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husband, he might set his sights on your throne. You still have the army to persuade—”
    “The army is mine, for Antipater has sworn to throw his weight behind me. The men will do as their general commands.”
    Olympias thrummed her fingers against her arm. “Antipater was always your father’s dog. I’m glad to see he shall be yours to command now. And Amyntas?”
    “He fell on his sword this night,” Alexander said.
    “At your request?”
    “Yes.”
    The world went cold then, that my golden brother had widowed brave, beautiful Cynnane with a mere command. My fear and revulsion ripened, expanding in the night air until I thought I would choke on it.
    Olympias smiled, an expression more fearful than if she’d ranted or raged. “Good boy. You learn quickly.”
    But Alexander only glowered at his mother. “I’ll have your word right now that neither Cynnane nor her daughter shall share Eurydice’s fate.”
    “Of course,” Olympias answered, as if granting a trinket. “Cynnane was a lucky woman to marry such a wise man as Amyntas. We must assure that she and her daughter are provided for.”
    A strangled cry of outrage escaped from my throat and drew Alexander’s and Olympias’ attention. “Thessalonike,” Olympias said, in a voice I knew too well from all the times she’d caught me in the cellars, my cheeks stuffed with dried figs. “Return to the nursery. You shall not speak of what you’ve seen here.”
    I nodded and turned to run as fast as my feet would carry me, but Alexander caught me by the hand. “Don’t touch me,” I hissed. I withdrew my hand in disgust and then I ran—away from them and the heat of the fire, from Eurydice’s shade and that of her son, back to my goat and my tortoise and my gentle brother, whose sobs still echoed down the hallways.
    And I swore a solemn vow to myself that if Olympias was right and this was what it meant to be queen, I’d never allow the golden diadem to touch my head.
    Lest I become a monster like her.
    •   •   •
    A letter came a few days later, on the morning my brother took control of the army. A dust-laden messenger launched himself from his nut-brown horse with a flourish, but it seemed only I noticed him, what with all eyes fixed on my brother and the aging general at his side. I still felt nauseated every time I looked at Alexander or Olympias and had set my eyes on everything except them to avoid the remembrance of the fire in the courtyard, the smell of roasting flesh, and the treachery that had shattered my innocence.
    Antipater of Macedon, my father’s dog and a general whose many years and battles meant that his unfashionable beard was more frost than ash, had just finished a speech urging the army to love Alexander as they had our father. Alexander stood before them dressed in full battle armor: a leather cuirass on his chest, his fair hair hidden beneath a bronze helmet topped with eagle feathers and crowned by a gold sphinx, and his shoulders draped with a lion skin as his ancestor Heracles had once worn. It was Olympias who stepped forward to relieve the rider of his message as Alexander spoke to his men, something about spreading our father’s legacy and the might of Macedon across the craggy mountains and beyond the churning seas. I listened with half an ear while Olympias scanned the paper. A slight smile tugged at her lips as she took her place among the women and children once again.
    And then she beckoned to me.
    I hesitated before wading past Arrhidaeus and the remainder of my father’s wives (all of whom sat as far from Olympias as decorum allowed), ignoring their pinched lips and pale faces.
    “The homeland of your mother revolts again,” Olympias said. “Its armies move against my son.”
    I wiped my suddenly sweaty palms on my chiton . Surely Olympias wouldn’t hold me responsible for a rebellion in a land I’d never seen, even if I did share its name. My mother had looked upon me in my cradle from her