The stables of the Circus Maximus: a different world, Marcella often thought. The whisper of straw and the swearing of stable boys, the creak of wheels, the grooms rushing back and forth with arm-loads of harness. The roars of the crowd filtering down distantly from the tiers, the charioteers muttering their prayers and fingering their good-luck charms, the stallions giving their full-throated whinnies. A different world—certainly not Marcella’s world, as the grooms and charioteers and even the horses seemed to know, looking at her dubiously as she picked through the straw and manure. But oddly enough, it was Diana’s world.

Marcella found her youngest cousin in the Reds quarter beside the Reds faction director, a squat bald man named Xerxes who looked like a scarred frog. They stared with equal concentration at a quartet of gray stallions tied to the grooming posts.

“They’re getting old,” Diana was saying. “We need a new team for backup.”

“They have a few victories left in them.”

Diana walked behind the stallions, too close as she trailed her hand down a glossy flank, but horses never seemed to kick Diana. She should have been as out-of-place as Marcella—a pretty little thing with her scarlet silks and pale hair—but no one gave her a second glance. The faction director for the Reds had given up trying to boot her out by the time she was eight, when he found her playing unconcerned under the belly of a stallion who had kicked in the heads of no less than four grooms. What a ruckus in the family that had been.

Diana stepped back, chewing absently on a piece of straw. “Who’s driving, Xerxes?”

“A Greek boy. Won a few races at the Circus Flaminius. Got good hands.”

“The bays run too?” More than one team of horses could run for each color faction.

“Aye. Under Tarquin.”

“He’ll win, if those buggardly Blues don’t foul him.”

“Diana!” Marcella broke into the litany. Uninterrupted, Diana would go on all day. “Cornelia sent me down for you. She’s going mad trying to make everything perfect.”

“Go on with her, Lady,” Xerxes grunted at Diana. “Take your pretty sandals out of the muck.”

Diana came forward, catching one of the gray stallions by the nose and dragging his head down. Her arms looked too slim to hold a big horse, but the stallion’s broad nose dropped under her hand, and the baleful gaze was caught by a pair of cloudy blue-green eyes that had half the men in Rome stammering like schoolboys. “Keep steady out there,” Diana told the horse. “It’s a wild time once the flag drops.”