She broke his neck for the question and threw his body into a bundle of straw. She could not afford screams.

The bestiarii occupied special quarters, and the queen smiled as she passed them. The gladiators caged there were chained until needed. Some of them would be permitted to kill the beasts they fought, provided with weapons or with hobbled opponents, and others would be sent naked before Rome to be executed by beasts. Something in their looming mortality pleased the dark parts of her heart. The parts that were not her own.

She heard the bears, smelled their ripe odor. The crocodiles were familiar, caged in a muddy pool to keep them wet. The quarters for the wild cats smelled of goat meat.

In Egypt, to kill a lion or a cat of any kind without the proper ceremonies would be death to the murderer. Here, things were done differently. In Rome, the animals were not gods.

Or maybe it was simply that the Romans did not know that they were.

In the air before the queen, a pale feather floated downward, caught in an unknown current.

The feather of Maat, she thought convulsively, though the better part of her mind knew that it was nothing more divine than a goose feather. Cleopatra could hardly ask for assistance from Maat. The Goddess of the Weighing of the Heart, of Truth, and of Justice kept chaos —isfet— from reigning. If the heart that had once belonged to Cleopatra were weighed now, she knew it would fail the test. Sekhmet was Maat’s opposite, desiring a world of blood and violence. The scales would drop, and her heart, leaden, would be given to the Eater of Souls, who crouched beneath the scales, lion-haunched, crocodile-jawed, fangs shining. Still, Cleopatra whispered a word of blessing to Maat, for whatever little good it might do her.

There was too much death in her memory. Caesarion, leaping from the platform, his neck breaking in the hand of the emperor’s man. She remembered each moment of her son’s murder, just as she remembered Antony’s death.

She hungered for the heart of the emperor of Rome. She imagined him pleading for his life. She would not grant him, nor any of the others who had fought with him in Alexandria, mercy. They would each be consumed. She was the Eater of Souls here, she realized.

She was the decider of fates.

Cleopatra hurried into the area of the lions, sighting familiar cats from the voyage. She leaned against the lion’s cage for a moment, enjoying the darkness and the sounds of eating and grooming. Her presence calmed the cats. Aboard the ship, she’d slept as an animal beside them, feeling part of a family as she never had in her childhood. She’d never been able to reach out her fingers in her sleep and touch another person, not until Antony and her children.

Cleopatra stayed a moment, thinking about her lost life, and then shook the sad thoughts away. She slipped through the bars.