Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [62]
She was far from her home, far from her people, and she had broken the rules.
Two days before, she’d irrevocably transgressed by braiding the threads of her own fate to the ones that began the tangle.
Before her, the girl’s head lolled back, her eyes rolling like those of a terrified animal. The seiðkona curled her aching fingers about her distaff, her seiðstafr, twisting and arranging the threads of destiny about the girl and her child as quickly as she could. The girl screamed, and then writhed, arching up from the bed, her body controlled by Auðr’s power.
The fate spinner caught the baby between her hands. A girl child. Still. Pale as a fish. Lips and eyelids deep blue. No spark of life there, no heartbeat.
She’d been dead three hours, perhaps longer.
Pounding on the door, shouting, horses. The seiðkona clenched her hand around the distaff. Her fingers worked, reweaving the child’s threads into a new pattern. Everyone had a place in the tapestry, and this soul would have one. She would have a life filled with ordinary miracles. The seiðkona would give it to her. It would be the last thing she did in these woods.
Auðr pressed the baby’s lips to her lips and said one word, breathing it into the infant’s mouth, just as the door of the hut burst open, and the soldiers swarmed in, shouting. The new mother screamed, and the seiðkona looked up, seeing only the silhouettes of the men against the door frame.
A pair of hands dragged Auðr from the hut. Someone threw her onto the horse’s back, ripping her leather cloak and tearing her hood from her white braids.
From inside the hut, the baby’s wail rose up, frail at first and then stronger. Hearing it, the seiðkona smiled, but a sharp object hit her hard in the skull, and that was all she knew.
Hours later, light slashed into her eyes, and she found herself sitting bound in the saddle—the smell of leather, the salted scent of horseflesh—an armored man behind her.
The soldiers came at her own request, though they did not know it. Auðr’s manipulation of the fates had ensured that she’d soon be in the center of the darkness, a part of whatever would happen there. She would die there, she knew. There was no other choice.
Blood trickled from the wound on her forehead, dropping onto the pale skin of her thigh. The man’s hand moved on her waist, and she bared her teeth to growl.
“She wakes,” he said, his command of the forest language rudimentary at best. “I am Marcus Agrippa, and you are summoned to Rome.”
6
The sun blazed down upon the emperor’s head, burning his scalp. His chariot was pulled by four white horses, and the laurel wreath was on his head, his gold-embroidered toga perfectly arranged over his tunic. He looked evenly, confidently over the Roman crowd, as though he did not imagine an enemy in their midst, as though he did not expect the world to shake and the city around him to crumble. If a horrible, unnatural war were coming, Octavian needed his allies to believe that his power had been granted by the gods.
Where was Marcus Agrippa? He and the legionaries had gone across the world in all directions to find the assistance Octavian needed, but months had passed and there’d been no word from any of them. What if Agrippa had encountered her? It was Octavian’s fault. He’d been too cowardly to tell his general of Cleopatra’s resurrection.
Octavian smiled tightly and processed forward into Rome, behind the conquered corpse of Egypt’s queen. A sculptor had rendered the image of the dead Cleopatra, incredibly lifelike, an asp clasped to her breast. She was carried on a flowery pyre, and her twins walked on either side of it, holding heavy chains, the younger son at the front. Selene moved regally, her hair loose and straight down her back. There was no grief on that face. It might as well have been carved of the same marble her mother’s was.
It was a cruel irony. Mark Antony, who had no need for heirs, had fathered at least