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“The city streets?” she repeated dumbly. “But I am—there are—”

“Guards, yes, I know. Do you take me for a fool?”

Her mouth opened and closed like one of the gold-flecked fish in the garden ponds. “No, Ganymedes,” she muttered softly.

“Then follow me, and hold your tongue.”

Arsinoe nodded. She could be quiet; she could cloak her fears. The eunuch turned and led her along the winding corridors that snaked toward the dormitories. Maybe she’d misheard his words, and he’d said “between scholars’ sheets,” or some other oddly turned phrase of his. At each bend, she glanced back to see whether her sister’s sentinels pursued them. Sometimes she saw none, but here and there one would emerge. An aging man, with the rough-spun tunic of a servant, appeared time and again. She knew better than to be tricked by his simple garb. He must be among Berenice’s spies. What else would bring him scurrying after her?

She caught up to Ganymedes and gasped at his shoulder, “There’s a—”

“I know, child, I know. Hush.”

But Arsinoe couldn’t hush—her heart thudded too loudly. Surely the guard could hear its pounding as clearly as she could. And with each step she had to fight the urge to peer back at him. She forced herself to count to five, to ten, fifteen, twenty before she twisted her head. And each time she looked, he loomed closer, quieter, more terrifying. At first she’d taken him for an old man, but she now saw that was a guise. His face might be bent over a walking stick, but that was another part of the spectacle. Beneath that hooded cloak, some tall, broad-shouldered soldier loomed.
The wolf.

After turning back on their steps a half dozen times, Arsinoe and Ganymedes arrived at the dormitories. And here the eunuch dropped the ruse. He attacked the tower steps madly, pausing only when they’d reached the very top. The corridor above looked drab to Arsinoe’s eyes. The muses on the walls had grown so dark with dust that she could hardly tell one from the other. When they reached the far end, Ganymedes pounded on a shabby wooden door.

But that’s Kleon the Argive’s cell,
Arsinoe wanted to object. She and Alexander had learned that lesson from harsh experience, ages ago, when they’d been playing king of the mountain. “Everyone knows the king has to be at the highest spot,” she’d told him, laughing, as they’d crept up to the top of the scholars’ residence. Most of the men had indulged the royal girl and her friend, but not Kleon. He had named them a nuisance and swatted Alexander with his switch until he bled. Yet much as Kleon frightened Arsinoe with his milky eyes and stony dedication to each task, the bent man who dogged their steps scared her all the more. If the eunuch thought they might escape this way, she wouldn’t question him.

The door swung open, and Ganymedes hustled her inside. The chamber itself looked as bare as a priest’s—but the good sort of priest, the sort that Myrrine sometimes told her of, not the ones who tended to Serapis and crowded their chambers with gems and gold worthy of a king. Arsinoe had expected something grander, more mysterious, but she knew better than to voice her disappointment. She knew better than to speak at all.

Kleon sat, blind eyes sealed shut, on a small blanket spread over a cold bit of stone. As far as Arsinoe could tell, he hadn’t gotten up to open the latch. The door, it seemed, had welcomed them on its own.

“My apologies,” Ganymedes murmured, and Kleon’s white eyes blinked open.
He won’t know it’s me,
Arsinoe told herself.
He can’t even see that I’m here.
“I didn’t mean to disturb you at this hour, but we find ourselves in need of the scholars’ passage.”

Time stretched, and the blind man said nothing. He didn’t move. Arsinoe wasn’t even sure he breathed. But then, ever so slightly, his chin angled downward, a mere fraction. She couldn’t say whether he’d actually nodded, but Ganymedes was already shuffling her forward, lifting a rotted tapestry and ducking her head through a hidden door, and then prodding her onto another, steeper set of steps into the black.

They climbed down for a long while—far longer, Arsinoe thought, than it had taken them to ascend, but it was hard to tell, for the upward scramble had been well lit. And still deeper they plunged into the bowels of the tower, until Arsinoe swore that they must be beneath the earth itself. When the ground flattened out, she stubbed her toe, hard, so accustomed had her steps grown to falling down, down, down.

“Quiet,” Ganymedes chided her, though she had hardly cried out at all. “It’s not much farther now.”

