages. Her eyes caught on the faience goblet on the ivory table to her left. How she longed to pick it up and toss the wine in Tryphaena’s face, to watch shock widen the woman’s eyes. Instead, she lifted the chalice to her lips; its sticky sweetness eased her anger. When she spoke, her voice was calm and collected. “I never ask for your meekness, Mother, nor your lies. And I haven’t believed the many that you’ve offered up so eagerly.”

“Believe this truth, then: Arsinoe must die. Or else one day you’ll wake to find her allied with her father. You have enough traitors in your midst; you don’t need to court another.”

“I know I have enemies, Mother. I don’t need you to name them for me.”

The two stared at each other in silence. Tryphaena, for once, had run out of words, and so they had reached a draw of sorts. Berenice would not back down. As queen, she could at last take on this woman who’d never found her worthy of her love. From the corner of her eye, she saw a door creak open, and her eunuch stepped into the atrium.