Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [126]
Already tonight, Chrysate had slipped into the silver room, past the guards. The Psylli had been the only true barrier. Had he been guarding the room, she might have had more trouble, but he’d departed with Augustus. Now she had the silver box containing Cleopatra. She felt more confident by the moment. Why had she been so afraid? All she needed was Selene. It would work. It had to. For a moment, only a moment, but it was enough, she’d been able to see Hecate in the scry, chained still but stronger than she had been.
Chrysate sculpted the wax into the form of a young girl, her bosom and waist newly curving but her limbs still childlike. She entwined a long black hair into the figure’s flesh, twisting the strand about the figure’s wrists, and binding them behind the girl’s back. She sang as she did this, a wordless incantation in a voice by turns rough and silken.
When the figure and spell were nearly complete, Chrysate pulled a golden pin from her braids and stabbed the doll through the heart. It opened its waxen mouth and gasped. It stretched out its waxen arms and writhed on the floor, pinned like a butterfly.
“No love but mine,” Chrysate said in Greek, stroking the figure with her fingertips. “No heart but mine. No mother, no father, no husband, no lover.”
She caressed the doll, and the figure arched like a cat under her touch.
“None but I will have you,” Chrysate told the figure.
The witch stabbed it through the heart once more, and the figure curled about the pin, clutching the metal to her breast. Chrysate smiled. Spells such as this one had many purposes, all of them sweet.
Cleopatra’s daughter woke suddenly from dreams of flower-strewn fields. The flowers had been the color of smoke, and the grass like sharp reeds. She’d walked barefoot up a long cliffside path, her eyes on the dark entrance to a cave high above her. On her right, the ocean had crashed against the rock wall, splashing her feet with foam.
The curtains blew in a breeze that came drifting, warm and scented with perfume. There was a pain in Selene’s heart, and she lifted her fingers to touch her chest. There was nothing to be felt on the skin, but deep inside her was a hot, searing feeling, as though her heart were being torn in two. The pain faded even as she touched it. A dream, then. Just a dream.
She turned her head, hearing a sound. A chanting close by in Greek. “No heart but mine.” The whisper made her skin prickle.
“None but I will have you.”
Someone was in her chamber.
She sat up in bed, but even as she did so, she knew she had been mistaken. Her eyes were fully open now, and she could see the corners of her room.
She lay back, strangely uneasy, and gazed at the bouquet on her bedside table, the most glorious flowers she had ever seen. They had never wilted but seemed as fresh as the day she had received them, the first day she met the priestess.
She’d been apprenticing with Chrysate now for weeks, chanting songs of Hecate in the priestess’s chambers, and all the time wondering where her parents were, what Chrysate had done with them. Her escape into Rome after the events at the Circus Maximus had not been successful. By the time the centurion had found her, she was hungry and scared and ready to return to the Palatine. She knew the priestess had captured her parents, knew that Augustus had tried to kill her mother, and yet she could not bring herself to sorrow. Selene, daughter of a queen who’d taken power not so much older than she was now, found herself wanting to turn back into a child. Chrysate daily took her hand, taught her new language, sat opposite her, peering into her face, smiling.
The flowers turned back into birds as Selene looked at them,