You couldn’t lie in Wolf. But you could bluff. Sometimes you had to bluff to keep a grieving pack together. What do mortals say? Fake it till you make it? That is a very wolfish philosophy.
“Thank you.” I looked up, but Lupa was gone. Nothing remained except silver mist, blending with the smoke from Jason’s pyre.
I gave Reyna and Frank the simplest version: I had received the wolf goddess’s blessing. I promised to tell them more the next day, once I’d had time to make sense of it. Meanwhile, I trusted that word would spread among the legion about Lupa giving me guidance. That would be enough for now. These demigods needed all the reassurance they could get.
As the pyre burned, Frank and Hazel stood hand in hand, keeping vigil as Jason made his final voyage. I sat on a funeral picnic blanket with Meg, who ate everything in sight and went on and on about her excellent afternoon tending unicorns with Lavinia. Meg boasted that Lavinia had even let her clean out the stables.
“She pulled a Tom Sawyer on you,” I observed.
Meg frowned, her mouth filled with hamburger. “Whad’ya mean?”
“Nothing. You were saying, about unicorn poop?”
I tried to eat my dinner, but despite how hungry I was, the food tasted like dust.
When the pyre’s last embers died and the wind spirits cleared away the remnants of the feast, we followed the legionnaires back to camp.
Up in Bombilo’s spare room, I lay on my cot and studied the cracks in the ceiling. I imagined they were lines of tattooed script across a Cyclops’s back. If I stared at them long enough, maybe they would start to make sense, or at least I could find the index.
Meg threw a shoe at me. “You gotta rest. Tomorrow’s the senate meeting.”
I brushed her red high-top off my chest. “You’re not asleep, either.”
“Yeah, but you’ll have to speak. They’ll wanna hear your plan.”
“My plan?”
“You know, like an oration. Inspire them and stuff. Convince them what to do. They’ll vote on it and everything.”
“One afternoon in the unicorn stables, and you’re an expert on Roman senatorial proceedings.”
“Lavinia told me.” Meg sounded positively smug about it. She lay on her cot, tossing her other high-top in the air and catching it again. How she managed this without her glasses on, I had no idea.
Minus the rhinestone cat-eye frames, her face looked older, her eyes darker and more serious. I would have even called her mature, had she not come back from her day at the stables wearing a glittery green T-shirt that read VNICORNES IMPERANT!
“What if I don’t have a plan?” I asked.
I expected Meg to throw her other shoe at me. Instead she said, “You do.”
“I do?”
“Yep. You might not have it all put together yet, but you will by tomorrow.”
I couldn’t tell if she was giving me an order, or expressing faith in me, or just vastly underestimating the dangers we faced.
Continue to act strong, Lupa had told me. It is how we start.
“Okay,” I said tentatively. “Well, for starters, I was thinking that we could—”
“Not now! Tomorrow. I don’t want spoilers.”
Ah. There was the Meg I knew and tolerated.
“What is it with you and spoilers?” I asked.
“I hate them.”
“I’m trying to strategize with y—”
“Nope.”
“Talking through my ideas—”
“Nope.” She tossed aside her shoe, put a pillow over her head, and commanded in a muffled voice: “Go to sleep!”
Against a direct order, I had no chance. Weariness washed over me, and my eyelids crashed shut.
Dirt and bubble gum
Lavinia brought enough
For the whole senate
HOW DO YOU TELL a dream from a nightmare?
If it involves a book burning, it’s probably a nightmare.
I found myself in the Roman senate room—not the grand, famous chamber of the republic or the empire, but the old senate room of the Roman kingdom. The mudbrick walls were painted slapdash white and red. Straw covered the filthy floor. Fires from iron braziers billowed soot and smoke, darkening the plaster ceiling.
No fine marble here. No exotic silk or imperial purple grandeur. This was Rome in its oldest, rawest form: all hunger and viciousness. The royal guards wore cured leather armor over sweaty tunics. Their black iron spears were crudely hammered, their helmets stitched of wolf hide. Enslaved women knelt at the foot of the throne, which was a rough-hewn slab of rock covered with furs. Lining either side of the room were crude wooden benches—the bleachers for the senators, who sat more like prisoners or spectators than powerful politicians. In this era, senators had only one true power: to vote for a new king when the old one died. Otherwise, they were expected to applaud or shut up as required.
On the throne sat Lucius Tarquinius Superbus—seventh king of Rome, murderer, schemer, slave-driver, and all-around swell guy. His face was like wet porcelain cut with a steak knife—a wide glistening mouth pulled into a lopsided scowl; cheekbones too pronounced; a nose broken and healed in an ugly zigzag; heavy-lidded, suspicious eyes; and long, stringy hair that looked like drizzled clay.
Just a few years before, when he ascended the throne, Tarquin had been praised for his manly good looks and his physical strength. He’d dazzled the senators with flattery and gifts, then plopped himself onto his father-in-law’s throne and persuaded the senate to confirm him as the new king.
When the old king rushed in to protest that he was, you know, still very much alive, Tarquin picked him up like a sack of turnips, carried him outside, and threw him into the street, where the old king’s daughter, Tarquin’s wife, ran over her unfortunate dad with her chariot, splattering the wheels with his blood.
A lovely start to a lovely reign.
Now Tarquin wore his years heavily. He’d grown hunched and thick, as if all the building projects he’d forced on his people had actually been heaped on his own shoulders. He wore the hide of a wolf for a cloak. His robes were such a dark mottled pink, it was impossible to tell if they’d once been red and then spattered with bleach, or had once been white and spattered with blood.
Aside from the guards, the only person standing in the room was an old woman facing the throne. Her rose-colored hooded cloak, her hulking frame, and her stooped back made her look like a mocking reflection of the king himself: the Saturday Night Live version of Tarquin. In the crook of one arm she held a stack of six leather-bound volumes, each the size of a folded shirt and just as floppy.
The king scowled at her. “You’re back. Why?”
“To offer you the same deal as before.”
The woman’s voice was husky, as if she’d been shouting. When she pulled down her hood, her stringy gray hair and haggard face made her look even more like Tarquin’s twin sister. But she was not. She was the Cumaean Sibyl.
Seeing her again, my heart twisted. She had once been a lovely young woman—bright, strong-willed, passionate about her prophetic work. She had wanted to change the world. Then things between us soured…and I had changed her instead.
Her appearance was only the beginning of the curse I had set on her. It would get much, much worse as the centuries progressed. How had I put this out of mind? How could I have been so cruel? The guilt for what I’d done burned worse than any ghoul scratch.