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“Perhaps,” he answered. “But in the meantime, we break camp and you shall accompany me.”

“We thank you for your generosity,” my grandmother said, bowing over her hands and stopping just short of kissing her fingertips in a
proskynesis
as if she were addressing a god or a king.

Alexander turned to my mother, her face pale and her hands clasped over the still-flat belly that would soon burgeon with my father’s secret heir. “I give you my word, Queen Stateira, that you and your daughters shall receive the same honors as my own mother and sisters.”

“Says the man who murdered the husband of his sister,” I muttered to myself. This man was our enemy and instead he was being feted like a powerful
satrap
.

Alexander ignored me to place his hands over my mother’s, then turned away with a sweep of his purple cape. “May the gods keep you,” he said to us, but I overheard him murmur in Hephaestion’s ear, “Sisygambis I like, but the Stateiras both quake like terrified rabbits. As for the younger daughter, I’ve seen fairer-faced horses.”

Hephaestion glanced back at us and for a moment I thought he might smile at me. Instead, his gaze fell on Stateira. “The elder daughter is lovelier than a nymph,” he said under his breath. “And you never know—the younger one may one day prove useful. Perhaps for target practice.”

Alexander’s laugh boomed as they stepped into the encroaching dusk, ushering in a gust of chilled autumn air that bespoke ripening pomegranates and hearth fires at night. I resisted the urge to shout obscenities at them, mostly because their foul soldiers’ mouths could probably outcurse me. Or their soldiers’ swords could stake my tongue as Alexander had threatened.

I sagged with relief as the tent flap fell closed, shutting out the commotion of the camp and leaving us with some semblance of protection.

Today my father had been branded a coward, but we would be safe as Alexander’s hostages.

At least for now.

CHAPTER 4

Balkh, Persia

Roxana

I gave a squeal of disgust at the gaily painted wagon of
karakul
as it lurched across the rutted road, its cargo of prized fetal lambskins tipping dangerously while mud from the recent rains splashed onto the hem of my favorite orange robe. “Foul-faced peasant,” I shouted at the driver, shaking my fist from the back of our rickety donkey cart. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“A trussed-up little shrew,” the man said, the black grime dug so deep into his lined face that he might have passed for a striped tiger. “With a mouth like a braying ass!”

“I hope you choke on a fish bone!”

“Roxana!” My father turned and snapped his whip overhead from his place at the front of our cart. “Well-bred daughters are silent as a corpse. Learn to keep your mouth shut, you little fool!”

Ha!
I snorted silently. Well-bred I was not, certainly not with hunchbacked old Oxyartes of Balkh for a father. My mother had birthed my twin and me, then died and left us to fend for ourselves.

“This is the Mother of Cities?” I muttered under my breath, wrinkling my nose. I’d hoped for more from the birthplace of Zoroaster and its
satrap
Bessus, cousin to King Darius and the man next in line for the throne. I’d lived within a day’s ride of Balkh for all of my thirteen years but hadn’t left the crumbling walls of my father’s rural estate on the dusty outskirts of the city since I was six, both because we lacked the coin to purchase anything the city might offer and because my father feared that some accident might befall his lone daughter. It wasn’t tender feelings that made him worry for my safety, but instead the fact that my dusky eyes and the long black hair that fell past my hips were the most valuable pieces of property he possessed.

All my life my father had promised to make a return on his investment in me. Today was that day; hence my short temper and roiling stomach.

Now my ears rang with the braying of donkeys and my nose twitched from Balkh’s pungent stew of dung, sweat, and animals. A storm cloud of gnats shifted in the air and the half-dead donkey that pulled our cart shat with exuberance. “I didn’t realize the Jewel of the East smelled like our stables,” I muttered.

“What did you expect?” My twin brother lay sprawled on the cart’s floor and lifted a hand to shield his face from the autumn sun, peering at me through slitted eyes. Parizad was all elbows and knees, with a giant fleshy apple at his throat. “That Balkh’s rivers flowed with honey and the walls were made of amber?”

The truth was, I
had
expected more from the Mother of Cities, had dreamed of the comforts I would gain once I left my father’s crumbling walls. Bessus was second only to King Darius himself, the powerful
satrap
of all of Bactria and my father’s overlord. Where were the jeweled towers and the marble palaces I’d been promised, the slaves to weave ribbons into my hair and the scent-makers to create exotic jasmine perfumes for me to swim in?

Instead, our father dismounted to lead our donkey and cart through the sea of scab-kneed urchins and scowling merchants that thronged the packed-dirt streets.

“Our hideous father is the most minor noble in all of Balkh,” Parizad said, sitting up and twisting his perfect lips into a lazy smile. “You should be honored that our great
satrap
would glance in our direction.”

“I know that,” I snapped. As if I could forget. For the past days, ever since our father had arranged my betrothal, he’d been scouting new horses for his perpetually empty stables and guzzling finer vintages of sweet raisin wine than had ever graced our table. Even the robe and the long-legged
shalvar
he wore today were new, a garish shade of yellow with blue embroidery that did little to hide his misshapen back or twisted foot, while my own robe was a piece of reworked silk from my mother’s marriage chest. The only things of any value on my father’s estates were his several metal foundries, as useful to me as pebbles in my slippers.

