0316382981 by Emily Holleman Read Free Book Online Page B

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