The floor was damp. The water soaked through her sandals, into the soles of her feet. She was weary, suddenly, and despite everything, she wished herself back in her chambers.

“Do you have your knife?” the eunuch asked.

By habit, Arsinoe kept the blade fastened at her waist, but she checked her belt just the same. The hard leather scabbard met her hand. She breathed a sigh of relief.

“Yes.”

“Good. You may well need it.”

“Ganymedes.” She clung to his hand, to the darkness, to the lost spaces between indoors and out. “What should I expect upon my father’s return?”

“Your father isn’t the most forgiving of men,” her tutor told her quietly. “But I imagine in your case, given your youth, he shall make an exception. I’ll ensure that he does.”

Arsinoe tried to parse
what,
precisely, she must be forgiven for. She only had told Berenice about Nereus, and he’d been Seleucus’s man, not her father’s. She hadn’t spilled any other secrets—there hadn’t been any others for her to spill. But before she had a chance to ask Ganymedes what he meant, they emerged. The daylight bit her eyes; in their haste, she’d forgotten the hour. The rest of the world had not. The agora buzzed with buyers and sellers, children and thieves. They’d hardly walked five paces before Arsinoe saw the truth of the eunuch’s words: the peasants had no qualms about which way the wind blew over the palace.

An ancient crone, gnarled fingers clenching a gnarled cane, scolded a clean-shaven youth preening at his curls: “Gabinius won’t stand for such girlish vanities. The Romans, they prefer real men.” The old woman shook her stick in anger, but her eyes lit up when they fell upon Arsinoe. The beldam searched her stall, knotted fingers grazing over yellow baubles and cheap jewels until she found what she was looking for. A turquoise beetle, true in its stone, opened in her palm.

“This gave fortune to the ancients,” she crooned. “I can see, my dear, that you’ll soon need it.”

Arsinoe’s ears piqued at the warning. She was about to ask Ganymedes about it when she was distracted by another sight. A throng of gritty street rats, eyes white and wide on filthy faces, stared at her. They moved as one, a single mass of flesh, until fights broke out and separate creatures emerged: a tangle-haired girl dragging her wailing brother by the hand, a sticky-eyed boy pushing another to the gutter, a mud-caked youth smirking as he snatched a hunk of bread from a babe.

“Ganymedes,” she began. “Who are those—”

“Hush, child. Listen.” Ganymedes pointed.

Her eyes followed his finger to where a fishmonger, a hunchbacked man of some unknown years—forty or eighty, she couldn’t tell—hawked his wares: “Buy before the Romans drive up the price. When the Piper returns, you’ll be begging me to sell you a sickly squid for three times the cost of this fine cod.”

“Why’ll the army up the price of your squirming worms?” a fruit-laden woman teased. “Gabinius most like wants to keep his soldiers alive, not poison ’em with these maggots you call fish.”

A second peasant, this one middle-aged but clothed in the bright hues of youth, laughed, and Arsinoe got the sense that such scenes played out often. The commoners spoke with a freedom unknown within the palace walls. There everyone talked of the great and glorious victory the queen would strike against the Roman legions. Arsinoe wondered whether Berenice ever snuck into the streets. She imagined not; it would be even harder to creep unnoticed as a queen.

The fruit-laden woman bent her head over the fishmonger’s goods, prodding at a few fish with her thick fingers. The seller took no offense at this rough handling of his wares, which Arsinoe found strange. Perhaps this, too, marked a common practice. She’d rarely seen food before it reached the table, and then only in the royal kitchens.

“My child.” The eunuch knelt at her feet, before the square’s small temple of Serapis, a miniature of the great one at the city’s southern end. His fingers dug circles about her wrists. “There’s somewhere I must go now.”

Arsinoe’s voice shrank. “I’m not coming with you?”

Ganymedes shook his head. “No, my dear. You must wait for me. You must wait for me here.”

“Here?” she echoed, glancing about the marketplace.

“Yes. I will come back for you.”

“Will you be long?”

His eyes were lined and sagging. The eunuch looked as he might in twenty years, when he was old, and tired, and spent. “No, my sweet, not so very long.”

