“Where is your mother?” he asked her, abandoning the canny line of questioning he’d prepared. Her glare discomfited him.

The girl spoke in an unknown language, a torrent of bewildering, crackling sounds. She then looked at him as though he ought to understand everything she said.

“Interpreter,” he called. It was ridiculous. Surely, someone had been aware of this problem before now and failed to alert him of it. Perhaps the girl was simple.

She took a step closer toward him, and involuntarily he drew back. She seemed to be taking his measure.

“There is no need for a translator. Our mother is dead,” Cleopatra Selene announced in Latin, her voice unexpectedly deep and rasping. “I am surprised you do not know where she is, as we were informed that you’d buried her.”

What fool had told them the details of their mother’s death? He’d ordered them sequestered. It would not do to have them grieving their parents and blaming him for their deaths.

“Where is my brother?” the boy asked, speaking unexpectedly. The girl put out her hand to silence him.

“Ptolemy is sleeping in our bedchamber,” she reminded him, and then turned back to the emperor. “Do you not speak Egyptian?”

“Of course not,” he said. “I am Roman.”

“As is our father, but he can speak the tongue of our people. How is it that you do not?”

“I’d like to visit Rome,” Alexander Helios interrupted, his eyes bright. “I’d like to train in the army.”

“I will take you to Rome,” Octavian told him. “In exchange for information.”

“We do not wish to go to Rome,” Cleopatra Selene interrupted. “We will await our father here at the palace. He is traveling, and we would not like to leave without his knowledge. He will grieve over our mother’s death, and we will comfort him.”

A stroke of luck. She did not know everything.

“If you tell me where your mother is,” he tried, “I’ll let your father live.”

The girl smiled a nasty, vindicated smile.

“So you are a liar as well,” she said, this time in Greek.

Octavian straightened his spine and put on his most regal air.

“Do not question me,” he said.

The girl laughed, a short, harsh bark, and continued in Greek.

“My brother doesn’t study when the tutor comes and so he cannot speak any language but Latin. He does not know that our father is dead. I heard the slaves talking, while everyone else slept. I do not wish to stay in Egypt. The people will kill us.”

Octavian was taken aback. The girl no longer looked like a ten-year-old, but like a full-grown woman, and it appeared that she was attempting to negotiate with him.

“Ask him where Caesarion is,” the boy whimpered, and his sister pinched him.

“He is dead,” Octavian said, resigned. “He was a traitor to Rome.”

The boy looked shocked. The girl did not, though Octavian caught her face wavering for a moment.

“A traitor? He isn’t a traitor. He’s the son of Julius Caesar! Our mother says he is as good a man as his father,” cried Alexander.