Diana couldn’t breathe inside her helmet and she flung it away, not caring about the murmur that went up when the crowd outside the Red faction saw her face and her long sweaty hair. She cradled Zephyrus’s nose against her cheek and thanked him for picking them all up in the last turn; she tugged Notus’s ears and crooned that he could have beat the sun horses across the sky; she moved Eurus’s braided forelock out of his eyes and whispered that he’d never been so sure-footed—and then finally she flung her arms around Boreas’s knotted neck and sobbed into his sweat-foamed shoulder.

“Fortuna, girl,” a voice growled, and she looked up to see Xerxes’s scowling face. “I realized it was you in the second lap. Don’t you ever get behind one of my teams again!”

“No.” She wiped her eyes, smiling radiantly.

“You’ll tell the Emperor that I had no part in this little stunt?”

“Yes.”

People were lifting her up now, carrying her toward the steps that led to the Emperor’s box, and she trailed her blistered fingertips across Boreas’s nose one last time before she let them usher her up. She caught a bare glimpse of Derricus, standing by his blood bays, and his face was tight and furious.

She barely had the strength for the steps toward the Emperor’s box. She would have crawled up on all fours like a dog if her hands hadn’t hurt as much as her legs. A bare glimpse of the Emperor in his purple robe, dim and hazy on his carved chair with a wine cup in hand, and then a whirl of silk and perfume descended on her.

“Diana, you idiot—”

“Juno’s mercy, what possessed you—”

“We didn’t even realize it was you until the race was over—we’d have been wrecks if we’d known—”

It was her cousins. Lollia wrung her hands, Marcella mussed her hair, Cornelia hugged her from behind, and Diana started laughing shakily. All of a sudden they were laughing with her, and she realized how long it had been since they had all laughed together. They stood there swaying, giggling like hyenas and getting smeared with Diana’s sweat as everyone gazed in disapproval, and finally Diana pushed free.

“Caesar—” Another mild bout of cackles seized her as she bowed before him. “It was all my idea, so don’t blame the Reds faction.”

Fabius Valens was staring at her. If looks could kill she’d have been dead on the tiles—but a patrician girl couldn’t be murdered in an alley like that poor Whites charioteer who had dared to win over the Blues.

“Girl,” rumbled Vitellius, “you know I passed an edict, forbidding patricians to drive?”

“I know.” She pushed her sweat-matted hair off her neck. “But the edict didn’t say anything about patrician girls, Caesar.”