At least the emperor was mortal, and he had sworn to the bargain. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to barter for independence. Usem could not let it go. He turned back to the Palatine, his cloak whipped about by the wind.

You must not trust him, the wind insisted. He lies.

“Then I will lie, too,” he finally said as he entered the house and made his way down the corridor to his room.

The wind left him then and made its way through the residence, slipping beneath doors and through windows, listening to conversations, exploring hearts.

Selene tiptoed into the hallway, her eyes alert, her nightdress barely rumpled. She’d been awake for some time, plagued by bad dreams. Her parents had appeared to her in a nightmare and then abandoned her to a mob of Alexandrians, all of them waiting to tear her apart.

She heard noise from down the hall, and paused. She was surely not supposed to be roaming the emperor’s house. In Alexandria, a nursemaid would have followed her. In Julia’s room, there were two women stationed to tend to the girl’s every need. Here, no longer the daughter of a queen, Selene had strange freedom. She pressed her back against the wall, breathing shallowly, but it was too late.

At the end of the passage, a door opened, and a beautiful woman stepped out, smiling.

“I thought everyone was sleeping,” she said. “Everyone but you and I, it seems.”

The girl hesitated, on the verge of running back to her bedchamber.

“There is nothing to fear. I am a guest here, too. You are daughter to Cleopatra, named after her, are you not?” the woman asked.

“No. My name is Selene, and I am a Roman now,” Selene said, stumbling slightly over the words. “My parents are dead. I am no longer anyone’s daughter.”

“You cannot change your parentage so easily,” the woman said, smiling. “Your blood is royal. There is no need to apologize for that. It is a precious thing, not a shameful one. You are a precious thing, though they may treat you like a prisoner.”

“They don’t treat me like a prisoner,” the girl protested. “No one watches me at all. I can do as I please here.”

Chrysate stepped into the hallway. It would not do to let the girl see the shade of her father, his angry spirit kept in her rooms.

A bouquet of wildflowers appeared in the priestess’s hand, and Selene gasped in delight.

The flowers transformed before her eyes into a bouquet of songbirds, their feathers jeweled in every color of the sunrise, every color of the ocean, every color of the deepening end of the rainbow. In spite of her uncertainty, Selene was flooded with desire. The colors in them reminded her of home.

Chrysate smiled hungrily at the girl. Nothing in the scry had indicated that she might find a child of royal blood in Rome, orphaned. The child was everything Chrysate had been once, long ago. She was everything Chrysate would be again. Selene would be the missing piece of Hecate’s summoning.