Parizad tapped his chin. A pathetic attempt at a first beard covered his jaw like the fuzz on a rotten peach. However, I was supposed to be silent and thus, I wouldn’t point out the shortcomings of his few dark whiskers. “They say Bessus has a hundred concubines,” Parizad mused, “but you’ll be, what . . . his third wife?”

“Fourth.” I practically spat the word at the reminder, then glanced at my brother and scowled. “And your beard looks ridiculous, by the way.”

Ahriman take silence, and I hoped the black demon might turn my brother’s tongue into a worm while he was at it.

But Parizad only stroked his chin. “I think it looks dignified. So did the pretty slave I tumbled in the garden shed this morning.”

I snorted. “If you recall, I did ask Father why he couldn’t find a nobleman to take me as his first wife,” I muttered. The welts on my back were healed to bruises now, but I winced at the remembrance. My father had emerged from his mother’s womb with a body twisted and bent like a fat harvestman spider—big-bellied with spindly arms and legs—and Parizad and I had once made the mistake of taunting him that his fists inflicted little damage on us. To our dismay, we quickly learned that his whip stung deeper than a swarm of hornets, and always avoided biting deep enough to scar or mark our precious faces. Fortunately, Parizad had discovered an interest in healing and kept his leather medicine satchel well stocked with rosemary and lavender salves, and chamomile and yarrow infusions, that eased the worst of the pain.

I yearned to one day be stronger than the hunchbacked spider, to take the whip from my father and flay the skin from his back. But the daughter of a spider could bide her time. . . .

We’d entered the heart of Balkh through its seventh gate, which led into its poorest and oldest section of town, and now we wound our way through a ramshackle market packed with carts of red slip pottery, frayed baskets overflowing with lentils and heads of garlic, and bloody hares strung by their back legs and bound for the city’s dinner plates. I thought perhaps we’d reached the palace when my father clambered back into the cart, but the cobbled street opened up to villas of the affluent, the scent of water lilies and oranges wafting over their whitewashed walls. They might not be palatial, but they were certainly more lovely than my father’s meager estate with its loose shutters, which had long ago given up pretending to block out the winter winds, and the stain of black mold that graced our hall’s ceiling. The streets seemed to go on forever, beyond towering Zoroastrian fire temples and the sprawling granaries, each orderly street crammed with obstinate mules, packs of mangy dogs, and slaves hurrying to do their masters’ bidding.

And then we came to a set of walls inlaid with turquoise and engraved with images of winged lions and bearded sphinxes. Guards with silver shields and lances stood at attention atop the immense wooden gates, their eyes hidden beneath beaten-metal eagle-wing helmets.

“Oxyartes of Balkh has answered the summons of Bessus,
satrap
of Bactria and cousin to the King of Kings,” my father called up to the guards, craning his neck so deeply that his shoulders seemed dislocated. “I bring my daughter, Roxana, at his behest.”

My father spoke like a polished courtier instead of a hawker selling trinkets with fake gilding and colored glass passed off as garnets. I could think of nothing save that beyond these walls lay Balkh’s palace and my future husband, a man I’d never even met.

And my freedom.

Parizad leaned forward and squeezed my hand. We’d shared the same womb and wet nurse, so I knew all the squalls of my twin’s temper, the smallest nuance of his laughter, just as he knew mine. Right now I wished he would press his lips to my forehead and talk of pearls the size of swallow’s eggs and the famed Basra dates that Bessus would gift me with. Instead my brother leaned back in the cart, resting against the rough-hewn crate that contained my father’s armor. Father would give me to Bessus, spend most of my bride-price, and then travel with the
satrap
to the west, to face the threat of Alexander of Macedon. If we were lucky, Alexander would crush my father beneath his boots. “I wonder if Bessus might allow me a position as a healer in his army,” my brother mused, feigning nonchalance. “Then the bards might one day sing of my glory saving men on the battlefield.”

“Perhaps I’ll make Bessus fall so much in love with me that he’ll make you one of his generals.” I gave an impish grin, prompting a smile from my brother.

“I have faith in your powers, sister,” he said, lacing his hands behind his black curls and winking. “For your beauty rivals only my own.”

And it was true. Ahura Mazda, or perhaps the god’s evil counterpart, Ahriman, had cursed us with a grasping, grotesque spider of a father, but somehow gifted us with enough dark beauty to make both men and women weep with envy, although Parizad had yet to grow into his new lankiness. Sometimes I wondered if that was why our father hated us so, because we’d been given everything he’d been denied.

For a moment I wondered why Bessus had deigned to negotiate with my father at all, but surely the
satrap
must be a great cultivator of all things beautiful.

“Shut your gullets, you two,” my father commanded, rubbing his hands together as the palace gates groaned open on ancient hinges. “Bessus has just finished his council meeting following the recent . . .
unpleasantness
in Issus.”

Parizad snorted under his breath. “More like a rout. And our King of Kings slunk from the field like a desert dog with his tail between his legs.”

I jabbed my brother in the ribs, not wishing to listen to him drone on again about the Greek victory. I didn’t care a whit for dead soldiers rotting on a battlefield; after all, the empty-headed imbeciles had volunteered to die in the first place. And despite what I had said to Parizad, I’d never send my beautiful brother to be slaughtered by some Greek pike, to let the carrion pluck out his sparkling eyes and tear apart his perfect skin. That would be akin to sending a piece of myself to die. No, he would stay here with me, right where he belonged.