Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [65]
Auðr’s head suddenly whipped to face the woman in black. The old woman hissed in surprise.
“What is it?” Agrippa asked the fate spinner, stumbling over her guttural language.
The seiðkona shook her head, her fingers twitching. Agrippa followed her stare, his face scanning the crowd until it landed on two travelers. Something about the man was familiar, and the woman, too. The way her arm moved, the way her feet seemed scarcely to touch the earth, caught his attention. There was a strange grace about her.
Agrippa’s eyes narrowed and he took a step in their direction, but as he did, the man took the woman roughly in his arms and kissed her.
Agrippa’s attention faded. She was nothing, a whore or a slave, and no business of Marcus Agrippa’s. He was overdue in Rome. Besides, the woman she reminded him of was long dead. Agrippa laughed at himself. The way his heart raced, you would think he’d seen a ghost.
Agrippa’s company marched on, only Auðr looking back. She’d seen something in that woman’s eyes. Something old and dark and familiar.
The seiðkona had seen its like only once before, when she was a girl of thirteen, sold as an unwilling talisman to an exploring ship, but she had never forgotten it. Her ship had capsized in a storm, leaving none but Auðr alive, clinging to a piece of wreckage in the middle of an icy ocean. At last, certain she was dying, she saw something in the waters: a great eye, a long and whirling tail, a creature like the dragon her ship had been carved in imitation of.
The monster hung there in the blue depths, and she looked into the eye for what seemed like thousands of years, seeing its history, a world of water, a melting sea. Worshipped by sailors and by kings, and then forgotten.
She had seen a god living deep beneath the world. An Old One, something from before the beginning. She felt herself falling into darkness and gave herself over, but the god sent her back.
She had stumbled onto the foreign shore, clutching only her seiðstafr, which she’d tied tightly into the cords of her dress as the ship had gone down. Alive. She had not known why, not then, but she knew there was a reason.
The universe worked according to its own laws. She was meant for something, some great task.
This task. She wished it had come sooner, when she was stronger, but the Fates had their own timing.
Auðr whispered to herself, twisting the threads of fate between her fingers as she was pulled through the marketplace and toward the emperor.
A moment later, the scholar and the queen parted from their embrace, and within a few steps, they and the child disappeared completely into the crowds and chaos of Rome.
8
Cleopatra caught her breath, trying to control herself as Nicolaus turned away. The scholar’s kiss had awoken her hunger, and now she wanted only to be away from him before she did something she would regret.
He wanted to be away from her as well; she could feel it. He wanted to run, but he had promised he would help her. His brave words were false. Nicolaus trembled before her, and yet he managed to turn his back on her, pushing through the throngs, wending their way through the slender, dusty streets of Rome, the child sleeping in his arms.
She had no pity for him. He was the one who’d insisted they depart the ship at dusk and walk into a sea of people, the sights and sounds of Rome, the animals flanking them, the whores and sailors. She could see only the back of his neck as he led her through the crowd, the slender vertebrae above the scholar’s cloak. It would be easy. The rope between them was pulled taut. He was already tied to her, though to observers, it would look as if she was tied to him, his property, his slave.
It would seem to the crowd that he was a trainer and she was his beast, a lion barely tamed by a leash, she thought, bristling, and then remembered that she was not a lioness but a woman.
“Never do that again,” she managed to say. “Never touch