She had seen a god living deep beneath the world. An Old One, something from before the beginning. She felt herself falling into darkness and gave herself over, but the god sent her back.

She had stumbled onto the foreign shore, clutching only her seiðstafr, which she’d tied tightly into the cords of her dress as the ship had gone down. Alive. She had not known why, not then, but she knew there was a reason.

The universe worked according to its own laws. She was meant for something, some great task.

This task. She wished it had come sooner, when she was stronger, but the Fates had their own timing.

Auðr whispered to herself, twisting the threads of fate between her fingers as she was pulled through the marketplace and toward the emperor.

A moment later, the scholar and the queen parted from their embrace, and within a few steps, they and the child disappeared completely into the crowds and chaos of Rome.

8

Cleopatra caught her breath, trying to control herself as Nicolaus turned away. The scholar’s kiss had awoken her hunger, and now she wanted only to be away from him before she did something she would regret.

He wanted to be away from her as well; she could feel it. He wanted to run, but he had promised he would help her. His brave words were false. Nicolaus trembled before her, and yet he managed to turn his back on her, pushing through the throngs, wending their way through the slender, dusty streets of Rome, the child sleeping in his arms.

She had no pity for him. He was the one who’d insisted they depart the ship at dusk and walk into a sea of people, the sights and sounds of Rome, the animals flanking them, the whores and sailors. She could see only the back of his neck as he led her through the crowd, the slender vertebrae above the scholar’s cloak. It would be easy. The rope between them was pulled taut. He was already tied to her, though to observers, it would look as if she was tied to him, his property, his slave.

It would seem to the crowd that he was a trainer and she was his beast, a lion barely tamed by a leash, she thought, bristling, and then remembered that she was not a lioness but a woman.

“Never do that again,” she managed to say. “Never touch me again. I would have had him.”

“It was quick thinking on my part. Agrippa’s men would have captured us. I saved you.”

She was not something to be saved, the voice of Sekhmet whispered. She was something to be worshipped.

Did she need him, truly?

Yes, Cleopatra reminded herself. He could go out in the day when she could not. He could seek her children where she could not. Her face was too easily recognized in this ugly city.

“I wanted him to see me,” she said, rebelling against her own thoughts. “I would confront him. Agrippa was the leader of the army in Alexandria. It is because of him that Antony is dead. And he was there when they killed my son, standing beside Octavian. He gave the order.”