The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(70)
“I know.” I shook my head. “I do know. It’s just . . . I’ve already lost friends and—”
“I’ll be fine. Aegypt has regained her queen,” Sorcha said. “More importantly . . . Ptolemy has regained his mother.”
She nodded back at where the queen had her son in her lap, and he was laughing with such pure joy, his little arms wrapped around Cleopatra’s neck, that it eased the tightness in my chest a bit.
“The gods give and take life as it pleases them, little sister,” Sorcha continued. “If sometimes we take matters into our own hands, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. And even as I grieve their loss, I honor our ludus sisters. I don’t think there’s any one of us who wouldn’t have made the same sacrifices for each other as Vorya or Hestia did.” She waved at the little prince as he looked over at us. “Or for that.”
At his mother’s urging, Ptolemy waved back. Shyly.
I smiled and waved too, thinking that, if he was anything like his parents, he wouldn’t remain shy for very long. Sorcha let go of my hand then and disappeared into the palace with the waiting women. I watched her go and then turned to see Charon gazing after her, the shadow of a frown on his brow and Neferet at his elbow, murmuring words into his ear that I couldn’t hear. Words that only made the shadows on his brow grow darker.
* * *
—
I had barely stepped foot over the threshold of the room I’d been given when a smiling, cheerfully insistent matron with an elaborately braided wig and eyes rimmed heavily in kohl appeared to escort me to the bathing house, where I was to “refresh and rejuvenate from my long journey.” Apparently, I hadn’t been exaggerating when I’d told Kallista and Selene about the sumptuousness of the baths in Aegypt surpassing the ones at the Ludus Achillea. In a land hot enough to make sweating an almost constant pastime, where the sand tended to leave behind a fine, shimmering grit clinging to that sweat, well . . . they took bathing seriously.
The guest baths of the palace seemed almost like a temple to me. There was no frigidarium—the cold plunge pool the Romans were so fond of—and Elka almost cheered at that omission. There were several individual tubs, each with its own personal attendant. We were directed to sit waist-deep in the heady scented water sprinkled with flower petals while more fragrant water was poured over our heads. We were scrubbed to glowing with brushes, and our hair was washed with perfumed solutions and combed tangle-free. Musicians perched on a raised dais at the center of the tub room and played soothing melodies on lyres and sistra. The columns were painted like lotus flowers, and gossamer curtains floated like mist in the slightest breezes caused by fan bearers moving the air with gilded fans on long poles.
After the tubs, it was into the large pool to splash about, and then on to massage tables where honey and goat’s milk was kneaded into our skin. I started to seriously wonder if maybe I had passed through to the Otherworld . . . and Aegypt was the Blessed Isles.
When I finally left the baths, toweled dry, and wrapped myself in a length of fine linen, I padded back to my room. It was larger than my whole house back in Durovernum. Ten times the size of my cell at the Ludus Achillea. I could stretch out on the middle of the bed and my hands and feet wouldn’t even touch the four corners. The walls of most of the rooms were covered with elaborate painted murals, filled with stylized, elegant figures of gods and royals striding in stately processions, and surrounded by incomprehensible symbols that Cai told me were called “hieroglyphics”—the written language of the Aegyptians. I’d barely begun to learn Latin letters and was suddenly very glad that I’d grown up in a tribe that saw no use for such things. I couldn’t imagine the time it would have taken to learn such complex mysteries, but I was sure it would have conflicted unhappily with the hours I’d spent running through the forests and sparring with Mael and Sorcha.
“You know there’s a library here in Alexandria,” Cai had said, grinning, when I’d told him as much. “A great, huge building solely devoted to the collection of scrolls and tablets and all manner of writing. It’s so big, it’s almost a city itself.”
“I’m not sure I believe you,” I said, gazing at him narrowly.
“We’ll go there one day,” he said. “You’ll see.”
I sighed and rolled over onto my stomach on the ridiculous bed, staring at the god with the strange beard and the green-painted skin on the wall. A city within the city. Just the thought of it overwhelmed me. Alexandria, just outside my window and across the harbor, already loomed large in my mind, strange and forbidding and, I feared, ultimately unknowable.
“Are you brooding?” Ajani said, popping her head in through my door. “You’re brooding again, aren’t you?”
“What? No!”
“Yes, you are,” she said, floating a little ways into the room, wrapped in a bright orange gown, her limbs and neck and ears dripping with gold and amber jewelry that made her look like a living torch. “Well, stop it. Your dress and your army of dressers—I swear, there’s an army of them—will be around any minute to start winding you up in linens like one of their mummies. So prepare yourself for the ordeal. I’ll see you at supper. Good luck!”
And then she was gone.
I sat up, blinking, and not a moment later, the “army” arrived, with their siege engines of fabric and jewels and belts and sandals . . . and they began their delicate, strategic assault on my appearance. The gossamer gown they dressed me in was a shade of green so pale and pretty it was like moonlight shining through a new leaf. Threads of silver were woven through the material and made it sparkle in the light of the multitude of lamps. My hair was dressed up with a thin silver band, and silver and amethyst gleamed at my throat and wrists and around my waist.