“Will I live?” he asked Auðr, hearing his childhood self asking the same question of Cleopatra.

She placed her hands on his face, touched the air around him, spun her fingers.

You will live a long life, she said in his mind. He felt, suddenly, that he had not asked the right question.

He walked from his bedchamber on thin and fragile legs, and out into the sunlight of the courtyard, where Agrippa was standing, one leg bandaged, his armor already tightened.

A messenger from Cleopatra awaited him. He had known it was coming.

Cleopatra had sent a child she’d plucked from the village near her hiding place. It was fitting. Augustus had sent a message to Antony that way, the message that had led to Antony’s death.

All who saw the messenger pass, in the towns that had been scarred by disease, in the towns that had been touched by the rumors of strange goings-on in Rome, of monsters, of a dying emperor, looked to the heavens and tried to interpret the signs.

Surely, they imagined the child they saw riding on the back of a running tiger, his tiny form jouncing as he held tight to the cat’s fur. Surely, it had not been a tiger but some other sort of animal.

The boy stood before Agrippa and Augustus, offering them a message addressed to “Octavian, Augustus, Emperor, Fool.”

Augustus took it, aggrieved, and read it aloud. The writing was elegant.

“Surrender my children and yourself, and I will leave your country and your people. I will not return here.”

Agrippa looked at Augustus.

“The rest?” Agrippa asked.

“If you choose not to surrender, know that I will lay waste to Italy. I will kill everyone you love, and I will destroy your country as you destroyed mine.”

“Rome will not surrender,” Augustus informed the messenger. “Rome does not surrender. Its emperor is not a coward. We will fight.”

“Midnight, then,” the boy trilled, excited. “Seven nights from tonight. At Avernus. She will meet you there, and in fair battle.”

“Avernus?” asked Augustus, appalled.

It was to the south of Rome, a crater where Aeneas had descended into Hades, according to the legends. There the rivers of the Underworld came aboveground in bitter springs and a poisoned lake, and caves housed creatures Augustus did not want to encounter. There was one cave in particular, at the ancient Greek settlement of Cumæ, which he remembered all too well from his fight against the pirate Sextus Pompeius, twenty years before. It had a chill about it, and a depth that was beyond sounding. It was an ideal hiding place for a monster, meandering, as it did, deep into the hillside.

Augustus did not want to go to Avernus. Nor did he want to stay in Rome. He could not fight her here, in a city filled with people. He thought of the plague springing from village to village. Too many would die, and the streets and buildings offered ample hiding places for a thing such as the queen. Better the wide, open expanses surrounding the crater. Better, he knew, but it made him uneasy nonetheless.