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The Romans had developed quite a taste for silk, as Pieton told it. It didn’t surprise Berenice. The Republic lusted after every art it couldn’t master: the rich purple cloth of Tyre, the delicate glasswork of Alexandria, the breathing statues of Athens. These trade routes would yield welcome revenue. But dark whispers thronged about this Mithradates, too, ones that didn’t share the pleasant scent of silk and coin. He had tried to sell himself as a husband to every princess along the banks of the Euphrates—and had been rebuked by all. If any imagined that he had the strength to recapture his brother’s lands, he would already be wed.

“I thank you for your kind gifts.”

The man, this lesser son of Parthia, knit his brow, as though he’d expected something more encouraging, though Berenice couldn’t imagine how she had raised his hopes. After touting his marital potential across the better part of Asia, he must, by now, have grown accustomed to rejection. His palms slid back and forth against each other. She could hear the dead skin worrying away.

“Will I hear no answer to my suit?” His voice cracked. This boldness was startling. He didn’t look the sort of man to press his points. His silks, as well-worn as they were rich; the rubbing of his hands; his pursed lips—he reeked of desperation. Berenice recognized the stink.

Still, she could be direct; the role fit her better than the coquette. And so she replied sharply, “You’ll hear an answer since you ask. I’ve no wish to waste anyone’s time, my own least of all. I won’t marry Rome’s wars in Asia. I’ve enough of my own worries to attend to at home.”

His face fell, all that nervous, jolting energy stripped away to disappointment. His palms stuck together; his lips gaped. Berenice nearly pitied him. Here was his last, his final hope, and she’d dashed it against the onyx. The matter didn’t weigh on her for long. When the Parthian shuffled off, her sympathies shuffled with him, and she thought of him no more.

Harvest came, rich and full and warm. The news from beyond her borders remained quiet. The nearest came from Judea, where the Syrian governor, Aulus Gabinius, and his Roman legions had stormed through Nazareth and toward Jerusalem to beat the Judean kingdoms into submission. But the eagle standard never passed south of the Dead Sea. The Republic, it seemed, was content to leave Egypt alone.

And so the only foreigners the early summer winds carried were more suitors. Cotys of Thrace, a frail man old enough to be her grandfather, tried to buy her hand with jewels. And trembling Antiochus of Commagene, nearly young enough to be her son, gave her rare and ancient scrolls plundered from Pergamum—“Gifts for your great library, my queen,” he enunciated meticulously, a child practicing his verses. When she gave her rejection, as gently as she could manage, the boy couldn’t hide his relief. Young Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia emerged as the best of a bad lot, though she worried over the five years she had on his sixteen, and over the putrid tales that spun about his mother. Athenais of Pontus, Berenice had heard, exerted a strange and unnatural influence over both of her adolescent sons. Having shed her own mother, Berenice wasn’t looking to take on a second.

One week ran into the next, and her interest waned. Bright tidings poured in from the Upper Lands: the harvest yielded high. Last Inundation had ripened the fields, and rather than doling out from the storehouses to keep the natives calm, the crown stacked its reserves. Each day, another armada laden with wheat and freshly cut papyrus reeds plowed down the Nile. The grain piled up in the warehouses along the city’s southern lake; the reeds were dried and pounded into production to feed the avid bookkeepers at home and abroad. The storehouses overflowed, trade ships swarmed the ports, and even peasant children grew fat.

Pieton convinced Berenice to preside over a citywide jubilee to praise the gods for these gifts, and for five days Alexandria’s limestone avenues clattered with charioteers and jugglers, flamethrowers and elephant-drawn wagons that splashed wine into the streets. The people of the city—Greek and Egyptian, Persian and Jewish—drank themselves into oblivion, slurring out her coronation name in glee: “Berenice the Shining One.” And the city itself seemed to shine with her. The great edifices of the Sema and Poseidon’s temple, of the gymnasium and the library, had been scrubbed and retouched until their friezes gleamed. The celebration was but a shadow of her father’s feasts, but sometimes a shadow outshone its creator. And best of all, throughout the revelries not a peep was heard about the Piper. He remained waylaid in Ephesus, friendless and alone.

