As the legions marched into Avernus, Cleopatra waited. It was sundown, and the moon rose in a yellow crescent. She could smell the armies coming toward her. She could feel their footsteps and hear their lust for battle. She could feel Augustus and Agrippa.

She had not been in battle since Actium.

She missed Antony, their planning together, the nights before the battle had taken place. She missed her lover, her general, her partner.

She knew, though, that she would have to do this alone. He was gone, and this was her fight, not his. She would fight to save her children and Antony. She would fight to avenge herself upon the man who had taken everything from her.

She thought of Augustus’s heart, and of how it would feel in her hands. She could feel it beating, his excitement as he approached. She could feel Chrysate, too, traveling somewhere in the vicinity of the Romans.

She would finish her task. She would be damned after tonight, if she had not been before. Her ka, if she ever reclaimed it, would fall against Maat’s feather, and the Eater of Souls would take it. She prayed to her own country’s gods, to Isis, long-neglected goddess of mothers. To Thoth, for knowledge.

She prayed not for herself, but for her children, the one who was gone and the ones who still remained. Her hands, when she spread them before her, were tipped with the claws of the lioness. Her body rippled with muscles that were not human.

She could not feel Sekhmet, but she had become a version of her. She could feel herself forfeiting the parts that had been Cleopatra.

The whirlwind where her heart had been no longer disturbed her.

At last, the queen rose to her feet and began to climb the hill toward the crater’s mouth.

The armies of Rome had arrived.

She would meet them.

Chrysate had found a beautiful abandoned cave, and though it smelled of felines, of bats, and of something else as well, it would do. It went deep into the side of the rocks. It was cool and ancient, and the cool soothed her skin, chapped and burnt after days of travel. It had taken no small magic to conceal herself and Cleopatra’s children in the litter of a senator’s mistress, a woman she’d throttled just south of Rome. The elder child had fought her, tearing her skin and wounding her delicate flesh. Finally, after he’d managed to push the younger from the litter, screaming at him to run, Chrysate had been obliged to drug him. It had taken her a great deal of energy to lay hands on the small one, who was well hidden in the bushes, and he had kicked her and screamed that she was not his mother.

She found the entire thing wearing.

They’d left the slow-moving litter after a few days and traveled in the bed of a wagon, Chrysate’s skin parching beneath the cloth that covered her. By then her charges were heavy and dull-witted with potions and disguised with the witch’s ebbing magic. It had been no small labor keeping them with her, no small labor keeping them hidden.