Two officers in breastplates and greaves turned at the sound of footsteps. “Lady Cornelia,” Fabius Valens smiled, and they both bowed. The other man’s face was just a blur in her eyes. She forced back the tears that had come to her eyes, hearing Tullia click away behind her. Ahead, the fountain threw its spray high in the air behind her prospective suitor, glittering in the sunlight; a dazzling aureole behind his head. The moss was soft and green underfoot, every bush was exploding into bloom, and the smell of jasmine hung on the air. A garden full of flowers, a perfect summer day, a waiting suitor, Cornelia thought distantly. A thousand poems begin like this. She descended the two marble steps into the garden but couldn’t feel the ground under her feet.

Fabius took possession of her elbow. Her skin crawled at his touch, but he was all smiles today. “You know Caecina Alienus, of course?”

The man bowed—her next husband—and Cornelia saw the thin handsome face through a haze. Alienus, another of Vitellius’s most trusted advisers, a Roman who had been in Germania so long that he wore shaggy hair and trousers like a tribesman and drank German mead at banquets until he was soddenly unconscious. He grinned, his eyes crawling over her body, and contempt warred in her stomach with nausea.

“—Emperor will give a wedding feast for you, of course. He’s always valued you, Alienus—”

Alienus tipped his head back, half-turning Cornelia for a look at her haunches, and rage choked her throat—rage at Tullia and her brother. I was the wife of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, Imperial heir, descendant of Crassus and Pompey Magnus. And now they sell me to a man like this.

“—don’t mind if you take her to Baiae after the wedding, Alienus. If you want to try out your wife for a few days, I can handle matters here—”

It had been winter when Piso came to ask for Cornelia’s hand. He’d gone to her father first, as was proper, and afterward they had been allowed a few moments to walk in the frozen garden, breath steaming white on the air. She had been too excited to feel the cold.

“—give you a house on the Aventine, the one with the pink marble columns. It’s got a spectacular view over the Tiber—”

“I know that house,” Cornelia managed to say. “Doesn’t it belong to Senator Septimus Fulvius?”

Fabius smiled. “Now it belongs to your new husband.”

Cornelia wanted her own house back, the one where she’d spent eight years of married life. The mosaics with their twining vines and buds, the frescoes of acanthus leaves and bunches of grapes, the statues she’d chosen herself for each niche. Long since confiscated, and doubtless now belonging to some other opportunistic thug.