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“I will,” he said.

“Don’t think I’m going to bow and scrape to you,” I said. “You’re still just Cassander, and I could still beat you with a sword if it came to it.”

“A fact I can never forget due to your constant reminders.”

The heavy silence that followed was punctuated by the call of a hawk in the distance. I startled when Cassander’s hesitant hand clasped my own, yet I didn’t pull away. His was a strong hand, scattered with dark hairs that gleamed in the sunshine, which hinted at the courage and stability of the man.

“You once claimed that you didn’t need me, Thessalonike, but
I
need you,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. “So I’ll ask you again. Marry me and be my queen.”

“I swore as a child with the heat of Eurydice’s pyre on my face that I’d never let the queen’s diadem touch my head,” I said. “Lest I become like Olympias.”

Yet I’d plunged my blade into Parizad’s belly and helped to slay Roxana.

Perhaps I had already become Olympias.

“You are nothing like Olympias,” Cassander argued. “Alexander’s mother was single-minded about her son’s power, and her own. You’ve never sought to gain power or to control others.”

No, but as queen I’d possess both.

I scoffed. “You only wish to marry Alexander’s last surviving sister, to make me your queen in order to solidify your claim to his throne.”

“Of course I do,” he said simply. “I’m weary of fighting. I’m just a common bore who’s spent too much time memorizing rules and looking down my nose at you, but if you marry me, I swear I’ll be the most dutiful of husbands.”

I opened my mouth to lambaste the echo of his first proposal, but the glint of laughter in his eyes stopped me. Funny, but I’d never noticed how warm his eyes could be, when he wasn’t droning on about duty and Greek values.

Instead, I turned up my nose. “I want—I
deserve
—a husband who will worship the earth beneath my feet until the day he carries me to my tomb.”

Cassander smiled, a rare gesture that transformed him even as he looked shyly away. “Then I have a confession to make. I’ve been enamored of you since the night of the Dionysian revels, when you were debauched with wine and spouting nonsense from that pert little mouth of yours, and you hurled your fists at anything that moved.”

I snorted in disbelief even as something warm fluttered in my heart and I recalled his prior proposals, his tenderness at Athens’ Acropolis. “How could you have been so
enamored
when you’ve since lectured me about the impropriety of everything I’ve ever done?”

“The feeling wasn’t by choice, I can assure you,” he said, his lips still curled in a smile. “I couldn’t keep my thoughts from turning to such an improper little beast.” He looked to the horizon but leaned sideways to whisper, “It’s part of your allure.”

“Is this your way of professing your love?”

He grew stern then. “Yes, Thessalonike. Against my better judgment, I
do
love you.”

I quashed a grin even as my heart threatened to burst from my chest. This wasn’t quite how I’d envisioned receiving my first declaration of love, drenched in another woman’s blood, but then, my life had rarely followed convention. “Despite the fact that I’ll make the world’s most terrible wife?”

He shrugged. “There’s no denying that I’ll be a wretched husband. It seems fitting that we not punish any other undeserving souls by forcing them to marry us instead.”

I’d never sought out marriage, but had always accepted that one day I’d be a wife and mother. Cassander claimed that he’d be a dutiful husband, but it was more than that. I had a duty to my brother, not to ensure that his blood continued to rule Macedon and beyond, but that the best man rule in his stead.

The best man was Cassander.

Cassander
was
ambitious and driven, but he was also loyal, dedicated, and honest. And if he was to be believed, he loved me despite the fact that it went against everything that was right and sane in this world.

I rose on tiptoes and brushed my lips against his. “Yes,” I whispered, tasting the mint on his breath.

“Yes, what?” he asked, appearing for all the world like he was negotiating a peace treaty with some fearsome tribe of
barbaroi
, even as his dark eyes sparked deep.

“Yes, I’ll marry you,” I said. “On one condition.”

“And what might that be?”

“That you let me continue to be an improper beast. After all, I don’t intend to change now.”

Cassander tapped his chin and gave me a hard stare. The flutter of nerves in my stomach surprised me, for against all odds, I
wanted
a future filled with Cassander’s black stares and philosophical screeds. “I accept your condition,” he said. “In fact, I demand it.”

I wrapped my arms around him then, Drypetis’ advice echoing in my mind as he caught me up in an exuberant embrace.

And I was delighted to let him do it.

EPILOGUE

308 BCE

Alexandria, Egypt

Drypetis

A tomb hewn of cold stone now sufficed to house the lion of a man for whom the world had not been enough.

It had been fifteen years since Alexander had breathed his last, but I’d waited until nightfall to approach his tomb, its grounds littered with trampled rose petals and the walls stacked with towers of bread and coins, all offerings to the man who was now revered as a god. The spiced tendrils of an Egyptian breeze still tugged at the hem of my Persian robe as I stepped inside the sanctuary.

Alexander’s tomb was a gaudy monstrosity of thick-veined marble attended by stark and silent columns. A geometric mosaic underfoot made my head whirl if my eyes lingered on it too long, and led visitors to a raised porphyry platform bearing a sarcophagus of hammered gold. The stone walls were a testament to Alexander’s empire, the flickering torches illuminating Macedonian sun symbols and images of Zeus and Ammon, along with inscriptions written mostly in Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs, but also in Persian and Indian, recounting tales of elephant charges, of scaling the colossal wall at Sogdian Rock, and of the celebrations of the Susa weddings.

