“What would you have me do?” Usem asked.

The only way to hurt the Old One is through the queen.

“And how might I wound the queen?”

The wind did not have an answer. The silver box that was Cleopatra’s jail waited inside the residence, but Usem’s dagger and poison had only pained her, not wounded her. He did not know what to do. He sat, sharpening his dagger, his snakes coiling about him.

3

They crossed Acheron in Charon’s ferry, Antony telling the reluctant boatman that the spirit he carried was a gift for Persephone and that her passage was paid. Cleopatra lay silently as wizened fingers passed over her, determining, after some examination, that she was lifeless. Her skin was cold enough to pass for that of a corpse and scarred with silver veins. The boatman threw a ragged blanket over her body.

Antony kept his hands on her, and where he touched her, she lived. She knew she’d left her body behind somehow, trapped in the witch’s hands. She knew that she was traveling in the land of ghosts, an Underworld not her own. Still, she was content.

She was with her love again, and nothing else mattered.

The boat rocked beneath her. A drop of river water splashed onto her wounded skin, and she felt the tears of tens of thousands of mourners sobbing over graves, strewing flowers and libations into the soil. There were no tears for Cleopatra in this river. The tears of Egypt flowed through the caverns of the Duat.

Eventually, after what seemed hundreds of years of travel, the boat scraped rock, and Antony carried her onto a bank dotted not with colored wildflowers but with poisonous plants, dark and ashen. The dead approached, slavering at the sight of one from the world of the living, but then backed away, bewildered by her bloodlessness.

“How did you get us away from the witch?” she asked, hearing the vessel recede back into the river.

Her beloved grinned, a strange, sweet expression here in Hades.

“She may be able to draw a soul up from Hades, but she does not understand Rome,” Antony said. “Everyone is willing to bargain if you have something worth bargaining for. I told the Senate about the emperor and his hiring of witches, and in return, they gave me their blood and stole the stone the witch was using to keep me tied to her in the upper world.”

“What do you mean when you say they gave you their blood?” Cleopatra asked sharply.

“A drop of blood reminds us of what we were and makes us feel human, at least for a time. Now I’ve tasted the blood of seven senators, and my bond to the witch is lessened.”

Cleopatra thought for a moment. Perhaps he would not mind what she had become.

A ghost approached them, its eyes wide and blank. It offered them a sprig of asphodel.

Antony pushed it away, and it spun on its heels, bowing back into the grasses, plucking flowers and pressing them into its mouth. The spirit moaned with hunger.