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“Why does he watch us like that?” Aspasia’s voice cut in, harsh with disgust. Arsinoe followed her dark-haired friend’s gaze to the fountain’s edge and across the marble walkway. And there he was, leaning against a column: Alexander. Watching.

“I don’t know.” Arsinoe shrugged. “Perhaps he’s lonely.”

“Perhaps he’s in love with you,” Hypatia teased, singsong.

“Don’t be stupid.” Arsinoe’s temper reared. She hated how Hypatia could think of love and lust, of weddings and finery, when her world had begun to crumble again. “Not all of us think only of marriage. Some of us have more important dreams.”

Yet the nights that followed turned her dreams to darkness, dreams of the dead, of Cleopatra and Alexander and Berenice. A cobra, a vulture, a lioness, Arsinoe stalked the fallen to their graves. In the dwindling Harvest afternoons, she ignored her night terrors as best she could. She distracted herself with knife lessons, teaching herself to cut and toss and jab. Even the throwing grew easier with practice: sometimes she’d get the blade to stick, quivering, in the wood. Her fingers sprouted first cuts, and then scabs. If Myrrine noticed Arsinoe’s scrapes and scratches, the nurse kept it to herself.

But Arsinoe couldn’t shake the visions, no matter how many times she struck her target carved into a tree. Against her better judgment, she started to keep a record of the signs, a mark for each corpse she saw. And though she saw less and less of Alexander as the air grew cooler, his was the body that haunted her mind most often. More often even than Berenice’s. And only on his bones did she feast.

Sun bright overhead, Arsinoe hurled her knife against the bark. The blade stuck, trembling a moment, before it bounced away, useless. She cursed her clumsiness. How much longer would she have to practice before her arm grew strong enough to stick the knife each time? She glanced behind her in time to catch a few guards circling toward her on their rounds; irritated, she hid the weapon in her robes. She hated stopping during a bad streak, but she’d practice all the more diligently when the men had passed.

Slumping against the tree, she unfurled her papyrus scrap, the record of her nightly sins. Menelaus’s name—scratched out with a heavy line—leapt to her eyes. She drew another mark next to Alexander’s. Thirteen now. Thirteen times she’d seen his corpse rotting in her dreams. But still he lived—he and Cleopatra and Berenice and Ganymedes. What had made her vision of the fire-bearded guard different? She’d seen through a cobra’s eyes, but there was nothing remarkable in that. At night, she was a snake, a bird, a leopard. “Turn your mind from these gruesome sights,” Ganymedes had told her. “Don’t choose Cassandra’s fate.” But how could she “choose” a fate? Wasn’t the whole point of fate that she wouldn’t have any choice at all?

Beyond the guards, a solitary figure sauntered by. Silhouetted against the sky, it might have been a small man or a tall boy. Arsinoe couldn’t be sure. His strides were long and careless. His hand tousled his black locks. And then he turned his gaze on her. He started at her stare, thrown by the shock of being watched. The sun passed behind a cloud, and she realized with a jolt that this changeling was Alexander. No matter how often she saw him lurking in the shade, she always expected him to look like a boy. Quickly, she folded the papyrus in her hand.

“What is that?” Unshaken, he approached her. Their time apart had turned him bold.

She tossed off his words. “What do you care?” She wouldn’t show him her list, and her insolence would—she hoped—drive him away.

“Come on, let me see.” He reached for the paper. She jerked it from his grasping hand.

“I said it’s no concern of yours.” Her face burned; she couldn’t say why.

“Don’t be such a child, Arsinoe.” His voice cracked over her name—another unwelcome aspect of his metamorphosis. She didn’t know him now at all. In her distraction, he grabbed her wrist and snatched away the papyrus. His eyes grazed down the page. “What’s my name doing here?”

“It’s—” The words died on her tongue. She wanted to tell him what she’d seen, but she couldn’t bear the ridicule, the pity. Not from him, of all people. And if she breathed a syllable, how could she deny the rest of what it meant? Then Alexander would know the truth: that she would kill him. He’d shrink from her in fear. Perhaps that would be easier.

