She drew her dagger from her belt and slit the younger child’s throat, the skin soft and yielding. The child’s eyes widened as she cut him, but he did not protest. The drug had him quieted, and he was frozen, scarcely capable of movement. She laid Ptolemy back on the bank for the moon to take as her fee.

Chrysate held Alexander out over the waters, and slit his throat —dull-eyed, she thought, like a goat, and dull-spirited, no match for his royal title— letting his blood pour down into the crater. It splashed in the dark liquid, Hecate’s gift.

“I summon you,” she shouted, exultant. “Come to me!”

The world froze in a moment as Hades opened, frost riming the armor of the Romans.

From the darkness, snow began to fall.

Pale shapes surged up through the boundary. There was a wailing deep in the lake. Fingers breached the surface of the freezing water, and then thousands of shades, hundreds of thousands of shades, crying for the royal blood that had been spilled in their sacrifice. Suicides and heroes, warriors and women, infants and ancients, they came surging upward into the cruel red light of the moon, and behind them, the Underworld emptied.

“Hecate! Hear me!” Chrysate cried. “Take them, take these fighters, take these wounded, take these dying and these dead! I dedicate their sacrifice to you! Feast on them and join me!”

The earth shook, and from beneath the hillside, the hounds of Hecate began to howl. Chrysate could hear the great Cerberus growling with fury.

The shades drank of life, their mouths wide-open. The blood poured from the child into the dead.

Chrysate was listening to one more sound below all of them, the rattling of a tremendous chain, a song, twisting and ecstatic, the song of a goddess rising from her banishment, when the shade of Antony rose from the crevasse, his body whipping with anguish, moving faster than light.

The witch laughed as he emerged. He was too late.

Antony screamed, his wails echoing through Hades and across the upper world. He held his children in his dark arms, but the younger was gone already. The elder was dying. Antony cursed, a dead man holding his dead children.

Cleopatra, battling with Usem and his wife, heard Antony’s screams, gathered her haunches beneath her and leapt over the Roman army, across the impossible distance at Chrysate, her teeth bared, her claws outstretched.

There was a shudder across the battlefield as Chrysate raised her hands into the air and pushed her long nails into the moon, holding it tightly. She hurled it across the crater, the crescent’s points serving as spears. It spun in the air, bright, lighting the world, but Cleopatra raised her hand, heaved the moon aside and kept coming.

Cleopatra grew larger as she charged, swollen with chaos, swollen with war. Her body was lioness, and her arms were serpent. Her face was her own.

Screaming, she bared her teeth to sink them into Chrysate.