When Berenice awoke every morning and gazed over the docks bustling with ships and galleys, she even dared to hope that she wouldn’t need to take a second husband. There might be enough men to allow her to conquer Cyprus on her own. Her advisers would chafe at the idea. “You’ll always need more soldiers,” she could almost hear the eunuch chide. “What chance would your farm-soft men stand against Rome’s legions?”

And so Berenice let her councilors fuss over each prospect. “In times of peace,” her father once told her, his lips purple with wine, “advisers need to find occupations for their time. Otherwise they think too much. And idle minds always make trouble.” Even dull meetings provided useful insights. Thais held the keenest interest in these goings-on; they seemed to kindle some long-forgotten sense of purpose in him. She’d never seen her reedy councilor so eager and bold. Each afternoon he’d bustle through the griffin-embossed doors of the royal atrium with a new set of possibilities.

Nereus, on the other hand, paid less and less attention to the matter at hand. More than once, Berenice caught him drifting off on some divan. Age had caught up with him: his knees and knuckles swelled as the rest of him wasted away. Perhaps he sensed that his death was near. She kept a close watch on him, but the old man seemed to have lost his conspiratorial aspirations. Indeed, with Seleucus dead, he appeared to have lost any aspirations at all. She was no longer sure if she should have him killed, or merely wait for nature to take its unrelenting course. After all, if his treachery became known, she stood to look as much a fool as anyone.

Her eunuch, too, remained more often silent than not during these negotiations, but for entirely different reasons. Pieton imagined that his patience would wear her down, that after the first, or fifth, or fiftieth unsuccessful suit she’d yield to his revolting plan and wed that mewling child who masqueraded as her brother. Pieton still saw her as that soft and pliant girl he’d taught. She would prove him wrong.

“Archelaus, high priest of Bellona at Comana, son of Mithradates the Good Father of Pontus.” The herald struck his staff three times against the stone.

In interest, Berenice glanced up, her eyes flicking over the wine god on his dancing leopard to where the trio of ivory-hatched arches opened into the atrium. The pedigree, if nothing else, intrigued her. After all, it had been
this
Mithradates, not the one from Parthia that she’d already dismissed, who’d proved the last great threat to Rome. And she saw that the owner of the name was pleasing enough. He wore an openmouthed lion headdress just like his famed progenitor, but beneath its jagged fangs Berenice noted a bright and playful set of eyes. His broad chest sheathed with a breastplate of gleaming silver, he looked everything a man should. Not that she cared about such things. As he bent his knee on the leopard’s mouth, a dark lock freed itself from the lion’s jaws and fell across his eyes. A better start than most.

“Rise, my friend.” A playful note had struck her voice. She tempered it. She was a grown woman of twenty-one, not some love-struck girl of fourteen. “I’ll hear your suit.”

Carelessly he tossed a curl from his face; his eyes, black and bright, bore into hers. An impish smile teased his lips to reveal a set of white teeth—
And how well I play this game.
The moment she noticed his grin it vanished, and he was all earnest courtesy.

“You are gracious, my queen, as well as beautiful. And I’ve heard tell often of your cunning, both on the battlefield and off.”

He paused, and Berenice couldn’t tell whether he mocked her. She liked to be ready with a witticism to deflect false compliments, but her wit failed her now.

“I daresay many others have come before you with a similar plea,” he continued. “I won’t insult your intellect by dancing about the matter. You already know the nature of my suit: I come to wed you.”

“You’re far from the first.” Again, that odd flirtation in her voice. Much as she wanted to, she couldn’t fully drown it out.

“I don’t wonder at that. Few women could equal you in loveliness, and from what I hear, not one equals you in will.”

Berenice raised her brow. “Is that so?” She could play this teasing game too. “What dreadful tales do they tell of me in Cappadocia?”

“No dreadful tales. Only glorious ones. All reflect the same claim: that you rule with twice your father’s strength and thrice his wisdom.”

If he knew her father, she thought wryly, he’d not think that such a compliment. She knew better than to be won over by pretty words. She wasn’t some besotted girl.

