The famous dry Alexandreian sunshine crossed the foot-worn white marble of the royal dwelling’s inner porch in a golden stripe and touched the queen’s left slipper, highlighting an unpainted but finely manicured toe. “You know I indulged that sophē beyond reason,” she said. Her grandfather had decreed that Patrikia Luisa Vaskayza set up an akademeia on Rhodos. The Rhodian Akademeia, named the Hypateion after a woman mathematician none in Alexandreia had ever heard of, had for the last fifty years competed with Kallimakhos’s Mouseion for research funding, more often than not receiving substantial royal awards. Useful and even startling work had come out of the Rhodian Akademeia, but everyone in the palace—and in much of the popular press—knew that the sophē’s highest priority had been finding a way to return to her home. Most had thought her more than a little mad.

“You are stating a royal opinion, my Queen.”

“Be straight with me now, Kallimakhos.”

The bibliophylax’s syrupy expression acidified. “Yes, my Queen. You overindulged her at the expense of far more worthwhile scholars, with more formal backgrounds and useful proposals.”

She smiled. Hearing this from the bibliophylax made it seem less true. “No one in the Mouseion has done so much for mathematics and calculation. For cybernetics,” she added, pronouncing the word as the sophē would have. She dabbled her toe in the sunshine as if it were a stream of water. For a moment, the simple color of the sunlight—warm and full of God—and the dry, cool breeze from the sea took her away from reality. She closed her eyes. “Even a queen needs a hobby,” she murmured.

Kallimakhos kept a respectful silence, though he had much more to say. The Oikoumenē Mechanikoi League had made its weapons procurement proposals to the palace two weeks ago. The rebel government of Nea Karkhēdōn, across the Atlantian sea, had twenty times in the past year raided the Oikoumenē’s southern hemisphere supply routes. The rebels had, a decade before, repudiated all contracts made by Karkhēdōn and were forming an alliance with the island fortresses of Hiberneia-Pridden and Angleia. The bibliophylax hoped that all the necessary defense work could mean fine rich contracts for his Mouseion. Instead, he sat discussing the sophē Patrikia’s granddaughter. The sophē and her family had dogged his footsteps for all the thirty years he had been in office, and the footsteps of his predecessor more decades before that.

Kleopatra smiled at Kallimakhos, a sympathetic, motherly smile despite the scar, and shook her head. “You must take her into the Mouseion. She must be accorded the rank of her father—”

“No match for his mother, that man,” Kallimakhos said.

“And she must be allowed to continue her search.”

“Pardon my insolence, dear Queen, but why does she not stay at the Hypateion in Rhodos? Surely she could better carry on her grandmother’s tradition there.”