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I laughed through my tears then, which felt good, for I was heartily sick of crying.

Nike might smile for me on those soft evenings, but otherwise she had a mind for nothing but sword-clang and vengeance. I saw her the next morning sparring in a circle of guards, spitting at them to come at her two, three, four at a time, and she looked so like Alexander that for a moment I saw him as he had been at Issus and Tyre and Gaugamela. Cassander watched Thessalonike too, his blunt face stony as she surged and clashed and spat curses against the guards.

I set down the rag I’d been using to polish a set of training swords and brushed the sand from my hands as I stood beside Cassander. “Do you really think you and your father can win against Olympias?” I asked.

Cassander glanced at me from the corners of his dark eyes. His heavy features rendered him far from handsome, but I liked to think my own brother might have grown up to resemble him: strong, intelligent, and steadfast.

Such simple traits to make a good man, yet so rare.

Cassander nodded toward Nike as her sword crashed against another soldier’s, neatly disarming him before she whirled on the next unfortunate guard. “We’d win in a week if all our men fought like her.”

Yet Thessalonike alone couldn’t win the war. And Cassander knew it.

He rubbed his jaw, his face haggard. “Our best hope is to entice Olympias’ Macedonian troops and Thracian mercenaries to turn against her. If they come to our side, we might win the war by the time the year is out.”

But it was a terrible year, with the worst yet to come—news that turned Cassander’s face gray, followed by even darker tidings.

Oh, my poor Nike. I rested my cheek against my Damascus ax and wept.

CHAPTER 28

Amphipolis, Macedon

Roxana

Olympias’ womb had never carried me, but I knew we were meant to be together as mother and daughter from the moment I was ushered into her solar in Amphipolis, begging for refuge from those who sought to kill me.

It was a refuge that she happily granted even as she lifted little Alexander Aegus from my arms like the most precious treasure, my son so freshly fallen from my womb that the black nub of his cord had yet to come away from his belly.

If my crimes against Stateira and Parysatis had truly been wrong, the gods would have cursed me with a girl or let me die in childbirth. Instead, they’d given me a perfect son as a sign of their favor.

And so it was that I sat in the palace’s converted aviary on a winter’s day several months later, ignoring the lethargic snakes in the dovecotes as I struggled to spin coarse brown wool into usable yarn before ordering it dyed a vibrant purple and darned into tiny socks for my son. The nursemaid would bring Alexander Aegus to me after the midday meal, for I insisted on feeding my own son despite Olympias’ offer to secure a wet nurse. I’d have demanded at least three wet nurses to guarantee my son’s health had I sat upon the Eagle Throne alongside my husband, Alexander, but feeding his son with my own breasts was one way to prove myself demure and unassuming, dispelling the rumors of murder that had followed me from Babylon.

“Roxana, dearest, I don’t think I gave you a proper gift to celebrate little Alexander’s birth, now, did I?” Olympias asked me, stroking the scaly skull of the mottled orange and black viper that she’d finished milking. She enjoyed instructing me on how to best handle the serpents while she milked their venom, but the snakes and their beady eyes made my skin crawl. Still, I dared not show Olympias such weakness. Fortunately I was saved from the task as slaves entered with wine and trays of crusty brown bread, goat cheese flecked with rosemary and wild chives, and an assortment of olives for the midday meal. The food served in the past weeks had been common fare in response to the recent skirmishes between Antipater’s and Olympias’ forces, which had ruined countless fields and threatened the harvest. So it was with great glee that I spied a bowl piled high with rare late-season pomegranates, each fruit sliced open to reveal seeds like polished garnets.

I reached for one of the decadent fruits, but Olympias pushed the bowl from my reach. “Pomegranates might sour your milk, my pet.”

I resumed my needlework with a dainty sniff. “No, I don’t recall any gifts.”

She pursed her lips in what might have been a smile and tapped the fresh vial of poison on the table. “It’s a bit late, but I have a gift for you. Two, in fact.”

“Truly?” The last gift I’d received for anything had been a handful of wilted wildflowers that Parizad had gathered and presented with a kiss to my forehead and a whisper that he couldn’t wait to meet his niece or nephew. That was before Alexander had died and before I’d enticed Stateira and Parysatis to the well in Babylon.

I willed away the memory of my brother’s careless laugh and the earthy scent of herbs that had clung to his hair. I spoke to him every night as if he were still here with me, so that now the slaves thought I spoke to myself. They muttered chants against evil spirits each time they saw me.

Stupid wart-faced hop-frogs, the lot of them.

“I received news this morning that Antipater has died of illness,” Olympias said, gesturing to a parchment on the table. “I hope the Hydra in Tartarus relishes the taste of traitors.”

I tried to summon some sliver of excitement, but a dead graybeard scarcely made an enticing gift, despite the war he had waged against Olympias. “Good news indeed,” I said, hoping her next offering involved something that shimmered in firelight, perhaps a new bolt of black silk I could cut to hide the bulge of my belly that remained after Alexander Aegus’ birth. I might be mother of the
basileus
, but I felt like a milk cow with deflated udders each night when I undressed and prodded the slack skin across my hips.

“Now we have only Antipater’s ambitious sprat Cassander to contend with,” Olympias said, more to herself than me. I wondered what terrible fate she was planning for the bore I’d often seen hovering around Thessalonike. “And now your second gift.”

At her signal a contingent of guards marched into the aviary with a mockery of a man stumbling between them. The oaf was dressed in a poorly arranged
chiton
with a purple cape that set my teeth on edge.

