Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [61]
“Where are the rest?” Nicolaus asked.
Cleopatra moved her hand to indicate the hole in the ship’s side. There was, Nicolaus noticed now, a shred of fabric clinging to the splintered wood.
The sharks. Nicolaus understood it suddenly, the mass of silver flesh tracing the route of the vessel.
“If you knew me once, then help me now,” she said.
Nicolaus stepped back. He did not want what she had to give him.
Cleopatra pulled the cloth in her arms aside and revealed the face of a small boy, perhaps four years old. Ashen cheeks, dark, knotted hair.
The child’s eyes opened and he looked at Nicolaus, terrified. The historian snatched him from Cleopatra. The boy was unwounded.
“This was his mother.” She touched a corpse with her fingertips. “My hands were on him, when I realized.”
She opened her fists and revealed long scores in the flesh.
The grief on the monster’s face crippled Nicolaus with guilt. She was not wholly a monster. He could see the Cleopatra he had known, still inside.
“I would not kill a child. You must believe me. She takes my body, and she hungers. I thought I was strong enough to resist her.”
The historian wrestled with his soul. He’d helped to do this. She was here because of him.
Sekhmet cared nothing for gold, nothing for gems. All she desired was blood. Once she began to kill, she could not stop. That was her nature. Cleopatra had killed not of her own volition but because he’d translated that spell, translated it badly, and summoned the goddess with no protections for the summoner.
Had he not, the queen would have been dead and buried these months. Had he not, Nicolaus would never have found himself aboard this vessel, hunted by Romans, a criminal.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“My children are in Rome with the emperor. Help me find them. He killed my husband. He killed my son. He killed me.”
“And yet you live.”
“Then you do not know what the living are.”
She grabbed Nicolaus’s hand and placed it on her breast. He tried to pull away from her, but she held him there until he felt the absence of her heartbeat.
“I will help you,” he managed.
5
Auðr was kneeling beside a bed deep in the northern forest, when she heard the legionaries approaching. The girl she was tending gasped, her swollen belly bluish and rigid, the pallet beneath her soaked with blood, and Auðr hissed in frustration. The horses outside were distracting, and she needed all her powers for this. Her arms trembled with tension. Too much time had passed.
Outside the doorway, snow drifted over the pines. In her own land, the gods came in the northern lights, glancing their fires across the skies, spinning clouds from their looms, singing with the thunder. Here, they did not even know that her homeland existed. Oceanus, they called it, as though it were not a true place, as though the water stretched to cover the world apart from them. Still, she had been here for years, had come across the ocean to this forest. Her part in the pattern had dictated that she place herself here. The sound of hooves on the frozen land was distinct, and Auðr cursed quietly. She had not expected the Romans so soon.
Auðr was a fate spinner, a seiðkona, but for the first time in her life, she was unable to see the entirety of the future. Something grave had changed in the world, and for months she’d tried in vain to understand what it was. She knew only that there were torn threads in the pattern, a dark disturbance in the tapestry of time.
Destruction and bloodshed, old gods rising.
Death.
If all humanity was fated to die or to descend into pain and chaos, it was not the place of a seiðkona to try to change it, Auðr knew; she was not supposed to interfere in the fate of the world, but she could not stop herself. Though she was not as strong as she had been in her youth, Auðr had spent her life keeping chaos