The Princess of Egypt Must Die by Stephanie Dray Read Free Book Online Page B

gone.
    “ How could they kill Antyllus?” my twin cried. “He’s one of them . He’s Roman!”
    My mother pulled us tighter into her embrace, whispering, “For all his talk of Republic, Octavian is just a despot. He respects no law nor bond of kinship. You’d do well to remember that.”
    “What about Caesarion?” I demanded to know of my oldest brother. “He’s King of Egypt. They can’t kill him too.”
    My heart pounded as we waited for my mother’s answer. She didn’t meet my eyes when she spoke. “Caesarion is gone.”
    Gone? What could she mean?
    Sometimes it seemed that Helios inherited more Roman stoicism than even my father had possessed, for his jaw set in grim disapproval. “Do you mean he ran away?”
    “Sometimes it’s better to fight another day,” my mother replied.
    I felt my twin’s burning anger. Searching for a target, he rounded on Euphronius. “Why didn’t the people fight for us? Are they cowards? Do they hate us?”
    The old wizard knew better than to speak without leave in the queen’s presence, so he busied himself lighting the alabaster divination lamps while my mother turned Helios’s chin and forced him to look at her. “Helios, I ordered the people not to fight. Once your father died, we lost all advantage. Resistance would have only made them burn the city. I know too well how the Romans love to burn things.”
    They had burned her harbor, storage houses filled with books meant for the Great Library, and even her husband, Julius Caesar. She seemed to be remembering it all now, as she buried her nose in my hair. “Helios and Selene. My sun and my moon. Can it already be time to say good-bye? It seems as if Isis gave you to me just yesterday and not a decade ago.”
    A pillar encrusted with lapis lazuli cast my twin brother’s face in blue shadow as he asked, “Why are we saying good-bye?”
    My mother’s eyes were calm, but her voice quavered. “You children must go to Rome, but I’ll be going somewhere else. Without me, Octavian will have less reason to kill you. Without me, he’ll need you.”
    The dread that had coiled in my arms as I held the basket now slithered up my spine. I understood, for the first time, that my mother meant to die.
    Helios must have realized it too, because his face instantly reddened. “You said that in three days’ time we’re all going to Rome!”
    “I said that because the Romans were listening,” my mother murmured.
    She tried to take Helios’s hands into hers. He pulled them away as if burned; I felt the panic that flittered across his face as if it was my own. It was my own.
    “We haven’t much time now,” my mother said. “So listen well. When Octavian declared war upon us, he said that a woman mustn’t think herself equal to a man. This was the just cause for which the Romans claimed to fight their war, so it will be hard for you in Rome. They’ll try to make you forget who you are or try to make you ashamed. But you mustn’t forget and you mustn’t be ashamed.”
    “ You said we were all going to Rome,” Helios insisted, as if saying it again would make it true.
    My mother pretended not to hear him. “Euphronius has taught you about the nine bodies, yes? Your father has been properly buried, so his akh , his spiritual body, journeys through the afterlife. Now I’m going to join him.”
    I looked to where my father was entombed with his armaments. He’d been a bear of a man, a warrior with a thick neck and broad shoulders who had, nonetheless, bowed to me and called me his princess. Sometimes, after his battles, he would come home and grab me up, tucking me under one arm as he walked. Other times, he would even get down on his knees, pretending to stalk me like one of the great cats of the jungle. That was the father I’d lost and now my mother meant to stay here with him, in this tomb, forever.
    Her handmaidens were already laying out her royal raiment. Not the royal diadem of House Ptolemy but the ancient,