What was she fighting?

The Psylli rose on the back of a beast, and the beast spat dust and bone in her face. It spat salt water, a tidal wave of ocean, and fish, gasping, plucked from the deep, and still Usem attacked her, his eyes blazing.

Vengeance. Reckoning. Augustus was standing behind the man, fumbling with something behind his back, but she couldn’t get past Usem.

The warrior and the wind were stronger than she had expected, and it took all her power to fight them.

The elder boy struggled, drugged though he was, but the witch had him, a rope twisted about his neck. What was left of Chrysate’s face contorted as she dragged the child up the hillside path, invisible to those battling above her. The other boy she had by the wrist, her fingernails digging into his flesh. Her scry had revealed strange things, changes in the fates. She’d consulted it just before the battle. What had happened? What had the Northern witch done?

The end of everything, but she saw nothing for herself. No Chrysate. No Hecate. No cave in Thessaly. Nothing.

Chrysate tripped on a soldier’s body and fell, her fingers slipping in his blood. The children were wailing. She heard their high tones over the deeper ones of the battle. Music. The heavens bent to listen. The gods, even the gods of love, loved war.

Chrysate pushed herself back to her feet, dragging her prisoners with her. The small one kicked at her legs, and she shook him until he was limp. The larger flung himself at her, and she hit him in the brow with the hilt of her stolen sword. Easier now. She laid them, almost gently, on the grass. No one was watching her. Everyone fought, insensible to what was about to happen.

Across the battlefield, she could see the queen, hear her battle cries, and watch the legions falling before her strange army of beasts. She was wreaking havoc, and Sekhmet was within her, all around her. She battled the Psylli, and all her attention was on him.

Chrysate whispered, and the sky shifted at her urging. A star came closer to light her work, sending a glow down upon the witch of Thessaly and her charges.

The moon’s pale surface turned red as Chrysate laced her spell about the moon’s surface and drew it down from its orbit until it hung just above her hilltop. She’d placed herself purposefully. There was a price, of course, but she had planned for this. For all of this.

Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, sons of Egypt. Royal children. The girl would have been more powerful, but the boys would do.

Were they unwilling sacrifices? It no longer mattered. They were drugged, and Chrysate, priestess of Hecate, psuchagoĝoi of Thessaly, supplemented her diminished strength with the borrowed power of the sky. The waters at the bottom of the crater opened for her, and the bitter lake of hatred shone in the moonlight.