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Arsinoe didn’t wait to hear the rest. She was too frightened by the boldness, by the rage Nereus brought on in her. She might say something, something that didn’t charm her sister. And so she raced from the royal atrium. She could run faster than her anger and her fear.

The summer winds tossed her hair as she outpaced the ugliness inside her. Arsinoe closed her earthly eyes and let the third one carry her across the waters to Rome, where her father and sister might gaze over the echoes of these waves. Beneath her feet the grass choked and gave way to rush and cracked earth and finally to the soothing burn of white sand. Her soles scorched until the mud grew soggy beneath her toes. Only when she’d splashed up to her ankles did she open her eyes and stare across the abyss, squinting first west to Poseidon wielding his trident atop the white lighthouse and then north over the sea that stretched, it seemed, to the very ends of the earth.

On such afternoons as this, the water burned the eyes, so intensely did it mirror the unflinching sun. Arsinoe squinted into the distance. If she squinted hard enough, she could almost make out Roman sails, a whole fleet heralding Cleopatra’s return. She mouthed a silent prayer to Poseidon:
Please, Lord of the Seaways, bring my sister safe across the waves.
She no longer included her mother or her father in her prayers. She hadn’t lied, she realized, when she told Berenice that she owed her father no loyalty. Nor had she made it up on the spot. Indeed, in her heart, she’d long known that to be true.
King Ptolemy’s daughter is already on board. With the king.

The days grew darker after that, though the sun shone yellow in the sky. Arsinoe no longer tried to escape her loathing, the heavy hatred that curdled in her chest. She nursed the fury there, whispering to it in the darkness, promising that she would exact revenge, first against Nereus. The old man had become her locus, her center. After all, he—she was convinced—bore responsibility for her fire-bearded guard’s death, and for that simpering idiot at her sister’s side who’d transformed her into some wretched, trembling creature.

Alexander didn’t understand.
Forget about Nereus,
he had told her.
What does that old man matter?
But she couldn’t forget; she didn’t want to. So rather than spend time with her friend, playing children’s games and sneaking sweets from the kitchens, she avoided company, reveling in her anger. She’d taken to wandering north along the shore and lingering in the forgotten courtyards of Ptolemy the Benefactor. Seleucus’s men had been installed in her great-grandfather’s lodges, among his wasting fountains and mossy stones. Perhaps if she waited long enough, she’d catch Nereus at some mischief there. And when she did, she felt certain, she’d win Berenice’s confidence. Perhaps even enough to convince her to allow Cleopatra to return…Arsinoe pushed that thought from her mind. It was childish.

Sometimes she grew bored, waiting on her own, watching Seleucus’s men march back and forth along the marble avenue that linked the main palace complex and this one. On occasion, she caught sight of Lykos, and her heart thrashed with new loathing. But she didn’t need to bother with him: he wasn’t worth her efforts. It was Nereus who’d corrupted Berenice, who’d poisoned her with this marriage. And he was the one who mattered. Still, she wished that Alexander would join her vigil, but she was too proud to ask him. He’d already told her she should be avoiding trouble, not looking for it.

Arsinoe was almost ready to give up—it was nearly time to return to the library for her afternoon lessons—when she caught sight of someone coming down the path from the palace. An old man, he leaned over a cane as Nereus often did on longer walks. Her heart pounding in her ears, Arsinoe squinted down the road. The figure’s face clarified. Those scrunched eyes, that sagging chin—those features belonged to Nereus. She froze a moment and then recovered herself, squatting behind a dittany bush.

Gingerly, Arsinoe peered out between the sticky branches as Nereus hobbled past her, groping with his cane before each step. She’d expected him to climb the portico, but instead, he continued onward, toward the abandoned gardens of her great-grandfather’s palace. Overgrown and deserted, the grounds were the perfect place for private talks and confidences. She knew that soon Ganymedes would be expecting her, that even now he prepared her lesson, but her curiosity had embedded itself too deeply. She felt as though she’d changed into the snake of her dreams, writhing after its prey. She had to follow, to see what treachery Nereus plotted.

