If Usem served Rome and won against Rome’s enemy, he would guarantee his tribe’s independence. Still, the Psylli felt uneasy. He did not trust Augustus. The man had agreed too easily to the bargain.

What if Augustus did not want to destroy Cleopatra? What if he wanted to harness her power instead? Currently, the Psylli might work for whomever they chose, but if the Romans added Cleopatra’s strength to their arsenal, Usem suspected that the emperor would claim the Psylli tribe as his personal poison ministers.

As Usem walked, his dagger in hand, he plotted his course. The best thing would be to find the queen before they did, and take her unaware. When she was dead, he would bring them her body and claim his reward. It did not occur to him to be afraid. The wind traveled with him, kicking up straw and clay dust, dancing into windows and out again, seeking the house that was sheltering her, and the wind was an immortal defender.

The wind whispered into his ear, telling him of the things it saw in Rome, the secrets kept behind grates and up chimneys. One house had a murdered corpse beneath the floorboards. Another had a fortune stuffed into a straw pallet.

The wind entered, finally, at a narrow window and fluttered through the rooms behind the bars. It emerged, and told Usem what it had found therein. A library, filled with all the poems of Rome and Greece. The wind had browsed the pages, flicking through the vellum and papyrus, turning inks to powder and stories to dust.

A woman, said the wind. Perhaps the woman you seek. She is dead.

“Does she move?” Usem asked.

Usem’s snakes emerged to twine around his neck. The serpents looked impassively at the building, and then slithered back into the folds of his garments. The wind began to blow in earnest, swinging the laundry hanging on the lines, spinning the weather vanes on the rooftops, and sending the chickens balancing on the fences up into the air. Usem placed his hand on the door handle, and felt the wind pushing him away from it.

I am not strong enough to protect you, the wind whispered.

Usem hesitated. The wind had never said such a thing before, and he took it seriously. A failed attempt would mean disaster. He would wait until he had more power at his disposal, then, even if it meant trusting in Rome a little longer. He need not fight her alone. There would be legions of soldiers, and the two other sorcerers as well, though Usem was not convinced of their intentions.

He wavered at the doorway, considering again. His dagger had slain many foes in the past. He had done the impossible and survived it, over and over again, though he wished he had his own men behind him, following his commands.

You will not kill her, the wind insisted. You can only die.

A thought occurred to him.

“Where are her children?” he asked the wind.

With the emperor, she answered.

“And her husband?”

The emperor has him, too. The scorn in the wind’s voice manifested as small whirlwinds. Ghosts were creatures of breath and spirit, like the wind itself. Usem could tell that the wind wished to set the shade free.

“That is not our place,” Usem told the wind.

He thought of the legions of soldiers who marched on behalf of the emperor. If he failed here, if he died here, it would be all too easy for them to march upon his people.

For a moment, he wondered if it would be better to let Cleopatra destroy the Romans. With the threat of Rome removed, the world would function as it once had.

Still, the queen had been a conqueror herself. His people had lived beside hers, but Egypt had not always been an easy neighbor. Once she had Rome, she would want more of the world. Once she had that, she would want everything.

At least the emperor was mortal, and he had sworn to the bargain. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to barter for independence. Usem could not let it go. He turned back to the Palatine, his cloak whipped about by the wind.

You must not trust him, the wind insisted. He lies.

“Then I will lie, too,” he finally said as he entered the house and made his way down the corridor to his room.

The wind left him then and made its way through the residence, slipping beneath doors and through windows, listening to conversations, exploring hearts.

She heard noise from down the hall, and paused. She was surely not supposed to be roaming the emperor’s house. In Alexandria, a nursemaid would have followed her. In Julia’s room, there were two women stationed to tend to the girl’s every need. Here, no longer the daughter of a queen, Selene had strange freedom. She pressed her back against the wall, breathing shallowly, but it was too late.

At the end of the passage, a door opened, and a beautiful woman stepped out, smiling.

“I thought everyone was sleeping,” she said. “Everyone but you and I, it seems.”

The girl hesitated, on the verge of running back to her bedchamber.

“There is nothing to fear. I am a guest here, too. You are daughter to Cleopatra, named after her, are you not?” the woman asked.

“No. My name is Selene, and I am a Roman now,” Selene said, stumbling slightly over the words. “My parents are dead. I am no longer anyone’s daughter.”

“You cannot change your parentage so easily,” the woman said, smiling. “Your blood is royal. There is no need to apologize for that. It is a precious thing, not a shameful one. You are a precious thing, though they may treat you like a prisoner.”

“They don’t treat me like a prisoner,” the girl protested. “No one watches me at all. I can do as I please here.”

Chrysate stepped into the hallway. It would not do to let the girl see the shade of her father, his angry spirit kept in her rooms.

A bouquet of wildflowers appeared in the priestess’s hand, and Selene gasped in delight.

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.

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 rested in Auðr.

She was seized with a spasm of coughing, raw and painful, and when it finally ended, her hands were spattered with blood. She felt about on the tapestry, testing the strength of her own thread. Cleopatra was coming, no matter the seiðkona’s health. Without the distaff, Auðr could be of little use.

She opened the door into the corridor and made her way through the marble complex. As she walked, she brushed aside the threads belonging to all those who lived in Rome. Her own thread was knotted with these destinies, its golden span tangled and braided in ways she had not imagined it could be. She might ensure the fall or the rise of Rome with her actions here. She might break bloodlines, or make them. Most of all, she might find the source of the chaos, the thing that was twisting the pattern, the reason she’d come.

The queen, and whatever it was that twined with her.

Cleopatra’s fate rippled, a strong strand, weaving itself against the souls of those in this house. She was coming, then. She had decided to act.

The seiðkona found a barely bearded youth standing uneasily against a wall. Her distaff was inside the room he guarded. She bent her back, a crippled old woman in need of an arm to hold. As the youth approached her, she worked a small magic.

The boy smiled upon her and opened the door.