“You don’t really have to go this morning,” he tried.
“I know, sir.”
“You were on watch yourself last night, yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re not too tired?”
“No, sir.”
Caesarion knew his mother would approve of this kind of empty exchange—it wasn’t the place of mortals like Khenti, after all, to make meaningful conversation with their superiors.
Realizing he was frowning, Caesarion shifted his face to a smile and called up the Egyptian language he’d been learning in his spare time, the better to understand his subjects. “So why are you here, Khenti?” he asked, doing his best to mimic the general accent of the men as he’d heard it, listening unseen to their banter in the guard barracks.
Khenti blinked at the sudden shift of language, and his gaze actually flicked up and down over the pharaoh for a moment, as if sizing him up. “It seemed best,” he said in Greek.
“You’re worried about something,” Caesarion said, keeping up his Egyptian, hoping his inflection was the proper conversational tone in the somewhat unfamiliar language. “Why? Do you know something I do not?”
Khenti thought for a moment, then turned to square up his shoulders with the co-regent of Egypt. His eyes were downcast. “My lord Horus,” he said, at last speaking in his native tongue, “you know there is nothing hidden from you.”
Caesarion felt like rolling his eyes, but he didn’t out of deference to the older man’s beliefs. “My dear Khenti, you know I’m not Horus. I’m just a man. Just like you. As much is hidden from me as it is from any other man. Perhaps more, if those who serve me will not speak freely their thoughts, their suspicions.”
Khenti’s gaze at last met the young man’s, though Caesarion could not read the emotions that might be roiling behind his dark eyes. “I am sorry if I have offended my pharaoh,” he said. “What would you know?”
“Why are you here this morning?”
“Would you have me speak in Egyptian? Or in Greek, as a scholar?”
There was, Caesarion thought, the slightest hint of a smile in the corners of Khenti’s eyes—though he couldn’t be sure. “Egyptian for now. I can use the practice.”
“Very well, my pharaoh.” Khenti took a deep breath, a sight that struck Caesarion as notable, as if he hadn’t seen the thick-formed man breathe before this morning. “It’s rumored in the palace that the Greek teacher has not always been kind to my lord. It is said that he’s odji.”
“Odji?” The Egyptian word was one Caesarion did not know.
“Wrong,” Khenti said in Greek. “Wicked.”
“I see. And who says this?”
Khenti shrugged, returning smoothly to Egyptian. “It’s rumored among the guard. I don’t know where it started, Lord Pharaoh, though I’ve ensured that it has not passed beyond my men.”
“And so?”
“Begging your forgiveness, my pharaoh, I think it is true what is said of the Greek Didymus. I do not trust him.”
“He hasn’t harmed me when I’ve journeyed to see him before. What makes you think it will be different this time?”
Khenti’s face betrayed a hint of a frown, and Caesarion wondered if it was disappointment that his pharaoh did not see things as clearly as he did. “He has not called on our lord Hor—… on my pharaoh in two turns of the moon,” he said. “I’m told he’s been away, in Sais. And his message now is unexpected, and begging haste.”
“You think he’s been up to no good while he’s been in Sais.”
“I think it best to accompany you,” Khenti replied, looking back in the direction of the island’s small palace.
Caesarion’s gaze followed the guardchief’s, and he saw his half-sister and -brothers running down the stone steps toward them. Their tending nurse, Kemse, a black-skinned slave from Kush, the land south of Egypt along the distant reaches of the upper Nile, was running behind them, panting. They’d clearly given her the slip. “Caesarion!” Selene called.
“I think I’m not the only one,” Khenti said in formal Greek, and then he was rigid as a statue once more as the children approached.
It didn’t surprise Caesarion to see that Selene was in the lead. Though a twin to her brother Helios, the nine-year-old girl had increasingly taken charge among the younger siblings over the past year, exerting herself in the same kind of headstrong manner as her absent mother—never against her older half-brother, thankfully, but there was no doubt who was in charge among her and the younger siblings.
The three children skittered to a stop in front of Caesarion. Though not adorned with such gold and finery as they had worn in the Lochian palaces in previous years, they nevertheless exuded a sense of wealth and the privilege that came from it: finely woven and clean, unmarred linens, delicate bracelets, fresh-washed hair, and a softness of flesh that had never known labor. Caesarion had actually considered some remedy to the last of these separations between the royal family and their subjects. He himself was proud of the calluses on his hands and feet that he’d developed from the weapon training that he’d continued even in the absence of Pullo. Even so, he couldn’t bring himself to force labor upon them. They were too young. And they’d already suffered so much, being confined to this little island, bereft of the god-worshiping treatments they’d known before their mother had left. At least the health of young Helios seemed to have improved after the move. Perhaps the air over the harbor was cleaner.
“What brings you out here this fine morning?” Caesarion asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be studying?”
Kemse came huffing up behind them, bowing so quickly and low she couldn’t catch her wind. “Apologies … Lord Pharaoh … I … they…”
“We want to come with you,” Selene said. The jut of her chin up and out was more than was necessary to look up at her taller half-brother. “You’re going to the city, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Caesarion replied, waving away Kemse’s still-stuttering concerns. “I have some business there.”
“We’ll help,” Selene said. She looked over to Helios and knotted her brow.
“That’s right,” her twin brother said at the prompting. “We’ll help.”
Caesarion smiled. “I don’t think you’d enjoy it. I’m going to check on the defensive works.” They’d accompanied him on one of his trips to do just that, a month earlier. The experience had bored them nearly to tears. “You know how much fun that is.” He sighed.
“No, you’re not,” little Philadelphus blurted out. Kemse gasped sharply, and Selene turned to shoot her little brother a glance that bore daggers. The boy wilted for a moment before hardening his face in defiance at her. “Well, he’s not. You said.”
Caesarion chuckled, tousled Selene’s lustrous dark hair to cool her emotions. A quick look at Kemse told the slave woman not to think about scolding the little boy. “Ah, you’ve found me out, have you, little ones?”
“You’re going to the Library,” Helios said. “To see Didymus. We want to see him, too.”
“I am,” Caesarion admitted. He looked to Philadelphus as he gently corrected him: “Though I will be seeing to the defensive works beforehand.” Because the news from the north is not good, he didn’t say.
“We miss Didymus,” Selene said. “We haven’t seen him since … well, it just isn’t fair.”
Not for the first time Caesarion wondered how much the children—especially Selene, who’d been so close to the events of that fateful night—knew about the assassination attempt a year earlier. Did they know Didymus had once betrayed their mother? Did they know how close he’d come to betraying them all? Not that he himself even had time to think much on such questions. If Antony and his mother failed—and the latest information he had made that possibility seem more than likely—he had a kingdom to save. These children’s lives to save. Not to mention his own. “No, it isn’t fair,” he confessed. “And I’m sorry for it.”