How could he have been so foolish?

On the ship, he had seen what she had done, but he had not seen her do it. He had not imagined what she was capable of, not truly. A lioness, he knew, but tonight, with every flicker of torchlight, she became a new thing, and all of them equally savage. With every move, she lacerated skin and wounded innocent victims, without conscience, without care. Nowhere in the stories, nowhere in the histories, was there anything comparable. And the sky. He knew that the Romans had called the goddess back to earth with those flames, as surely as he knew anything. Fire was Sekhmet’s family. She was a daughter of Ra.

Now a lowly witch held her in a box.

Did they not understand that a witch could not cage a goddess? Cleopatra would escape, and when she did, she would tear the world apart.

Nicolaus knew that he should take to the sea and disappear beyond the horizon. He was a scholar and a fool, and she was a monster.

Instead, he ran down the stairs, trying to force himself to do what needed to be done before he had time to regret it. He sprinted through the Circus Maximus and out the gates, saying a silent good-bye to any life he’d had as a historian. His fate had changed, and he must follow it.

He climbed the Palatine Hill. He would go to the emperor.

He’d lost hope of separating Cleopatra from Sekhmet. The queen he’d known was gone.

Now, in spite of his conscience, in spite of his guilt, in spite of his fear, Nicolaus sought a weapon that would kill her.

“There is opportunity in this!” cried the first senator. “Augustus employs powers far beyond his control. The emperor will say the fire in the sky was an omen for his success, but Cleopatra lives, and our emperor marched through Rome declaring her dead. He is a liar and a betrayer of the republic. He deals in the very things he decries.”

“More than that. He battles against something Rome has never seen before. What is she?”

“Nothing Rome should provoke.”

“We have all seen her captured.”

“Who can know what we saw? We saw the witch take her. We did not see her destroyed. Who knows who the witch truly serves? Perhaps the emperor seeks to turn Cleopatra to his purposes. To kill his enemies.”

“We are the Senate,” scoffed one. “He would never dare.”

“Do you feel so safe?” asked another.

“The emperor is not as protected as he once was. It was only sorcery that saved him,” said another, still trembling from the proximity of the serpent, from the searing heat of the unnatural fire.

“What emperor of Rome encircles himself with witches?” howled the eldest.

“Even his uncle would never have dared traffic publicly in magic,” said the first, and the group nodded, certain of that. Even aside from all else they had seen that night, it was indisputable that Augustus had gone beyond his predecessors, beyond any code of Rome. Now it was a matter of using the emperor’s error to the advantage of the republic.

“A rebellion.”

“We are too old to rise up,” said the eldest, but even he, with his papery skin and quavering head, felt his hands drawing into fists and his young man’s ambition rising within him.

“We will not be alone in this,” said the final senator, and the rest nodded. “Augustus is not a general. He does not command the military cleanly. They were Antony’s men once, and they may be ours now.”

“And the common people?”

Surely, the events of the night were a sign of disaster for Rome. Surely, they were omens that might be found in the Sibylline prophecies or if they could not, they might be written there, given the proper connections.

The senators possessed such connections.

Once a story was told, it would catch the ears of the people. This was a story that might change the course of Rome.

The senators nodded at one another and walked off into the city, each in his own direction, each with his own instructions, each with his own set of weapons.

These men fought not with swords but with sharpened tongues.

They would wound Augustus with words, and then, when he was suitably damaged, they would kill him by more conventional means, just as his uncle had been killed.

“The queen is captured,” Usem protested. “What they do with her is none of my concern. We were brought here to help them trap her, no other reason.”

The wind twisted around him, and he suddenly felt his wrists bound by hurricane. Hailstones pelted his face. He shut his eyes, frustrated. The voice of the West Wind’s daughter whirled through the buildings and pressed into his ears.

“I did not enslave her,” Usem said, his voice taut with fury. “Rome will be at peace through my efforts, and my tribe will be safe. Our children will be safe. They will never be at the mercy of Rome.”

The wind tossed dust in the street.

“She was already entwined with the Old One. If anyone has enslaved her, it is the goddess, and now they are both captives.”

The wind whipped Usem into the air, lifting him until he could not breathe. On the horizon the fireball crouched, shining bright against the edge of the world.

Usem stared at it, miserable. His wife was right. The queen might be captured, but Sekhmet lived. He was not finished. There were things he did not know, and he had not been paying enough attention.

The wind about him faded, dropping him slowly to the earth. The air was still and heavy. The summer night settled around him, hot and thick, and above him, the stars gazed down, careless.

Usem looked up, wishing to apologize, but his wife had gone.

Things had gone horribly wrong. Auðr had not been strong enough to keep the snake sorcerer from acting outside the fate she’d woven for him. He had been meant to deliver the queen to the seiðkona, and instead, Cleopatra had ended up in the hands of Chrysate.

She’d lost control of several strands, and the chaos still showed, dark and twisting, larger than it had been. Nothing the seiðkona did seemed to change it.

Auðr knew only that her own fate was tied to that of the queen. It all fit together in the tapestry, each thread twisting with others, each warp to each weft, and the knots and spaces were part of the whole.

The queen still lived, Auðr knew, and the goddess was stronger than she had been. As the flames rose around Cleopatra, Auðr had felt the Old One feeding on the heat, on the violence.

She was here now.

Auðr touched the night air, sensing gleaming strands of fate strengthened by the bloodshed. Darkness was rising in Rome. Violence and destruction. Other old gods stirred, strengthened by this one.

She could feel it happening, and she could not keep them down. She coughed, bent over, her lungs racked by exhaustion and powerlessness. Why did she still live if she had failed? Her eyes hazed over with smoke, and she choked, dropping to her knees and trying to draw a breath.

The legionaries, stumbling over her, picked up her limp body and carried her up the hill and back to the Palatine, her distaff, even in her unconsciousness, clenched tightly to her chest.