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About the Author
Copyright Page
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For Samuel and Elanor, who are every reason
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is never a solitary endeavor. So first and foremost I must acknowledge my family for giving me the time and the energy to finish this novel. Thank you, Sherry, for watching the kids a bit more (not to mention driving through Book One!), and thank you, Mom and Dad, for coming out to help when I’d reached the end of my rope. Kids, I owe you so much for understanding that Daddy had to work.
Friends gave the encouragement and the feedback I needed to cross the finish line. Catherine Bollinger continues to be the finest alpha-and-omega reader I could ask for, and Kelly DeVries is owed much for helping talk me through my moments of writer despair—with bonus Roman troop movements along the way! Kayla Moore made the last push possible, and David Allen kept the wolves at bay when I needed it most. My writer friends Mary Robinette Kowal, Ilana Myer, and Harriet McDougal were lights in times of darkness. Amy Romanczuk is the best unpaid cheerleader imaginable. Thank you all.
At a fundamental level, of course, this novel simply doesn’t happen without the strong support of Claire Eddy, my editor, as well as my publicist, Diana Griffin, and all the other fine folks at Tor. Well done, gang.
Last, to all the kind readers and reviewers who loved Book One, your encouragement was simply beyond anything I could have imagined. This one, I think, is even better.
PREFACE
The Shards of Heaven series, of which this is the second volume, is a historical fantasy. As such, its story is intended to fit within the bounds of known history wherever possible: What occurs within these pages is inspired by real events, happening in real places to real people. Vellica was real, as was Carthage. And so, too, were the writings of Thrasyllus, the sickness of Augustus, the tales of Olyndicus, and even the remarkable boldness of the outlaw king himself.
The reader wishing a basic understanding of the facts of history as they pertain to the characters herein should consult the glossary at the end of this book.
Do the gods build this fire in our hearts, Euryalus?
Or is a god built of each man’s desire?
—Virgil, Aeneid, Book 9
PROLOGUE
THE DARK OF THE MOON
ROME, 27 BCE
On the January night that the Republic finally came to an end, thirteen-year-old Cleopatra Selene fell asleep waiting for the emperor’s son.
* * *
Not for the first time she dreamed she was ten again, sitting on the cold stone bench of a Roman prison cell, her head against Alexander Helios’ shoulder as she pretended to sleep. The yellow light of an Italian dawn was just beginning to stream in through a barred window high on the outside wall, taunting them with unreachable warmth.
Helios shifted his shoulder beneath the weight of her head. “Wake up, Selene,” her twin whispered.
Selene didn’t move her head. “I am awake.”
“Did you sleep?”
She let the air out of her lungs, then yawned it back in again and regretted the instinct: the air was thick with the sickly humid reek of mold and mildew and human despair. She coughed and gagged.
“Me neither,” he said.
Through the window came the voices of the gathered crowds: jubilant cries of celebration at the festivities of the Roman Triumph, mixed with angry shouts for the death of the traitorous Egyptian royalty whom Octavian had brought back from Alexandria: the children of Antony and Cleopatra.
Selene felt their hatred run like cold fingers up her spine. Before she could shiver she lifted her head from her brother’s shoulder and stood, rubbing at her numb arms. The roiling mass of emotion outside had been building for more than two days, but today it would come to a final climax. Today was the end.
“Do you really think Caesarion is dead?” Helios asked.
Selene instinctively started to reassure him, to say that no, of course he was still alive, but she knew he would recognize the lie. “Maybe. Probably.” It was the truth, painful though it was to admit. Juba, the Numidian prince she had promised to marry in order to save the life of her old friend Lucius Vorenus, had told her that Caesarion was dead, that he’d been killed in Juba’s struggle to find the Ark of the Covenant and use it against their common enemy, Octavian. She believed the Numidian, of course—he had no reason to lie—but even so she could hardly imagine that their older half-brother—tall, handsome, strong Caesarion, so much the image of his father, Julius—could be dead. It just didn’t seem possible.
Helios, so slight, so sickly compared to Caesarion, coughed loudly, painfully, and Selene felt a pang of sorrow rise in her gut that she had to fight to keep at bay.
“Caesarion’s not here, anyway,” she said when he had control of himself again. “Octavian would march him, too, if he was alive. He wants to make a display of us all.”
She didn’t mention their younger brother, Philadelphus, but she didn’t have to. The child, even sicker than Helios when they last saw him, was never far from their thoughts. Was he dead, too?
“Maybe Caesarion’s alive, though,” Helios said. “Octavian could be lying about it because he’s scared. He’s using us to keep Caesarion from doing what he wants to do. Maybe that’s another reason why Octavian hasn’t … killed us yet. Like how he wanted to use us against Mother.”
Mother. Her brother’s voice cracked at the word, and then Selene’s dream spun wildly, sweeping her out of the cell, rushing her back through even more distant memories, back to the moment she stood before the vivid and all-too-real image of her mother’s agony-contorted face, staring at the world through dry, sightless eyes. The corpses of two loyal maidservants were slumped on the floor beside the throne, themselves twisted by the bite of the asp that Selene had managed to smuggle into the guarded chamber to fulfill her mother’s desire for death. The reed-woven basket of ripe-to-bursting fruits was overturned in front of them, and there was an apple in Cleopatra’s venom-clawed hand, squeezed to broken mash. The scepter of Egyptian authority was broken into two pieces at her feet, nothing more than the wooden stick that it was beneath the luminescent jewels and the fine gold casing.
Octavian was there, too. He’d made the children come to the chamber before anything was touched, before anything was moved, so that they could see with their own eyes what he’d taken from them, as if Cleopatra’s suicide was his victory, not hers.