Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [143]
Cleopatra.
She looked up, feeling the movement of dark magic somewhere on the grounds. She twisted her distaff just slightly, and the sharp thread of the witch coiled about it. Chrysate would not enter this chamber. She felt the creature stop, change course, depart to another place. Soon, Auðr could no longer feel her.
She shifted her attentions to Selene. The girl’s fate had been dark, and now it was brighter. She had taken her from death and brought her back. A queen. Selene would have a long life, be married by the emperor of Rome to an African king. A happy marriage. Recompense for her pain. Her heart would be further broken in the days to come, and Auðr had taken mercy on her.
Selene had no great acts left to perform. The seiðkona had shifted them away.
The witch’s ring sat on a table in the seiðkona’s chambers. Auðr did not know how to destroy it, but she had gotten it free of Selene’s finger, and surely now it was a mere bauble.
In her tapestry, the seiðkona saw lives ending, and lives beginning. She saw a battle, and many dead. She saw the moon rotating in its orbit, gleaming like a tooth in a demon’s smile, and she saw lightning slashing the sky. She saw herself walking the battlefield. She did not know which side she fought on, if she fought on a side at all.
Things looked dark ahead, things looked broken, but there might still be change.
Cleopatra had surprised her. She’d fought her fate. She had not given in.
The seiðkona would not either. She curled herself about her tightening lungs, willing herself to survive just a little longer. She had a part to play.
She knew she did, even if she did not know what it was.
In his chamber, the emperor’s skin prickled with constant terror, and nothing gave him ease. A string of rough, scarlet blotches ran from his throat to his thigh. He turned his head and vomited into the basin that waited beside his cot.
His mind was blotted with visions, Sibylline prophecies of his own manufacture. He saw Cleopatra and Chrysate wherever he looked, in every corner, beneath every veil, in shadows and in light. Kidnappers surged at him when he left his house to attend to his business, and then disappeared without touching him, their dark cloaks slipping into the cracks in the stones. Every flash of sun revealed a sword, half concealed, threatening his throat. Every flutter of wings told him that she was waiting somewhere nearby. He thought of the moth she had been when last he’d seen her. The bloodred body and the wings white as death.
His organs twisted in his body, reminding him of all the ceremonies he’d overseen, the augurs pawing through animal organs, announcing omens.
Slice yourself open, said his mind. Read your own entrails. See if they tell you what to do. See if they tell you of the fall of Rome. See if they tell you how you invited a witch into your bed.
He would die if he did not sleep. He knew this much.
Nicolaus sat in the corner, waiting to take down changes to the emperor’s will.
Augustus fretted. Who would he leave Rome to if he died?
He could not leave the empire to Julia, to a daughter, but she was all he had. He thrashed in his covers, chilled and then boiling, frozen and then sweating. He summoned the seiðkona, leaving the will for later when he might have a moment of clarity. Perhaps she might take his thoughts and make him sleep. She hobbled into the room, older than she had been. Augustus felt as ancient as he ever had. Perhaps this was what happened when one fought immortals. Life passed in an instant.
“Will I live?” he asked Auðr, hearing his childhood self asking the same question of Cleopatra.
She placed her hands on his face, touched the air around him, spun her fingers.
You will live a long life, she said in his mind. He felt, suddenly, that he had not asked the right question.
He walked from his bedchamber on thin and fragile legs, and out into the sunlight of the courtyard, where Agrippa