THE Reds lunge off the drop a second late, trailing last before the wheels are even in motion. But Diana doesn’t mind that. She doesn’t want to get caught in the jockeying for the inside space against the spina; she doesn’t have the experience to bull her way through a crush. All she has is the raw speed of her four winds. The chariot rocks under her feet, the air blurs her eyes through the slit in her helmet, the reins are taut sawing lines in her hands, and oh gods, she never dreamed that even the four winds could run so fast. She braces her arms, adjusts her weight against the front of the chariot, tucks her chin into her chest to cant the streaming airflow away from her eyes; minuscule adjustments that are second nature now after months of Llyn’s nitpicking, and she realizes that under the helmet she’s grinning like a fiend. “Slowly, beauties,” she sings out to the Anemoi, who are fighting her grip. “Slowly.”

They’re fourth and last coming into the turn, but Diana doesn’t want to rush. Her first turn in the Circus Maximus—gods’ wheels, if she clips it wrong out of nerves she’ll wreck the chariot and likely kill the horses. She grips her lip in her teeth, heart hammering as she gathers the reins on the inside—and Boreas lowers his head into the harness like a bull and the chariot wheels around neat as a pin and they’re thundering into the straightaway again. One more turn, pretty as the one before, and the first lap is done. In a flash of gold overhead she sees the dolphin tilt its carved nose down.

That wasn’t so hard.

She hears a dull roar somewhere behind the rush of wind in her ears, and knows the crowd is shouting. The Greens have the lead, the Blues on the rail behind, the Whites somewhere on the outside. If she were watching from her usual place in the stands she’d be screaming now, begging the charioteer to pick up the pace, but she wants another lap or two to feel out her team. After months of watching from the stands she knows them inside and out—knows exactly how much speed Zephyrus can produce in the stretch, knows how Eurus and Notus can match their strides so perfectly they look like one eight-legged horse, knows how Boreas can lean nearly horizontal into a turn to bring a chariot around—but she’s never driven them before, and she has exactly six laps left to get to know them. No, four laps—two more have come and gone in a flash, and maybe seven laps isn’t so long as all that, because the race is almost half done.

Time to move up.