Augustus was seventy-six years old. He’d reigned over Rome, over his empire, for nearly forty-four years. It was the nineteenth of August, the month he’d named after himself. Other Augusts crowded his memory, one spent in Alexandria. He thought suddenly of Antony. Augustus had long outlived his old enemy, his old friend, his old idol, but he did not know why he thought of him now. He remembered walking into the cool depths of a mausoleum and —

No, no. He would not think of that.

A flash of memory, another August, this one on a battlefield. Tigers roaring and an emptiness where his heart had been, snow falling down upon him from the heavens. A god screaming from the sky, and his enemy, his beautiful enemy, bleeding in the snow. What had she done with his heart? What was the strangeness he felt? His soul —

He did not know.

He remembered an ancient woman with silver eyes, tapping him on the forehead with her distaff, emptying his history and replacing it with unknowns.

He had run back to Rome, served the empire, served the people. Dazed, he’d closed the Gates of Janus and brought peace to his realm. A price owed to a warrior, a price he knew he must pay, but his own life had not been peaceful.

Rome was his only daughter now. Julia, his sole blood heir, had betrayed him, conducting an affair with the last surviving son of Mark Antony, sacrificing to old religions, dancing naked in the city’s temples, offering herself to anyone who desired the emperor’s daughter. On her finger, she’d worn a ring engraved with Hecate’s face, something she claimed she’d found in Augustus’s own house.

Augustus had banished her from Rome and ordered her lover killed, but these punishments did not ease his pain. Just hours before arriving at this orchard, he’d given the order for the execution of his final grandson, the youngest son of Julia. The boy was a child of an unknown father, and the emperor could not take the chance of Rome being inherited by a descendant of his old enemy. No. He must pass Rome to Tiberius, his stepson, a man he disliked and distrusted. There was no other option. All his other heirs were dead, and his line was broken.

The emperor felt a grasping seizure in his chest, where his heart should have been.

He’d banished his friends as well. Nicolaus of Damascus, his biographer, he’d sent away when he’d given the emperor a copy of his history of the universe. It rankled. Even the sections pertaining to Augustus, which he’d dictated himself, seemed strange, filled with untruths. Had he talked in his sleep? He could not say.

He had Ovid sent to the Black Sea because something in his stories, in those Metamorphoses, those women transforming into beasts, those beasts transforming into women, those gods walking amongst men, reminded Augustus of —

What?

Something in them made Augustus believe that someone had gotten to the poet, whispered in his ear, told him all the secret things, initiated him into mysteries the emperor himself did not recollect.