She watched as they marched away with the box that contained Antony. Too quickly, the legionaries were out of sight, and she was left in the dark with the guards to take her back to the palace.

The Romans kept her caged in her own bedchamber, where she awaited the emperor’s summons.

Outside the room, sentries trod the marble, their steps echoing through Cleopatra’s mind. Her luxurious bedding had been stripped from the bed for fear she’d use it to strangle herself. All that was left was a bare pallet, but it didn’t matter. She’d neither slept nor eaten since Antony’s death.

Her mind seeped with an unpredictable darkness. Was it madness? Had she imagined everything that happened in the mausoleum? She saw herself in a horrible flash, a soiled linen shift, muddied feet, tangled hair, wandering the roads, collapsing, her flesh picked over by vultures, yet still living, a shrieking husk. This would be her legacy, not her years of rule, of preserving the city from the Romans, not her pure love of Antony.

The Mad Queen Cleopatra.

She unwrapped her robes and ran her fingers over her skin to confirm what she already knew. Smooth. No evidence of the knife that had penetrated just below the ribs. She was chilled, and she shook as though fevered, but her body, at least, was unwounded. She could not say the same for her soul.

Something, everything, was terribly wrong. She could feel it, but she could not find it.

All night, she lay wide-eyed in her chamber, every sound magnified, the darkness dazzling.

At dawn on the sixth day after Antony’s death, she opened the shutters to watch the sunrise, once her particular pleasure. She sought to comfort herself with ritual, standing in the window, watching the indigo sky turn pale gold, but as the sun broke over the edge of the world and touched her face, she felt a searing pain. She gasped and leapt back from the window, her skin burning.

Tentatively, she stretched her fingers back into the light, and they blistered as though doused in boiling oil. She snatched them back, cradling her hand to her breast. Her eyes watered and sparked with the sun. Hissing with pain, she slammed the shutters closed again.

Had she offended Ra as well as his daughter? Might she throw open the shutters and die in the sunlight?

No. As she watched, her hand healed with agonizing speed. Where the flesh had been burned, there was smooth skin again. Soon, it was as though the burning had never happened.

It seemed that even this pain would only cripple her, and that only temporarily. She tried to calm herself by counting her heartbeats, but she could not find them.

She checked again. Nothing. Silence where there had always been motion and song, emptiness where her soul had been.

The goddess had taken her heart, her soul, her ka.

Cleopatra curled in the corner of her chamber, shaking, her hands clasped to her breasts, feeling the place where the darkness had touched her. Even if she died, without a heart to be weighed she could never enter Egypt’s Underworld. She could not follow Antony. She imagined herself ferried across the water to the Island of Fire, Osiris standing on the shore waiting to judge her. What would she offer him? She had nothing.