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The gimp had fallen some twenty paces off—he’d made it farther than she’d imagined. His gray tunic was stained brown; the rest of his body would soon join his leg in rot. She walked to his corpse. Even if he was a coward, he, too, had died for her. That was enough. She knelt beside him and laid her hand on his shoulder. She strained to roll his body over; his lame leg had fattened the rest of him. At last the corpse yielded and flopped onto its back. Arsinoe winced, wishing she’d managed to move him with more dignity. His eyes, the same narrow slits in death that she’d imagined in life, glazed open, and she shut these eyes as well. As she stood, she smoothed her robes and her hands came back bloody. And then, dumbly, she stared at the bodies. If only she’d listened more to the rituals, to the preparation of the dead.

“There you are,” Alexander cried out. “I’ve been searching for you for hours—”

His voice cut off. He must have seen the horrors, but she didn’t turn. She couldn’t let go of her men so easily, no matter what Ganymedes said.

“Arsinoe. Arsinoe.” He repeated her name dully.

“They are dead.”

“I see that.” He grabbed her wrist.

“They died for me.” Her voice scratched in her throat.

“Come back inside.” The boy’s hand tugged at her, but she kept her feet planted.

“We must bury them.” The realization came sharp and quick. Arsinoe didn’t know the libations by heart, but she could remember enough.

“Arsinoe, we must go. Now.”

“You go, Alexander. I must bury them.”

The slap came from nowhere, stinging hard across her cheek.

“You’re as brave as Antigone, but you can’t be as foolish. I won’t let you. We must leave before someone starts asking questions.”

Alexander jerked her arm and pulled her back toward the palace. She dug her heels into the stone. He yanked her hand, hard, but she didn’t budge.

“Arsinoe,” he hissed. “You’re soaked in blood.”

“You can’t tell me what I must and mustn’t do.” She wrenched her fingers from his grip and rushed through the columns of the great plaza and past the Arsinoe fountain in the Sisters’ Courtyard, and up the stairs to her own chambers.

Myrrine gasped when Arsinoe stumbled in. “My dear child! What happened to you? Are you all right?”

“It’s nothing,” she lied. This came easier each day. “A cut. That’s all.”

“Where is it?” her nurse asked, taking hold of Arsinoe’s wrists.

“It doesn’t matter.” She snatched her wrists away.

“As you wish, my sweet.” Myrrine shook her head slowly. “Come here. Let me help you with those clothes.”

As her nurse lifted her tunic over her head, Arsinoe ached to confess, to tell her all, to relate every detail of what had happened—both in the flesh and in her dreams. How the foxes had turned into dead men. But she held her tongue. Alexander was right: no one should know what she’d seen.

“Eirene! Layla!” her nurse cried out. “Bring hot water for the basin. The princess must bathe before the funeral.”

The two girls appeared: the mute maid who, having served Arsinoe since Berenice’s coup, had slowly regained her tongue, and the dark one from the Upper Lands. Each carried a bucket of steaming water for her bath. Arsinoe pictured them dead, as she’d seen the fire-bearded guard. Everyone who loved her, protected her, ended up in a pool of blood. A lump rose in her throat, and no matter how hard she swallowed, she couldn’t shrink it away.

“Do you believe in dreams, Myrrine?” Arsinoe asked as she slipped into the tub. In her heart, she wanted to speak of her dreams only to Cleopatra. But now she knew that she couldn’t wait until her sister returned. She needed an answer before more people died. Before she killed them. “In visions and omens and other evils that come to us in the night? Do you believe they come true?”

“They’re not evil, my dear. These are gifts. ‘Dreams as well can come our way from Zeus.’”
^*

“But what if there are bad things that happen in the dreams?”
What if my dreams make bad things happen?
That was the question she wanted to ask, but she didn’t dare. “Is there a way to stop them from coming to pass?”

“If the gods send us dreams of what’s to be, then there’s not a thing we can do to change them.” Her nurse patted her head gently. “And even if the dreams are bad, good may come of them. All the greatest kings and queens in the world—Alexander the Conqueror himself—consult seers and soothsayers and dream tellers. Who’m I to question that?”

