The Wings of Ashtaroth

Prologue: Children: Section V: Moniqa

Moniqa: Qemassen: The Palace Gardens

Moniqa lay dying on the cold surface of the stone bench beneath her lilac trees.

Her lilacs. Hers.

She stared up at the purple blossoms above her. As her vision blurred and sharpened, blurred and sharpened, the flowers took on strange shapes. They looked so much paler in the moonlight, their thousand rounded petals like the curled fingertips of ghosts. Soon she would join those ghosts—Eshmunen's thugs had made sure of that. The bench was coated in her blood, and every time she breathed too hard she coughed more blood into her mouth. It tickled at her gums, oily in her throat, just like all those years ago when she'd been a child.

Back then, back in Indas, she'd tripped on her skirts one morning and cracked her chin against the hard palace floor. She'd cried and cried, and the slaves hadn't been able to make her stop. She'd cried until her father had come and lifted her up and pretended to steal her nose. She'd lost a tooth, but that was lucky, her mother and father had said—a sign she was growing into a woman.

Being a woman had meant marrying Eshmunen. She'd been so proud then, to be growing up.

The leaves above her shivered against one another.

Everything felt cold—no, not cold, numb. Numb, and she was alone, the soldiers already gone by the time she'd woken. She'd wanted to crawl from the bench for help, but her limbs were too heavy, like she'd woken from one of her nightmares, immobile. The soldiers had laid her out on this bench with a knife beside her—a knife she couldn't even hold and had knocked onto the garden path when she'd tried. They expected the Semassenqa to believe she'd killed herself beneath these trees, stabbed such a deep hole in herself with this feeble blade. Moniqa laughed, tears springing to her eyes, blood to her mouth and lips.

Had it been minutes? Hours? Time seemed to have slowed, or maybe speeded up. Aurelius might already be dead. She'd failed him.

There was no mother with him to steal his nose.

She stretched her trembling arm upward, her reach just shy of the flowers. The blood of her slaves had dried on her hands, had mingled with her own. Her skin, her fingers, were all dirty with it—too dirty for the clean beauty of the lilacs. But if she touched skin to blossom, flesh to leaf, perhaps Adonen would hear her. And then Aurelius—the first Aurelius—would take her hand and clasp it in his own. She would be free to return to her family. Her mother and Lena were doomed, having never welcomed Adonen to their breasts, but Moniqa would see her father and brother again. Lena had followed the old gods, and her sun had set with theirs.

And Moniqa's son? What if she hadn't taught Aurelius enough of Adonen's wisdom? How did one instill the love of a god in a child's heart? There hadn't been time. His spirit would be lost, wandering the Western Desert, unsure how to make his way back to Adonen's bosom, to her.

Her chest felt full, like it might burst, but that wasn't logical—her chest wasn't full, it was empty, pierced through by Gemel's sword.

Moniqa dropped her arm and it fell against the bench like a heavy stone.

She blinked away a dampness from her lashes.

An owl hooted somewhere behind her, and the noise was followed by the sound of rustling leaves, as though the bird had taken flight. She'd found that owl's feather in her trunk earlier, before the disaster at court, before Aurel had been ripped from her and sent out like a lamb to slaughter. She should have known then. She should have understood. Evil gods watched with evil eyes. Evil goddesses of violence and vengeance.

The strix in the window of her babies' bedchamber had been summoned to her side. It had known what was about to happen, before even Moniqa had realized. It had sensed a mother's need for retribution and come to feed.