0316382981 by Emily Holleman Page B

and love and devotion onto rods of gold and silver and bronze. She traced a careful finger along one cold knob. A dark streak stained the metal; scholars flickered before her eyes, desperate in their flight. As one ancient ran, blood burgeoning on his tunic, he tripped and splayed his papers on the desk. Curiosity pressed her to unfurl the papyrus, to see what other evidence lay on the page, but she didn’t. That was why Ganymedes had left them there: to tempt her. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
    Her skin prickled. Someone was watching. She glanced about the gallery, half expecting to find a lingering fiend, blood-tried ax in hand, ready to kill her once and for all. Instead, a pair of familiar gray-green eyes stared back at her.
    “Alexander!” She sprang up and rushed to embrace the boy. “My beloved Alexander!” she declared. Forgotten were the days when her entourage of girls had teased and taunted him. They’d called him Athena for his strange eyes and stranger presence in their female set. But that hardly mattered now. He was here, and he was hers. “Dioscorides didn’t make you return home?”
    “My father told me if you were safe within these walls, I’d be as well.” Alexander shrugged his bony shoulders.
    Her eyes narrowed at the boy. She recognized the rehearsal in his words; her own practiced phrases took on the same emphases, no matter how hard she tried to speak them plainly.
    “And what of your mother, then?” she asked. “Didn’t she want you to join her in the countryside?” Arsinoe could hardly imagine Cynane remaining alone within the city walls.
    “She—my father’s wife —doesn’t much care what happens to me.” He met her eyes, daring her to fling back insults.
    Arsinoe chewed her lip. She’d forgotten that Alexander was born a bastard; she didn’t put much stock in such distinctions. Least of all now, when Berenice had named her a bastard too. It was the father’s blood that mattered, not the mother’s.
    “What have we here?” Ganymedes loosed a second set of scrolls onto the table. In the eunuch’s presence, her friend transformed. His shoulders slumped, his knees trembled, his gaze fixed on the stone. Her tutor had this effect on many of her companions. They were frightened of him. She was not.
    “Alexander’s remained within the palace,” Arsinoe replied with a touch of glee. “Not all my friends have left me. Sometimes, Ganymedes, even you are misinformed.”
    “You asked after Aspasia and Hypatia. I told you they were gone. This one’s name never passed your lips. I assumed you didn’t care whether he’d stayed or fled. Or died.”
    She laughed in answer. Ganymedes enjoyed teasing her playmates, trying to turn them away from her. Besides, her own anger had turned against the eunuch—he’d wanted to make her feel lonely and forgotten. She pulled Alexander to sit beside her on the bench and bent to whisper loudly in his ear, “He wishes that we take him seriously. That is why he affects such low tones: he wants us to think him a man.”
    “That’s enough, Arsinoe,” the eunuch admonished. “Alexander, you’ve made enough mischief for one lesson. Go make yourself a nuisance elsewhere.”
    “If Alexander goes, then so do I.”
    Her companion’s return had emboldened her. Her sister Berenice had power over her life and death, and might have her murdered as she slept, but what nastiness could Ganymedes—or any eunuch—inflict upon a Ptolemy? “If you wish to teach me, you must teach us both.”
    To her surprise, her tutor smirked at her insolence. “If you wish to study with him, so you may. But see that the boy remembers that I’m no easy teacher. If he wants to learn beside one of the great members of the House of Ptolemy, he’ll do it well, and to my satisfaction.”
    “I’ve learned beside her before,” Alexander spoke up. Arsinoe smiled at her friend’s retort. He sat taller now that she’d defended him, and he talked without a