He taught her how to keep her balance in the low-slung chariot, how to strap the heavy reins about her waist, how to brace her weight against the pull of the horses. She learned how much strength it took to guide a team around a hairpin turn at all, much less keep them close to the spina, and was mortified when she careened off the track in a shower of mud on her first try.

“Again,” called Llyn. He paced the mud beside the track with his hands clasped behind him, calling instructions as the rain dripped off the ends of his hair and the black dog sat at his feet. He looked exactly the same standing in a pool of mud as he looked standing in the Emperor’s box under golden sunlight: calm, contained, aloof. Diana decided she’d be alarmed if his expression ever changed.

“Racing’s dangerous,” he warned her the first time she crashed a turn, as he impersonally bandaged her scraped arms. “You break your neck, I’ll not make excuses to your family.”

“Dump my body at the Blues stable,” Diana suggested absently, inspecting a bloody scrape on her knee. “With any luck, we could pin a murder on them.”

Her elbows and knees turned into patches of scabs, her thighs were chafed red from being crushed against the front of the chariot, and she had a permanent belt of black bruises about her waist from the knotted reins. She stepped down from her chariot at the end of those long afternoons hardly able to stand, her arms trembling under the weight of the harness when she unhitched the geldings and staggered off home.

“Oh, my beauties, I’m getting good,” she whispered when she visited her Anemoi at the Reds faction stables. The four stallions pushed their red noses eagerly into her hands, knowing her well by now. “I wish I could drive you in a real race.” She dreamed of it sometimes, dreamed of wearing a red tunic embroidered in gold flames about the neck as she stood in a chariot crowned by a fire god’s painted head, sending her four red winds streaking ahead to victory. Getting the victory palm, that simple branch that weighed nothing in the hand, but meant everything.

Of course she knew she’d never drive the Anemoi, or have a victory palm. Young men of the patrician class sometimes raced in the circuses, if their families didn’t shunt them into the legions or the Senate or anything more exalted—but never a woman, not of any class.

But at least she could drive.

“Surely I can handle a faster team by now,” she cajoled Llyn.

“You’re too small to hold a faster team.”

“But I’m strong now. Feel!” She took his hand between hers and squeezed with all her might. Even through the leather gloves, her hands had grown hard as horn. As hard as Llyn’s.