Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [76]
The flowers transformed before her eyes into a bouquet of songbirds, their feathers jeweled in every color of the sunrise, every color of the ocean, every color of the deepening end of the rainbow. In spite of her uncertainty, Selene was flooded with desire. The colors in them reminded her of home.
Chrysate smiled hungrily at the girl. Nothing in the scry had indicated that she might find a child of royal blood in Rome, orphaned. The child was everything Chrysate had been once, long ago. She was everything Chrysate would be again. Selene would be the missing piece of Hecate’s summoning.
It had taken most of Chrysate’s remaining power to bring Mark Antony from the Underworld, and she was significantly diminished. The gods of the dead did not approve of such transactions, and shades tended to descend back to Hades the moment their summoner released hold. Once, she would have sacrificed an entire animal as part of her spell, a black-fleeced ram. Now, with her patroness Hecate so weakened, a drop of her own blood was all she could spare to bind Antony to her, and she was not sure that it would be enough. The holding stone was a precautionary measure until she regained her strength.
Chrysate was limited by her depletion, and so this final spell, bringing the birds out of nothingness, conjuring them out of feathers and words to woo the girl, was a slow-acting dream, a soothing song, the most rudimentary of love spells.
It would do what was needed, however, even if it took more time than Chrysate desired. The body the priestess occupied had been used for much too long, but gifts such as these had to be willing or the spells would fail.
“Selene,” she purred. “These birds came all the way from Greece to sing to you. Would you deny them?”
The birds opened their golden throats and sang.
The wind flickered down the hall, listening as the songbirds sang to Selene of poisons drenched in honey, of corpses dancing beneath starry lights, of bears raising themselves up onto their haunches to orate, and of the moon, dipping itself into blood and drowning there.
All these words were sweetly sung, but the wind heard the darkness in them and watched as Selene walked toward Chrysate, entranced, her hands outstretched for the bouquet.
The seiðkona, locked in her chamber, was suddenly alert. Currents of power whipped about the building, slithering down hallways, simmering over hearths, broiling beneath flesh, scalding to the bone. The magic of night and of day. She could feel both sorts. Someone in the house was casting a love spell. The wind was wandering the hallways, and below the ground, the currents of cold fire and death were massing.
Auðr’s head spun to the window, but she could see nothing.
Without her distaff, she had not been able to accurately divine the other witch’s roles in the events to come. The man was here for the money, she assumed. Rome was rich in Egypt’s gold, and the Psylli would be paid his weight in it if his services proved useful. The woman was here for other reasons. The threads of her fate, the ones the seiðkona could see, were barbed and bloodied. Chrysate served an old god. It was she who had summoned the dead and set them to intervene in the affairs of the living.
The seiðkona smiled. This was not a bad thing. A soul whose thread had been cut was now restored to the tapestry, and its presence changed the pattern. It might be useful.
Auðr stretched her arms out in front of her body, gazing on the knots that bound her wrists. Panting with exertion, she watched as the ropes gracefully unlooped themselves and fell to the floor. Her captors had not understood her nature. She was a spinner of fates, and the strings of destiny obeyed her. The ropes they’d bound her with were just another form of thread, just another sort of spinning. Her fingers stretched like the legs of a spider, kept too long twisted about a web.
Her distaff was under guard, somewhere nearby. She could feel it, if she could not see it.
Now that she had seen Cleopatra, she knew that she would need it. If there was any hope at all, it