Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [43]
Just as her fingers touched him, a centurion appeared behind her child, raised his hands to Caesarion’s throat, and placed them on his perfect skin.
“Kill him!” the crowd screamed, and she tore at the centurion’s tunic, desperate to get to her son before he did. This could not happen. Not this. Not while she watched.
Someone kicked her in the face, throwing her back to the ground, and her eldest child disappeared, dragged into a sea of hungering, murderous bodies as she was dragged in the opposite direction.
She could not reach him.
She saw, fleetingly, pale gray eyes, light hair, a laurel crown, as the emperor fled the platform. He would not even watch what he had set in motion.
She heard the sound of bones giving way as the centurion wrapped his fingers around Caesarion’s throat. She heard her son’s last breath as the Roman broke his neck.
Her howl of agony shook the buildings of the agora, calling the crows in chaos down from the sky, but it did not stop what was happening. It did not stop anything.
20
The boy died quietly, gracefully, in the manner of a king. Octavian was able to watch only a moment of it before he was forced to turn away. It had taken twenty-three thrusts of his betrayers’ daggers to bring Caesarion’s father down, and Caesarion was more a man than Octavian himself, who vomited from the platform as he heard the bones in the boy’s neck shatter.
Then, there was that sound, that unearthly, animal howl, which came from no discernible place, from no discernible person. The crowd boiled before him, and crows filled the sky, circling and shrieking.
Octavian was suddenly aware of how exposed he was.
The crowd erupted before Octavian, rushing toward the body of the boy, and the centurions pulled their leader away, pressed him into a litter, drew the curtains. There was blood on Octavian’s white toga; he could see it, scarlet droplets standing out from the ivory linen.
The queen had not appeared. Where could she be? What army might she be raising against him? Octavian secured an extra slave to taste his food, in case she thought to poison him. It was a faint protection. She could be anywhere. She could be part of his own army, hidden in the guise of a man. He called his troops to order and had them inspected. Agrippa, his only trusted general, tore their tunics from their bodies, revealing all their scars and puckered battle wounds.
She was not among them, though part of the emperor now desired to execute everyone who had accompanied him to Alexandria. Any of them could be guilty of hiding her. Any of them could have been seduced by her magic. They could be plotting against him even now. He well remembered her beauty, echoed in that of her son. Now the son was dead and the mother was not, and Octavian could neither sleep nor eat. Dread overcame him in his bedchamber, and when he sat at his table, his fear of poisoning was too great to allow him to partake of anything more than a dry crust of bread.
He remembered a hideous story involving the queen of Parthia, who had dined in peacetime with an enemy. The enemy, watching the queen’s robust consumption of her meal, had believed he was safe.
He was wrong.
The queen had coated one side of the serving knife with a lethal dose of poison and left the other side clean. When she sliced the meat, the poisoned side calculatedly went to her foe, while she innocently served herself the other half of the dish.
This queen, Octavian’s enemy, was easily as intelligent and crafty. He trusted nothing, not until he was safely ensconced in Rome, though he knew that there was no way to be entirely protected, not even in his own city. How could he have let her escape him? She’d been his, conquered and killed. And yet she lived.
He had let her live, and every moment she lived ensured his death.
He sent patrols in search of her, turning up every paving stone, investigating every secret passage. Agrippa’s men searched the kitchens, the far warrens of the palace