Free 0451472004 by Stephanie Thornton Page A

father’s secret heir. “I give you my word, Queen Stateira, that you and your daughters shall receive the same honors as my own mother and sisters.”
    “Says the man who murdered the husband of his sister,” I muttered to myself. This man was our enemy and instead he was being feted like a powerful satrap .
    Alexander ignored me to place his hands over my mother’s, then turned away with a sweep of his purple cape. “May the gods keep you,” he said to us, but I overheard him murmur in Hephaestion’s ear, “Sisygambis I like, but the Stateiras both quake like terrified rabbits. As for the younger daughter, I’ve seen fairer-faced horses.”
    Hephaestion glanced back at us and for a moment I thought he might smile at me. Instead, his gaze fell on Stateira. “The elder daughter is lovelier than a nymph,” he said under his breath. “And you never know—the younger one may one day prove useful. Perhaps for target practice.”
    Alexander’s laugh boomed as they stepped into the encroaching dusk, ushering in a gust of chilled autumn air that bespoke ripening pomegranates and hearth fires at night. I resisted the urge to shout obscenities at them, mostly because their foul soldiers’ mouths could probably outcurse me. Or their soldiers’ swords could stake my tongue as Alexander had threatened.
    I sagged with relief as the tent flap fell closed, shutting out the commotion of the camp and leaving us with some semblance of protection.
    Today my father had been branded a coward, but we would be safe as Alexander’s hostages.
    At least for now.

CHAPTER 4
    Balkh, Persia
    Roxana
    I gave a squeal of disgust at the gaily painted wagon of karakul as it lurched across the rutted road, its cargo of prized fetal lambskins tipping dangerously while mud from the recent rains splashed onto the hem of my favorite orange robe. “Foul-faced peasant,” I shouted at the driver, shaking my fist from the back of our rickety donkey cart. “Don’t you know who I am?”
    “A trussed-up little shrew,” the man said, the black grime dug so deep into his lined face that he might have passed for a striped tiger. “With a mouth like a braying ass!”
    “I hope you choke on a fish bone!”
    “Roxana!” My father turned and snapped his whip overhead from his place at the front of our cart. “Well-bred daughters are silent as a corpse. Learn to keep your mouth shut, you little fool!”
    Ha! I snorted silently. Well-bred I was not, certainly not with hunchbacked old Oxyartes of Balkh for a father. My mother had birthed my twin and me, then died and left us to fend for ourselves.
    “This is the Mother of Cities?” I muttered under my breath, wrinkling my nose. I’d hoped for more from the birthplace of Zoroaster and its satrap Bessus, cousin to King Darius and the man next in line for the throne. I’d lived within a day’s ride of Balkh for all of my thirteen years but hadn’t left the crumbling walls of my father’s rural estate on the dusty outskirts of the city since I was six, both because we lacked the coin to purchase anything the city might offer and because my father feared that some accident might befall his lone daughter. It wasn’t tender feelings that made him worry for my safety, but instead the fact that my dusky eyes and the long black hair that fell past my hips were the most valuable pieces of property he possessed.
    All my life my father had promised to make a return on his investment in me. Today was that day; hence my short temper and roiling stomach.
    Now my ears rang with the braying of donkeys and my nose twitched from Balkh’s pungent stew of dung, sweat, and animals. A storm cloud of gnats shifted in the air and the half-dead donkey that pulled our cart shat with exuberance. “I didn’t realize the Jewel of the East smelled like our stables,” I muttered.
    “What did you expect?” My twin brother lay sprawled on the cart’s floor and lifted a hand to shield his face from the autumn sun, peering