Even the asp was there for the children to see, coiled in a corner where it had been trapped. Selene, for a moment, had wanted to run to the black thing, to grip its head and plunge its glistening mouth into the soft flesh of her own neck, to let it drink its fill of blood even as she drank of its terrible venom, but the desire for revenge had steeled her against such a surrender. As they watched, Octavian took from among his guard a spear. Then, with slow steps that echoed in that stony place, he walked to the corner and drove the sharpened point into the writhing, hissing creature.
* * *
Cleopatra Selene—daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, once heir to the great Ptolemaic empire of Egypt, now adopted daughter to the very man who’d brought her family to such ruin—awoke from her nightmares, gasping and reaching for the dead: her mother, her father, her brothers.
She found, instead, another young man, a year older than herself, who recoiled from her clutching fingers. As he shrank back, the flickering lamp-shadows around the bed swallowed his gentle features, but it took only a glance for Selene to recognize Tiberius, the boy she’d fallen asleep waiting for this night, the stepson to the man who, she reminded herself, was no longer to be called Octavian. Among everything else that had happened this day, the man who had all but officially ended the Republic—who’d already been accorded the title of Emperor Caesar, son of God—had been declared by the Senate “Augustus”: the Illustrious One.
Augustus Caesar. Much though the thought of her adopted father made her ill, Selene had to admit that the name had a certain ring to it. Not unlike the name of Augustus’ adoptive father—Caesarion’s blood father, she couldn’t help noting to herself—Julius Caesar. The Romans had made Julius into a god. Would they do the same for Augustus?
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Tiberius said, stirring Selene back out of her dark thoughts. “You looked like you were having another bad dream.”
Another. Selene concentrated on breathing deep, allowing her heartbeat to slow. In the two and a half years since her world had ended, hardly a night had passed without a dream of the horrors. Walking with the basket to see Mother. Staring into those unblinking eyes. Trembling in that Roman prison. The smiths coming to their cell with their gritty, blackened hands to fasten the golden fetters to their wrists and ankles, to their necks—collars and chains of their mother’s Egyptian gold melted down and made into the very signs of the subjugation of her children, her kingdom.
Selene rubbed at her wrists as if she could feel the weight of the metal on her skin even now. “It’s fine,” she said. “Just a dream. I must’ve fallen asleep waiting.”
Tiberius smiled in the shadows. “That’s all right. I was just glad you were, um, dressed.”
Though she was, as always, uncertain if there was some romantic interest behind his comment, Selene took it as mocking play and she rolled her eyes. After all, they both knew they were promised for others. Tiberius was arranged to be married to Agrippa’s eight-year-old daughter, Vipsania. And rumors were already swirling that Selene would be married to Juba the Numidian sooner rather than later. “I’m dressed enough,” she said, slipping out of bed and lacing up her best sandals. Then she stood and shrugged her shoulders as if to unencumber herself of the memory of her dead mother and the promises for revenge that she kept hidden even from Tiberius. “No one saw you, did they?”
Tiberius gave her a look of mock anger. “No. Of course not,” he said, trying to sound exasperated. “So why’d you want to sneak out tonight, anyway? I think the whole city is drunk or passed out.” He yawned. “I could use more sleep myself.”
The festivities to celebrate Augustus Caesar and his acclamation by the Senate had, indeed, overtaken Rome. This night more than any other, the city would be quiet and still, and the usual fun of their nocturnal walks would be taken away. Selene looked over to the curtains that were pulled shut across the balcony. The rich cloth rocked to the moving air outside as if pushed by the touch of unseen hands. “You’ll see,” she said.
Tiberius was wearing a good traveling outfit that would keep him warm but still enable him to move easily: a necessity for climbing down from her balcony, among other things. She had already donned something similar, but she went over to her chest and quickly rifled through it to produce the shoulder bag she’d managed to make from the soft and gentle cloth of one of her old Egyptian dresses. Royal linen.
“What’s that for?” Tiberius asked.
“A Shard,” Selene whispered, feeling the small but heavy stone statue inside the bag and thinking how maybe after tonight she’d have no more nightmares. Maybe after tonight she’d dream of Caesar in golden chains, Caesar in sackcloth, Caesar begging her for mercy. It would take time to master the Shard, but she was certain she could be patient. Once she’d learned that killing Octavian wouldn’t be enough to sate her thirst for vengeance, after all—once she’d learned, as Juba had before her, that true vengeance meant destroying Rome itself—she’d lived among his family in his house, never once making an attempt on his life. Yes, she could be patient. Even with the Shard, she could bide her time. Find it, take it, master it. Then strike.
“What did you say?” Tiberius asked.
Selene turned back to look at her friend, smiling at possibilities he could never understand, possibilities he would surely think treasonous, even if he had his own reasons to hate Octavian. First things first, though: she had to get it. And if she was going to slip inside the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, the keepers of Rome’s eternal fire and its most sacred relics, she was going to need his help. “I told you,” she said, lifting the bag with its hidden statue to her shoulder. “You’ll see.”
* * *
From Augustus’ house on the crest of Palatine Hill they moved through the quiet, darkened streets, shadow to shadow, ever downward toward the ancient Forum. Tiberius was quiet, as he so often was, and Selene was glad for it. Her mind was on the Shard.
She still found it difficult to believe that one of the Shards of Heaven had been here, in Rome, all this time. How often had she walked past the House of the Vestals, past the ever-burning fire of their temple, not realizing that a piece of her vengeance was so close for the taking? Staggered at the thought of it, she’d had to ask Vergilius to repeat himself at a dinner with old Varro two months earlier, when he’d made an offhand comment that he was planning to mention the Palladium in the poem he was writing in honor of the man who’d restored the glory of Rome, the man soon to be Augustus. Yes, Vergilius had assured her. That Palladium. The statue of the goddess Pallas Athena that had such mysterious power that its presence alone had kept the Greeks at bay during their decades-long siege of Troy. Stolen from the city by Ulysses, the Palladium, the poet said, had eventually been brought to Rome by Aeneas—the Trojan exile and legendary founder of Rome who was the hero of Vergilius’ poem in progress—and the artifact now rested under the protection of the Vestals.
Conversation at the dinner had gone on as if the foreign-born girl had never interrupted, but to Selene it was as if the gods of old—gods she had become certain did not exist—had inexplicably handed her the key to her vengeance. Sitting in the Great Library of Alexandria so many years earlier—before the fall of their city, when her brothers were still alive, when she still thought herself, in the tradition of the pharaohs, a goddess on the earth—she’d listened to Caesarion, their tutor Didymus, and a now-dead Jew discuss the Shards of Heaven.