Only slaves, Cleopatra thought, still troubled by what had happened aboard the ship, but it was no comfort. She hadn’t known about the child as she took the mother, as she took the father, as she took everyone, frenzied, glorying in hunger and satisfaction. She’d nearly killed the child, too. Her mouth was on his throat when she realized what she was doing and forced herself backward, screaming into the darkness for discovery. She’d thought herself in control of her hunger by the time she boarded the ship, but she was wrong.

You will be her slave.

Half through the voyage, she’d found herself crouched with the cats in the hold, running her fingers over a tiger’s coat, certain she could read the markings on it. The future, she’d thought, believing, if only for a few hours, that her own acts were written here, her own hopes, her own solutions. The tiger’s stripes were hieroglyphs, she’d thought, as she’d sat in the dark, reading in the language of the gods. It was only now, walking through the streets of Rome, that she saw the madness in this.

Her future, whatever it was, was written nowhere but in her own body, and the writing was unclear. All she knew was that she had arrived in the city of her enemies, and that they were all around her.

Nicolaus placed the ship’s child in apprenticeship to a scribe he had known in Damascus, and at last, they arrived at their destination.

“No one will look for us here,” he said as he pried the lock from the door. He hid her in a library, the home of a poet, Virgil, a great favorite of the emperor. Nicolaus had encountered him in Alexandria months before and learned that he planned to be in Campania for some time.

She tried to study Virgil’s library instead of dreaming of fire and bloodshed. The scholar brought incense to the room, and she burned the resin, but it gave her none of the pleasure it once had. It reminded her of Alexandria, the smell of the cedar planks imported from Cyprus. Those same dockyard planks had caught fire and ignited the library filled with the knowledge of every traveler, every scholar, medicines and magic, maps and death songs, in all the languages of man. Now all that true understanding was lost, dispersed as ashes into the air of Egypt and settled into the sand. Cleopatra had inhaled the ashes herself —she remembered walking the city as it burned, the smoke low and black— and they had not taught her anything.

Nicolaus went out into the city to glean the location of her children. This was what a queen should do, she knew. Wait for her servants to get her the information she could not herself obtain. She knew that Rome was traitorous, that assassins could appear out of nowhere. She knew she should be reasonable. She would resist Sekhmet’s voice. She could not take revenge until she knew where her children were. She would not run the risk of hurting them more than she already had.