“You’re right,” he jeered. “It’s better not to tell me. I don’t want to hear about some silly game you and Hypatia are playing. Just leave me out of it.”

Alexander let the scrap slip from his fingers, and watched as it fluttered to the ground.

Arsinoe couldn’t bear for him to think of her like that, to lump her with those simpering girls. “It’s not—”

“No, I see it now. You’re no different from them, cooing over Archelaus and any man who stumbles onto your path. Go braid your hair, or play with dolls, or pick which man you want to wed.” The anger mounted in his voice, and she could hear the relish in his final words, as though he’d practiced them a hundred times before: “Some man who matters, as you say.”

Alexander stormed off. His stride lost its preening quality; he became a boy once more. Arsinoe shouldn’t follow. It would be better to let him leave and forget her. All she could offer him was death.

Her feet rebelled against her wisdom, and she raced after him. She grabbed his shoulder. He tried to shrug her hand away, but she only tightened her grip.

“I can—I’ll tell you what the papyrus means.”

His shoulder rose and fell beneath her palm. She could feel his breath in her fingers. When he turned to her, his voice was cool. “I don’t care, Arsinoe. Just leave me alone.”

Helios’s chariot blazed behind him, and even as Arsinoe squinted, she could see him only as a shadow. His gray-green eyes obscured, he looked a stranger, an angry Adonis curdling into a man.

“I haven’t changed,” she said. “You have.”

“Me?” Alexander’s voice cracked again. He didn’t bother trying to hide it. “Tell me: what about me has changed?”

Arsinoe took a deep breath. Half-truths and worse had become her element. The right words would salve the wound. How well she’d learned that lesson in court. But with Alexander, the task was harder. The lies and platitudes didn’t spring to her tongue as they did with Ganymedes and Berenice.

“You avoid me,” she began slowly, stalling for time, shifting the blame. But even that couldn’t help her. She was too flustered; her confidence flagged. “You’ve stopped coming to lessons. You’ve lost interest in our games. Ganymedes warned me that you’d change.”

“Oh, Arsinoe.” Alexander let out a cruel laugh. “Don’t ply me with your poison. I’ve heard you lie to others too many times to be tricked myself.”

He walked into the sun. Ganymedes had been right: Alexander would leave her, as Cleopatra and her father had, as her mother and two little brothers had. Each had abandoned her in the end, and for all her honeyed words she couldn’t call them back.

“They’re the names of the dead.” Her voice burst across the yard.

Alexander stopped. “What do you mean?”

“The dead. It’s a list of the names of people I’ve seen die.” She turned her gaze to the ground. She shouldn’t speak of her visions; she didn’t even know if she could trust this changing Alexander. But it was too late now. She couldn’t unsay what she had said. Those words would always stand between them. But better that he think her mad than lump her with her frivolous friends.

When Arsinoe glanced up, she realized that her recklessness had been rewarded: his eyes were in her thrall.

“I saw the queen this morning—she must have met a quick demise,” he taunted.

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Don’t play dumb.”

“Explain it to me, then. Slowly. I’m not as quick as your new playmates.”

“You’re twice as quick,” she snapped. She dropped her voice to a breath, a whisper, forcing Alexander to take a step nearer to catch her words. “They’re the names of those I have seen dead in my dreams—my visions.”

She nearly swallowed the final syllables as she cast an eye about for eavesdroppers. So many skulking pairs of ears. She could count the four guards she’d seen before along the garden gate, and a pair of servants trimmed the bushes beneath the cypress trees.

“Go on,” he prompted.

“This isn’t the place to speak of this. Come.” Arsinoe enjoyed borrowing Ganymedes’s lines, sowing her own infuriating mysteries.

