Could it be he meant to do as she asked?

“But where would I send them to meet him?”

She hesitated. Could she trust his honor?

“Koptos,” she said at last. “We sent Caesarion to Koptos with his tutor, and then overland to the Red Sea, and Myos Hormos. He will not have arrived yet.”

Octavian smiled. She could glean nothing of his thoughts. Nothing of his fears. Nothing of his plans. It made her uneasy.

“Son of Caesar,” he murmured. “I should like to meet him. Does he take after his father?”

“He does,” said Cleopatra. Her bones rattled, hollowed. Her skin burned where the chain wrapped about her wrists. Her mind felt blurred at the edges.

“He is just as Caesar was,” she continued, impatient to reach agreement. “Anyone would see it. He is Caesar’s only son.”

Octavian leaned back, his jaw tight. She saw his eyes darken.

“I think not,” he snapped. “I am Caesar’s only son. Your children are mine. Your gold, your palaces, your books? Mine. You are no longer the ruler here. I heard that Antony gave you the libraries of Pergamon, which were not his to give.”

She looked up at him, her eyes blazing.

“Your own dear Caesar burned the library of Alexandria, and I was owed a replacement,” she retorted, still bitter, even in this dire state, about the loss of Alexandria’s treasure. Tens of thousands of scrolls set afire as Caesar sacked her city. Had the library not been burned, had the summoning scroll not been damaged, perhaps things would be different.

“You’re owed nothing,” Octavian said quietly, enjoying himself, his calm returned. “You’re conquered. Do you not know what it means to surrender? You’ve surrendered to me, and all the world knows it. You are mine, Cleopatra. You belong to me.”

Antony’s words. Antony’s rights.

She screamed a wordless sound of rebellion, threw herself forward, straining against her bonds, and spat in Octavian’s simpering face. He stepped back in disgust, beckoning a servant to wash his skin.

“I have what I need, in any case,” he said. “You’re not the only one who knows where your treasures hide.”

Cleopatra’s secretary was summoned, and he searched through the accounting in front of them both, finding mistakes and crying them out, betraying her who had brought him from the countryside, taught him his trade, kept him from the squalor of the poor.

The guards, the secretary, and Octavian retreated from her chamber, and that, at least, was a blessing. She was no longer cursed with the smell of their flesh. Eiras and Charmian tended her, dressing her hair and washing the wound on her throat, but she heard her maids murmuring outside the chamber door.

“The queen is mad,” Eiras whispered to Charmian.

Cleopatra reclined in her chamber, pretending to sleep, but her senses were acute. She could hear every word said in the palaces, from the kitchen depths to the upper towers. She could hear falcons landing on the roof, and men stamping their feet in the courtyard. She could hear rats wending their way through secret passages, and moths chewing at silks. She could hear bats fluttering from the dark, hidden corners, departing for a night of hunting. These women were fools to think she could not hear them talking.