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“What else troubles you?” she asked quietly, doing her best to mask her disappointment. “Have you news of my father?”

“As far as our spies can tell, his course is set for Rhodes. He seeks a particular favorite of ours: Cato.”

Cato—that stinking thief. He had stolen Cyprus in his Roman greed, and now her father would kneel before that man, beg for Roman arms to defeat her claim. She shouldn’t be surprised: the kingdom had never mattered to the Piper. He’d been raised as a spare, she reminded herself, a bastard in far-off Syria, drinking in the favors of whatever king glanced his way. He’d viewed the throne as a gift, not an obligation. The loss of Cyprus still burned as salt in a wound, and her familiar fury sated the emptiness she’d felt. She couldn’t undo her father’s misdeeds in a day, but she had hoped he’d have pride enough not to seek aid from the very man who’d destroyed his legacy.

“Tell me: who else knows of the Piper’s plans? Have your rats begun to spread the poison around the city?” This aspect of Pieton’s power had long impressed her, his way of consorting with all manner of men, of blending seamlessly into palace and alley alike.

“Not yet, my queen. It’s better to leave his friends in the dark a little longer. They think him fled; they know not where. Let them wonder at his cowardice for a time.”

“There’s much of it to wonder at.” Her skin bristled. Her father’s weakness baffled her. And how long she’d remained blind to it. She’d endured years of his scorn before she’d recognized the truth. It made no sense: her father had been born of Ptolemy the Savior’s seed, just as her mother had been. But she couldn’t imagine two dispositions more opposed. Did that same thinness run in her blood?

“You’ll never be like him.” Sometimes, the eunuch seemed to read her thoughts with disturbing ease. “You’re cut from your mother’s cloth, not his.”

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment.” She grinned.

The wiry eunuch paused, assessing her. His teeth wore at his lower lip. “There’s one more matter, of a rather delicate nature. The question of your sister.”

Her sister. She thought she’d accounted for the children. The eldest, Cleopatra, would be with the Piper, and the concubine would whisk away the rest; she always imagined that would be the plan. The boys were barely out of changing clothes. And even Cleopatra was scarcely eleven—which would make Arsinoe younger still. Berenice tried to recall the child’s face. The two daughters her father begot on his concubine blended in her mind. They were close in age, a scant two or three years apart. True siblings, the sort that had been stolen from her.

“I thought her mother took her from the palace.”

“I thought so too. But it seems she has only the boys. This younger daughter appears less loved by both parents. A guard found her quaking beneath her bed during first watch last night.”

“Surely she has some nurse or tutor who cares for her.” It took Berenice a moment to realize why the eunuch was troubling her with this, to remember how her mother would react to find one of the Piper’s younger children within her grasp. Her mother would want the girl dead.

“My mother, I presume, has other plans for the child,” Berenice went on.

“She never did take a liking to your father’s lesser children…”

“And what do you think, Pieton? What are your plans?” She hadn’t wanted to involve the children—not if she could avoid it. But kindness, softness—she couldn’t betray those either. They weren’t the province of queens.

The eunuch’s finger teased the fuzz along his upper lip. After all these years, he still needed to flaunt his vestigial traces of manhood. It saddened her. “I bear this Arsinoe no love,” he said. “But the child is not universally disliked; among the servants she is something of a favorite. And there are those who worry that a city under Tryphaena’s thrall will be a bloody one. The murder of an innocent girl would confirm those fears.”

Berenice smiled. He had answered perfectly. This ability to cast her decisions in the most politic light was a special talent of his. “Perhaps, then,” she answered, “it would be wiser for me to intervene on her behalf. Saving this poor, abandoned child might endear me to my subjects.”

“I think it would reflect some wisdom, yes, and kindness too. That can work to your advantage.”

Not a sentiment Tryphaena would ever credit. To her mother, kindness was softness, and softness was death.

After Pieton quit her chambers, Berenice let her thoughts wander to Arsinoe. The girl would be alone and terrified. At that age, she would have scarcely spent a night apart from her nurse, and now she’d measured two. And what could this child know of hunger pains and fear? The girl must be nine or so, the same age she’d been at Cleopatra’s birth, when she’d watched her own mother cast from the palace and lain quaking in her room, waiting and wondering what would become of her. A stitch of sympathy twisted in her gut for the forgotten child.

Younger

A
rsinoe had run out of tears. Her fingers clutched the damp blanket, cold evidence of the recent flood. Now her eyes were dry as sand; she could hardly believe she’d authored such a deluge.

Half naked, shivering, she clutched her knees to her chest. She’d removed her soiled tunic and changed her underthings, but she’d no idea how to dress herself. That was never her job; that’s what servants were for. A fool, she still hoped for Myrrine’s return, for lavender-scented water, for cleansing hands. But no servant came to bathe or feed her, nor perfume the air or strip away her clothes. Even though she’d bundled them off in a corner, she could still taste their stench.

How she longed to creep from her chambers, and cross the corridor to her sister’s rooms, to curl up beside Cleopatra in her bed. Her sister would whisper all the court’s secrets in her ear. She would know what to do, and what to say, when to beg for mercy and when to stand with pride. But those chambers would be stripped and empty. That sister was far across the sea. In Rhodes? Athens? Rome? Arsinoe didn’t even know where her father sailed. And what difference did that make? If he’d worried after her, he would’ve taken her along too.
King Ptolemy’s daughter is already on board
.