This tomb was a graveyard of dusty dreams and tarnished triumphs.

Yet it was also a monument to all that Alexander had accomplished, his joining of two massive nations to become the largest empire on earth and his melding of their cultures, languages, and gods. Alexander had always believed that the gods’ golden
ichor
flowed in his veins and he had proved it with his actions in this life, guaranteeing that his deeds would be sung for eternity while he celebrated in the afterlife.

My own name was absent from the list of revels, which I preferred, but I let my thumb linger on Hephaestion’s name, slowly tracing the same Greek letters that I’d carved into sand and wood and parchment, all left behind at the pyramids of Gizeh and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, and the Colossus of Rhodes. My husband would have commented about the folly of wasting such manpower on the pyramids and mocked Artemis for the cacophony of egg-shaped breasts on her statue, but still, I liked to think that perhaps he’d seen all those wonders and more through my eyes.

My time with him was the greatest treasure of my life, each day a glittering jewel atop the pile of memories I kept of Stateira and my brother, my mother, father, and grandmother.

And while Alexander had caused great tumult in my life—in so many people’s lives—without him, I never would have met Hephaestion. I knew not whether Alexander’s strivings had been worth the cost, but I had long ago made peace with the reality. Everything was as it was, and there was nothing I could do to change it.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” a woman’s too-loud voice sounded behind me. “I waited all day, and finally decided you’d washed your hands of us.”

I turned and grinned, for although many years had passed since I’d laid eyes on Alexander’s sister, Thessalonike looked the same, save for the bulge of her obviously pregnant belly. “I wouldn’t have missed all this—or you—for anything.”

“Is Hephaestion’s tomb as grand as this?” she asked, gesturing to the surrounding decadence even as she toyed with the gold collar around her neck, a tangle of acorn and lotus pendants intermingled with several Dionysian heads.

“Almost,” I answered, for I’d been at Hephaestion’s tomb mere months ago with a spotted dog at my heels, the descendant of the four-eyed mongrel Hephaestion had given me in Tyre. I’d left my husband an offering of a fine vintage of Lesbos wine and some newly penned Greek poetry he’d have abhorred. It had been more than fifteen years since I’d seen him in the flesh, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still tease him on occasion.

I hugged her, then stepped away to marvel at the swell of her belly. “Cassander certainly keeps you in swords and babies, doesn’t he?”

She smiled broadly and waved an absent hand at her queen’s retinue, causing the flock of rainbow-colored geese to fall back. “This will be our fourth. I’m hoping for a girl to give her brothers complete and utter hell.”

“And how fare young Philip, Alexander, and Antipater?”

“They fight like demons, just as their namesakes once did,” she said, but her eyes sparkled with pride. Motherhood sat well upon her, had tempered her. We had both found our peace in this world, mine by tramping over it and drinking in its sights as Hephaestion and I might have done, and she by settling down with her unlikely husband.

“Cassander must be a proud papa,” I said.

“He can barely look at them without bursting at the seams.” She laughed. I felt a pang as she linked her arm through mine as my sister had once done. Time had softened that pain too, to a dull throb.

“And I believe he’s proud of you as well,” I said. “I heard from little Greek birds that your husband just renamed a city in your honor.”

She waved off the accolade. “The city of Therma was built on a mosquito-infested swamp. I’m not sure how its residents feel about now being citizens of Thessaloniki, although surely it’s an improvement over living in a city named for malarial fever.”

I chuckled as she bumped my hip with her own, a movement that made her look like an off-balance hippopotamus, albeit a beaming one. “You should stop there someday,” she said. “On your way to visit us in Macedon.”

“I’d like that very much.”

She stopped and clasped my wrist with a hand covered in gold rings, some shaped like snakes or twined laurel leaves, and each studded with a king’s ransom in pearls and gemstones. “Really?”

“I’d stay in Pella with you for a while—if you’d have me, that is.”

Regardless of the sanctity of her brother’s mausoleum and its air of solemnity, Thessalonike’s screech of excitement sent the pigeons flapping from the rafters, even as she grabbed me in a hug so tight that my ribs creaked. “My home is your home,” she said, pressing a kiss to my cheek. “Forever and always.”

Together we approached Alexander’s sarcophagus, gleaming gold and hammered into the shape of a man. We knelt amid fresh piles of offerings—balls of frankincense and myrrh, Bucephalus coins and silver bangles—and I waited as Thessalonike whispered a prayer to her brother’s shade in Elysium. I had no doubt that Hephaestion was at his elbow there, sharing a glass of wine with the likes of Pindar and Socrates, and laughing as in old times.

It was Alexander who had brought us all together, the golden lion of a warrior who carved out an empire from Macedon’s shores all the way to India’s rocky hills, from the barren mountains of northern Persia to Egypt’s vast deserts. He had transformed the world and our small lives forever.

I both hated him and loved him for it, yet I refused to dwell on what my life—what any of our lives—might have been without him. After all, we cannot choose the lives the gods give us, only how we face them.

Thessalonike and I had been left behind to face this life and live after all the others had died. And we
had
lived, had laughed and cried, had bled and savored each moment. And one day we would greet all of those who’d gone before us to the afterlife and regale them with stories of all that we’d seen.