She raised her hand to tap on Chrysate’s door and found it already open. There were candles lit, and she could smell the priestess’s perfume.

Selene pulled aside the curtains of the priestess’s bed and saw only the silken coverlet. She touched the soft impression where her friend’s body had been. The place was still warm. She turned back to the table, where the birds were congregating.

There was a silver box on it. Selene recognized it from her home. Isis and Dionysus together, the gods of her parents. She took a step toward the table. Then another.

She ran her fingers across its embossed surface, feeling her parents’ faces in the silver. She’d seen Chrysate capture her mother within this box, and her father come from inside it, bowing to Rome. Her parents, she thought, dizzy. She was no one’s daughter.

Selene fit her fingernails beneath the lid and began to pry at it.

“Princess,” said an amused voice from behind her.

Selene turned, hiding the box behind her back as quickly as she could.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she lied. “They sang to me all night.”

She gestured at the birds, but as she moved her hand, they transformed into flowers again, hundreds of them dropping from the ceiling and onto the carpet. Selene caught a soft pink petal in her hand and crushed it in her fingers. She could smell the scent of roses everywhere now. The petals continued to fall, until they covered her bare feet.

“You should not touch things that belong to others,” the priestess said.

“I only wanted to see it,” said Selene.

“Give it to me,” said Chrysate.

Selene kept it behind her back, holding it tightly in her hand. She could not let go of it, even as she walked toward Chrysate, basking in the glow of the woman, her heart pounding as she came closer to her.

Chrysate’s eyes shone with love, like Cleopatra’s should have, like Antony’s should have, and Selene felt herself pulled. Still, she held the silver box.

“You must undress now for the ceremony,” Chrysate told her, and Selene did so. She undid even the band of linen about her chest, spinning as the priestess took the end of the fabric.

She unclasped the pin that tied her robe about her shoulder, and was left naked.

Her parents should have protected her from all of this, she thought with some deep part of her mind, and yet here she stood with the box that contained them in her hand. She could throw it into the fire. They could die. They were supposed to be dead already.

She thought of her mother, spinning in the arena, on fire. She thought of her father, wavering, half visible, calling her mother’s name.

Somewhere the birds were singing, and if there was a strange pain in Selene’s heart, a tearing feeling, a piercing feeling, she could forget that and inhale the incense that burned and the perfume that Chrysate was anointing her with. She could smell the flowers, and something darker. The petals reached up to her thighs now, drifting softly around her.