Myrrine scrubbed the dried blood from Arsinoe’s knees. The cloth stung but she said nothing. She leaned into the pain. It was a small price to pay.

When Ganymedes came to take her to the funeral, Myrrine pulled her aside. “My dear,” her servant whispered away from the eunuch’s ears. “What worries you? What can your poor nurse do to comfort your sorrows?”

“I’ve no sorrows,” Arsinoe answered, forcing a smile along her lips. Myrrine would be no help, not if she thought dreams couldn’t be stopped and changed and twisted. It was better, then, to keep her secrets to herself.

Outside, she found a city shrouded in black. Thick along the marble avenue, mourners wailed. Their hair was already thinned from years of tearing, and still they ripped the remnants. One mourner, a girl only a few years older than Arsinoe, split open her rough-spun tunic and dug her nails into her breasts. Three crimson streams trickled in her fingers’ wake.

“Even here?” she asked Ganymedes. “I thought the corpse lay in the Sema.” That was where all her ancestors had been buried, from the magnificent Alexander to the uncle who’d lost Cyprus to the Romans.

“It does. But when you are mother to a queen, your mourners stretch the length of every street. So it shall be upon your death.”

And what of those other deaths, of the fire-bearded guard and the gimp? Men had died for her that day, men far braver and kinder than Tryphaena. But for them, there would be no mourners, no weeping, no libations. Their souls would wander lost and helpless through the world as listless shades, stripped of life yet unable to pass into the undergloom. Would he haunt her dreams, her Menelaus? Would she see him around each bend, only to find him vanished when she looked again? Or would he merely come to her as the red fox, as he already had?

The wails echoed against wind and sea. They sounded as one now, a united cry for the death of Tryphaena. In olden times—so she’d been told—the women of the house not only prepared the body but performed the mourning rites as well. There’d been no hired wailers, no underclass of women born to tear their hair.

“Arsinoe,” the eunuch whispered. “When you enter the Sema, you must be silent, and respectful. Bow only to the queen and then retreat. Don’t make a nuisance of yourself.”

“I know how I must behave.” She shrugged Ganymedes’s hand from her shoulder.

As they drew deeper into the city, the moans joined in a dirge, long and low and mournful. Here the criers were of a higher class—singers, not mere rippers of hair. Arsinoe was jealous of their madness, of their mutilations. And angered by their weeping too. Her father’s sister didn’t deserve such honors. She deserved no distinctions at all.

A line snaked outside the Sema, the imposing marble mausoleum that contained Alexander’s tomb and the tombs of all her forebearers. Hundreds upon hundreds of nobles had come to pay their respects. With ease, Ganymedes steered Arsinoe through the gathered men. If they recognized her she couldn’t tell, but whatever their reasons, they parted before her step. “But Death overtakes even the man who runs from the battle…”
^*
These words hummed in her ears.

A hundred wailers dotted the outer colonnade, with its columns of red-streaked onyx; subjects passed between these pillars to see the fallen Tryphaena. The Alexandrians were stoic and stern-faced. Perhaps they didn’t care so very much for Berenice’s mother—or for the queen herself. As Arsinoe entered the sanctuary, the dirges grew louder, but she felt a hush fall over the gathered lords. Perhaps they, too, were frightened of the unrisen Ptolemies who flanked each side. She shivered at the first: a sapphire-tinted cast bore the likeness of her uncle, his wide nose and fleshy cheeks, though she knew that his true body had been lost in Cyprus. She peeled her eyes away, fixing them above the altar. There, dwarfed by the goat-headed columns that marked the entrance to Alexander’s shrine, she saw Berenice, quiet and regal, no trace of sadness in her eyes. Arsinoe understood her stoicism. She wasn’t sure if she would weep if it were her own mother who lay dead.

All at once, a fear gripped her: what if Tryphaena hadn’t died at all? Too many grown-ups stood between her and the corpse; she couldn’t make out the body. And if she didn’t see it, how could she know this wasn’t some elaborate ruse? Arsinoe long had her doubts: the woman was too monstrous to meet such an ordinary fate as death. Ganymedes, at Arsinoe’s side, gripped her hand tightly, as if he could smell her thoughts.

