Page 155 of Cleopatra

I looked back at the sealed door.

“How did you get in here?”

She pointed to the empty pool, still unfinished after all these years. “It is connected to the cistern—I climbed through the empty tunnel.”

“I am to die this day.”

She held three fingers to my chest.

“I go with you, always.”

I wanted to fight her, to send her back through the cistern. But in truth I was comforted by her presence. And I had no fight left except this one.

“Give me the wolfsbane,” I said with finality.

We kneeled together at the altar, and I carefully laced my hairpins with the poison.

“Press them into your arm.”

“Both of them?” she asked.

“Yes, it will be a surer dose.”

I watched as the pins pierced her flesh. She gasped in pain immediately, slumping into my arms.

I took the hairpins from her arm and eased her to the ground.

“Let us go on one final journey, you and I,” she said through her pain.

I coated the needles with the wolfsbane once more, then lay down next to her and Antonius.

“When next we meet, I will beat you at senet,” I said and pushed the hairpins into my skin.

And so, we died.

Chapter Thirty

A Beginning

opened my eyes beneath a bright red sky, clouds like clotted blood swirling above. A figure in my likeness stood beside me.

“Rise, Cleopatra.”

Not in my likeness. It was her likeness that I emulated.

“Isis,” I breathed.

I could not see her face, for she had many. But I knew her like I knew my own reflection. Here was my god.

I kneeled on the ground and bowed lower than I had for any other.

It was then that I realised the floor beneath me was crimson too, undulating like blood from a wound.

I looked back to my god. “Are you to judge my entry to the beyond?”

She shook her head, the beads in her hair chiming like the sweetest of melodies. “You are not to pass beyond, Cleopatra. Today your curse awakens.”

I rose, confused. “Am I not worthy of the field of reeds?”