The guards, their faces horrified, this image of the emperor’s ward and her attacker worse than anything they had seen in battle, ran about the room in disarray. They would die for this, they knew. They would be executed, or condemned to fight animals. They had let Selene be attacked and Cleopatra escape under their very noses. All of them had been sitting at dinner, drinking and laughing for hours, as though under a spell. They had no idea where the emperor was, nor his historian and bodyguard. Agrippa was away as well. The guards were alone with this, and they knew they would be blamed.

She will live, the seiðkona said to them, in their own languages, and in their minds. She will live. She contains powers of her own, and those of others as well.

For the first time, Auðr noticed the ring on Selene’s finger, a blazing opal engraved with the face of Hecate. The witch had won the hand of the queen’s daughter, if not her heart, and her dark power remained there.

The war was not over. There was no hope of a peaceful end. Cleopatra was free, Chrysate lived, and Hecate’s bonds had been loosened. Even the failed sacrifice had yielded blood, and Auðr could feel Hecate pulling at her chains. The Underworld shook.

It was only beginning.

The seiðkona looked at the threads, the fates spinning about Rome, the possibilities.

Gods walked the earth, and the sky shone with arrows. The Underworld was at war, and the upper world as well. Emperors and queens, daughters and sons, witches and sorcerers.

The seiðkona did not know what would happen. She had changed the fates, and yet the chaos remained, the rift in the tapestry, the darkness.

Someone still tried to end the world, and someone tried to save it.

Auðr could not tell the two lines apart. They seemed the same.

Chrysate ran, the streets of the city unfriendly and unfamiliar to her. She was buffeted by a strange wind, which pressed against her face, tearing at her torn skin, beating at her injured body, reminding her that she had lost the queen.

She stumbled, scraping her withered hands on the stones. She was not supposed to be this misshapen thing, this hag, half covered in sweet skin, half covered in scales and darkness. Hecate had been so close. She had felt her coming.

She turned her face, the part of it that still existed as human, toward the moonlight, moaning. The wind would not offer her a respite, though. It raged against her broken cheek, threw sand into her one, bloodied eye.

She snarled, clawing at the wind. Nothing she did eased it, though she could see, outside of her vicinity, still air. The trees stood calm in the darkness. Only about Chrysate was there this bitter thing.

She screamed with fury, chanting curses, chanting spells, tearing at the air itself, but nothing kept the wind from whistling around her, shrill and violent. Nothing kept the wind from spinning her in wrong directions. Nothing kept the wind from surging into her lungs, filling her with dusty air and her own spells, blown backward into her mouth.