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Arsinoe switched back to Greek. “Please—I beg you. Do you know what’s happened to my nurse, my dear Myrrine?”

The maid shoved the door open.

“Please—just stay. You needn’t answer.”

Wood slammed on stone, and Arsinoe was again alone. Still, she hoped the girl would return; otherwise, a more severe servant might come, one who wouldn’t even glance in her direction. She walked her chamber, on ginger tiptoe, first in a straight line back and forth, and then round and round in restless circles until her head spun and her feet ached. The sun finally slipped into the sea, and Arsinoe flopped onto her divan. When the door opened, she lay still. Perhaps her questions had driven the servant away last time; maybe if she stayed quiet, the maid would linger.

This time, the girl approached her, cutting straight across the room. Arsinoe opened her mouth to speak, but the maid put up a finger to her lips:
Quiet.
The girl slipped a roll of papyrus into Arsinoe’s hand before she scurried from the chamber.

Arsinoe unfurled the paper to find Ganymedes’s script. Nonsense characters jostled together on the page. No matter how she stared at them, the symbols refused to coalesce into words. It must be a cipher, she realized. She tried to remember which code Ganymedes used. He’d told it to her once, in passing. First, she replaced each letter with the third following, but the corresponding words made no sense. That scheme belonged to her and Cleopatra. She tried again, this time swapping out the second, and then the fourth.
Xi
became
sigma,
and
pi
turned into
upsilon,
and slowly she hit upon the meaning: “You haven’t been forgotten. Devise a visit with your sister. It’s always better to act.”

This message soothed her. Its words gave her a goal, though she couldn’t imagine how she’d meet with Berenice. When she had memorized every word, every line, every curve of the eunuch’s hand, she dangled the message over her oil lamp’s spout and watched the papyrus curl into flames.

The days settled into a routine. In the mornings, she’d awake and dress all on her own. The first time she tried, she’d failed—pathetically. She’d taken out her favorite tunic, a turquoise one whose silver stitching matched its cinch, and stared at it awhile. Myrrine would tell her to lift her arms above her head and slip on the garment all at once. When she tried to put her head through first, her arms wouldn’t cooperate—and more than once she’d ended up squirming from a tangled heap. But she didn’t give up so easily; after all, she’d have to wear fresh clothes if she was ever to meet with Berenice.

After a few more attempts, she mastered it: by slipping her arms in first, she could then get the linen over her head. Dressed, she’d sit by the window, mouthing the words on the new scrolls the maid delivered: Ganymedes’s steady diet of Sophocles and Euripides, Aeschylus and Homer. Thankfully, he sent only stories, her favorites among them. “In the spirit of action,” the note on each scroll read. She hadn’t puzzled out, precisely, how these works should teach her to act, but she gathered that she must prepare some sort of speech for her sister. And so she’d study them until late in the afternoon, when her silent servant came, bearing plates of bread and fruit and cheese.

She struggled through the first two Theban plays. The familiar tales of overweening fate, of cruel incest, and of dark love. She could never understand Oedipus’s horror at his discoveries: he was a great king, not some ordinary man. Why should it matter if he’d slain his father, if he’d taken his mother to bed? Her own family history was riddled with more twisted stories. Her great-grandfather had coupled first with his sister, and then with that same sister’s daughter by his brother. And her father’s sister had been wed first to her uncle and then to that uncle’s son. Oedipus’s paucity of brides was more surprising than his choice of them.

Ganymedes always scolded her for such thinking: “The House of Ptolemy might abide by incest, but the rest of the civilized world does not.” And she tried to take these matters seriously—she did. And once she’d buried blind and crippled Oedipus in his grave, she came upon the play that sparked her spirit:
Antigone
. In a desecrated city, one brother’s body lies unburied, the other’s celebrated and raised up to the gods. The words of caution echoed in her ears: “Now look at the two of us, left so alone.…Think what death we’ll die, the worst of all if we violate the laws and override the fixed decree of the throne, its power—we must be sensible.” She pleaded with Antigone just as Ismene did: “Why rush to extremes? It is madness, madness.” How often she’d urged Cleopatra to caution: not to spur her horse so hard, not to swim so deep, not to provoke Ganymedes’s rage. Sometimes Cleopatra would listen, but more often than not, she’d merely laugh and race her pony all the faster. And Ismene’s words would echo in her head: “You’re so rash—I am so afraid for you!”
^*

