Chrysate crouched on the stones opposite Cleopatra, shouting words in her ancient language, but Cleopatra’s body was filled with fire, as though lightning had struck it and stayed inside its veins. She reached out her hand and clawed the witch’s face, and the witch shrieked and flung herself across the courtyard. Where Cleopatra had touched her, there were long scores ripped in her flesh.

“You are my creature,” Chrysate cried. “You belong to Hecate!”

Cleopatra bared her teeth and leapt at her, tearing at her skin. The liquid that came from beneath it was not red but dark, and the witch’s skin was tattered by fangs and claws.

Chrysate hesitated, overmatched, before leaping into the darkness and fleeing.

The queen looked up to the open window above her and saw Auðr standing there, frozen. The seiðkona lifted her distaff, but Cleopatra moved like one in a dream, her eyes wide and unseeing. She lifted from the ground the silver box that had imprisoned her, pressing the spilled ash back into it, and then she, too, flew from the Palatine, her every step shaking the ground, moving as fast as fire in a dry season.

Her light blazed over the hillside, and then she was gone.

In Chrysate’s rooms, Auðr looked around, stunned.

She shouted at the top of her voice, raising the alarm, though she knew Chrysate would not be captured by any human. She would be moving amongst the spirits now, fleet as a demon, but she was terribly wounded. Creatures such as Chrysate did not travel quickly by land.

Auðr bent over Cleopatra’s daughter. She could see her heart, a precious red fruit, exposed inside her rib cage, bright as a phoenix nearing its rebirth. It was not beating.

She made a motion with her fingers, twisting the distaff in a complicated pattern, her face tense. At last, the seiðkona leaned over the girl and exhaled a word, quietly, into her lips.

Selene shuddered and gasped, taking a breath. “Where is my mother?” she croaked, her eyes darting frantically about the room. “Where is my father? Where is Chrysate?”

Auðr stitched closed the wound in her chest with a golden thread unspooled from her seiðstafr. The thread was the girl’s own fate. It seemed smooth and delicate, but it was as strong as wire. She found a tiny waxen doll stabbed with a pin, its wrists bound together with a long black hair. She tore the skein of hair from the doll’s wrists and carefully, gently, removed the pin from her heart. The girl in the bed arched for a moment, gasped, and sighed, and then relaxed again.

Auðr laid her seiðstafr against the forehead of the queen’s daughter. The girl moved. Tears ran from her eyes, and she opened them.

“I don’t want to forget,” Selene whispered. “I want to know what happened. Don’t take it away from me. I was stupid to trust her.”

Guards surged into the room, their weapons drawn, and Auðr showed them the thing that had been discarded beside the bed. Part of the beautiful, bloodless skin of the woman Chrysate had been was lying crumpled and torn on the floor, like a fine garment thrown off in the heat of passion. A breast, and an arm like an elegant glove, the skin perfect and creamy. A scrap of a throat and lovely face. One side of a curving waist and a portion of round hip. The rest had been torn away and taken by the witch as she fled.