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By Root 812 0

shivered, noticing the chill of the marble beneath her feet. The blood welling over her fingertips was the warmest thing in the room. She was alone in the mausoleum she’d built with Antony, the safest and most secure location in the city, or so she hoped. Cleopatra’s two handmaidens kept watch over the stairs that led to the second floor of the structure, though there was little need for that. The crypt, designed not just for burial but as a fortress, was two stories high, and the lower floor had no windows or doors, just thick, smooth stone walls. The top floor had only one entrance, a barred window some forty lengths above a man’s head, accessible only from the interior. The place was unfinished—Cleopatra and Antony had not expected to need it so soon—but it was complete enough to be formidable.

All the treasures of Alexandria were piled around her, the entirety of Egypt’s war chest, along with firepots, papyrus, and wood, stacked from end to end of the chamber, the better to kindle the flames should things not go as Cleopatra planned.

Everything was ready. Everything but Antony, who was somewhere outside the city walls, stubbornly fighting a last, hopeless battle against the invaders. He belonged here, beside her, but time had run out. Two hours before, she’d sent a messenger running across the city to tell her husband that all was not lost, to bid him join her, but Antony had not come.

She could not let herself think about what that might mean.

She’d woken up beside him that morning, and for a moment, looking at the lines in his sleeping face, at the gray in his beard, at the scars and bruises on his body, she felt more woman than queen. The past year had aged Antony, and where Cleopatra had always seen his courage and strength, she now saw his mortality. The time for hesitation was past, and yet, as she thought of the day ahead, of the power she planned to invoke, her heart raced with uncertainty.

Cleopatra had not told Antony what she planned to do. She knew he would not approve, and there was no time to argue with him. She was the queen. The decisions were hers alone. This was her home country, not his.

Looking at him beside her in the bed, however, she’d suddenly felt very foolish, wondering if this would be the last day she held her children, the last day she kissed her husband. She sought to summon powers unseen in thousands of years. What if she did not succeed?

Cleopatra nearly shook Antony awake with a plan to flee and take their children with them. As she put her hand on his chest to wake him, though, he opened his eyes.

“We will win this war,” he told her, and smiled.

His resolve brought her duties back to her, her responsibilities to the kingdom, to her people, to her crown. Of course she could not flee. She was the queen. She must save the kingdom.

She helped Antony don his armor, kissed him good-bye, and went to her throne room to meet with her advisors as though this were a day like any other, instead of a day on which she might lose everything.

The advisors urged her to send her ancestral crown out to the conqueror, but she refused. Instead, she made a public sacrifice to assure Octavian that she was on the verge of giving Alexandria over to him. Goat. Her nostrils curled at the smell of its blood. There was no question of surrender, but it was in her interest to suggest that there was.

Now Cleopatra felt like vomiting, whether from fear or anticipation, she did not know. She’d be the first in thousands of years to perform this spell, such as it was. There were pieces missing from it, and Nicolaus, the scholar who’d translated the spell, had guessed at them. She only hoped he was right.

The scholar had refused to accompany her to the mausoleum, insisting nervously that there was no role in the spell for him. He was not wrong, she reminded herself. No one but she could perform this sacrifice. She was the ruler, the pharaoh. It was hers to do, reserved for royalty, and if it ended badly—

She must not lose courage now.

In the darkness of the siege, Cleopatra had remembered the stories of the