Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [82]
“I told you! I saw visions in her eyes, Agrippa, visions of dark things! She’s a serpent! A lioness! Her daughter swears she and the tutor summoned something in Alexandria, something powerful, and I saw blood—”
“Now that I know what I am to fight, we will defeat her,” Agrippa interrupted. “She is only a woman. A single enemy who has lost everything she once had. She has no army, no weapons, no friends beyond the tutor. We’ll hold a venatio tomorrow night and trap her in the Circus Maximus. What could be better than an arena, enclosed, with a moat about its edge and lined with my soldiers? We’ll capture her easily, and this time we will kill her.”
“And how will we attract her there?”
“Her children,” said Agrippa.
“She did not oppose us when we executed Caesarion. If we use only the children, we will fail.”
“She is their mother,” Agrippa insisted. “Think of our beginnings, when everyone in Rome thought we would fail in attacking Caesar’s assassins. We did not fail. Look around you.”
Augustus looked around the room, at the trappings of an emperor. It all looked fragile. He thought of his great-uncle, stabbed twenty-three times at the height of his power, by men he called friends. Augustus felt dizzy.
“We won those battles when we were boys,” he said. “And now we have much more to lose.”
“Not today,” Agrippa said. “We fight a woman and a scholar.”
“We’ll have the witches,” Augustus said, remembering, with relief, his defenders.
“I do not recommend that,” Agrippa said. “We will bring what Cleopatra loves, and bait the trap with it. My soldiers are well trained.”
“Her husband,” Augustus said, his voice suddenly taking on a liveliness it had not previously possessed. “Antony is what she desires.”
Agrippa was certain that the vision Augustus swore the Greek witch had produced was merely a trick, a creature made of smoke. Nevertheless, such a skill might prove useful.
“Yes,” he agreed, a concession. “We will offer Cleopatra her husband.”
14
The shadow detached itself from the stones and moved invisibly along the wall, slipping out beneath the door of the emperor’s bedchamber.
They all thought he was a hopeless wisp of soul, locked in the Greek priestess’s rooms, but they were wrong.
As Chrysate slept, exhausted by the spells she’d cast, a wind had gusted suddenly into the room, whipping at the witch’s coverlet. The holding stone fell loose in her hand, and Antony was free, at least until she woke. It was well that Chrysate’s chambers were far from the emperor’s. She had not wakened when Selene screamed.
The witch did not know as much as she thought she did about shades. Antony was no one’s servant. She’d told them he could be deployed at Rome’s whim, his price a droplet of blood, his memory emptied of all his old grievances, but Antony had not forgotten who he was. Though he’d spent months in the Underworld, he’d repeated Cleopatra’s name over and over, willing himself to remember even as he watched spirits fumbling toward the rivers, seeking to forget the ones they’d loved, the lives they’d lost.
His heart filled with fury as he thought of the things he’d overheard. The false messenger sent by Augustus to swear that Cleopatra was dead. The bribes paid by Augustus to sway the Egyptian army and tear them from Antony’s service. The fact that Augustus had knowingly buried Cleopatra alive.
The fact that she still lived. Antony paid no attention to the other things Augustus swore, the visions he said he’d seen in Cleopatra’s eyes. They were the visions of a coward. If he had been as