Selene turned her head to give him a quick kiss in return. “It’s getting easier,” she said as her breathing slowed. “Down and then out, just like you keep saying.”
It had been more than a year since she’d stolen the Palladium of Troy from the sacred temple of the Vestal Virgins in Rome. That night Selene had triggered the Shard’s power accidentally, terrifying Augustus Caesar’s stepson Tiberius and partially blinding his cousin Urbinia. Selene had refused to answer Tiberius’ confused questions about what had happened, and she had done her best to avoid him in the many months since, despite the fact that he was obviously infatuated with her—and that his feelings were further aroused by the new, supernatural mystery surrounding her. She’d also refused to touch the Shard again, for fear of what it might unleash through her, even if she still wished that she could harness its strength to somehow avenge the deaths of her parents—suicides to be blamed, without doubt, on Caesar and Rome.
It was only with her marriage to Juba of Numidia, just weeks after she turned fifteen, and only weeks before he was summoned to join Caesar here in Cantabria, that she even spoke to anyone of her theft of the Palladium, and of what it really was. She’d done it on their wedding night, after they’d been blessed by the Roman gods of marriage and fertility and ceremoniously paraded into the room where they were meant to consummate the union that had been decreed for them by Caesar. Juba had known of the Shards of Heaven: he’d discovered the Trident of Poseidon, after all—he’d been forced by Caesar to use it to destroy Selene’s parents’ fleet at Actium—and they both knew how he had acquired the Aegis of Zeus by taking the armor from the tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria. He had saved Selene’s life then, and at every turn he had seemed a man she could believe in, a man she could trust. It was a test of that trust to tell him about the Palladium, and she was not surprised that he expressed no shock at the existence of another such object of power.
She was surprised, however, that he’d responded to her crime—for a most grievous crime it was to violate the sanctity of the Temple of the Vestals as she had—with a smile and warm laughter. Taking her hand, he’d led her to a locked chest. Opening it up, he had carefully unpacked traveling clothes, old maps, and even a set of hardened leather armor. Then, staring at what seemed to be an empty trunk, he’d let out a long sigh and told her that he, too, had stolen something quite special. Then he had reached down, pulled off a false bottom to the trunk, and showed her the Aegis, which he’d managed to keep hidden from Caesar’s prying eyes.
They’d embraced then, not as politically bound titles, but as unexpectedly kindred souls. She’d cried purely and honestly and openly for the first time since she could remember: cried for her dead parents, Mark Antony and Cleopatra. She cried for her dead brothers: her twin, Alexander Helios, who had died in the prison in Rome, and little Ptolemy Philadelphus, who she later learned had died before he ever made it that far. She cried for her dead half-brother, Caesarion, who was the best of men. She cried for her vanquished homeland of Egypt, and for the horror of living as the adopted daughter of the man who’d taken it all away from her.
Juba had understood. She’d known that he would, even from the first moment they’d met in Alexandria, when he helped to save her from the bloodthirst of Rome. But even as they were engaged to be married, even as they came together in tentative, too-formal hugs and greetings, she’d never opened herself to him. Not like this.
Through all of it—the sorrow, the rage, the guilt—Juba had simply embraced her. And then, standing over the Shard of Heaven of Alexander’s breastplate, the very Aegis of Zeus, he had sworn that he would support her quest for vengeance, which so closely mirrored his own. And he swore, too, that he would teach her to control the Palladium of Troy, to no longer need to fear the Shard’s power. It was, she’d thought as he held her, the most wondrous thing she could have imagined.
How little she knew. They made love that night, but as the months had passed it was clear that their bond was just beginning. They were genuinely and truly in love. And that was surely the most unbelievable wonder of all.
It was that same love that she saw sparkling in his eyes as he stepped around from behind her and eyed the path of the little torrent of wind that she’d unleashed with the power of the Shard. “You’ll be better than I am soon enough,” he said. “You control it so effortlessly.”
“Still tiring,” she said. She frowned a little at the bag on the tree. “It’s not enough.”
“You’re getting stronger, though,” he said. “You have to start small. You have to build up to it. To learn the Trident I started with a cup of wine.”
Selene saw something dark pass over his face. Memories, she knew. Juba was nearly eight years older than she was, but more than once she’d had to comfort him when he woke up screaming from the nightmares of remembering what he had been made to do with the Shard that Caesar did know about: the Trident of Poseidon, which controlled water. “Of course,” she said. Selene made her voice quiet and demure, aimed at bringing his attention out of the past. “I couldn’t do this without you.”
To her relief, when Juba shook his head she could almost see the ill memories fall away. “No, I think you could. Maybe not as fast, but you’d still do it. Strongest person I’ve ever known. And the most beautiful.”
He’d said it to her many times now, but she didn’t like hearing it. Somehow it reminded her too much of her mother and her pursuit of power through lovers. None of that interested Selene. She would hold power between her hands, not between her sheets.
At the thought, she looked down at the Shard, which indeed sat in her lap between her hands. It remained an unimpressive-looking thing: a crystalline rock, vaguely the shape of a woman in robes. In Troy they had associated it with Pallas Athena. It protected them. For years it kept them safe. Only after it was stolen from them did the city fall. If the stories were to be believed, the thief Odysseus had paid for that crime—and his failure to control its power—with a wandering journey of years spent away from his beloved homeland.
She was a thief, too, Selene supposed. Only, she would control the Shard. She would succeed where Odysseus had failed. And rather than spiriting her away from her homeland, the Shard would be the key to bringing her back to it.
“Do you think we can really do it?” she asked.
“What’s that?” Juba had turned and was looking at the empty bag again. He seemed to be calculating something.
“Destroy Rome,” Selene replied, her voice unintentionally small this time.
Juba turned back around. He knelt before her, just as he had on the night he’d sworn his support for her dream of vengeance. He took her hands in his, the Palladium untouched between them. “You know I do,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. I believe in you, Selene. I believe in us.”
Selene examined how their fingers enmeshed, his darker skin alternating with hers in a perfect grip that felt complete. “And the Shards?”
“What do you mean? I believe they’re real enough.” He seemed about to laugh at the object of power between them, but the seriousness on her face gave him pause.
“No,” Selene said. She squeezed his beautiful fingers more tightly. “I mean, you say you believe in us. But is that only—?”
“Only because of the Shards?”
Selene nodded, biting her lip.
“No,” Juba said. He squeezed her hands in response. “I told you: I believe in us. The Shards are only a means to an end. They are tools. Nothing more. And like all tools each requires a user, one who understands how to use it. That’s what Octavian didn’t understand. That’s what he still doesn’t understand, and it’s why he can’t use the Trident.”