Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [133]
She shouted at the top of her voice, raising the alarm, though she knew Chrysate would not be captured by any human. She would be moving amongst the spirits now, fleet as a demon, but she was terribly wounded. Creatures such as Chrysate did not travel quickly by land.
Auðr bent over Cleopatra’s daughter. She could see her heart, a precious red fruit, exposed inside her rib cage, bright as a phoenix nearing its rebirth. It was not beating.
She made a motion with her fingers, twisting the distaff in a complicated pattern, her face tense. At last, the seiðkona leaned over the girl and exhaled a word, quietly, into her lips.
Selene shuddered and gasped, taking a breath. “Where is my mother?” she croaked, her eyes darting frantically about the room. “Where is my father? Where is Chrysate?”
Auðr stitched closed the wound in her chest with a golden thread unspooled from her seiðstafr. The thread was the girl’s own fate. It seemed smooth and delicate, but it was as strong as wire. She found a tiny waxen doll stabbed with a pin, its wrists bound together with a long black hair. She tore the skein of hair from the doll’s wrists and carefully, gently, removed the pin from her heart. The girl in the bed arched for a moment, gasped, and sighed, and then relaxed again.
Auðr laid her seiðstafr against the forehead of the queen’s daughter. The girl moved. Tears ran from her eyes, and she opened them.
“I don’t want to forget,” Selene whispered. “I want to know what happened. Don’t take it away from me. I was stupid to trust her.”
Guards surged into the room, their weapons drawn, and Auðr showed them the thing that had been discarded beside the bed. Part of the beautiful, bloodless skin of the woman Chrysate had been was lying crumpled and torn on the floor, like a fine garment thrown off in the heat of passion. A breast, and an arm like an elegant glove, the skin perfect and creamy. A scrap of a throat and lovely face. One side of a curving waist and a portion of round hip. The rest had been torn away and taken by the witch as she fled.
The guards, their faces horrified, this image of the emperor’s ward and her attacker worse than anything they had seen in battle, ran about the room in disarray. They would die for this, they knew. They would be executed, or condemned to fight animals. They had let Selene be attacked and Cleopatra escape under their very noses. All of them had been sitting at dinner, drinking and laughing for hours, as though under a spell. They had no idea where the emperor was, nor his historian and bodyguard. Agrippa was away as well. The guards were alone with this, and they knew they would be blamed.
She will live, the seiðkona said to them, in their own languages, and in their minds. She will live. She contains powers of her own, and those of others as well.
For the first time, Auðr noticed the ring on Selene’s finger, a blazing opal engraved with the face of Hecate. The witch had won the hand of the queen’s daughter, if not her heart, and her dark power remained there.
The war was not over. There was no hope of a peaceful end. Cleopatra was free, Chrysate lived, and Hecate’s bonds had been loosened. Even the failed sacrifice had yielded blood, and Auðr could feel Hecate pulling at her chains. The Underworld shook.
It was only beginning.
The seiðkona looked at the threads, the fates spinning about Rome, the possibilities.
Gods walked the earth, and the sky shone with arrows. The Underworld was at war, and the upper world as well. Emperors and queens, daughters and sons, witches and sorcerers.
The seiðkona did not know what would happen. She had changed the fates, and yet the chaos remained, the rift in the tapestry, the darkness.
Someone still tried to end the world, and someone tried to save it.
Auðr could not tell the two lines apart. They seemed the same.
Chrysate ran, the streets of the city unfriendly and unfamiliar to her. She was buffeted by a strange wind, which pressed against her face, tearing at her torn skin, beating at her injured body, reminding