The Briton smiled, tilting his long sword up across one shoulder—and Marcella suddenly saw that the blade was dark.

“He wasn’t worth it,” said Diana. “I hope you realize that, too.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Then why?”

The Briton paused, fingering the hilt of the blade still tilted across one shoulder. “Eighteen years I’ve been in Rome,” he said finally. “And every morning when I wake up, I think for a moment that I’m in Britannia. Sometimes it’s my friends pounding at the door, shouting at me to go hunting with them. Sometimes it’s my father, planning a raid on a Roman fort and wanting me to lead my scouts for a diversion. But for a moment or two, it’s real. More real than any of this.” His arm encompasses the hill, the horses, the city below. “More real than you.”

“And?”

“Emperor Claudius made us swear oaths we’d never leave Rome. I wanted to kill him for that. My father kept the oath, but my father’s dead now. Dead of captivity. I’d go ahead and kill Claudius, if he were still alive, but—” Llyn shrugged. “Another emperor will do just as well.”

Diana gestured at his sword. “Better hide that.” The Briton paused, looking up at her as he squatted down to shove the sword under a pile of harness at the corner of the yard, and Marcella wondered if she’d ever get the full story.

“IS it over?”

Marcella could hear the question being asked everywhere as the blood was cleared away and people came creeping back to their daily lives. “Is it over?” Not just a matter of the bloodshed being over, or Vitellius’s reign being over. Is it all over?

Rome was silent. Plebs scurried hastily back to their bolted homes, blood dried in the gutters, slaves who had fled their masters in panic crept shamefacedly back. The Cornelii family home was a wreck, the furniture smashed or stolen, half the statues broken, the doors gaping wide. The house of Lollia’s grandfather had fared better—his wine cellar was empty, but the task of emptying it had clearly distracted the looting soldiers, who had otherwise left the house untouched except for a few broken statues, sundry small stolen valuables, and a wrecked mosaic in the entrance hall. “And the mosaic,” Lollia said affectionately, “can be blamed on Diana the Huntress here. You must all stay with me until everything else is put in order, of course—”

“Not me,” said Cornelia. She was still pale with the nausea she couldn’t quite seem to shake off, but she threw her palla over her head and started resolutely for the door. “I’m going to find Drusus.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Marcella wondered, then blinked as her cousins both turned and eyed her a little oddly. “What?”

“You didn’t guess?” Lollia raised her eyebrows. “It’s plain as the nose on Cornelia’s face.”