“I sacrifice this child to Hecate!” Chrysate cried. “I take her body for my own, in service to Hecate!”

The priestess had torn open the girl’s chest and climbed inside, though the girl still lived. The witch’s claws tore still deeper into the girl’s breast, and she began to twist her body into the space beneath Selene’s skin.

Auðr raised her distaff, the fate like a thorny vine wrapping around it. She could feel Hecate in this room. So foolish. She’d been thinking only of Sekhmet and had not noticed what was growing only a few doors away.

“Hecate,” Chrysate whispered, and the girl repeated it. Their voices twisted into spell, pulling at the gates of Hades, pulling at the chain that bound Hecate below the earth, even as Auðr pulled in the opposite direction.

Blackened petals flew and the crows shrieked.

Selene turned her tearstained face toward Auðr and reached out her hand.

“Tell my mother I did not mean to leave her for Rome,” she whispered, her voice ragged.

Clutched in Selene’s hand was the silver box containing Cleopatra.

She threw it, and as it spun through the air, time slowed. The corners of the room flashed with light, the birds on the canopy rose as the wind shook them, and the witch of Thessaly howled with wrath as she leapt for the box.

Cleopatra’s prison tumbled through the open window and clattered onto the stones of the courtyard two stories below.

“NO!” screamed Chrysate, and threw herself out the window after the box, but it was too late. The box was open. Auðr ran to the window and looked out.

There was a moment of stillness, of nothing. It was empty, Auðr thought in terror, and its contents missing. Someone else had stolen them. Had Cleopatra been given to Hecate? If so, there was nothing more to be done. She’d made a terrible mistake, fumbling with the fates of mortals when she should have been spending all the time she had left on binding Cleopatra below the earth. She had seen the possibility of disaster and ignored it. She’d believed Cleopatra might be mistress of her own fate, might split from this and change the future herself.

The ground of the courtyard trembled, and the wailing began, millions of lost souls crying to come to the surface. The air was suddenly scented with asphodel and with the waters of the rivers of Hades. Lethe, with its limitless, soothing black depths, and Styx, whose waters ran with the blood of slaughtered innocents. Acheron, made of salt tears; Cocytus, whose waters wailed like grieving widows; and Phlegethon, whose surface burned with eternal flames.

A moth whiter than starlight rose from the silver box and hung in the air for a moment. Then, her eyes blazing, her skin as bright as candles, shining with a web of molten metal, Cleopatra appeared in the courtyard below Chrysate’s chambers.

Her roar of fury rattled the palace, causing the servants to spring panicked from their beds.