“Piss and shit!” I cursed before I could stop myself, my spindle falling to the floor in a heap of tangled wool as I glowered at Alexander’s half-wit brother, Arrhidaeus. My son should not have to suffer the indignity of sharing his birthright with a beast better suited to mummery or goat herding. His mother might have spared the lot of us by ordering him abandoned on a dung heap as soon as he fell from her body. “What is
he
doing here?”

The imbecile cocked his head. “They took us,” he said simply, as if
I
were the simpleton.

“Immediately after his father’s demise, Cassander attempted to entice my Macedonian troops and Thracian mercenaries to turn against me,” Olympias answered, stroking the sardonyx pendant bearing both her and Alexander’s likenesses. “He didn’t anticipate their refusal or that they’d move against his allies. Sadly, Arrhidaeus and his wife were forced to flee. Fortunately, they didn’t get very far.”

“You captured the Cyclops?” I asked Olympias. Parizad had recited to me the story of Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus the Cyclops, filched as it was from Hephaestion’s ridiculous collection of outlandish Greek tales. Pluck out one of Arrhidaeus’ eyes and he was exactly as I’d imagined the giant monster.

“And his wife,” Olympias confirmed. “Fragile Adea is enjoying my hospitality elsewhere in the palace while she recovers from the fright of facing several regiments of armed Macedonians.”

In truth, Arrhidaeus’ capture was a pleasing gift, as it meant that Alexander Aegus would no longer share his throne with a half-wit. But the capture of him and his wife paled in comparison with the woman who next entered the aviary, several guards prodding her with spears while she hurled insults at them.

Thessalonike looked like a crass joke of the gods in her silver-studded greaves and polished breastplate. Her expression curdled still further when her gaze fell on me.

“I might have known you’d give refuge to a known murderer,” she said, gesturing to me. “Do you two sit around the hearth fire at night and swap stories over the best way to kill your rivals?”

“Stateira and Parysatis sought to murder me,” I lied through gritted teeth, rising from my chair before she could say more. “I dispatched them to protect Alexander’s son.”

It was the story I’d first told to Olympias, recited each night until I almost believed it myself. I’d never told her about the child in Stateira’s belly, nor did I ever plan to.

Some secrets beg to be told, others must be kept until the right moment, and still others swallowed until we forget they existed. The death of Stateira’s whelp was only one of the secrets I’d choked down.
It was her child or mine.

Thessalonike’s eyes devoured me. “I killed your brother and I’ll put a sword through you too.”

I might have killed her then, for some irrational part of me clung to the belief that Parizad still lived, that I hadn’t led him to his death. My knees threatened to crumble to dust beneath me, but I reached out a hand to the snake cages to keep myself upright, digging my fingernails into the wood even as the serpents darted away from my sudden motion.

“Enough!” Olympias’ voice rang out and she studied me for a moment, then patted the bench next to her. “Come and sit, Arrhidaeus. I ordered a tray of pomegranates for you.”

“No!” Thessalonike screamed, but Olympias’ guards held the captive back, their hands clamped tight across her mouth as they dragged her toward the door. I bristled as the Cyclops stepped closer, chewing on the tip of his thumb as he glanced first at the snakes in the dovecote and then at Olympias, as if wondering which serpent was safer.

“Pomegranates are my favorite,” the beast finally said. He sat at the table with a loud thump and shoveled the garnet-hued seeds into his mouth like a starving, overgrown, ugly ape.

A full helmet should always cover a face like his, the better to save terrifying children and small animals. Especially when he ate.

“Enjoy,” Olympias said to him. “They’re all for you.”

“You show Alexander’s brother great benevolence,” I said with a genuine smile for Thessalonike, who remained restrained by the guards while tears poured down her cheeks.

“His bastard
half
brother, sown from a common dancing girl who could barely dance,” Olympias said, breaking a crust of bread and eating a dainty bite even as her eyes devoured the Cyclops’ every movement. He made short work of the pomegranates, their scarlet blood staining his fingers, cheeks, and lips. “And I am indeed benevolent, considering the many Thracian mercenaries I lost during the slaughter of Cassander’s supporters.”

But I knew Olympias’ mind and almost clapped my hands with glee. This would indeed be the best gift I’d ever received.

It didn’t take long before the Cyclops frowned and stomped his feet. “Legs feel funny,” he said. “They hurt.”

Only then did the guards release Thessalonike. She ran to Arrhidaeus and fell to her knees at his side. “Your joints are swelling.” She whirled on Olympias and me. “What poison did you give him?”

Olympias continued eating, cutting a sliver of cheese even as her lips curled into a shade of a smile. In the meantime, Thessalonike implored the beast to bend his legs, but to no avail.

“It’s cold,” he slurred as if his tongue had gone numb. He wrapped his arms around himself and rubbed them, but his fingers seemed frozen into misshapen claws. “Want to lie down.”

“He needs a physician,” Thessalonike said to us, trying unsuccessfully to wedge herself into the pit of his arm to help him stand. Instead, Arrhidaeus slumped from his chair and fell to the tiles. “Fetch someone!” Thessalonike ordered.

“There shall be no physician,” Olympias said, finally setting down the cheese. She lifted the vial of fresh snake venom toward the sun to admire the cloudy liquid. “The milk of the valley viper will soon render Philip’s last surviving son immobile. It shall be a quick death and relatively painless. As I said, I am nothing if not benevolent.”