She cringed, her rage gone as quickly as it had arrived. Now she was terrified of the pain that would surely come. They’d tear her skin, and she’d live. They would wound her flesh, and she would remain awake, feeling each ripping movement. Feeling each creature—and she knew them now, not birds but bats—diving toward her heart. Their tiny fangs, their scrabbling claws. Her body, though it was changed, was still hers. It was her only possession, and these were thieves coming to break it apart.

They would find her empty.

Something else was coming, though. She could smell a musky, dry odor. Snakes slithering across the stone, their sleek bodies blending into a rippling surface, roiling as a storming sea. And rats, their skeletons bending against the narrow passages, their fur glittering black, their eyes glowing.

Her subjects.

She laughed, the sound mixing with a sob. Queen of Egypt, in her lost, gilded robes. Naked before her true citizens, she must offer them her last words. Oh, the proclamations she might make, here in the dark.

“Save me,” she whispered. “Your queen commands you.”

She laughed again, feeling hysteria rising. Nothing to calm her here, no wines or potions, no Antony to press his fingertips against her lips. She felt the rasp of snakeskin on her ankle. The brush of leather wings on her face. The lash of a rat’s tail, whipping through her fingers.

This is how it would end, then. This is how it would be, from here until the end of time. The queen and her creatures. Eaten, but not consumed.

A snake pressed its skull beneath her breast, fitting its triangular head under the chain and then flowing over her skin. It slipped up her throat, and appeared before her, its eyes glittering in the dark, gazing at her with what seemed to be intention.

She was mad to think the snake might understand her. More were coming. She felt them writhing across her limbs like a living mantle.

The snake stared into her eyes, waiting for something. She tried to move but could not.

“Free me!” she shouted, giving in to the madness. “I am your queen! The queen of Egypt calls upon you!”

The snake slithered away, and Cleopatra laughed and cried at once. She was insane, and worse, she knew it. Her predictions had come true. She, who was the daughter of generations of kings, now thought that she could talk to animals.

The rats began to gnaw at something. Let it not be her bones. She couldn’t feel anything anymore, couldn’t tell where the animals were.

The chain shifted around her, burning, burning, but she didn’t care. Let it burn. Anything was better than this, these beasts of the night pressing against her body, the sounds of hissing and hungering. Another serpent slithered across her abdomen, pressing into the curve of her waist, where once a jeweled belt had hung, tempting kings, tempting warriors.

The chain shifted again.

She could hear the rats gnawing at the wood beneath her, furrowing its surface. She’d commissioned the pyre, just as she’d commissioned the box that held Antony’s ashes. Now the rats were turning it to dust. Everything would go to dust, everything but Cleopatra.

The chain loosened. She stretched her arm and touched a serpent. She moved her leg and felt another. The room was dark, but all around her was the sound of movement.

Bats rose through the dark, singing. A moth glowed in a sudden spark of light and was taken, struggling against claws.

The chain lifted from her skin and hung in the air above her.

She lay there for a moment, amazed, and then she felt the creatures waiting, all around her.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

The only reply she heard was the soft swishing of serpents making their way back to where they’d come from, bats singing their way back out into the sky, and rats channeling their bodies into the cracks in the walls. Like ghosts, they returned invisibly to the waking world, populating the hidden spaces, filling the shadows. She realized that she was as good as a ghost herself, and as she listened to the departure of her saviors, she learned from their quiet. There were secret places in her city, places the Romans would not think to look for her.

She eased herself up from the slab, naked and exultant. Whatever it meant, whatever it would mean, she was free.

She slipped back in through the slave’s quarters, taking only the silver box that contained Antony’s ashes, wrapped in a cloth to protect her fingers from the strange, scalding pain the metal caused her skin. She hid in a cellar. It was daylight, and she could not go out into the sun, particularly not as she was. She would need dark clothing, and something to swath her face.

She found herself confused, uncertain where to go next, and so she stayed hidden. Her city was a great unknown, though it had always cradled her in the past. She had no servants, no trusted friends, no messengers. She had no dresser, no woman to paint her skin and braid her hair.

She was dead to all of them.

She thought of this with a kind of wonder as she crouched, naked and filthy, against the cool stone wall of the cellar. She was no longer a queen. She could do exactly as she pleased now. No more politics, no more advisors, no more declarations of war.

What was it she wanted? What would she do now that she was dead? She was dead, that much was certain. Dead to her country, in any case.

The things she loved had been taken from her, but some of them still lived. Her children. She would find them. Her enemies still lived as well. A whisper of memory came back to her as she thought of Octavian. She saw him as he knelt over her in her bedchamber, thinking her dead, speaking to her as though she could forgive him. He’d confessed his sins to her. He was the one who’d told Antony she was dead. He was the one who had told her armies to desert her husband.

All of this had been set in motion by Octavian’s lies.

When she found him, she would hurt him as he had hurt her.

The palace seethed with activity when first she entered, servants running from room to room, the foul scent of roasting meat, excited gossip, but as the day passed, the place quieted. Octavian had left the palaces just before she’d arrived, or so she gleaned from listening to the chatter. He’d taken a mass of his soldiers, bodyguards, and armor, kindling, and firepots, and gone out into the tombs. Starting a tiny war somewhere in her city, she imagined.

When at last she emerged from the cellar, creeping along a kitchen wall, the place was nearly empty. The creature she finally spoke with was ancient, a blind crone hovering over a basin, scrubbing away at some vile root.

“Where are the other servants?” Cleopatra asked her.

“Are you not one of us?” the crone asked.

“I’ve been away,” Cleopatra said, trying to repress her regal tone. This was not the sort of conversation she would normally have with a slave.

“They’ve gone to the execution,” the servant said.

This was a stroke of luck, though who might Octavian be killing now? His own soldiers? She would not be surprised by such an act. He would kill his trusted allies. Antony had been his friend, his teacher, and look at what he’d done to him.

There was no one left to war against. The city had surrendered. Mark Antony was dead, and so was she, for all Octavian knew. She looked forward to seeing his face when she proved that assumption wrong. Her mouth filled with saliva. Hunger. She still could not remember the last time she’d eaten. Something about the shock of her false burial, she concluded. There were gaps in her memory. It was a blur of light, a glimpse of red that failed to resolve into anything clear.

Cleopatra found a kitchen knife. In the dark, she held out a lock of her hair and sawed it off, shuddering as it drifted to the floor, braided strands and loose ones. A single shining twist of silver. Her hair had been beautiful, and the coif she’d been buried with, dressed by Charmian, was complex, each knot signifying something specific. Those things were gone. She grieved them as much as she gloried in her new state. Free, she reminded herself. Free.

Soon, it was all sheared, cut into a rough tumble, and her head bound up in a swath of dirty cloth. She washed the paints from her face with cold, greasy water. She looked like a slave. None of the assembled would know her for their queen. Still, she would cover herself fully, for though the day was waning, the sun shone low in the sky, and she did not imagine she would be immune to its rays. She wrapped the box containing Antony’s ashes in a piece of cloth and slung it over her shoulder before dressing herself in a robe, a pair of leather sandals, and a rough traveling cloak stolen from one of the cook’s chambers.

At last, she veiled her head and made her way into the city, following the sounds of reveling.

Her enemy would be at the execution. She looked forward to seeing his face when she appeared before him.