A murder of crows, screeching over a victory.

Auðr moved as quickly as she could toward Chrysate’s chambers, hobbling into the witch’s rooms through the half-open door.

The floor of the chamber was covered with black petals, like ashes left behind after a tremendous fire. Dozens of crows clung to the bed frame, their dark wings unfurling as they looked down into the bed. The curtains were drawn, but the seiðkona could see movement behind them. A shadow shifting in the candlelight, bending over something stretched on the mattress.

The witch’s hand moved. Auðr watched it in silhouette, drawing a line from one end of the figure on the bed and downward.

“You will love me,” Chrysate said.

“Yes,” said the girl.

“You will love only me,” said the witch.

“Yes,” said Selene. There were tears in her voice. A ragged sound in her breath, but her voice was certain and pure.

“None but I will have you,” said the witch, and her voice changed in that moment into something ancient and murderous, the voice of earthquake and landslide, the voice of dead rivers and poisoned flowers. The vicious and brokenhearted hounds of Hades howled beneath her tone.

The crows began to scream their song.

The wind rose up and tore away the curtains, and Auðr saw what they had been hiding, the creature crouched atop Cleopatra’s daughter, and the girl, her skin pale with loss of blood, stretched upon the bed like something already dead. Auðr saw Chrysate’s snarling face, the ravaged skin, the single, glowing green eye, the knotted hanks of hair, the bloodred lips stretched over sharp teeth.

“I sacrifice this child to Hecate!” Chrysate cried. “I take her body for my own, in service to Hecate!”

The priestess had torn open the girl’s chest and climbed inside, though the girl still lived. The witch’s claws tore still deeper into the girl’s breast, and she began to twist her body into the space beneath Selene’s skin.

Auðr raised her distaff, the fate like a thorny vine wrapping around it. She could feel Hecate in this room. So foolish. She’d been thinking only of Sekhmet and had not noticed what was growing only a few doors away.

“Hecate,” Chrysate whispered, and the girl repeated it. Their voices twisted into spell, pulling at the gates of Hades, pulling at the chain that bound Hecate below the earth, even as Auðr pulled in the opposite direction.

Blackened petals flew and the crows shrieked.

Selene turned her tearstained face toward Auðr and reached out her hand.

“Tell my mother I did not mean to leave her for Rome,” she whispered, her voice ragged.

Clutched in Selene’s hand was the silver box containing Cleopatra.

She threw it, and as it spun through the air, time slowed. The corners of the room flashed with light, the birds on the canopy rose as the wind shook them, and the witch of Thessaly howled with wrath as she leapt for the box.

Cleopatra’s prison tumbled through the open window and clattered onto the stones of the courtyard two stories below.

“NO!” screamed Chrysate, and threw herself out the window after the box, but it was too late. The box was open. Auðr ran to the window and looked out.

There was a moment of stillness, of nothing. It was empty, Auðr thought in terror, and its contents missing. Someone else had stolen them. Had Cleopatra been given to Hecate? If so, there was nothing more to be done. She’d made a terrible mistake, fumbling with the fates of mortals when she should have been spending all the time she had left on binding Cleopatra below the earth. She had seen the possibility of disaster and ignored it. She’d believed Cleopatra might be mistress of her own fate, might split from this and change the future herself.

The ground of the courtyard trembled, and the wailing began, millions of lost souls crying to come to the surface. The air was suddenly scented with asphodel and with the waters of the rivers of Hades. Lethe, with its limitless, soothing black depths, and Styx, whose waters ran with the blood of slaughtered innocents. Acheron, made of salt tears; Cocytus, whose waters wailed like grieving widows; and Phlegethon, whose surface burned with eternal flames.

A moth whiter than starlight rose from the silver box and hung in the air for a moment. Then, her eyes blazing, her skin as bright as candles, shining with a web of molten metal, Cleopatra appeared in the courtyard below Chrysate’s chambers.

Chrysate crouched on the stones opposite Cleopatra, shouting words in her ancient language, but Cleopatra’s body was filled with fire, as though lightning had struck it and stayed inside its veins. She reached out her hand and clawed the witch’s face, and the witch shrieked and flung herself across the courtyard. Where Cleopatra had touched her, there were long scores ripped in her flesh.

“You are my creature,” Chrysate cried. “You belong to Hecate!”

Cleopatra bared her teeth and leapt at her, tearing at her skin. The liquid that came from beneath it was not red but dark, and the witch’s skin was tattered by fangs and claws.

Chrysate hesitated, overmatched, before leaping into the darkness and fleeing.

The queen looked up to the open window above her and saw Auðr standing there, frozen. The seiðkona lifted her distaff, but Cleopatra moved like one in a dream, her eyes wide and unseeing. She lifted from the ground the silver box that had imprisoned her, pressing the spilled ash back into it, and then she, too, flew from the Palatine, her every step shaking the ground, moving as fast as fire in a dry season.

Her light blazed over the hillside, and then she was gone.

In Chrysate’s rooms, Auðr looked around, stunned.

