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My grandmother cleared her throat. “You forget, Stateira, but that upstart Macedonian already rules the entire Greek peninsula,” she said with her eyes closed. “I’d scarcely call that a backwater.”

“Stop gnawing on your thumb like a starving rat, Drypetis,” my mother said, ignoring my grandmother. “And take off that hideous hat.”

My elephant hat was hardly hideous, but I knew this battle was one I’d never win, at least not without my father at my side.

My mother pulled herself to sitting and beckoned to my sister with one elegant hand. She wound a lock of Stateira’s ebony hair around her finger and rubbed it with her thumb. “More almond oil,” she ordered to a waiting servant. Our women were nobles chosen from Persia’s illustrious Seven Families for the honor of serving the King of Kings’ wife and daughters, yet for the way my mother treated them, they may as well have been slaves dragged in from slinging dung onto the empire’s wheat fields. “And more whitening cream for Drypetis’ fingers.” She scowled at me. “I thought I told you to leave that water wheel alone.”

That morning after the troops had moved out, she had forbidden my examination of the nearby irrigation
karez
, but hadn’t said a word about the spare chariot that my father had left behind. Having abandoned the terra-cotta pot experiment and needing something to keep my hands busy and my mind off the nearby battle, I’d tackled changing the chariot’s draft pole, which had given me a devil of a time, and then contented myself with polishing the white holly-wood axles. Then I’d uncovered an abandoned box of bronze scythes. The long bronze blades were an awkward length for one person to hoist and mount onto the axle ends, but the project had successfully distracted me, although by the time I was finished, my hair was disheveled and my hands were raw.

I extended my hands to the waiting servant with a wan smile and allowed my palms to be slathered with the whitening mixture of ground lentils, barley, and powdered deer antler. It smelled wretched, but afterward my hands would be as soft as a child’s. No amount of rose oil or salt from the Dead Sea would ever make me as beautiful as Stateira, but my mother was determined to die trying, and I often enjoyed the results. Although my mother never said it aloud, there was no doubt that I was the greatest disappointment to her, the plain-faced second daughter of Persia’s most renowned beauty. It was said that my father had swooned with love when he first saw my mother among the limestone towers of Cappadocia, that the very breezes themselves were heartsick from her perfumes. Yet I was plain and wiry as a field mouse during a seven-year drought, and my nose had acquired a decided ridge last year after I’d tinkered with an elevating winch and received a wad of lint shoved up my broken nose as a reminder to secure winch lines properly. Fortunately for the house of Darius, Stateira possessed all the grace and beauty that I lacked. My mother had even shared her name with my sister, while I was named after a mottled brown butterfly. Although a caterpillar might transform itself, a butterfly never would.

“Put away the perfumes and oils,” my grandmother finally commanded, rising from her seat in one elegant motion. Her white hair was piled on her head in the same tight mass of stiff curls she’d likely worn when she’d married her brother, the former King of Kings, who now lay moldering in our royal mausoleum. “No one will care how soft our hands are if my son fails today, nor will they notice how we smell like roses if he returns flush with victory over the Macedonian hordes.”

I mouthed my thanks to her and was wiping my hands on my oil-stained sleeves when the echo of hundreds of men’s boots reached us and was joined by the snorting of horses outside. For better or worse, the battle must have ended and our army was now returning.

Stateira clutched my hand so tightly I thought my knuckles would shatter. I imagined my father riding triumphant in his golden chariot, Alexander’s head in one fist and a Macedonian
sarissa
in the other.

Or perhaps Alexander was entering the king’s huge pavilion, stealing its chests of gold and silver while his boots trod my father’s blood over the intricately woven carpets.

We stepped outside to watch our men return. But it wasn’t blue-robed and bearded Immortals with spears and long-shields approaching at a double march, but a whole host of beardless Macedonians armed with menacing swords and garish sun shields.

My mother screamed and dragged Stateira back into the tent, my grandmother following and issuing stern injunctions for them to remain calm.

