She wavered, and at last, she slumped forward, her body slipping over the lip of the cauldron as she fell.

The boiling potion closed over her head.

The surface of the cauldron bubbled for a time, dark and tarry, and beneath the liquid, nothing moved.

7

Cleopatra and Antony walked hand in hand toward the entrance to the city of the dead. Birch trees quavered around them, pale things veined with black, like the ivory bones of giants. They were followed by thousands of shades, all of them murmuring quietly, all of them hungering.

Cleopatra shuddered as they drew closer to the doorway, possessed by a fear she had not imagined herself capable of feeling. She heard something, a faint echo of Sekhmet’s roar, calling her back from the Underworld. A glimmer of wrath and hunger, a god’s voice calling down to a place that did not worship her. She thought of her children left behind in the world above, and then, in spite of herself, she thought of Sekhmet, alone and starving.

Cleopatra looked at Antony and found herself unable to speak. Every part of her insisted that, without her soul, she did not belong in any Underworld. She could scarcely keep from turning and running to the river, so great was the certainty that she should go back.

At the same time, she knew that her own world did not want her. In that world, she was trapped in a silver box, and all around her, suddenly, she could feel its walls.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she said. She could not say that she yearned for the thing she hated. She could not say that half her heart was Sekhmet’s, that she craved the darkness and fury she’d left on Earth. The vengeance and bloodshed, the destruction. How could she desire those things over this? Hades was still and cold, but she was free. How could she long for her enemies?

“We are here together,” Antony said, holding her shoulders. “You are safe with me.”

He was the only person who had ever seen her heart. Perhaps he was the only person she had ever trusted.

Her husband pulled her into his arms, his hands touching her beneath the ragged covering. She stretched her fingers tentatively to run them over his chest. His wound was still there, and she could see it, though she could not feel it when she touched him. He lifted her off the ground to kiss her. She caught herself thinking that nothing had changed, that none of this had ever happened but had been merely a terrible dream.

His lips were cold, but they were his, and she lost herself, forgetting everything, her body against his, her hands in his hair, the curls twisting in her fingers, the coarse silvering strands.

“It is not over,” Antony told her, kissing her eyelids, and she had a flash of memory, back to Alexandria. She had said the same words to him. It felt like centuries ago. “We are not finished.”