“Do you see my court, Archelaus?” Berenice gestured to the bowed buttresses of the ceiling with their gold- and ruby-leaf lotus flowers, to the glistening mosaic on the floor wrought from glass and lapis lazuli, to the silver chairs that held her advisers on enamel-studded claws.

He nodded, though his eyes did not shift to look. Instead, they dug into her very soul.

“I shall tell you a secret, then,” she whispered in her most conspiratorial tone. “The worst-kept secret of Alexandria. The city is chock-full of flatterers. From the moment I rise in the morning to the moment I sleep, praises ring in my ears. I don’t need to wed another honeyed tongue.”

She could see that his soldiers, great oafs of men in crimson-edged robes lurking beneath the largest doorway, eyed her warily. One bent to whisper something to his companion, but then thought better of it. Their master, though, laughed loud and heartily.

“You catch me out on flattery, my queen. I can’t help but admire that. And you’re not wrong.” He paused to study her a moment, as if testing how she might react. “That comes as a relief, for there are other, more disagreeable rumors that surround your name.”

“And what might those be? I admit that they sound more intriguing.”

Pieton shifted in the chair at her left. He coughed into his arm. She ignored him.

“That you think no man is worthy of your marriage bed.”

She blinked in amazement. She’d not expected that. She imagined tales of murder to swirl, but not of vanity. That, too, was a form of softness, one that she particularly despised, and one that she’d never dreamt she would stand accused of. Beauty had never been her gift, nor her aspiration. It would have been a foolish exercise in defying fate. Her mother had ensured that she would have no illusions on that front.

“It seems you’ve come on a fool’s errand, then.” Berenice laughed brightly. “All the way from Comana to Alexandria too. A long and dangerous way to come to try to wed a woman who refuses to be won.”

Archelaus smiled. “I relish a challenge. I’m fool enough to think I might prove my worth.”

He snapped his fingers. Two servants straining beneath a silver chest appeared in the grand ivory-inlaid arch. He watched their progress fixedly as they lumbered through the room, clinging so close to the corners that their backs brushed against the battle tapestry that Berenice had had hung to hide a few of her father’s preferred satyrs. Alexander and his rearing horse swayed at the intrusion, but the great general, sword hoisted above his head, was otherwise unperturbed. The men gave the arrow-pierced Persians and their thrashing steeds a wider berth and shuffled on without further incident.

Once before her, the smaller of the two servants, a delicate, amber-eyed youth, coughed and lost his grip. His partner stumbled forward to keep the box from falling, but the chest and its contents still hit the stone with a heavy thud. The son of Mithradates winced at the sound.

“A small token, my queen.”

More silks, Berenice expected, or else gold and precious gems. She’d no use for such trinkets. She needed men, arms, and horses. The dainty servant opened the chest to retrieve a small gold box from its innards. With a smile, he delivered the gift to her. It weighed heavy in her hands. It wasn’t gold plate—every inch was hewn from solid metal. She ran her fingers along its carvings: a young Jason sailing with his Argonauts. With care, Berenice eased away the top. Within lay the expected: a necklace, a hundred pearls dripping from a web of golden threads. A lovely piece. His slaves had fine taste. Her fingers twitched to caress it.

The eunuch spat his poison in her ear. “My queen, you shouldn’t be the first to touch.”

Too cool, Pieton, too cautious. She wasn’t a eunuch but a queen. She wouldn’t quake like some divested, unsexed thing.

“My eunuch thinks you mean to kill me with this gift,” she told her suitor. “So come, Archelaus, and prove him wrong. Fasten your necklace about my throat.”

His men murmured at her words. The tallest of the Galatian guardsmen reached for the ax he belted at his side, only to remember, too late, that he’d abandoned his weapons outside the atrium. Her own advisers looked no happier. Pieton fumed at her side, muttering curses under his breath. Berenice ignored all that; it was noise and nothing more. She watched her suitor’s act instead. Seleucus would have reeled at such a request. “Do you mistake me for a slave?” he would have spat.