The woman in black looked over her shoulder as the scholar led her, and the whore caught a glimpse of her face. A dark-smeared eye, a flash of brightness. Something strange there. And beautiful, too. The whore was intrigued.

She tugged at the sailor’s arm and pointed in the woman’s direction.

“Who’s she? And the boy?”

“The only slaves the lion didn’t kill. The scholar bought them for a couple of coins. She’s bad luck. The captain wanted to be rid of her, and I don’t blame him.”

The whore craned her neck after the woman. What sort of thing might she be, that a slave-selling captain would throw away his prospect of profit? She took a half step in their direction, but the sailor who’d purchased her for the hour pulled her the opposite way, his hands already burrowing into the folds of her gown.

Marcus Agrippa and a small group of his soldiers, ragged after months of travel, marched past a moment later, agitated by the delay the animals had caused their vessel. They bore with them the seiðkona, her long white hair tangled and her eyes as silver as polished metal. She looked about the port, her expression chilling to any who inadvertently met her gaze.

Auðr’s head suddenly whipped to face the woman in black. The old woman hissed in surprise.

“What is it?” Agrippa asked the fate spinner, stumbling over her guttural language.

The seiðkona shook her head, her fingers twitching. Agrippa followed her stare, his face scanning the crowd until it landed on two travelers. Something about the man was familiar, and the woman, too. The way her arm moved, the way her feet seemed scarcely to touch the earth, caught his attention. There was a strange grace about her.

Agrippa’s eyes narrowed and he took a step in their direction, but as he did, the man took the woman roughly in his arms and kissed her.

Agrippa’s attention faded. She was nothing, a whore or a slave, and no business of Marcus Agrippa’s. He was overdue in Rome. Besides, the woman she reminded him of was long dead. Agrippa laughed at himself. The way his heart raced, you would think he’d seen a ghost.

Agrippa’s company marched on, only Auðr looking back. She’d seen something in that woman’s eyes. Something old and dark and familiar.

The seiðkona had seen its like only once before, when she was a girl of thirteen, sold as an unwilling talisman to an exploring ship, but she had never forgotten it. Her ship had capsized in a storm, leaving none but Auðr alive, clinging to a piece of wreckage in the middle of an icy ocean. At last, certain she was dying, she saw something in the waters: a great eye, a long and whirling tail, a creature like the dragon her ship had been carved in imitation of.

The monster hung there in the blue depths, and she looked into the eye for what seemed like thousands of years, seeing its history, a world of water, a melting sea. Worshipped by sailors and by kings, and then forgotten.