Entertainers streamed out between courses: dancers in thin gauzes, poets with hymns to married love, jugglers with gilded balls. An orator in a Greek robe was just preparing a recitation when a sudden blare of trumpets drowned the plucking of harps. Cornelia looked up to see a line of red-and-gold-clad soldiers filing into the triclinium. The Praetorian Guard, personal army and bodyguards of the Pontifex Maximus and ruler of the world. Whispers ran across the throng: “The Emperor!”

A hunched figure in Imperial purple stumped in. As one, all the guests in the room, from host to bride, rose from their couches.

“So that’s him?” Marcella managed to cast her glance upward even when she bowed with the rest of the guests. “Oh, good. My first close look.”

“Sshh!” Cornelia had seen Emperor Galba many times before—he was a distant cousin of her husband’s, after all, and a guest at her table long before he’d taken the purple. A man of seventy-one, hawk-nosed, wrinkled as a tortoise but still sturdy. Emperor for five months now, appointed by the Senate upon Nero’s suicide. The Imperial mouth turned down in a frown as Galba looked around at the wreaths of flowers, the silver dishes, the flagons of wine. Everyone knew the Emperor had frugal tastes. “Some might even say cheap,” Marcella murmured whenever the latest money-saving decree passed through the Senate.

Galba made greetings in his barking voice, waving irritably for the guests to resume, and Cornelia rose from her bow and threaded breathlessly through the throng to the only figure in the crowd of Imperial arrivals who mattered. “Piso!”

“My dear.” He smiled down at her: Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, her husband of eight years. Chosen for her at sixteen, and she had never wanted another. “How lovely you look.”

“Did he say anything?” Cornelia lowered her voice as Galba stood barking orders at his Praetorians, and a troop of dancers in bells and beads undulated in to entertain the guests. “The Emperor?”

“Not yet.”

“I’m sure it will come soon.”

Neither of them elaborated. It rang loud enough unspoken: The day when Galba chooses you as heir.

Who else could the Emperor choose, after all? A man of seventy-one needed an heir, the sooner the better, and who would be more suitable than his distinguished and serious young cousin? Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, with his distinguished bloodlines and impeccable record of service to the Imperium? Everyone knew it would be Piso.

Certainly no man in Rome would make a handsomer Emperor. Cornelia looked at her husband: tall and lean, his features somber but lightening when he smiled, his eyes that always looked straight at the world where other men looked for shadows. Emperor Nero had once mistrusted that straight gaze and threatened to exile her husband to Capri or even Pandetaria, where few men survived—but Piso had never looked away, and Nero had found a new fancy for his fears.