The Shards of Heaven. It was hard for her to imagine a time when she had never heard of the fragments of divine power that had been cast out across Creation when the angels—there’d been a time she’d not heard of them, either—tried to open a gate to the highest heaven by giving up the greatest gift of God, the gift He’d given of himself: their souls. Caesarion had died in the struggle over the Jewish Ark of the Covenant, one of the most powerful of the Shards. Her husband-to-be, Juba, had held two more: the Aegis of Zeus and the Trident of Poseidon—the latter now kept under the personal control of Augustus. And here, now, was the fourth and final Shard she’d learned about on that distant morning in the Great Library. The Palladium.
Her mother had defined herself by men: first by Julius Caesar, then, after his death, by Selene’s father, Mark Antony. Looking back, Selene could see how Cleopatra had never really had control of her own destiny.
“Not me,” Selene whispered to herself as she turned off the paved path, skirting through a shoulder-breadth alley between stone buildings. With the Shard, she’d have power her dead mother could never have imagined. With the Shard, she could be her husband’s equal. And if he joined his power to hers—if they gathered the Shards once more—their shared power would reshape the world. Destroy their Roman enemies. Achieve vengeance for them both. Juba had been meant to rule Numidia before Rome seized it, after all, before he, too, had been left an orphan in the house of his family’s conquerors.
The alley emptied out into the sacred grove that spread across the base of the Palatine Hill, its darkness thick and deep, impervious to the slight sliver of moon in the sky. Selene forged onward until she felt the stands of growth closing in all around her. When she stopped, Tiberius stumbled into her back.
“What are you stopping for?” he asked, voice quiet in the hushed wood. He moved around through the grassy, winter-dried underbrush between the trees to stand beside her. “And why are we going this way? Thought you wanted to go down to the Forum.”
Selene looked around and saw nothing but silent trees in front of her and the black expanses marking walls behind. The air was chilled, but not unbearably so, and it smelled of earth and dried leaves. It was as good a place as any to tell him what he had to know. “Not to the Forum in particular, no,” Selene said, crouching down to the ground and keeping her voice at a conspiratorial hush.
Tiberius crouched down, too: close, but not too close. “So? Where?”
“The Vestals.”
Even in the shadows of the wood she saw his eyes widen, and he seemed to lean back from her slightly. “Vestals?”
“That’s right,” she said, trying to keep her tone even, as if she wasn’t talking about potential treason. “I want to get into the Temple of the Vestals.”
Tiberius blinked. She imagined him trying to decide if she was joking. “Why?”
For weeks she’d rehearsed this exchange in her mind, knowing she couldn’t get what she wanted without his help but knowing, too, that there was no way he would help her. So now, when the moment came, the words flowed easily enough. “You remember the Triumph, don’t you? Octavian’s Triumph after Alexandria?” Of course he did. She remembered him, after all. She remembered how he rode in his stepfather’s chariot, waving happily at the adulating crowds, looking down at the suffering, burlap-clad children of Cleopatra as if they were slaves, not high-born royalty once worshipped as gods. Though they’d never spoken of that day, Selene had always felt his fear that she might remember him from it. She’d felt his guilt and held fast to it, preserving the favor that it would provide even if she didn’t know what that favor might be. When Vergilius revealed the Palladium’s presence in Rome, she’d known the time for using Tiberius’ decent humanity against him had come. “You do remember, don’t you?”
Her adopted brother seemed to sigh back into even deeper shadows, his shoulders rising or his face falling, she couldn’t tell which. “Yes.”
“Octavian—Augustus—took something from me that day.”
“Your kingdom,” Tiberius whispered, the words hardly audible.
“Yes. My home. My pride. My hope. My family.” She let that last phrase sink in for a moment, knowing how Augustus had taken Tiberius’ own father from him when he’d forced Livia to divorce because he lusted after her. “But that’s not it, Tiberius. He took something else away, too.” Selene shifted her crouch, bringing her shoulder bag around so that she could grip the statue inside. She held it up, though she didn’t expose it.
“What’s that?”
“A statue,” Selene said, focusing her eyes on it to help steady her nerves through the lie. “They sell them down in the market and I bought one. It’s of Horus.”
“Horus?”
“An Egyptian god, son of Isis and Osiris. My older brother, Caesarion, was thought to be the living Horus.”
“I … I don’t understand,” Tiberius said. His voice sounded deeply hurt. The guilt all coming back, Selene imagined.
“This statue is a replica of one that Augustus gave to the Vestals. It’s a statue he took from my home. It belonged to Caesarion, and I want it back. More than anything in the world.”
“You want to steal it?”
Selene imagined him picturing the high cliff of the Tarpeian Rock at the other end of the Forum, the promontory from which traitors to Rome were thrown, headfirst, onto the stones below, where they were torn apart by the crowds whether the fall killed them or not. “He stole it,” she said, her voice both stern and hurt. “It’s rightfully mine.” She let a few tears fall, hoping that they would catch the scant moonlight on her cheeks. “It’s all that’s left.”
Tiberius was silent for a long time. A slight breeze rustled the trees around them, making the tiniest of singing sounds in the branches. Selene took a hand from the still-covered statue to wipe her cheeks. Whatever he said next, she hoped it wasn’t that he wanted to see it.
“So you want me to help you get into the … gods … the Vestal Temple so you can take back the statue and … what? Replace it with that one?”
“I … I guess so. No one would ever know,” Selene said, letting her words start to spill out as she fell into the role of the thoughtless girl. It always made men feel more comfortable, more in control. “Roman sculptors have told me that they need only see a thing once to reproduce it perfectly. The Horus statue has often been on display. And it was real simple. I remember it exactly, and no one would be able to tell the difference between the real thing and this fake one. No one but me.”
Tiberius let out his breath. “This could kill us both,” he said. “It’s sacrilege.”
“I’m not going to put out the sacred fire,” Selene said. “And I’m not asking you to sleep with one of the Virgins. And no one will know, anyway.”
“But if someone—”
“No one will find out. Even if they did, I’d tell them you didn’t know what I was doing.”
“I don’t know, Selene.”
The pleading tone in his voice was all Selene needed to hear to know that she’d won, that he’d do it, and she had to fight back a sigh of relief. She’d been prepared, after all, to offer him much more than guilt in return for his compliance, the sort of thing her mother, she was sure, would have tried first. But then, Selene wasn’t her mother. She was better than that. “It’ll be easy,” she said, using her gentlest voice. “I’ve got a plan.”
* * *
From the far corner of the House of the Vestals, near the abomination of an arch that Augustus had built to celebrate his triumph over her parents, Selene looked eastward down the Forum, past the round, column-encircled Vestal Temple with the telltale plume of gray smoke rising slowly from its crown, to where Tiberius was approaching through plazas filled more with litter than with people. Where mingling crowds and noise would typically reign, she saw only a handful of citizens shuffling along the paths or talking in small groups. From their shuffling steps or their overloud talk, it appeared that most of them were drunk on the free libations of the night, just as she’d hoped. And not one of them was taking any notice of Tiberius, who was moving slowly but steadily—building up his nerves, she thought—now passing between the stretching length of the House of the Vestals and the Regia, where the high priest of Rome was supposed to live. The latter was empty now, Selene knew, because Lepidus has been exiled by Octavian years earlier—allowed to keep the title, but not the power. A rare act of mercy. Selene wondered if he, too, desired the emperor dead.