“At mine I was too busy hoping I’d wake up and find it wasn’t real.”

Lollia and Senator Vinius shared the ritual cake, sitting on stools inlaid with gold. Lollia’s rubies winked—cuffs on both wrists, brooches at both shoulders, shoulder-sweeping earrings, and a collar wrapping her throat. “Lollia gets such nice presents from her grandfather whenever she gets married,” Marcella mused. “All Father gave me was a letter of congratulations sent four months late from Gaul. And he couldn’t remember who I married.”

“Our father was a great man.”

“He couldn’t even tell us apart! He barely bothered giving us enough of a dowry to marry on, and he didn’t come home from his precious legions one year in five—”

“Great men have more important matters to tend to than domestic concerns,” Cornelia sniffed. She had mourned their father very properly when Emperor Nero ordered his suicide, observing all the correct rituals, but Marcella hadn’t seen any point in pretending grief. She hardly knew her father, after all—he’d been too busy crashing around Gaul during her childhood, racking up victories. I suppose all those victories made Nero nervous. It just goes to show that too much success is bad for one’s health. That might make a neat little aphorism on ambition, with a bit of rewording. Just the thing to finish up her account of the life and reign of Emperor Nero . . .

A white bull was led forward onto the steps of the altar, and the priest shoved back his sleeves and cut its throat with a practiced double slash. The bull bellowed, but went down easily before the shrine—a good omen for the marriage. Marcella twitched her pale-blue hem away from a creeping trickle of blood and heard a careless voice at her shoulder.

“Am I late?”

“Yes,” Marcella and her sister said in unison. Diana, of course—late for everything. The bull might be dead on the altar and Lollia fidgeting, but the priest was fussing with the bloodied knife and consecrating it to the goddess of marriage, so Diana slid into place behind them.

“I saw the most marvelous race in one of the little circuses! Four Arab stallions and a Greek running for the Whites beat Perseus and the Greens—gods’ wheels, Cornelia, what are you fussing about? Lollia won’t care if I’m late. Can you imagine the Whites beating the Greens? They’ve already sworn the Greek can’t do it in the Circus Maximus, but I think he might. Good hands, a nice sense of timing, driven eight months for the Whites so of course he hardly has any victories because Helios the Sun God couldn’t get many wins driving those mules the Whites call horses—Marcella, what are you rolling your eyes at me for?”

“Because you’re drowning out the priest and everybody’s shushing you, that’s why.”