Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [115]
He poured theriac into his cup and drank. His original dosage of two drops had begun to seem ineffective, and now he poured it in equal proportion to his wine. He’d lost his appetite for food other than this. With each sip, he felt his twisting mind smoothed and relaxed.
In her chambers, Chrysate lit the fire. With the queen captured, with Selene in her possession, Chrysate should have been at her most powerful. Augustus had given the girl to Chrysate three days after the battle at the Circus Maximus, transferring her sleeping chamber to the one beside the priestess and telling Selene that she was to be an apprentice. But the girl was resistant to her spells. After her flight from the Circus Maximus, Selene had spent two days hidden somewhere in Rome, finally sighted by a centurion and brought back to the emperor’s house. It should have been easy to woo her, but Selene looked at Chrysate with dark, suspicious eyes, and the priestess found herself scarcely able to accomplish the simplest things. She’d spent the past nights trying to communicate with Hecate, to no avail. Her goddess was still bound in the Underworld, and nothing Chrysate did brought clarity. The scry was blurry, everything bloody, but the future was invisible. Now that she had Cleopatra, she did not know what to do with her. There was no clear way to bind her, and the power contained within Cleopatra was inaccessible.
Had she captured the queen for nothing? Was she no longer linked with the goddess? Was there anything inside the silver box at all, or had it all been an illusion? Had the Northern witch tricked her? Did she have Cleopatra? Or did the Psylli? The box rested in its silver room, and Chrysate left it there. At least if something went wrong, Cleopatra would be trapped in the second prison.
Chrysate opened her hand and looked at the green holding stone. She shut her eyes, clenching her fist, and said the name of the man who was tied to the synochitus. She might send a message to Hecate through him. He could pass through Hades and find the goddess.
Her call should have brought him, but it did not. Her powers had ebbed too far, she assumed. She could not find Antony, and she could not understand what had happened.
She did not dare go to the silver room and open the box to find out. She needed Hecate if she was to use that power, and to summon Hecate, she needed royal blood.
She needed Selene to submit. Every day, Chrysate grew weaker. The effort of keeping herself disguised was wearing on her. Finally, the deteriorating condition of her body had become too obvious. The spell she was about to perform was necessary. If she appeared as she truly was, Selene would never give herself over willingly, and that would invalidate all of Chrysate’s efforts.
Beauty was a tremendous part of her currency, both with Augustus and with Selene. Who would trust her as she truly was?
She scarcely trusted herself.
Groaning with effort, she opened a small leather pouch and pulled from it a bronze cauldron large enough to hold a boar. She settled the cauldron atop the flame, and tugged open the pouches that held the supplies she’d brought from her cave. Crystalline sand from the beach at the end of the world, and a pinch of frost gathered from beneath the shine of a thousand-night moon. The feathered wings of a screech owl, struggling against her hands and threatening to fly from her even as she crushed them into the cauldron. Nectar from a star torn from the sky one night long ago, when Chrysate was only a girl. The powdered liver of a stag that had once been a prince. The entrails of a man who had once been a wolf. The eyeless head of a crow, which opened its dry black beak and spoke to her as she brought it from the bag.
“Murderer,” it said.
She no longer listened to it. She brought out a dry olive branch and stirred the mixture,