“Oh no,” Diana said serenely. She’d driven her four winds to victory once, and that was enough. No one laughed at her now when she trailed down to the stables in her silks; no one scoffed when the Anemoi pushed their red noses eagerly into her hands as if to say, Remember when we flew together? She had a withered palm branch in her bedchamber; she was a charioteer; and though the Anemoi would run hundreds more races, they would never run for any other driver the way they ran for her. Horses ran like that only once in a lifetime . . . or maybe twice. She smiled, thinking of how they’d flown under her hands during the riots. Maybe she had gotten to drive them for two races, at that. Nessus had been right after all.

So . . . now what?

She kilted her skirt through her girdle, trotting up the long slope to Llyn’s villa and coming automatically to the stables. Normally he would be bedding the horses down by this time in the evening, but she didn’t find him among the stalls. “Llyn?” She came into the yard, shading her eyes against the sun and looking at the rail where he so often sat looking west toward Britannia. But he wasn’t there tonight.

She came up to the villa then, putting her head around the door and calling his name again. No answer. She hesitated a moment, thinking of the laws of guest-right, but finally entered. The villa was a sprawling pillared place, untidy but friendly. The black dog looked up at her entrance and then put his nose down again.

“Llyn?”

Two slaves stared at her but returned silently to their work. Diana passed them, coming to the atrium at the center of the house. No urns or columns, just a square of grass—and a stone in the middle instead of the usual pool. Some dark foreign stone, rough-hewn, flattened like an altar. From Britannia? Somehow she was sure of it.

Something rested on top, and she picked it up. One of Llyn’s bronze arm rings, carved with twining leaves and laughing faces. “Seems rather cheerful for you,” she’d said once, looking at the sinuous bronze curves. They’d been in the hayloft, sweat drying on naked skin, lying identically with hands clasped behind their heads. “I’d have expected swords and skulls.”

“It was my father’s,” he’d said. “He was lord of all chiefs, appointed by the Druids. Lord of war. Lord of death. A Druid gave him that”—touching the laughing, time-smoothed bronze faces—“to remind him he was lord of life, too. He gave it to me last year, when he died.”