White ibises stalked through reedy shallows near the sandstone and granite retaining walls that had maintained Mareotis’s ancient boundaries for a thousand years. Rhita sat in the boat, trying desperately to remember something, her head hurting; perhaps she felt the pressure of her didaskalos’s attentions. They weren’t unwelcome, but there had been something else far more urgent…meeting with the queen? When would she do that?

“I’m still waiting for my appointment with Kleopatra,” she said, apropos of nothing.

Demetrios smiled. “Your father’s doing?”

“I think so,” she said, her head hurting more.

“He wants to beat out the bibliophylax.”

“I don’t think that’s the reason…. It must take a long time for anybody to see the queen.”

“Reasonably enough. She’s very busy.”

Rhita pressed her hands to her cheeks. They felt like…nothing made solid.

“I need to go back to shore,” she said quietly. “I feel ill.” Perhaps it was then that the long, continuous delusion began to unravel, and not because of her captors. Something within Rhita’s psyche was going wrong. All she had seen and felt erupted within her hidden thoughts, seeking release.

Days seemed to pass. She studied, tried to sleep quietly at night, but sleep was an odd thing, a void within a void.

She dreamed in these troubled sleeps of a young girl pounding on her grandmother’s door, wanting in. Who was this young girl, who wished to see Patrikia when she was very busy and could not attend to just anybody? The young girl wept and grew thinner, starving. In one night’s dreams she was nothing more than a husk, wrapped in a tight linen shroud and smelling of herbs, slumped against the door like a roll of stiff cloth, jaw slack. The next night, she was not there, but the knocking continued anyway, empty and desperate.

Patrikia never gave an audience to the girl.

Rhita, however, did finally get an appointment with the queen. She walked through the private quarters, noticing Oresias sitting in one corner, reading from a very thick, very long scroll, like an ancient scholar; she saw a funeral portrait of Jamal Atta on the wall.

And then a red-headed Kelt led her into the queen’s innermost chamber, the bedroom, deep in the palace, surrounded by arms and arms of quiet stone, cool, dark. The room smelled of incense and illness. Rhita examined the Kelt, who regarded her with outwardly solemn, inwardly terrified eyes. She said, “I should know your name, too.”

“Go in,” the Kelt told her. “Never mind my name. Go in to the queen.”