Engrossed in the daughters’ tales, Arsinoe didn’t long for company. Her own travails paled against those of Antigone, the girl who shattered King Creon’s uneasy peace. Arsinoe admired her righteousness, and feared it too. Sometimes she herself bristled with that firmness of conviction. And how weak and paltry lesser loves grew in comparison: Ismene’s love, and Haemon’s as well. They couldn’t measure against Antigone’s wild passion for justice, for the laws of the gods, no matter how Arsinoe wished they might sway the fated path. “Deserted so by loved ones, struck by fate…”
^*
Only in the evening, when her maid carried in her final meal, would she pry her eyes from the texts and repeat the practiced phrase, “I beg an audience with my beloved sister, the Shining Queen, Berenice.”

As Arsinoe read on, Antigone’s woes came to an end: she hanged dead as her weeping lover slammed his hands against the rock. And Ismene, sweet and kind and useless Ismene, was left to live on, knowing that she could neither change her sister’s path nor share it. To Arsinoe, that always seemed saddest of all.

Her own trials wore on too. In her darker moments, she wondered whether she’d ever leave her chamber again. She cursed the eunuch, and his plans, with every dirty word Cleopatra had passed along from her long weeks on ships. How could she set up an audience with Berenice when no one spoke to her or remembered that she still lived? She was neither great nor brave nor bold. She was the ordinary daughter. That was why she’d been left behind. Not only by her father, who’d always whisked Cleopatra away, but also by her mother, who’d saved her brothers even though they were only dull babies.

One evening, instead of delivering another text from Ganymedes, her mute maid bore a different gift: a note sealed with an unfamiliar mark, the bloodred image of a woman crowned by the vulture headdress. A stiff hand informed, “The queen will grant you an audience tomorrow.”

The words didn’t frighten her, though she imagined that they should. Instead, the knot in her stomach loosened and she was overcome with a strange sense of calm. Arsinoe knew what she must do. She had to write, and act quickly. Somehow she had to convince Berenice to spare her. To prove to her sister that she didn’t conspire with their father.

“My august and royal sister, the Shining Queen of the Upper and the Lower Lands…” Her quill scratched against the papyrus. “I beg not for my life.” Her handwriting had grown straight and even with practice. She smiled at her work. “For who can twist the wrist of fate?” Over and over she scrawled and scorched each phrase until her hand ached and her fingers crisped. “I merely ask for mercy.” She couldn’t say why she burned each practice papyrus. The childish part of her wished to hold on to them and show the neatness of her letters to Ganymedes. But torching them seemed somehow wiser than leaving them strewn about her chambers. Her eyes grew weary and watered at the flame. She rested her head on her hands, but only for a moment. And then dreams carried her far from Alexandria’s palaces and across the great sea to Rome and her incumbent terrors: Cleopatra wounded, Cleopatra weeping, Cleopatra dead.

The sun had risen high by the time Arsinoe awoke, and in haste she scrubbed her face raw in her silver basin’s cooled waters. She scoured her hands as well, but she couldn’t rid herself of the grime between her bruised and bitten fingernails. When the maid entered, she hid her hands behind her back. Myrrine would have scolded her for them, but this new girl didn’t seem to notice. In silence, she rooted through Arsinoe’s chest of clothes until she pulled out a pale blue chiton.

Arsinoe would have rather worn her turquoise tunic—she almost would have rather dressed herself. She felt more comfortable in tunics; they were looser, easier for running about. But she didn’t object. Instead, she matched the quiet mood and spread her arms wide to form a
tau
as the maid slipped the sheet over her head and buttoned it tightly along her underarms. It tickled, but she didn’t laugh. It was a serious matter, this first meeting with her queen.

