Rome 2: The Coming of the King by M. C. Scott

courtyard was a stone water trough for the use of the more distant worshippers who must ride to their devotions, and on it, a neat, swiftly scratched graffito in the shape of a wild lily with a hound alongside. The hound had one ear.
    Resting on the trough, he scratched his own sign of the bullalongside Hypatia’s mark of the lily, and gave the hound its second ear to show that he understood that she had seen Saulos, then turned back up the hill and made his way back to the inn to return the stolen tunic to a night-slave not yet risen and tell Mergus all he had found.

C HAPTER E IGHT
    SOMEWHERE, SOMEONE WEPT .
    The noise hid in the sea-mist that rolled over the palace gardens, almost, but not quite, private. Hypatia caught the sound’s thread and followed it along a paved path past a series of three marble fountains, on each of which a weed-clad Oceanid cavorted in bronze, spilling water from hand or hair or heel.
    Beyond them, at a corner where the cyclamens and orchids wove a pastel carpet, she turned left towards the sea and passed through avenues of scarlet tulips, dripping dew fat as blood. There, at the garden’s end, a set of stairs led down to a pair of iron gates and on the steps a dark-haired girl sat slumped with her head in her hands, sobbing just loudly enough to be audible throughout the gardens.
    Hypatia crouched on the top step and waited a while, watching. When it was clear she was not going to be acknowledged, she said, ‘Kleopatra?’
    The girl’s head snapped up. She had sharp features, honed by eyes that held exactly the same startling gaze as her aunt Berenice’s, but that these were greener and paler now than theyhad seemed in the lamplight, almost the colour of the deep ocean sea. A tear slid down one cheek, sharp as a diamond.
    ‘Is this because I caused the queen to send you out of the audience room the other night?’ Three of the five days had passed until Hypatia was due to attend the theatre. Slowly, she was learning where she could and could not go.
    ‘Oh, that.’ The girl tipped her head, considering. Plain on her face was the calculation of what she might gain by agreeing with Hypatia’s suggestion.
    Honesty, or pragmatism, won. ‘No. It’s Iksahra, the black beastwoman. She promised she’d let me fly the falcon before we go to Jerusalem, and we might ride at any moment. But she’s taken Hyrcanus and his tiercel out instead. She loves him – Hyrcanus, not the bird. They hide in the horse stalls and fornicate.’ That last was said with all the boundless venom of a wounded girl-child.
    Hypatia, who did not believe it, let her eyes grow wide. ‘Does your uncle, the king, know that?’
    ‘I’ve told him, so he must.’ Kleopatra stood up, dragging her fingers through her mist-sodden hair. She wore a plain, undyed linen tunic, belted with leather, not silver. If Hypatia had not known her already, it would have been altogether too easy to mistake her for a well-dressed slave. In this palace, the slaves were dressed in fabric of better weave than at least half the city’s population.
    Kleopatra said, ‘You’re the Chosen of Isis.’
    Hypatia had heard her title spoken in awe and hope, in fear and horror, in longing, in grief, in love. More rarely than any of these, she had heard it said in hate, by priests of other gods who fell in the shadow of her own.
    She had never heard it spoken as an insult before; even Iksahra had managed to keep the inflection from her voice. She inclined her head. ‘I am.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Why what?’
    ‘Why were you Chosen?’
    No one in twenty-five years had asked that. Hypatia closed her eyes, the better to think. The better, in fact, to ask the god who sometimes gave answers.
    Not today. Her mind was empty of all but the horror of the night’s dream. It was coming continually, now that Saulos was close.
    Opening her eyes, she said, ‘I had dreams as a child.’
    ‘True ones?’
    ‘Dreams are rarely completely true. They show the essence of