A transport ship with a cargo of long-awaited animals, imported to celebrate the return of Rome’s first citizen, was being unloaded in the midst of this, the creatures harnessed, muzzled, and then prodded into the crowd.

The zebras descended the planks first, their hooves stamping so hard after long captivity that the wood splintered beneath them. The gazelles followed, their eyes rolling up to show white. Even in the chaos of the shipyard, the ostriches drew attention, with their high-stepping, with their long, wavering necks. Crocodiles, low and dry and scraping, heaved themselves slowly onto the stones, their tails lashing as they went, several sailors clinging to the ropes that bound each one. A set of jaws snapped and a feathered thing was gone.

The most dangerous creatures were the last off the vessel. First, the rhinoceros, its horn tipped with cork in a hopeful attempt to blunt it, and then the hippopotamus, which opened its jaws and bellowed, to the entertainment and awe of the crowd. There’d never been a hippopotamus in Rome before. Then, the tigers, each as long as two men, with their glossy, variegated pelts and flashing, dismissive eyes. Finally, the lions appeared on deck, sailors wrangling them into submission.

“One of the lions went wild and ate up all the slaves that ship was carrying,” a young sailor bragged to his whore. “I got it from the ship’s boy.”

“Which lion?” she asked.

“That one.” He pointed at the largest of the lions, a male with a twisted mane and rheumy eyes.

“That one looks old,” she replied.

The lion chose that moment to roar, revealing a gummy, toothless mouth. The whore looked at the sailor and smirked.

A slender woman wrapped entirely in a dark, hooded cloak and veil too heavy for the weather made her way down the Persephone’s plank. Her gloved hand was roped to that of a young and handsome man, who was draped in scholarly robes. His chin jutting, his other arm supporting a small child, the scholar pushed his way through the crowd.

As the trio of passengers moved alongside them, the lions and tigers began to roar, rearing up onto their haunches and struggling with their captors. It seemed that they were trying to follow her, though surely this was an illusion. The animals that had already been unloaded began to cry out as well, the ostriches looking about in alarm and flapping their useless wings, the gazelles and zebras bolting in terror to the ends of their ropes and then snapping backward. A crocodile broke his bonds and barreled forward, his teeth snapping, as sailors danced about him, trying to wrestle him back into servitude.

The woman in black looked over her shoulder as the scholar led her, and the whore caught a glimpse of her face. A dark-smeared eye, a flash of brightness. Something strange there. And beautiful, too. The whore was intrigued.

She tugged at the sailor’s arm and pointed in the woman’s direction.

“Who’s she? And the boy?”

“The only slaves the lion didn’t kill. The scholar bought them for a couple of coins. She’s bad luck. The captain wanted to be rid of her, and I don’t blame him.”

The whore craned her neck after the woman. What sort of thing might she be, that a slave-selling captain would throw away his prospect of profit? She took a half step in their direction, but the sailor who’d purchased her for the hour pulled her the opposite way, his hands already burrowing into the folds of her gown.

Marcus Agrippa and a small group of his soldiers, ragged after months of travel, marched past a moment later, agitated by the delay the animals had caused their vessel. They bore with them the seiðkona, her long white hair tangled and her eyes as silver as polished metal. She looked about the port, her expression chilling to any who inadvertently met her gaze.

Auðr’s head suddenly whipped to face the woman in black. The old woman hissed in surprise.

“What is it?” Agrippa asked the fate spinner, stumbling over her guttural language.

The seiðkona shook her head, her fingers twitching. Agrippa followed her stare, his face scanning the crowd until it landed on two travelers. Something about the man was familiar, and the woman, too. The way her arm moved, the way her feet seemed scarcely to touch the earth, caught his attention. There was a strange grace about her.

Agrippa’s eyes narrowed and he took a step in their direction, but as he did, the man took the woman roughly in his arms and kissed her.

Agrippa’s attention faded. She was nothing, a whore or a slave, and no business of Marcus Agrippa’s. He was overdue in Rome. Besides, the woman she reminded him of was long dead. Agrippa laughed at himself. The way his heart raced, you would think he’d seen a ghost.

Agrippa’s company marched on, only Auðr looking back. She’d seen something in that woman’s eyes. Something old and dark and familiar.

The seiðkona had seen its like only once before, when she was a girl of thirteen, sold as an unwilling talisman to an exploring ship, but she had never forgotten it. Her ship had capsized in a storm, leaving none but Auðr alive, clinging to a piece of wreckage in the middle of an icy ocean. At last, certain she was dying, she saw something in the waters: a great eye, a long and whirling tail, a creature like the dragon her ship had been carved in imitation of.

The monster hung there in the blue depths, and she looked into the eye for what seemed like thousands of years, seeing its history, a world of water, a melting sea. Worshipped by sailors and by kings, and then forgotten.

She had seen a god living deep beneath the world. An Old One, something from before the beginning. She felt herself falling into darkness and gave herself over, but the god sent her back.

She had stumbled onto the foreign shore, clutching only her seiðstafr, which she’d tied tightly into the cords of her dress as the ship had gone down. Alive. She had not known why, not then, but she knew there was a reason.

The universe worked according to its own laws. She was meant for something, some great task.

This task. She wished it had come sooner, when she was stronger, but the Fates had their own timing.

Auðr whispered to herself, twisting the threads of fate between her fingers as she was pulled through the marketplace and toward the emperor.

A moment later, the scholar and the queen parted from their embrace, and within a few steps, they and the child disappeared completely into the crowds and chaos of Rome.