She shouted at the top of her voice, raising the alarm, though she knew Chrysate would not be captured by any human. She would be moving amongst the spirits now, fleet as a demon, but she was terribly wounded. Creatures such as Chrysate did not travel quickly by land.

Auðr bent over Cleopatra’s daughter. She could see her heart, a precious red fruit, exposed inside her rib cage, bright as a phoenix nearing its rebirth. It was not beating.

She made a motion with her fingers, twisting the distaff in a complicated pattern, her face tense. At last, the seiðkona leaned over the girl and exhaled a word, quietly, into her lips.

Selene shuddered and gasped, taking a breath. “Where is my mother?” she croaked, her eyes darting frantically about the room. “Where is my father? Where is Chrysate?”

Auðr stitched closed the wound in her chest with a golden thread unspooled from her seiðstafr. The thread was the girl’s own fate. It seemed smooth and delicate, but it was as strong as wire. She found a tiny waxen doll stabbed with a pin, its wrists bound together with a long black hair. She tore the skein of hair from the doll’s wrists and carefully, gently, removed the pin from her heart. The girl in the bed arched for a moment, gasped, and sighed, and then relaxed again.

Auðr laid her seiðstafr against the forehead of the queen’s daughter. The girl moved. Tears ran from her eyes, and she opened them.

“I don’t want to forget,” Selene whispered. “I want to know what happened. Don’t take it away from me. I was stupid to trust her.”

Guards surged into the room, their weapons drawn, and Auðr showed them the thing that had been discarded beside the bed. Part of the beautiful, bloodless skin of the woman Chrysate had been was lying crumpled and torn on the floor, like a fine garment thrown off in the heat of passion. A breast, and an arm like an elegant glove, the skin perfect and creamy. A scrap of a throat and lovely face. One side of a curving waist and a portion of round hip. The rest had been torn away and taken by the witch as she fled.

The guards, their faces horrified, this image of the emperor’s ward and her attacker worse than anything they had seen in battle, ran about the room in disarray. They would die for this, they knew. They would be executed, or condemned to fight animals. They had let Selene be attacked and Cleopatra escape under their very noses. All of them had been sitting at dinner, drinking and laughing for hours, as though under a spell. They had no idea where the emperor was, nor his historian and bodyguard. Agrippa was away as well. The guards were alone with this, and they knew they would be blamed.

She will live, the seiðkona said to them, in their own languages, and in their minds. She will live. She contains powers of her own, and those of others as well.

For the first time, Auðr noticed the ring on Selene’s finger, a blazing opal engraved with the face of Hecate. The witch had won the hand of the queen’s daughter, if not her heart, and her dark power remained there.

The war was not over. There was no hope of a peaceful end. Cleopatra was free, Chrysate lived, and Hecate’s bonds had been loosened. Even the failed sacrifice had yielded blood, and Auðr could feel Hecate pulling at her chains. The Underworld shook.

It was only beginning.

The seiðkona looked at the threads, the fates spinning about Rome, the possibilities.

Gods walked the earth, and the sky shone with arrows. The Underworld was at war, and the upper world as well. Emperors and queens, daughters and sons, witches and sorcerers.

The seiðkona did not know what would happen. She had changed the fates, and yet the chaos remained, the rift in the tapestry, the darkness.

Someone still tried to end the world, and someone tried to save it.

Auðr could not tell the two lines apart. They seemed the same.

She stumbled, scraping her withered hands on the stones. She was not supposed to be this misshapen thing, this hag, half covered in sweet skin, half covered in scales and darkness. Hecate had been so close. She had felt her coming.

She turned her face, the part of it that still existed as human, toward the moonlight, moaning. The wind would not offer her a respite, though. It raged against her broken cheek, threw sand into her one, bloodied eye.

She snarled, clawing at the wind. Nothing she did eased it, though she could see, outside of her vicinity, still air. The trees stood calm in the darkness. Only about Chrysate was there this bitter thing.

She screamed with fury, chanting curses, chanting spells, tearing at the air itself, but nothing kept the wind from whistling around her, shrill and violent. Nothing kept the wind from spinning her in wrong directions. Nothing kept the wind from surging into her lungs, filling her with dusty air and her own spells, blown backward into her mouth.

She could hear horses in the streets, pursuing her, perhaps, but she could not tell where they were. She could hear howling dogs, but she could not find them. They would protect her. They were the creatures of her mistress. But they howled, and they howled, and finally, Chrysate realized that there were no dogs. The sound she heard was the wind mocking her.

As she raised her hand to fight off the tornado, she noticed her finger. Naked. Her ring was gone. She’d left it on the hand of the queen’s daughter.

Chrysate concealed herself in a doorway, shielding herself from the wind. The moon was high in the sky now, a pointed crescent, each edge sharp and wounding. It did not heal her. A tear slid down her cheek, scalding as it went, and she tasted the sour salt of it.

She watched the wind pass by, and she waited until it had gone. She listened for the footsteps of legionaries patrolling for her, and waited until they had moved on. Then she began to move again, whispering spells of concealment and searching for a dark and secret place to hide herself more effectively.

She thought, muttering to herself frantically.

She could still accomplish what she had planned. It would be bloody, and it would be difficult, but it was still possible.