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for what was said about them.
    The priest cleared his throat and cast his eyes around the columned court. He looked to the heavens, and then down at the gathered fools. Finally, he spoke: “Glory to the gods. Serapis smiles upon this rule! The entrails are lush and red, the color of the bold, of the brave, of the great. Berenice the Shining One shall return Egypt to her days of glory!”
    Relief flooded her veins; despite her mother’s warnings, she would indeed be crowned—with blessings. Amid the smoke and guts, a second attendant entered from the inner sanctum bearing the insignia of rule: the white diadem and the golden scepter. She could still picture her father wearing his as he disembarked from his royal barge. He was younger in her vision, she no more than a girl of six. And overjoyed, she’d leapt into his arms.
    “In the name of Serapis, I crown you, Queen Berenice the Shining One, Queen of the Two Lands.”
    The priest knotted the ivory ribbon tight about her brow. Her twin braids dug into her skull; she felt no pain. When she stood, she stood as queen.
    The other ceremony, the one in Memphis—she wouldn’t fret over that. The Upper Lands had lain quiet for a generation. Her grandfather had crushed their hopes of uprising once and for all, burning Thebes to ruin; the dangers were here in Alexandria. The city folk had torn more Ptolemies from their thrones than the natives ever had.
    As she crossed the outer court a second time, she met with murmurs that coalesced into halfhearted cheers. That didn’t worry her: the nobles would stand behind her. Their priest had blessed her claim, and besides, they’d no other choice. Her father had abandoned them. And when she descended back into the city, her subjects roared anew. Free of priests and nobles, entrails and omens, she delighted in this return march, in the drunken shouts of revelry, in the cool breeze lapping at her throat. She refused to be a cloistered queen, shut away in a gilded litter.
    In the palace, her mother would be pacing the upper corridors; from time to time, her eyes would glint over the bloated crowds. The unflappable Tryphaena, too weak to join her daughter’s procession. “We can’t have you hacking blood upon the queen’s robes,” her unyielding eunuch had chided. And her mother had groused, “Why not? It’ll hardly add to the stain.” Berenice knew her mother hadn’t always been this way. There’d been a time, she reminded herself, when Tryphaena had held herself proud. Before her father had turned her out and bitterness had coalesced into fury gnawing away at her soul.
    As Berenice passed through the royal gate, the world quieted. The palace, for one, looked unmoved by the day’s events. The twin sphinxes that guarded either side of the marble entrance stared ahead with blank human faces. Above, the cobalt frieze of Alexander’s defeat of the Persians gleamed in the sun. The great man himself, Medusa’s head writhing on his breastplate, appeared as eager as ever to strike his opponent from his horse. She could divine a single welcome difference: one of the four statue nooks stood empty. Where her father’s form had piped in marble remained only a barren block of granite. That was something, at least.
    A gruff voice interrupted her thoughts. “A moment of your time, my queen.”
    “Dio.” Berenice named the man before she turned. She was a great reader of voice and accent; the trick had often stunned her father’s advisers when she was a girl. Sometimes he’d bring her out, blindfolded, to guess the origins of his guests. At the time, she’d nearly burst with pride at the attention, but now it seemed nothing more than another of his foolish capers. Still, it proved a useful gift. Even if she’d overheard just a whiff of a sentence, nineteen times out of twenty she could name the speaker, along with his city of origin. “It is a pleasure,” she told Dio. “Walk with me a turn.”
    “Perhaps this isn’t the proper