Song of the Nile by Stephanie Dray Page B

now, all its warehouses getting tinier with every stroke of the rower’s oars.
    “I’ll find a way to forgive you,” Juba said at length, his voice cold. “Just tell me that it’s done.”
    He shocked me into saying, “You think I went willingly?” I turned to stare at him.
    “Don’t!” His grip on the rail tightened until his knuckles went white. “Don’t pretend you didn’t seduce him, Selene. You used the occasion of our wedding to make a whore of yourself, and I endured it, so don’t lie. If not your loyalty, you at least owe me the truth.”
    Each word drove into me like a dagger. I’d known he wouldn’t believe me, so why did it hurt so much? And I remembered that Juba had asked for my love, but he’d never promised his. “What of your loyalty?”
    “First and always to the emperor,” he said, without any hesitation at all.
    Looking deep into Juba’s troubled amber eyes, for one horrifying moment, I wondered if he’d somehow been complicit. “You left me a virgin. Were you saving my virtue for your master?”
    He snorted. “It was you who went rigid on our wedding night.”
    “What about the night after?” I asked only to lash out at him, to cause him as much pain as he was causing me, but a flicker of guilt passed over his features and what he said next stole my breath away.
    “One doesn’t take from Augustus what he wants for himself.”
    Though wind filled the billowing sails overhead, I couldn’t seem to get enough air. Until this moment, I hadn’t known what kind of man Juba was. Not truly. Both hands went to my cheeks, fingers over my ears, as if I could unhear his words. “You knew . . .”
    “I’m not blind,” Juba said. “Of course I knew what he wanted from you.”
    Then Juba had betrayed me. Again . “Why didn’t you defend me? Why didn’t you protect me?”
    “Protect you?” Juba asked, eyes ablaze. “It’s what you wanted, Selene. Now you’ve had your way.”
    “It’s not what I wanted. Shall I show you the bruises?” I reached for my skirts to yank them up.
    Juba caught my wrist, stopping me. He wouldn’t look. He wouldn’t see . And whatever might have been salvaged between us was now shattered. Blinking back stunned tears, I wrenched my arm from Juba’s grasp, hating the white indentations his fingers left in my skin. I didn’t want him to touch me. I didn’t want any man to touch me ever again. There wasn’t a man in the world I could rely upon. No one but Helios had ever protected me, and now no one else ever would. I must always and only rely upon myself. The realization left me frightened, furious, and torn asunder. When I found my breath, I spat, “You’re a coward, Juba.”
    He blanched, his throat bobbing. “I ask you again, is it done between the two of you?”
    For him to ask such a question, he mustn’t have known me either. “No. It isn’t done. I’ll never let it be done.”
    Another man might have struck me or demanded a different answer from his wife, but as I turned to go Juba merely followed me to the tiny cabin on the deck that had been specially prepared for us. Inside, Chryssa vomited into a brass pot. Juba hovered in the entryway. “If she’s going to be seasick the whole journey, I might as well find another berth.”
    I didn’t even glance at him. “You might as well.”

Seven
    THEREAFTER I shut myself up with my slave girl in a cabin that smelled of vomit. I’d taken to scratching at my arms with my fingernails, as if I could scrape off the emperor’s filth. That Juba had known, and let it happen, defiled me twice over, and I feared that all the water in the sea couldn’t wash the shame away. So while Chryssa retched, I wished I could heave up the poison of humiliation in my own belly. All that comforted me was the memory of my goddess and her words.
    Child of Isis, you are more than flesh.
    “I’m going to die,” Chryssa whispered late on the third night of our voyage, her eyes bloodshot, hair clinging in