Her palms cradled the fire-bearded soldier’s gifts. Yesterday, her hunger had ebbed to a dull roar; hours had passed when she’d almost forgotten it entirely. But today her famine returned with a vengeance. Each breath brought a new pang in her gut. Starvation, too, could kill a girl, and not nearly so quick as poison. Democrates’s end, when she thought of it now, didn’t seem such a wretched one. Her left hand toyed with a grape, twisting it back and forth between her thumb and index finger. She brought the fruit to her lips. She kissed its cool skin. And so this was how her life would end: alone, abandoned by her mother and her father, by her sister and her friends. She clung to this moment, her very last, and then she sank her teeth into its flesh. The room spun as the juices dripped down her chin.

Death seemed a fair price to pay for such pleasure. So she ate another grape, and a third. She couldn’t help herself. Soon she no longer ate them one by one but in handfuls, stuffing her cheeks until only a barren stem remained. A minute passed. And then another. She wondered what it would feel like as she died, whether it would be like falling asleep, or if—instead—it would hurt like something wretched. Like the time she’d caught the burning fever when she was six. How she’d shrieked and shivered in her bed, her head flaming and her mind possessed by dizzying dreams. Cleopatra had insisted on sleeping at her side, cradling her sweating form in her arms and whispering tales of Odysseus to soothe her each night. When their father had tried to banish Cleopatra from her chamber, fretting over the older girl’s health, she’d fired back, “You have sons, Papa, and I won’t live anyway, not without Arsinoe.” But this felt different. No flames licked her cheeks; no hands cloyed at her throat. She could see straight and steady enough to count the Seven Sisters in the sky, fleeing from Orion’s wooing sword. Her clenched fists uncoiled. She would live.

But rather than be sated, her hunger grew more forceful. She yearned for bread, as she’d never yearned for anything before. Only a bite, she promised herself, perhaps two, enough to tide her over to tomorrow’s dawn, no more. Her teeth attacked the stale crust. And though she had to gnaw and gnash and tear, it tasted better than the softest, sweetest loaves in her father’s hall. Before she knew it, she was licking the last crumbs from her fingers. The dates she wrapped up in the guard’s cloth, and she slipped them beneath the bed.

That night, a hyena chased her through the palace halls. Her feet slipped against stone; she’d lost her sandals and the floor was cool beneath her toes. Her eyes scanned the walls for a door—any door—but there was none, only endless sheets of marble lined by statues: Apollo drawing back his bow, Athena helmed for war, the Three Gorgons struggling over a single eye. She rounded the corner to find shadows, shadows lurking, windows black. Ahead: nothing, nowhere to run, only solid stone. The beast snarled at her heels, and when she turned to face her enemy, she saw it was no natural animal. Instead, a bristled creature stood before her with a human face, the most wretched she could imagine: the bulging, bulbous eyes of Tryphaena glinted with hate. She gnashed her sharpened teeth. Arsinoe screamed.

She awoke, trembling. But slowly her panic recoiled as she took in her surroundings. The morning that greeted her wasn’t so very different from ones that had come before her father fled: a tidy room cleared of soiled robes, blankets folded by the bed, even the curtains thrown open. And when she approached the window, she could see that a dark rain had washed away the bloodstained stones. And beyond, the light of Pharos called sailors to Alexandria’s dawn. Perhaps Myrrine might even be returned to her. Eager, she paced the room to pass the time. Once, then twice, then thirty times. The sun inched higher on his path, but no servant came.

Arsinoe’s stomach growled in protest, even after she’d eaten the dates. But someone had been in to tidy her room. That made her bold. She could demand food as well. She crossed to open the door, but it was bolted shut. Her fingers balled into a fist and rapped against it. She waited, but no one answered. Once more, she knocked, tightening her grip. Still silence. She banged a third time; her right fist joined her left, flailing harder and harder against the cedar. Her hands prickled with pain, and her right one snagged a splinter, but the hurt spurred on her fury. She beat against the door, against her father and her nurse, against her tutor and her mother, against her departed sister and the reigning one, until her hands were bruised and bloody, and her eyes stung with anger. Then she banged harder still. At last, defeated, Arsinoe sank to the floor, hunger consumed by rage.

When the sun had long since passed his apex and begun his slow descent into the sea, the door creaked. An unfamiliar maid, a girl perhaps a year or two her elder, darted in, bearing a plate of cheese and bread and olives.

“What’s your name?” Arsinoe asked. There was a power in naming people and things. Cleopatra had taught her that too, when they’d encountered a strange woman lurking in the library. A vagrant of some sort, rooting through the scrolls. Arsinoe had shrunk away in fear, but Cleopatra had smiled sweetly and asked the woman’s name. “If you call people by name, Arsinoe,” she’d explained afterward, “they’ll answer you.” Arsinoe believed those words—fervently. The natives of this land even held that the first god, their Atum, spoke himself into existence, that he came into being from the water by conjuring his own name.

But the servant only shook her head, her gaze fixed on the floor. Arsinoe didn’t know what this maid had to fear:
she
was the one who’d been abandoned, imprisoned in her rooms, and waited on by strangers. Arsinoe felt the tears building, the pressure clawing at her eyes, but she blinked them away. She kept her gaze trained on the girl, and an idea came to her: perhaps the maid wasn’t Greek by birth. Her skin was burned a deep copper, darker than her own. There were some servants who traced their roots to the Upper Lands. Cleopatra’s first milk mother had spoken only the local dialect. Not for the first time, Arsinoe wished she had her sister’s tongue. Her own knowledge of the Egyptian language was dismal on the best of days. Her Persian, her Aramaic, even her shoddy Latin came more quickly to her lips. But she found the words, pronouncing each with painstaking care.

“What is your name?”

The girl’s dark eyes grew wider still. Did she recognize the alien sounds, or fear them? Arsinoe couldn’t tell. The maid rushed to the door.