“But where—”

His finger silenced her lips. Gently, he kissed her hand, and then, more quickly than she could have imagined, he vanished into the throngs.
Wait,
she wanted to cry out.
You can’t leave me here. Not you as well…
She swallowed her protests. They’d make no difference. If Ganymedes said that she must wait, he’d have a reason for it. And no amount of bargaining on her part would change that. He would come back for her. He always had.

Arsinoe’s stomach grumbled, though she couldn’t say if it was from hunger or nerves. Perhaps she would be sick. The crowd wiped against her; she could taste the peasants’ sweat, their stink upon her skin. Desperately, she needed to run, to rid herself of these vermin, or she’d become one herself. Barreling forward, she used her shoulders to cut out a path to the edge, to a great stone temple that turned out from the agora, gazing over the sea. She scampered up the stairs, taking them two by two. Up close, she recognized the designs on the sky-blue pillars: the swirls of fish and mermaids, ships and sailors, climbing the heights. She was at the Temple of Poseidon, though she’d only ever entered through its broad colonnade across from the beach.

Poseidon, Earth-Shaker, Lord of the Seaways, I beg you…
Her thoughts trailed off. Hard as she tried to summon one, Arsinoe didn’t know the proper prayer. Should she beg for her sister’s safe passage? She’d said those words often enough, but now she wasn’t sure. If Cleopatra arrived, then surely her father would come too. And then what would become of her? Of Ganymedes? Of Myrrine? Of Berenice? She’d been a girl of eight when her sister had seized the throne, but Arsinoe remembered the day’s bloodshed well, and
that
had been named a bloodless coup. She didn’t wish to see what a bloody one looked like, didn’t wish to add those visions to her haunted nights.

Stares tore at her skin. The children’s gazes weighed heaviest of all. A clutch of them sized her up from the far side of the square.
What can I snatch off her?
those eyes demanded.
Is she as feeble as she looks?
Much as Arsinoe liked the breezy plane of the temple portico, she’d left herself exposed. Only a solitary beggar lingered here, too old and ragged to have anything to steal. And so she snuck back down into the agora. She’d have to find Ganymedes there at any rate. And she shouldn’t keep him waiting.

She needn’t have worried. The eunuch wasn’t at the fishmonger’s stall, nor was he waiting by the scarab-peddling crone. Her legs were weary and she wanted to sit down, but she didn’t dare. The crowd nearly swallowed her when she stood; she’d be lost if she sank any lower. How would her tutor find her then?

Dusk had fallen violet, and Arsinoe shivered with night’s first chill. And still, no Ganymedes. As the dark crept in, the crowds began to clear, and she could see well enough across the marketplace. She stood on her toes and gazed in each direction, but she could make out no sign of her tutor. What, she wondered, could possibly be taking him so long? Slowly, she realized the truth: he wasn’t coming back. She’d known that he’d abandon her; she’d always known. Or at the very least, she should have known. What other certainties were there? Her father and her mother, her sister and her brothers, had all turned away from her when Berenice stole the throne. It had only been a matter of time before the eunuch did the same.

Shaking, Arsinoe wrapped her coral mantle more tightly around her shoulders. Her clothes shone garish in the crowd, the sapphire tunic beneath an even greater affront than the shawl. The fabric was far too finely woven as well; the clothes of her companions were all rough-spun. Her tutor hadn’t merely abandoned her: he’d left her marked an outsider, tainted by her royal garb.

Too many eyes, whichever way she turned. Arsinoe darted through the lingering throngs, slight as an arrow, and, eager to escape their gazes, raced down the first alleyway she saw. Her pumping blood, fresh with fury, warmed her body and stirred her mind. With no purpose but to run, she turned and twisted down smaller and smaller lanes. She was done waiting for people who weren’t coming back.

Winded, she skidded to a stop and dropped her head between her legs. It had been silly—childish, she saw—to race off like that. But still, not all was lost. She could retrace her steps to the palace. She’d visited the agora and the lesser temples and even the Temple of Serapis, which lay across the southern edge of town, enough times to be able to find her way back home. The salty scent of the sea reached her nostrils; the docks couldn’t be far. Arsinoe circled back through the narrow lanes. Helios’s dying rays kissed her left cheek. She knew that she was walking north and true. Eyes set on the stones in front of her, she raced onward through the avenues. She’d rid herself of alleys now. Her feet opened onto the beach, hitting on soft sand with relief.