Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [26]
He’d never imagined it could go this far.
Nicolaus was a historian, after all, not a magician. He’d come most recently from Jerusalem, where he was employed as King Herod’s personal philosopher, following a dream of greater stature. Cleopatra and Antony seemed like the rulers who would eventually be remembered, while Herod seemed a waning force.
Nicolaus cursed his ambition now. He’d been a fool. His actions had left him one choice: Flee Alexandria or die, and he had no plans to die here, at the beginning of his career.
Nicolaus turned away from the shuttered palace windows and walked into the night, heading for the port. He’d find a ship and leave.
He could never see Cleopatra again, he knew that much. Not if he valued his life.
If she returned to power, he’d be executed. And if the spell had worked, as he feared it had, who knew what had been unleashed?
He would not stay in Alexandria to find out.
11
The fools thought they had sealed her away from any weapons, but the palace was her home, and she knew every stone. Behind them, beneath them, concealed everywhere were knives and relics. She slashed her palms and watched as the wounds opened and then closed again, bloodless, like gills on a fish. She couldn’t summon the goddess back, not the way she’d originally summoned her.
All she could do was listen to the whispers that filled her mind.
You are mine. You belong to me.
“I must speak to Nicolaus,” she ordered Charmian. “You must find him and bring him to me.”
Drink.
“He’s left the city, lady,” the girl told her hours later. “No one can tell me where he’s gone.”
I hunger.
She’d executed the only other scholar who might have helped her, the Egyptian. She saw his face now, his admonitions against the summoning. Forbidden, he’d said. Forbidden.
The bird quenched her thirst for only a few hours. With Charmian, she had to will herself not to act. Her teeth were razors in her mouth. She clasped her arms about her knees and shook, pressing her spine into the corner of her chamber.
She was a murderess, if not yet, then soon.
It was terrifying, this certainty that she teetered on the verge of losing control. Her entire life had been a study in calculated restraint. Reserve and then seduction. Seduction and then manipulation. The arts of a queen. Only Antony had been exempt. She’d loved him, and that had terrified her, too, at first. Now there was no one to hold her back from doing what the voice wanted her to do. There was no one who loved her enough to save her.
“There’s an old temple near Thebes, where the lions come to drink,” Nicolaus had told her when they’d practiced the ritual. “The sanctuary of Sekhmet. This spell, the scroll says, comes from there.”
The sanctuary was Cleopatra’s only hope, but she was here, a prisoner, and if she broke free? She found herself panicked at what would happen if she went among her people. Here, at least she could do no harm to her citizens, but every night, it was worse. Every night, she grew stronger.
Cleopatra had loved her freedom, loved walking among her people, walking with Antony. They’d spent countless evenings that way, strolling the city, watching the swifts at play in the darkening sky, the queen uncrowned, her hair done in the style of a commoner, and Antony without his armor, his face smudged with dirt, an anonymous Roman soldier. Invisible, or so they fancied themselves. They joked and threw dice, sang in the bars, danced amid the people of Alexandria, with no guards, no gold, nothing but the two of them and the breath between them.
Antony stopped in the midst of a dance one night. His face glowed with love for her, and she drew her cloak over their shoulders and led him from the festivities, out into the street and into an alley. They made love in the half dark, her back pressed against the wall, and she cried with sheer pleasure. This man, king of all she held dear.
Nothing could take him from her, she’d thought then, feeling herself ecstatically in charge of her destiny, powerful, certain. So human, and so foolish.
Now the freedom she’d taken for