“One must adapt.” Julia smiled, and for a moment Regina saw something of Aetius’s strength and resilience in his daughter’s eyes. “And as you can see, we can still afford one of the amphitheater’s best boxes. Your aunt Helena has two daughters, Leda and Messalina—I suppose Messalina is about your age. Messalina, too, has children, daughters.” All daughters, Regina noted absently, no sons. Julia went on, “And I have one daughter—”

Regina closed her eyes. “Mother, you have two daughters.”

Briefly Julia reached out to touch her hand, but she pulled back. “Two daughters, then. Your sister is called Leda.”

“Half sister—”

“Yes. Her father is dead. He was uninteresting.” This dismissal was chilling. “And now,” Julia said softly, “you are here. What do you want, Regina?”

Regina spread her hands. “I am here to build a better life than I could have found in Britain.” She told her mother something of the extirpating advance of the Saxons, and the foolishness of the British leaders like Artorius, still dreaming of empires. “And,” she said, “I have come here for repayment of certain debts.”

“Debts owed by this Amator. And, no doubt, by me.”

Regina said evenly, “You had a duty to protect me—a duty doubled by my father’s death. You didn’t fulfill that duty. If it hadn’t been for Aetius—”

Julia nodded, considering. “We are not rich, my Order. But we can take you in—you and your daughter—if that is acceptable. We are family: Leda, and Helena and her daughters, myself, we all live in the same community.”

The proposal sounded acceptable to Regina. After all the family would be together, a network of mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces, sisters and cousins.

“I’ll consider it.”

“Good. We can discuss terms later.”

Terms? . . . We are bargaining, Regina thought, bargaining with duty and guilt. How cold we are—and how like me this woman is—or how like her I have become.

The crowd bayed again, and Regina glanced back at the sun-drenched arena.

The beast slayers had almost done their work. The last animals were released—but they were not beasts but humans, Regina thought at first. Very tall, very naked, they ran like the wind, faster than anybody she had ever seen. And, she saw, their heads above their very human faces were flat, their brows reaching back from great ridges set over eye sockets, within which terror and bafflement was easy to discern.