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bring on her own death, not when she’d already survived that first night alone. She should throw the gifts out the window. But she couldn’t do that either. Instead, she retreated beneath her bed, the guard’s poison clutched tight against her chest.

Elder
    T he crowds screamed. They screamed for her. For her, the least loved of Ptolemy the Piper’s daughters. The shunted child of the shunted bride. For her, the humble phoenix rising from Egypt’s smoldering ash. “Berenice Epiphaneia”—they cried her coronation name. “Berenice the Shining One.”
    Even as she drank in their chants, she couldn’t shed her fears. Her coup had been too quick and too seamless. It had shown nothing of her strength. Her father had fled before real blood was drawn. The piping fool would have reached Rhodes by now. And where to then, Father? Even as her subjects shrieked for her, she knew that, in truth, they shrieked against him, against him and his brother, against their loss of Cyprus. That last, vanished vestige of her once great house.
    Besides, it shouldn’t be Alexandria that stretched before her but Memphis, the Balance of the Two Lands, with its sandstone halls and sphinx-lined avenues. That coronation would yoke her dynasty to the ones that had come before, to the ancient pharaohs who had ruled these lands as gods. In time, she promised herself. Her father had sat the throne for four years before he’d sailed up the Nile to the white-walled city to be blessed by Ptah and assume the double crown. And it was his priest, his beloved Psenptais, his so-called first prophet of the Lord of the Two Lands, who held sway there. It was too soon; she knew that. Better to let the dust settle. To secure her power here. The white steps snaked up the hillside, above the adoring crowd that flanked the city’s sweeping boulevards. As she climbed, her breath ran thin and her heart pounded in her throat. Alexandria had seen kings, of course, who didn’t deign to ascend on foot. Her great-grandfather had been among them. Ptolemy the Benefactor—or the Potbelly, as he’d been less kindly known—had commanded his litter bearers to hoist him up on their shoulders when he’d been restored to the throne. One had collapsed beneath his weight, sending king and litter in a tumbled heap on the marble. Another example that Berenice was eager not to emulate. The Potbelly had been the first to entrust Egypt’s welfare to Rome, preferring to sign away his bloodlines’ rights in a will rather than see the wrong son inherit. No, she’d follow in the footsteps of her first forebearers, the ones who’d expanded the realm’s holdings, not stripped away the kingdom bit by bit.
    Still, despite her plans, there was an emptiness to her victory. Now that she’d won, and easily, her hatred of her father grew worn, as though all the years of tending it had eroded the bile of his betrayal. When he’d cast her mother, cursing, into the streets, and turned his love to his younger, lesser children begotten on his concubine—then she’d thought she’d cling forever to her loathing. But what was left now, when she thought of him, was a mere man, not a monster—a foolish, selfish man who’d fallen in love with a woman who was not his sister. She almost pitied him.
    The top of the temple pediment soared into view: bearded Serapis enthroned with three-headed Cerberus at his feet. As she climbed upward, the frieze opened to reveal the two nymphs, golden cornucopia in hand, flanked by a pair of splotched bulls. She should have been laughing at this cobbled-together god—part Osiris, part Dionysus, both Hades and Apis—but her skepticism failed her. Once she’d passed into the first colonnade, myrrh foiled the summer breeze. She could only imagine how the stench must already clog the inner sanctum’s air. The priests rejoiced in this addling. She could see why: it stoked her own terrors. Some deformity in the animal itself would taint her, no matter that these