She hungered, troubled by the gaps in her memory. Surely, she had last eaten weeks ago, before Antony’s death. She’d dined with her love, that was it. The night before he died.

But somehow, she was not certain of that. There were flashes in her mind that felt like memory, pale skin, blood trickling.

The last light of the sun shone directly on the shields ahead, reflecting into her eyes. Her wrappings were not enough to keep it from burning. She felt weak, with both hunger and heat, her skin sparking beneath its coverings, her eyes filling. She needed to get out of the light, but there was nowhere to go. She pushed herself deeper into the crowd toward Octavian.

Odd. She caught a glimpse of someone she knew, close to the platform. It couldn’t be he, though. Rhodon the tutor was long gone, to Myos Hormos with her son Caesarion. She was mistaken.

Drink, her body called, urging her onward.

Octavian was somewhere up there, and even if she could not see him, she could smell his strange absence of odor. The smooth grayness of him, like a gap in all the other scents and thoughts. Ahead.

She pressed forward, her mouth filling with saliva.

A shaven-headed centurion appeared on the platform, his short toga newly white. Bleached in urine, and then rinsed in water until it passed for clean. Cleopatra wrinkled her nose, sniffing the foul Roman odor from where she stood, even if no one else in the crowd could smell it. The centurion leapt off the platform in pursuit of the victim, and then, suddenly, through a gap in the crowd, Cleopatra caught a glimpse of her son.

His panicked face, his slender brown limbs scrabbling as he ran from his executioner. Cleopatra staggered with shock even as she shoved herself deeper into the crowd, toward him, toward him. It could not be.

Why had he returned to Alexandria? He’d been safe, taken from the city by Rhodon. How had they found Caesarion? Who had betrayed him? It came to her, in a devastating realization.

She had.

“I am a family man,” Octavian had sworn, and she’d trusted him, thinking to save her other children, thinking to bargain with a fiend.

She’d led the Romans to her son.

“KILL HIM!” the crowd screamed, pummeling one another in their desire to snatch at Caesarion’s garments. Cleopatra saw knives flashing out of concealment and smelled blood being shed all around her.

With the bloodshed, everything came rushing back to her, all that she had done, her maid arching backward, struggling to free herself from Cleopatra’s clutches. The other girl, paling quietly, as her body dropped like a shed garment to the floor of the queen’s chamber. Cleopatra gasped, convulsing with the memories, but she could not afford to let them stop her.

She threw herself forward, clawing her way closer to her child, her voice drowned by the rioting around her.

“CAESARION!” she screamed, fighting the crowd. The last rays of sun shot through a gap in the buildings, and light flared off the raised shields of the legionaries, momentarily blinding Cleopatra and amplifying the heat. She lost her balance and stumbled to the ground, stunned and weakened, her clothing in disarray, her veil sliding off to bare her face to the glare, blistering her skin instantly.

Fingers tore at her clothes, and sandaled feet kicked her trapped body. Her bones shifted in her skin, crushed and then repaired. Her cheekbone shattered under a heel. She felt her arms break and then knit themselves back together.

She knew the mind of the crowd then, with that horrible knowing. They hated her, hated the royal family for their neglect, for their distance, for their scandal, for their Greek ancestry. They hated her for losing their city to Rome. It was her fault that they were inflamed now against her child. They demanded a sacrifice.

She screamed wordlessly from the ground, pushing herself up, rising, rising.

Her son threw his hands into the air and shouted a desperate proclamation.

“Hear me!” he cried, his voice cracking, speaking in Greek. “Hear me! I am your king! I am son of the Ptolemies! I will rule over you! I will keep you safe from the Romans! They will enslave Egypt! I will keep you free!”

He repeated his declaration in Latin and then in Egyptian, to prove that he was a man of the people, but his voice was drowned by the sounds of rioting. His words were exactly the wrong ones.

“I AM YOUR KING!” the boy shouted again, and Cleopatra struggled to her knees, the sun still searing her flesh, her eyelids blistering, glimpsing her son mere lengths from her now, almost within reach.

Just as her fingers touched him, a centurion appeared behind her child, raised his hands to Caesarion’s throat, and placed them on his perfect skin.

“Kill him!” the crowd screamed, and she tore at the centurion’s tunic, desperate to get to her son before he did. This could not happen. Not this. Not while she watched.

Someone kicked her in the face, throwing her back to the ground, and her eldest child disappeared, dragged into a sea of hungering, murderous bodies as she was dragged in the opposite direction.

She could not reach him.

She saw, fleetingly, pale gray eyes, light hair, a laurel crown, as the emperor fled the platform. He would not even watch what he had set in motion.

She heard the sound of bones giving way as the centurion wrapped his fingers around Caesarion’s throat. She heard her son’s last breath as the Roman broke his neck.

Her howl of agony shook the buildings of the agora, calling the crows in chaos down from the sky, but it did not stop what was happening. It did not stop anything.