“I need some air,” Cornelia said to Gaius, and stumbled off her couch toward the gardens. The sky was already black—had the banquet gone on for more than five hours?—and the gardens were filled with Vitellius’s Germans. Two were wrestling, stripped to the waist and surrounded by cheering friends; they barreled into a stone nymph holding an urn of summer violets and sent it tumbling over in a crash of stone chips and crushed blossoms. Another soldier lay under a lilac bush, his hips pumping rhythmically over one of the dancers. The blond giant who had groped at Diana unsheathed his dagger to dig the ivory eyes out of one of the matched ebony statues that lined the walls. Pools of regurgitated food lay everywhere. Someone had vomited into the fountain, still splashing streams of expensive wine.

Lollia’s grandfather gave them just what they wanted, Cornelia couldn’t help thinking. And now they’re ruining his beautiful house.

Well, none of the damage was serious. They were celebrating, that was all. Of course they were bound to get a little wild—they had defeated Otho, after all, so now they wanted a little raucous fun. No harm in that.

Someone threw up all over her shoes.

Lollia’s grandfather sighed at Cornelia’s shoulder. “Perhaps I’ll have that vomitorium installed after all.”

WELL, this is better,” Cornelia said aloud, relieved. The Emperor’s box at the Lucaria races was a cheerful hubbub—shouted bets, peals of laughter, rough jests—but the noise was merely highspirited. She hadn’t intended to go to the races at all that day—Lucaria, coming at the height of summer, was always so hot, and she would have preferred a book and a cup of cold mulberry infusion in the coolness of the atrium to a sticky afternoon at the circus. But a Praetorian delivered a scroll that morning with a toneless mumble, and Tullia had ripped it open to find the Imperial seal.

“Fabius Valens has invited us to the Imperial box at the Circus Maximus,” she said gleeful. “Especially you, Cornelia. Thank goodness for your connection with Piso and Galba—it was a trifle inconvenient with Otho on the throne, I admit, but Vitellius seems determined to honor anyone even remotely connected—”

“Perhaps the Emperor means to marry you to one of his supporters,” Gaius broke in, taking the scroll from his wife’s hand. “Lollia isn’t the only one who can make an advantageous marriage.”

“For once you’re right, Gaius.” Tullia eyed Cornelia sternly. “I do hope you’ll be sensible.”

“Let Marcella make the advantageous marriage.” Cornelia folded her hands at her waist to keep them from clenching into fists. “She and Lucius haven’t even spoken to each other since Brixellum—he’d happily divorce her. Or Diana—seventeen years old now, it’s high time she married—”