But the crowds were pressing thicker, and they couldn’t turn anywhere. The litter lurched, lurched again, and then one end fell and Marcella spilled out, hip smacking painfully against the stones. Lollia fell against her legs with a sharp little scream, Diana scrambled more nimbly to her feet, and Marcella looked up to see the litter-bearers dashing away into the night. Several street urchins let out a cheer and leaped into the litter for a game, but the rest of the crowd was silent. Marcella saw eyes glittering like pieces of jet, assessing her, and fear leaped suddenly in her throat. She wore one of her plain pale gowns, and Diana had a dusty smock fit only for grubbing in a stable, but Lollia’s silks and pearls . . .

“Forget about trying to reach the house.” Diana hauled them both up with rough little hands. “We need shelter, and we need it now.”

“Yes,” Marcella agreed faintly. “Maybe this is enough excitement.”

But there was more shouting ahead, and torches being waved in the air, and the crowd was murmuring now, not words so much as a low ominous rumble. Marcella felt herself pushed forward, Lollia’s fingers latched to her elbow, and then Diana managed to yank them all up a rough step into a vestibule.

“Can you see?” Lollia craned her neck, eyes wide and white.

“Yes.” Marcella, far taller than either of her cousins, could see everything—she had a clear line of sight down into the end of the Forum, where a bald head bobbed over a hired chair in the torchlight. Galba’s wrinkled tortoise neck turned this way and that, and Marcella could even see his mouth opening as he shouted orders, but the crowd bore him along hysterically, hearing nothing. She saw Old Flaccid close at his side and looked for Piso, for Cornelia—but there was only Galba in his useless breastplate.

Hoofbeats. Marcella couldn’t hear where they were coming from, but suddenly mounted Praetorians were spilling into the square and surrounding Galba in his chair, and short swords waved overhead and the red plumes of crested helmets looked like smears of blood in the twilight. Galba’s arm thrashed as his chair overturned, and then the swords were rising and falling.

“Marcella!” Lollia was screaming, pulling at her arm. The crowd’s silence shattered; half of them were screaming and buffeting to get away, and half were screaming and pushing forward to see an emperor get hacked to pieces. Marcella saw Lollia’s husband dragged from behind Galba’s fallen chair and stabbed through the gut as he shrieked for mercy.

Lollia gave a strangled whimper.