The arm ring was still warm in her hands. Something lay under it, sitting on the rock—a wax-covered tablet; signed, notarized, quite official. “If anything happens to me,” Llyn had once told her, “my horses are yours.” But he’d lived in Rome long enough to appreciate the importance of the legalities, so he’d gone ahead and made it official. The horses, the barn, the house, the slaves—everything now belonged to her.

“Do you ever think of fleeing Rome?” Diana had asked him once in the hayloft, tracing an old puckered scar along his broad chest. “Going back to Britannia?”

“Yes.” A restless movement of the shoulder under her head. “But I took that oath. Emperor Claudius forced it out through my teeth, but I said the words.”

“Wouldn’t that be an oath worth breaking? Rather than putting a knife in your own heart a few years down the line.”

He stirred the ends of her hair with his fingers—long fingers, blunt-tipped and callused. “Oaths are the only thing that make men different from beasts.”

Diana sat down on the rough-hewn rock in the atrium, turning the bronze arm ring over. It lay heavy in her hands, and it smelled like him. “You smell like bronze,” she’d informed him the first time they’d ended up in the loft. “And hay.”

“You smell like horse,” he’d retorted, one of his big hands exploring the bare arc of her spine. He’d looked bemused, as if she still weren’t quite real to him—but he’d smiled too, ruefully, as if he couldn’t figure out how he’d ended up in a hayloft with a girl who wasn’t quite real, either.

It had been quite easy. They’d boosted each other into chariots and lifted each other out of crashes; they’d bandaged each other’s scrapes and massaged each other’s wrenched muscles; they’d drunk wine and shoveled manure and argued horse breeding. At some point lovemaking had slipped into the mix as well, with no more fuss than the rest of it.

The black dog came padding into the atrium, and Diana scratched behind his ears. “It’s been quite a year,” she said aloud. “Quite a year.” She’d said as much to Llyn last week, feeling the hay prickle against her bare legs and watching the sunlight coming in brilliant fingers through the cracks in the hayloft’s roof.

“A bad year.” He’d looked so sober that Diana leaned down and brushed her mouth lightly across his.