The queen still lived, Auðr knew, and the goddess was stronger than she had been. As the flames rose around Cleopatra, Auðr had felt the Old One feeding on the heat, on the violence.

She was here now.

Auðr touched the night air, sensing gleaming strands of fate strengthened by the bloodshed. Darkness was rising in Rome. Violence and destruction. Other old gods stirred, strengthened by this one.

She could feel it happening, and she could not keep them down. She coughed, bent over, her lungs racked by exhaustion and powerlessness. Why did she still live if she had failed? Her eyes hazed over with smoke, and she choked, dropping to her knees and trying to draw a breath.

The legionaries, stumbling over her, picked up her limp body and carried her up the hill and back to the Palatine, her distaff, even in her unconsciousness, clenched tightly to her chest.

25

Augustus sprinted up the hill, wincing at his bruised ribs and denying the men who were supposed to carry him. He reached his study, slammed the door behind him, and vomited out the window. What had happened? He had only a few minutes before Chrysate and Marcus Agrippa would arrive, bringing with them the box that contained Cleopatra.

In those moments, he tried not to see what he had seen, the lioness springing at him, her talons stretching for his throat. The serpent, whose eyes had reflected his own small and fearful face. The queen, her naked form quivering in the dirt, looking up at him with grief and hatred in her stare. Her children torn from her embrace. And the way she had wailed Antony’s name.

The fire had not killed her. He saw her body again in his mind’s eye, turning white hot in the net, surrounded by flame. She’d looked into his eyes just before she flew.

He tried to convince himself that this ordeal was finished, but he did not believe it. The things that had happened tonight were only the beginning of the visions he’d seen in Alexandria.

He drank the last of his vial of theriac, swallowing convulsively.

He thought of Agrippa, flung by the snake, a weak man, a flawed defender of Rome. The terror Augustus had banished began to return as fury. Was he not the emperor? He’d nearly been killed, and everyone around him had watched it happen. He saw the box closing around Cleopatra, his witches succeeding where his warriors had failed.

By the time Agrippa opened the door to the emperor’s study, favoring his fractured arm and grimacing with untreated pain, Augustus was in a righteous rage. Chrysate followed the general into the room. Her wrists were bound, though she still clutched the silver box.

“Why is my defender being treated like a prisoner?” Augustus asked, his tone frigid.

“She cannot be trusted,” Agrippa said. “She refuses to surrender Cleopatra, if Cleopatra is even inside that box.”

“You saw her trapped in it,” Augustus seethed. “We all saw it. She is captured.”