Once inside the palace, the guards moved them efficiently toward the royal rooms, and Selene felt her heart beating harder. They were going to their mother’s chamber. She wasn’t meeting them in the hall. She’d summoned them to her private room. Why? What was going on?
Down twisting corridors, from lamp to lamp, they walked in silent parade. Philadelphus was awake now, but he clung to Kemse, sensing the foreboding anxiety in the air. Helios coughed once or twice, the rattling hacks shockingly loud in the tomb-silent halls.
And then they were there. The guard leading them knocked lightly on the door, but Selene didn’t need to strain to hear her mother’s strong-voiced reply. “Come.”
The guard paused for a moment at the threshold before he pushed open the door, his body bowing low and out of their way as he did so.
Kemse gasped and almost violently pulled Philadelphus to her as the little boy cried out in horror. Helios croaked out the word “Father” before his voice was broken off by his sobs.
Selene just stared, disbelieving what she was seeing even as her heart told her she could have expected nothing less. Their mother, Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, the living embodiment of a god, had obviously been roused from her bed in mid-sleep. Her short-cropped hair was messed, and she was wearing nothing but her night linens. She’d collapsed as soon as she’d stepped from her bed, and she’d fallen back against the cushions at the foot of it, her night linens twisted obscenely by her position, exposing her glistening right breast in the lamplight. Her face was streaked with tears and blood. In her arms, his head dangling lifeless off her elbow, was their father, Mark Antony, once general of Rome. His torn shirt had been pulled closed, but nothing could be done to hide the wide red stain spread out across his abdomen, or the thicker gobs of red that dangled from his fingertips above the pools of blood on the floor and on Cleopatra’s naked legs.
Through the gore, their mother’s face was serene. She smiled in a look that made something knot in Selene’s gut. “Children,” Cleopatra said, “our beloved father has left us.”
Kemse was trying to turn Philadelphus to look at his divine mother, but the little boy was fighting her in his sobbing urgency to bury his face against the nurse. Helios had slumped against the wall, his eyes staring at everything and nothing all at once.
“Be not sad,” Cleopatra continued. Her voice sounded far away. “This is how a king should die. In honor, not in chains. In happiness, not in misery.”
Selene saw how their father’s face was twisted in the agony of his death. A shiver ran up her spine, tamping down the sobs that welled up in her throat.
“He told me that he loved you all. He asked me to see him buried with full Roman honor before we joined him.”
Selene’s heart skipped a beat. Philadelphus looked up through Kemse’s arms, their mother’s words reaching him through his horror. “Join him?” Helios asked, his voice breaking.
Cleopatra looked at him as if he were a far younger child. “Yes, prince of Egypt. None of us are meant for chains.”
Something broke in Selene. She wailed. She screamed. She pulled at Helios, screaming against the insanity of it all, but his gaze would not meet hers, and he shrugged off her touch despite his weakness. She grabbed for Philadelphus, too little, too young to know any better, but Kemse held him tight, and his body was racked with terrible shrieks.
Then she ran. Not looking back, not caring where she was going. Her face streaming tears, she let her legs take her out through the halls, out of the palace, out into the thick night air.
Out of breath and out of tears, she looked up to the uncaring stars, over to the sleeping city, and then across to the glowing lighthouse. At last her gaze fell upon the little supply ship in the small harbor. There were two men nearing it, readying it for a return to the docks.
Selene thought for a moment about going back for her brothers, about shaking them out of whatever it was that held them to that room, but even if she could do it she knew the boat would be gone when she got back. Taking a deep breath to calm her heart, wiping quickly at her eyes to focus her vision, Selene hurried through the shadows to once more steal her way to the mainland.
By the time she’d slipped beneath the tarp covered with her father’s blood, she knew what she was going to do. How she would do it, she didn’t know, but she was going to kill Octavian.
* * *
An hour and a half after stealing away from Antirhodos, as the sun was brightening the sky to the east and melting the stars into a pale blue wash, Selene stood behind one of the pillars flanking the entrance to the Museum. Peering out across the wide main square of the city, ignoring the pain of her blistered feet, she watched as Roman legionnaires that were not her father’s marched down the Canopic Way out of the bright dawn, their footsteps hard and angry.
Selene’s heart sank, but only for a moment. She’d come too far to turn back now. She’d been halfway across the harbor when she’d realized, through her silent tears of sorrow, rage, and fear, that she had only one hope of killing Octavian: the Shard that she’d seen on Alexander’s breastplate.
It had to be a Shard: a black stone, swallowing light, just like the one Jacob had described as being in the Trident. Somehow it had protected Alexander. Somehow it had kept him strong. It could do the same for her.
And no army of Romans was going to keep her from it.
Besides, they surely would think her no threat. She was just a little girl, alone and unarmed. Surely they wouldn’t even stop her.
She smoothed out her dirtied linens to wipe the sweat from her palms, then stepped out from the pillar and hurried across the avenues and up the steps to Alexander’s tomb. The legionnaires kept marching. No one shouted for her to stop.
The great gallery of pillars detailing Alexander’s life was usually dim, but this morning it was dark as night, its lamps all lifeless. Selene moved quickly despite her sudden blindness, trusting her memory and urgency to get her where she was going. Ahead, she could see the light-framed portal between this chamber and the central chamber beyond, which was lit from above by windows. Alexander’s crystal coffin glimmered as if beckoning her.
Moving so fast she was near to a run, she had no time to stop when the shape of a man in Roman armor stepped out from the shadows in front of her. In the instant before she ran into him, she tried to dodge aside but only succeeded in bouncing off his hip and leg. She fell forward into the lighted chamber, her ankle twisting badly on the steps. With a sharp cry of pain she struck the dark stone floor, her loose night shift catching in her feet and tearing as she crumpled to the ground.
“By the gods, girl! Are you hurt?”
Selene could not see the Roman, but she could hear that he was coming down to help her. She scrambled to stand, wincing at pains in her ankle and ribs, and tried to get away from him. “Stay back,” she gasped.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the man said. His boots made shuffling noises in the chamber as he stopped.
Selene, panting from the pain, managed to limp close to one of the white-marble statues of her mother’s ancestors, and she reached out to it, bracing herself. “Just stay back,” she said, closing her eyes to swallow the pain and try to think what next she could do. With a Roman soldier here, she couldn’t get the Shard. And Octavian’s armies were just outside.
“I am,” the man said. “I’m sorry. Can I get you some help?”
Selene at last opened her eyes and turned to look back at the Roman. Her ribs wailed at the movement, but it was not pain that made her take in her breath. The man with her in Alexander’s tomb was a handsome young man wearing fine leather armor. Emblems of eagles held his white cloak back off his shoulders, and the ornate, burnished helm under his left arm was crowned with a shoulder-to-shoulder red crest: all told, he wore the battle dress of a high-ranking centurion at the least, more likely that of a member of Octavian’s most trusted staff. But it was his skin that most captivated her: darker than that of a Roman, dark enough for him to be a Numidian. Selene’s eyes widened as there was only one man that he could be: Juba, the adopted son of Caesar who’d sought the Scrolls of Thoth, the man whose messenger had nearly killed both Didymus and Vorenus on that terrible night. “I’m … I’m fine,” she managed to say.