The great courtyard looked brighter than Arsinoe remembered. Even when she shielded her face with her hand, the light bouncing off the marble paths seared her eyes. Maybe it was just the emptiness that struck her. Usually this public court bustled with courtiers and bureaucrats, royal friends and servants. Now only sentinels lined its colonnades, tall and unfamiliar men so stiff in service that they, too, might have been made of stone.

“Keep up,” one of her escorts snapped at her, and she nearly tripped over a trailing edge of her skirt as she hurried through the western colonnade. Here the soldiers grew thick in number, their eyes glaring at her even through their helms.

The first anteroom seemed to have overgrown itself in her absence. The granite arches sweeping upward toward the gods themselves and the twin sphinxes who guarded the atrium looked menacing. Even the one on her left, which she’d always imagined resembled her father, stared at her with an eerie, human gaze. She’d been called into the audience hall itself only on a few rare occasions. Once was when some Roman senator had come to town, and her father had wanted to show off his daughters. She’d been frightened then—Cleopatra had teased her that Romans ate little Macedonian girls for dinner—but she could not be frightened now.

She heard the herald announce her name: “Arsinoe, Princess of Egypt.”

She was still a princess. That meant something. And with a deep breath, she walked past the sphinxes and into the hall. The chamber was quiet and nearly empty; perhaps half a dozen guards. Slowly, Arsinoe raised her eyes to Berenice.

Her sister sat bolt straight on her throne—their father’s golden chair with its curved leopard-headed feet. It looked all wrong to see Berenice this way, the white diadem bound tight across her dark hair. At her right was Tryphaena, the stony-eyed monster who haunted Arsinoe’s dreams. She remembered all too well the screaming scenes when she was small, before her father had banished his sister-wife from the royal lodgings. Returned to power, the woman appeared even more terrifying. Arsinoe glanced away, turning her gaze to her sister’s eunuch, a skinny, almost graceful thing who from a distance could have passed for an uncut youth. In the far corner, a scribe, a squinting face familiar to her father’s court, trembled over his papyrus.

Irreverently, Arsinoe hoped she wouldn’t grow to look like Berenice, whose face betrayed all the lesser Ptolemy traits: the heavy brow, the hooked nose, the thin-lipped smile. “Medusa,” she and Cleopatra had called her until, one day, Alexander, the odd boy among their royal set, had pointed out that the Gorgon herself had once been a beauty so ravishing that she’d been envied by the gods—and transformed into a monster. The fear of being changed themselves frightened them enough to drop the nickname.

“Approach,” her sister told her.

Arsinoe obeyed, chasing disrespectful memories from her mind. What if Berenice could read them on her face? Cleopatra always knew precisely what she was thinking, and perhaps that was some skill of sisters, even ones she didn’t know very well.

“You’ve begged an audience long enough, and given quite a fright to the poor girl who serves you.” Berenice looked her in the eye. “What must you tell me?”

Arsinoe’s hand twitched at her side, tracing words she’d practiced in the empty air, but her tongue stayed plastered to her teeth. Her mouth was dry and chafed; she couldn’t dream of speech.

“I know you don’t want to waste our time.” Her sister’s tone was nearly kind; perhaps Berenice didn’t mean her harm.

“Perhaps the child doesn’t talk,” the eunuch offered with a shrug. “Shall I return her to her chambers?”

“Indeed,” Tryphaena crackled in a hoarse voice. “Her mother could scarcely string a sentence together. I can’t imagine why the pup would differ from the bitch.”

The pup would differ from the bitch.
The words ripped at Arsinoe’s ear. And still, no words formed in her mouth.

“That’s enough, Mother,” Berenice said, clearing her throat loudly. Disappointment—or so Arsinoe thought—clouded her sister’s eyes as she addressed her guards. “Return her to her chambers.”

The moment ripened to the point of spoiling; she had to answer. She forced the syllables from her lips.

“My august and gracious sister, the Shining Queen of the Upper and the Lower Lands, it is an honor to be admitted to your presence.” Her rehearsed words came easily once she’d begun. “I beg not for my life, for who can twist the wrist of fate? I merely beg to pledge my allegiance to you, and ask for your mercy.”