She wrenched her fingers from the eunuch’s and darted through the crowd, past the earlier Ptolemies, the Potbelly and the Savior too, their glass faces staring at the vaulted ceiling. And then at last she saw her: Tryphaena reduced to a shrunken, weak-willed body draped in white and laden with gold hanging from her ears, her wrists, her varicose throat. No more dangerous than a spider squished beneath a heel. Arsinoe rushed toward the hateful corpse, dodging the legs of men who’d come to pay their respects. This woman—this creature—had a thousand mourners. Her Menelaus had none. There was no fairness in that.

Arsinoe’s fingers clawed her tunic and tore it open. Her nails ripped away her flesh in gashes as she shrieked and wailed and moaned. One mourner would remember her fire-bearded friend.

The dirges echoed louder as her fingers plowed into her skin. In her mind they sang for him.
Menelaus, kindest of the Argives and of the Alexandrians too…
Eyes fixed on her—the gathered men, the high priest, even her sister Berenice. Arsinoe dug her nails into her scalp and clawed at her hair. And then Ganymedes caught her hand.

“My queen, I beg you, forgive this child,” the eunuch pleaded. “She doesn’t know herself for grief. She forgets the proper place of a royal princess.”

“No.” Berenice spoke in a queer and unfamiliar voice. It seemed to tremble. She looked Arsinoe directly in the eye. “No, indeed, she recalls it better than any other here today. She knows what it is to mourn, though I can’t imagine for whom she grieves.”

“For your mother, my queen,” Arsinoe’s tutor answered seamlessly.

“Don’t lie to me, Ganymedes. I have my own eunuch for that.”

As her tutor led her away from corpse and queen, Arsinoe smiled. He would be remembered, her Menelaus, because she wouldn’t forget this day. This day the whole of Alexandria had paused to watch her, wrenching their eyes from that wretched corpse.

“Don’t look so pleased,” Ganymedes scolded her.

“Why shouldn’t I be pleased?”

“I know you think it great fun to make a spectacle of yourself, to remind the people of the Piper’s forgotten daughter,” he whispered. “And perhaps it is great fun for now: you are but a girl, and many things might be forgiven. But one day you’ll appear a true threat, Arsinoe, and on that day you’ll go too far.”

“But
fortes fortuna adiuuat.
It was you who told me that, Ganymedes.”

“Yes, fortune favors the bold, little one. That’s how the saying goes. But neither fate nor fortune favors the foolhardy.”

She swallowed her protests. Even though she wanted to argue, she knew that she couldn’t. She
had
been foolhardy, but she wasn’t old or wise or brave enough to admit it aloud.

The eunuch walked too quickly up the avenue, as if he wanted to outpace her steps and leave her to her fate.

“Ganymedes.” She raced to catch up. “Ganymedes, there is—I know—there is something that has been troubling me.”

He looked back at her. His eyes weren’t unkind.

“Go on.”

Arsinoe hesitated. She wasn’t sure how to phrase her question. How to explain that the visions that haunted her at night became true in the light of day. But she couldn’t wait any longer; she had to know if he would offer her more comfort than Myrrine had. “Do you believe in dreams?”

The eunuch laughed. “What do you mean by such a question?”

Her voice dropped to a murmur. “Do you believe in visions?” Her eyes darted to see if anybody watched them. But all eyes were on the mourners and the musicians and the maidens on the temple steps. No one among them paid any mind to a girl and her eunuch. “Do you believe in the sort of dreams that predict what is to come?”

“My dear, we all have dreams. And we all have minds that read our desires into our dreams.”

Desires? Had she wanted to see Menelaus slain? Had she, like Antigone, fallen in love with death? “I’m not speaking of those sorts of dreams. I mean the sorts where bad things happen. And then happen again in life.”

The eunuch studied her. His hand twitched at his side. “You believe that you have had such dreams.”

Arsinoe nodded, gnawing at her lip.

“Let me give you some advice, my child. Put such thoughts from your mind, and don’t speak of them again. They are nonsense. Only fools believe in such madness—priests and witches and lunatics. The sort who think that you can brew magic from some amalgam of roots and body parts. Commoners and idiots, Arsinoe. You wouldn’t want anyone to think you are among them.”