And so, quietly, Arsinoe crept along the side of the path, keeping her head low beneath the bushes. Nereus muttered softly to himself as he passed through the first two gardens, skirting about their central pools and hugging the bushes that guarded their edges. If his murmuring included words, she couldn’t make them out. Perhaps he wasn’t meeting anyone at all; he might merely be stealing a few moments to himself.

The thought of Ganymedes waiting for her, and of Alexander too, nagged at her. She could turn back and get away with a mere scolding from the eunuch. But as she passed into the third field, she saw the reason for the old man’s expedition. There, beneath the great laurel tree, stood a dark-haired man, sneering and impatient. She couldn’t place his face, but she recognized him at once as a Seleucid. His red tunic was cut too high up his thigh. No self-respecting Alexandrian would wear it so short. Her heart pounded all the faster. She’d been right: there was some treachery here. There was no other reason for Nereus to meet with one of Seleucus’s men in secret. She squatted back on her heels behind the brush at the entrance to the gardens, watching, waiting.

As Nereus poked his way through the flush grass, leaning heavily on his cane, the Seleucid made no move to help him. Arsinoe almost felt sorry for the man, nearing his second infancy, so old that he walked now on three legs instead of two.

“So this is it, then?” the young man snorted. An eastern accent tainted his Greek, and his face twisted into a grimace of disgust.

Nereus answered him, but Arsinoe couldn’t make out the words. And then the Seleucid lowered his voice as well. Here they were, scheming—and she couldn’t hear a word. She needed, somehow, to get closer. The best hiding spot would be behind the far wall of the crumbling fountain, long since mossed over with disuse. Nimbly, she unlaced her sandals and knotted one around each wrist—she’d be quieter on bare feet.

Her eyes scanned the distance that separated her from the two men. The cover was sparse: a few straggly bushes and a hunk of granite that, she’d heard ages ago from Cleopatra, had once served as a pedestal for a solid gold statue of the Benefactor himself, a statue that had long since been melted down for coin. Crouching to stay out of sight, Arsinoe scampered to the first bush, and then the second. As she drew nearer to Nereus and his Seleucid companion, she began to catch a few dull words: “my master,” “my mistress,” “the palace,” “the sea.” She’d need to get closer to hear full sentences. The block lay about ten feet off—mere strides from the two men. She took a deep breath and broke into a run. A bramble caught on her arm and she yanked back, hard, as she dashed toward the stone. Only when she’d ducked behind it, resting her head against its cool edge, did she realize what she’d left in her wake. One of her sandals had caught on a branch, and now it dangled by a lace, for all the world to see.

“I tell you.” Nereus’s voice snapped sharply against her ears. She prayed that neither man would glance her way. “The first attempt didn’t go well. And now the queen appears set against it.” Arsinoe could hear his every word. Her gut pinched with hatred.

“And whose fault is that?” the young man growled. “My master tells me—”

That would be Seleucus, Arsinoe told herself.

“I’ve already put myself too much at risk. I wash my hands of this business.”

Her heart pounded—this was it. Her moment. The trouble she’d been looking for.

“We’ve come too far for that, old man.”

She didn’t breathe. She couldn’t twitch even a muscle. They were close, perhaps only a few yards away. And she didn’t dare move, not even to retrieve her sandal.

“What? Do you threaten me now? Here? Here in my own city?”

“It is not your city. It’s the queen’s.”

“What would you have me do? Berenice has taken a liking to the girl. I can’t say why—nor can I understand why your master is so concerned with her. She is a
daughter,
the
youngest
daughter.”

Arsinoe felt her pulse beating in her throat. They were talking about her. Nereus had been plotting against her, as she’d suspected. But why did Seleucus hate her so much that he would send one of his companions to get rid of her?

“And her father was the
youngest
son, a
bastard.
We all know how easily elder children might be…lost. What my master doesn’t understand is why the queen would fatten up a rival. He only wishes to ensure that his own children, when they arrive, inherit in due course.”

