Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [157]
By the time Auðr arrived before Augustus, he no longer feared her. She lowered her distaff to his forehead, and when it touched him, he felt his mind laced with a filigree of frost. All the pain was gone for the moment, the memories of broken things, the guilt.
For a glorious moment, he did not know who he was, and he was grateful.
He did not want to know who he was. He did not want to know what he had lost.
Auðr walked onward, and Augustus knelt on the hilltop beside the dead woman, a woman he now only faintly recognized. He stayed there, bewildered and uncertain for he knew not how long. At last, Agrippa walked up the hillside behind him, bloodied, his face scored with new lines.
“I found her among the wounded,” he said.
A small hand took Augustus’s fingers. He looked down, startled. Selene, her face smeared with dirt, snow in her eyelashes. He recognized her in a rush of sorrow.
“Rome has won,” she said, her voice wavering. “And I am a Roman. I will go with you.”
And then, without looking at her mother’s body, without looking down, she led Augustus down the hill and away from the battlefield.
“We have won,” she said, and only then did Augustus realize that he was crying.
When they had gone, Auðr bent over Cleopatra’s body, coughing as she knelt. Her own thread, tangled with all of these, was moments from completion. She could see its tattered end in the light of dawn, shorn and frayed.
She looked at the queen’s face. Peaceful. Where did she travel? the seiðkona wondered. Which of her gods had taken her?
Auðr twisted her distaff, employing all her remaining strength to wrap the queen’s thread about it. She groaned as she tore at the fates, unraveling, her powers withering even as she used them.
The universe shifted above her. A pattern in the sky, a ripple in the gray as the sky began to roll, a shifting of seasons, night to day and back again. The last stars peeled back to reveal sun, and the last sun peeled back to reveal emptiness, and still the seiðkona labored, weaving the pattern, the warp and weft of the future, the edges of the universe in her hands.
At last, she rose and walked toward the historian.
It was nearly finished. All of it.
Nicolaus could not move, even as he watched Auðr approach him. Blood coursed from the ragged tear that ran from his shoulder to his wrist. He was going to die, he knew, but he could not bring himself to run.
He wanted to die.
The battlefield was covered in bodies, and the waters ran red. Vultures wheeled high in the sky, and soon they would land.
The seiðkona’s hair had come unbound, and it twined in the air, a white nebula. Her lips curled as she assessed him. She put out a hand and touched his mouth with icy, bluish fingers. Her other hand gripped the distaff.
Nicolaus braced himself for its touch. He discovered that he was crying. His tears froze on his face, and one fell to the ground, shattering as it hit the earth. He bowed his head toward her, giving himself over.
Let her touch him. Let her take away the things he’d seen and done. Let her take his mind and thoughts. Let her take him and all the words he’d clung to.
No, she said, her lips unmoving. You will remember this.
He looked up and was caught, pinned by her silver gaze.
You will remember all of this. You will tell this story. You will write it.
The seiðkona lifted her distaff over her head, and Nicolaus watched it move toward his brow.
As it touched him, his mind broke open, making room for everything it must encompass. He felt his own memories splinter and spin like marbles, rolling to the edges of his consciousness, to be lost there.
The distaff touched him for only an instant, and yet he was no longer only Nicolaus.
He knew. Everything. His mind swelled with it, agonizing, horrifying, filled beyond its capacity, and then filled more. Love and sorrow. Death and despair. Hunger. Bloodshed. Armor being donned and swords being sharpened, children waking from