I stood rooted where I was, watching as my father’s camp was overrun with orderly lines of Macedonians, their metal helmets gleaming like a thousand moons fallen to earth. I trembled to see our Persian attendants being rounded up: my father’s cooks, musicians, wine servers, and even his scent-makers. The camels that carted my father’s concubines brayed and snorted, commanders barked orders, and leering soldiers carried towering stacks of golden bowls and ewers. A
yona takabara
stood across the way, almost a head taller than the rest and holding the reins of a black monster of a horse wearing a gold-horned helmet. He directed soldiers as they carried crates of coins and unminted silver from my father’s tent, along with a royal purple carpet and a massive ibex-handled golden jar that contained purified oils to burn for Ahura Mazda. The authority the man wielded and his plumed helmet with its emblazoned lion told me whom I beheld. It could be only one man.

Alexander of Macedon.

I gasped and almost ducked back inside, but the warhorse shifted to reveal the terrible items behind him. My heart screamed with rage and pain, even as I stumbled forward.

It was the custom for an empty chariot drawn by white horses to accompany the King of Kings into battle, to invite Ahura Mazda to assist in leading the troops. Yet before me was both that chariot and another: my father’s, its gold plate still gleaming with the image of Ahura Mazda as an eagle beneath the smears of mud and blood. The yoke glittered with the full panoply of rainbow-hued gemstones and I could just make out the hammered image of my father on the side, dressed in his king’s cloak with his curled beard I’d loved to run my chubby fingers through as a child. Alongside the Chariot of the Sun lay my father’s golden shield and his purple robe, now rent to tatters and stained with something almost black.

My knees turned to water, but somehow I managed to remain standing even as the world shattered about me.

“No, no, no,” I moaned, stumbling toward all that remained of my father. Alexander swiveled and said something in heavily accented Greek, his eyebrow raised in question, but I only spat at his feet. “I curse you, Alexander of Macedon, for all you’ve done today!”

I expected a sword in my belly to end my trials, but instead I was greeted with a great boom of male laughter.

“Alexander?” the man repeated, touching a hand to his cuirass, smeared with another man’s blood. “No. I am merely Hephaestion,” he said in Aramaic, the language of my father’s empire.

I knew not which surprised me more: that I understood the man or that he was not Alexander. I’d expected Alexander’s catamite to be like my father’s favorite eunuch, Bagoas, small and pretty with skin like rose petals, but this beast was certainly no eunuch, unless he’d been gelded after reaching manhood.

I drew ragged breaths to try to calm myself. “Well then, Hephaestion, you may inform Alexander of Macedon that the widow and daughters of King Darius request an audience.” I barely managed to push the words around the stone in my throat. My eyes burned with unshed tears and I yearned to touch my father’s chariot and breathe in the scent of him from his purple robe, yet I dared not.

Hephaestion glanced behind me to my mother’s pavilion. “Darius’ widow?” he asked. Confusion marred his coarse features, then cleared. “But Darius still lives.”

“He lives?” I almost choked on the words. “But you’ve captured his chariot and shield. . . .”

“Yet not the wily king himself,” Hephaestion said, as another commander with a smaller-plumed helm joined him. “His troops scattered in the four directions and the King of Kings bolted east toward Babylon.”

My father had fled, meaning he’d left us behind to be captured by these
yona takabara
. My heart shriveled to something small and black at the thought, but surely my father had abandoned us only out of necessity, so he might fight another day.

And he
would
fight. Of that I had no doubt.

Hephaestion glanced back at my mother’s tent. “Tell your mistress I will send Alexander to speak with her after his physician finishes with him.”

Mistress?
And then I almost laughed; this man thought me a slave to my own mother!

“His physician?” I asked. “Was he injured?”

“A sword thrust to the thigh, delivered by King Darius, in fact.”

I felt a surge of pride. “And might he still die from the wound?”

“It’s merely a scratch. He’s suffered far worse.”

“Pity,” I muttered. “Someone will need to finish the job one of these days.”

Hephaestion’s eyes narrowed. “You may tell Queen Stateira that she shall be treated gently by Macedon, although Alexander has no use for slaves with whips for tongues.”

I recoiled, then offered him my back and returned to my mother’s pavilion. The women inside set upon me before the tent flap fell shut.

“You little idiot! Where have you been?” my mother began, but my grandmother cut her off.

“What did you discover?” she asked, her face a mask of calm even as her nails dug into my palm.

