“No love but mine,” Chrysate said in Greek, stroking the figure with her fingertips. “No heart but mine. No mother, no father, no husband, no lover.”

She caressed the doll, and the figure arched like a cat under her touch.

“None but I will have you,” Chrysate told the figure.

The witch stabbed it through the heart once more, and the figure curled about the pin, clutching the metal to her breast. Chrysate smiled. Spells such as this one had many purposes, all of them sweet.

Cleopatra’s daughter woke suddenly from dreams of flower-strewn fields. The flowers had been the color of smoke, and the grass like sharp reeds. She’d walked barefoot up a long cliffside path, her eyes on the dark entrance to a cave high above her. On her right, the ocean had crashed against the rock wall, splashing her feet with foam.

The curtains blew in a breeze that came drifting, warm and scented with perfume. There was a pain in Selene’s heart, and she lifted her fingers to touch her chest. There was nothing to be felt on the skin, but deep inside her was a hot, searing feeling, as though her heart were being torn in two. The pain faded even as she touched it. A dream, then. Just a dream.

She turned her head, hearing a sound. A chanting close by in Greek. “No heart but mine.” The whisper made her skin prickle.

“None but I will have you.”

Someone was in her chamber.

She sat up in bed, but even as she did so, she knew she had been mistaken. Her eyes were fully open now, and she could see the corners of her room.

She lay back, strangely uneasy, and gazed at the bouquet on her bedside table, the most glorious flowers she had ever seen. They had never wilted but seemed as fresh as the day she had received them, the first day she met the priestess.

She’d been apprenticing with Chrysate now for weeks, chanting songs of Hecate in the priestess’s chambers, and all the time wondering where her parents were, what Chrysate had done with them. Her escape into Rome after the events at the Circus Maximus had not been successful. By the time the centurion had found her, she was hungry and scared and ready to return to the Palatine. She knew the priestess had captured her parents, knew that Augustus had tried to kill her mother, and yet she could not bring herself to sorrow. Selene, daughter of a queen who’d taken power not so much older than she was now, found herself wanting to turn back into a child. Chrysate daily took her hand, taught her new language, sat opposite her, peering into her face, smiling.

The flowers turned back into birds as Selene looked at them, and the birds fluttered about her chamber, singing a sweet, lulling song.

She could almost understand the words they sang. Almost.

“It is time,” she heard. “Come.” Then it became a simple melody again, but she was already out of bed, making her way down the corridor in her nightgown. The birds accompanied her, a singing cloud rising toward the arched ceiling of the corridor, then swooping to the floor.