“I don’t care anymore for Seleucus’s wishes,” Nereus growled. “I tell you, the queen is willful. Drop the matter for the moment, before it rains destruction on us all. And besides, in all likelihood the Piper—”

“The Bastard, you mean?”

“You know what Ptolemy I mean. And when he returns with a Roman army, we’ll have graver problems to attend to.”

The two men had grown angry. They no longer bothered to modulate their voices. And Arsinoe could hear one of them—the young one, she imagined—pacing back and forth in front of the tree. She’d been stupid, she realized. Foolhardy, not brave. One false glance could reveal her now, her shoe dangling in plain sight. She clung to the hope—the vain hope of a child—that her own blindness would turn others blind to her as well.

“To think that Seleucus was so certain he’d find an ally in you. You were, as I recall, a dear friend of his mother’s in her youth…”

“That was in another life.”

“And these intervening years have convinced you that baseborn blood outmatches that of trueborn heirs? I can see why: Alexandria has certainly flourished under the reign of the Bastard and his brethren. Cyprus stolen away, and soon the whole kingdom will bow to Rome.”

Arsinoe swallowed her fears. She’d come, and there was no changing that. She focused on parsing their words. Who was Seleucus’s mother? And how had Nereus known her in his youth? It was strange to think of the old man as having been young at all. But he must have been once.

“I didn’t say—I don’t need to justify my loyalties to you. I was fighting for this dynasty before you were a twinkle in your father’s eye.”

“Ah, I see the way of it, then. Now you’re old and weak and spent, and so you give up the battle, you abandon Selene’s dying wish, when it’s so close to fruition.”

Selene. Her grandfather’s sister. He had two, and he was wed to both at different times. Selene, the younger, had later married the other brother too—and later still…Arsinoe quieted her breath and sifted through her remembered lessons. Some king, but she couldn’t say which land he had ruled.

“This matter no longer concerns her.”

“I know. It’s a touchy subject for you. Rumors abound—”

“I don’t care about rumors, neither then nor now. I won’t listen to a pup natter on about a subject he knows nothing of.”

“So be it. I’ll keep my thoughts on that matter to myself. But I don’t need to remind you that your goal is very near at hand: her son sits on the throne.”

Idiot.
Arsinoe cursed herself. Selene had married Antiochus—the name had come racing back to her. A whole series of Antiochi: Antiochus the Hook-Nosed, and his brother Antiochus the Cyzican, and then the first’s son, Antiochus the Pious, though Arsinoe couldn’t remember what, if anything, had been particularly pious about him. Of course Seleucus would want her dead: he thought he had his own claim to the throne. He might even plot against Berenice as well. Any true Ptolemy stood as an obstacle.

“Sits
by
the throne. And what these intervening years have taught me is that he’s nothing like his mother. Nothing. Tell me: what interest did he take in Alexandria before his listless brother lost his empire?”

“Ah, yes, of course. Your famed Alexandrian pride is wounded. You’d have had Seleucus take on the Bastard in a fight some twenty years ago? A mere child matched against a king.”

“I did not—”

“Quiet.” The stranger’s voice turned cruel. The pacing stopped; Arsinoe couldn’t see him, but she could nearly feel his stare. “My, my. What have we here?”

Her stomach sank into a pit. He hadn’t seen her—only her sandal. If she stayed still, very still…She prayed that the ground would swallow her, belch her into the land of the dead. It was no use. She felt his eyes on her, burning.

“It seems, Nereus, that we aren’t quite so alone after all. I thought you said this grove would be safe from prying ears.”

“It is. It should be.”

“Come out, little one.” Arsinoe heard him thud toward her. He’d guessed where she was. His feet sounded heavy even on the grass. His voice turned sickening and sweet. “You’ve been caught. And you know the punishment for eavesdropping.”

She thought to run, to leap, to fly. But to what end? Nereus she might outrun, but Seleucus’s man—he was young, agile. He’d catch her in a moment.