The bearers stopped, and she climbed out of the litter. A nameless little green patch at the top of the Quirinal Hill; not much of a garden. Just a grassy hillock with a few trees and a stone bench or two, where the pleb boys liked to take their sweethearts on fine evenings—but it did boast a high, wide view of Rome, and Marcella had it all to herself as she strode up the slope on legs still faintly shaky and looked out over the city. Dusk now, the sun falling orange-pink behind purple bands of clouds, the sky on the other side a cool darkening blue. Torches and lamps lighting the streets below, a sprawling forest of lights. Rome. She’d seen four emperors within the past year—Nero, Galba, Otho, and now Vitellius. Four emperors . . .

Three of them, thought Marcella, done away by me.

Partially, anyway.

Nero really had been an accident. “The world would lose a great artist in you, Caesar,” Marcella had told him at that private banquet, just trying to soothe his frantic nerves. And instead he’d sobbed into her lap and asked her how he could possibly escape it all, and she’d said he would fall on his sword before the Senate could execute him. All she had wanted was to get out of there and go home . . . but Nero did fall on his sword a week later. He’d even stolen Marcella’s words about the death of an artist. Nero never could write a decent line for himself.

Galba . . . well, one could say he was an accident too. Almost. Piso had been declared heir, Marcella jibed at Otho about how he might be declared Emperor yet if the omens weren’t favorable, and he had seized the idea, bribing a priest to interpret the omens badly and using the discontent of the soldiers to his own ends. Her little joke hadn’t really been a joke—even at the time Marcella had wondered if Otho might take the hint. But she never dreamed he’d go as far as he did. She certainly hadn’t wanted Piso dead; hadn’t wanted to end up dead herself on the steps of the Temple of Vesta along with her sister and cousins, as had so nearly happened. That really did get a bit out of hand.