Alexander followed quietly. She was grateful for his silence. Her mind was busy, racing from chamber to chamber, but she didn’t dare admit that she didn’t know where to take him. Ganymedes would often conduct private talks in the library, but she imagined that Aspasia and Hypatia were lurking there. The kitchen’s use was in listening, not speaking; two chatty children drew attention, whereas quiet ones didn’t. And she couldn’t trust the gardens of Ptolemy the Benefactor anymore. But her feet went on, unbidden, across the marble walks and between the cypress colonnades, by the lotus-studded archway that opened into the royal courtyard and past the piping satyrs that graced its walls. Alexander’s footfalls came to match her own, so soon they two sounded as one grown man instead of a pair of children. Only when she saw the other Arsinoe at her fountain did she realize her destination. She turned and put a finger to Alexander’s lips. She had to stand on tiptoe to whisper in his ear.

“There will be two guards outside my rooms.”

“Your rooms?” Alexander repeated dumbly. There were few sacred spaces in the palace, but their adventures had never brought them to her chambers.

“Yes, my rooms,” she replied, delighting in his awe. She liked that she could still surprise him. “Myrrine will be waiting in the antechamber. When I go in, I’ll shriek. That’ll get the attention of the guards. You sneak in behind while everyone’s distracted. Go hide under the golden bed in my room.”

Alexander nodded.

“And take off your—”

“Sandals. I know, Arsinoe. We’ve played this game before.”

It’s not a game,
she nearly snapped, but she held her tongue. “We must be careful. Wait here for my signal.”

“You mean your scream?” He gave her an odd look.

She let her feet slam hard against the wood as she raced up the stairs. She wanted her approach to draw attention. This dance was familiar; she’d played it out in her head a hundred times. In her imaginings, it was Cleopatra she had to sneak into her rooms. Her sister returned from Rome in secret, boxed in a wine cask, perhaps, or rolled up in a carpet. Word would come of her passage, and it would fall to Arsinoe to keep her safe until their father returned. In the meantime, she’d steal extra food from the kitchens, and every evening the two sisters would whisper their dark exploits to the dark night. But that was back in the days when she longed for her father’s return, when she was sure he’d embrace her with open arms.

By the time Arsinoe reached the threshold to her rooms, her heart was pounding in her throat. The two guards loomed taller, more menacing in life. And though they often smiled at her, today both of their faces were grim. Even their vulture helms looked as though they were scowling.

Within the chambers, voices battered; Arsinoe had not anticipated this. In her imaginings, it was Myrrine, and Myrrine alone, who waited in her rooms. But those had been mere dreams, fantasies. Through the door, Arsinoe could hear Ganymedes’s falsetto, though she couldn’t make out the words. Startled, she wanted to turn back, to tell Alexander that they should slip off to some other hideaway, but she did not.
Fortes fortuna adiuuat.

When she opened the door, the eunuch cut off his speech. Myrrine smiled in relief.

“There you are,” Ganymedes shrilled.

“These are my chambers. Why are you here?” Arsinoe looked to Myrrine for aid. Her nurse bore no love for the eunuch—“the man who lost his balls,” the woman called him behind closed doors. But she said nothing now.

The eunuch chuckled. “I thought you might wish to hear your father’s plans.” His broken teeth were stained purple. He’d been drinking. Arsinoe could read it on his blotchy face. He had never held wine well.

“What—what of my father’s plans?” She stumbled, thrown.

“I’d hoped that you would know the answer by now. Or are you afraid that Nereus lurks behind every bush? Your father marches from Ephesus to Antioch with Aulus Gabinius’s army as we speak. It seems that your sister thinks this putative son of Mithradates will lead her men to war. But I suppose you know that’s why she wedded and bedded him.”

This time, wine had turned Ganymedes talkative; Arsinoe had seen it drive him to both extremes. This, she realized, was the ripe and perfect moment she’d been waiting for, the moment to ask about her visions and her father. To ask why some came true and some vanished into nothing. To ask whether the New Dionysus would count her among the traitors. The eunuch wanted to engage her; she could hear it in his swift and lulling slurs. She might ask anything. But there was Alexander to think of, still and silent by the stairs. In time, he’d realize that she’d lost interest in their game—he was the one who had called it that: a game. And then, afterward, he’d grow cool toward her again. But he’d come around. He always did. Or at least he always had before. The two desires tore at Arsinoe, claws kneading her chest.

“Ganymedes. I need to speak with Myrrine alone.” Arsinoe spoke quickly, before she could take back the words.