“Father is still alive,” I said, my immense relief at his survival quashing the whisper of shame that he’d run from the battlefield. “And Alexander will come once he finishes plundering my father’s tent.” I refrained from mentioning the pile of his treasures outside or my father’s captured chariot.

Hephaestion was true to his word, and we didn’t wait long for both him and Alexander to arrive, the latter’s golden curls damp and smelling of fresh almond oil. He was shorter than I expected and more handsome, but I clenched my fists beneath the pleats of my robe to realize that this
yona takabara
had befouled my father’s great marble bathing basin, carried west by a sledge and six matched horses from our palace in Babylon. My mother gave a sharp inhalation and cursed under her breath, likely troubled not by Alexander’s bath but by the woman dressed in sapphire and gold on his arm, whom I recognized as Barsine, the widow of my father’s Greek commander, Memnon. Until recently Barsine had spent almost her full thirty years exiled in Greece, so she was considered more Greek than Persian. Her face was shaped like a heart, framed by lovely black hair, but even her beauty paled in comparison with my sister’s. I imagined Stateira on Alexander’s arm and winced.

“Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon,” my grandmother said. She too was drawn to the sheer size and power emanating from Alexander’s guard, and bowed as she addressed Hephaestion. I cleared my throat in an attempt to redirect her misguided attentions, but she ignored me.

Hephaestion and Alexander exchanged grins, and it was Hephaestion who corrected my grandmother in fluent Aramaic. “This, Dowager Queen Sisygambis, is Alexander of Macedon.”

“My apologies for so egregious an error,” my grandmother said smoothly, but I thought I detected a rare flush of embarrassment on her cheeks.

“It is no mistake,” Alexander said, his smile wide. “Hephaestion and I have been of one mind since we were boys, two sides of the same coin. Thus, he too is Alexander.”

One mind and one flesh as well.

To my shock, he knelt on one knee, and I took satisfaction at his wince, although there was otherwise no sign of his leg wound. The rest of his retainers followed suit, but it was almost humorous to watch Hephaestion find his knees, akin to watching a poorly trained bear bow. “I am honored to be in the presence of King Darius’ women.”

“And we are honored by your attentions,” my grandmother answered. “This is Queen Stateira and her daughters, the princesses Stateira and Drypetis.”

Hephaestion stared at me as the men stood; then his lips curled into a grin. “Beware the younger one,” he whispered to Alexander, his lips almost grazing the man’s ear. “She hisses. And spits.”

I did my best to look down my long, albeit broken, nose at him, but that was difficult considering the top of my head scarcely grazed his shoulder.

Alexander inclined his head to us, which I supposed was another honor. “I shall guarantee your safety and comfort while I make arrangements with King Darius for your return.”

“You mean while you ransom us,” my mother stated, ignoring my grandmother’s pointed look.

Alexander shrugged. “So it is in the ways of war.”

“As dowager queen, I believe I may speak on my son’s behest,” my grandmother said. “Perhaps instead of a ransom, you may be amenable to a more enjoyable arrangement?” She stepped past Barsine, sniffing as if she were rancid meat, then nudged my sister forward. To her credit, Stateira stared straight ahead, although she’d gone pale as milk. “My eldest granddaughter, Stateira, is of a marriageable age. Marry her, become my son’s heir, and put all this foolish war business behind us.”

My sneaky, slippery grandmother. Alexander would become my father’s heir only if the babe in my mother’s belly was another girl or, worse, another stillborn. But, of course, Alexander didn’t yet know of my mother’s pregnancy.

Alexander blinked at her boldness, then chuckled. “I like you, Sisygambis of Persia. However, there is one flaw in your otherwise cunning logic.”

My grandmother smiled, and I realized with a start that she was enjoying this, the sly old she-cat. “And what might that be?”

“While I appreciate the women your empire has to offer”—Alexander tucked Barsine’s perfectly manicured hand over his—“I’ve already taken your family as captives. I could marry all of you if I wished it, but as King Darius discovered when he fled today, wives and children are a costly burden to any campaign.”

“You may be right,” my grandmother said. “But in time you may come to see the beauty of my offer.” The word
beauty
was pointed as her gaze flicked to my sister and prompted a genuine smile from Alexander.