Plotina could see it clearly now. How foolish she had been, to ask for guidance from such a woman. Did she not have a conscience of her own? Didn’t she know what was best for Rome? For Trajan? For Dear Publius?

Empress, perhaps, was the title that must come before wife. If it was her duty to help Trajan see clear to the right path, then she must help him. And Dear Publius too.

The Chief Vestal called for quiet just as former Empress Marcella reached the cluster of her family. Plotina heard her voice very clearly, cool and faintly amused as she spoke to her sister: “Cornelia, perhaps we should take your granddaughter home. Somehow I don’t think she’ll be selected today.”

CHAPTER 11

VIX

“Isn’t he splendid?” I beamed. “Isn’t he?”

“That’s the Emperor?” Demetra had refused to speak to me all morning, but the sight of the Emperor of Rome riding through the streets right before her eyes had unlocked her pretty mouth from its stubborn silence. “He looks like a god!” she breathed.

“He is a god.”

“I think I agree,” Titus echoed, a skinny pillar standing on Demetra’s other side. He wore his toga, for which he ditched his tribune armor whenever possible, and somehow even in all this crush the immaculate folds were unwrinkled. “There’s no one quite like Emperor Trajan, is there?”

Our Emperor rode through the streets of Moguntiacum in a red cloak and full armor, vigorous and impatient on his black horse, waving and calling out to the crowd as they screamed for him. He could have been a god… or a man on holiday… or simply an emperor. An emperor the way an emperor was supposed to be. “I cut his arm open in a fight once,” I said reminiscently. “He’s probably still got the scar.”

“You shouldn’t tell lies,” Demetra chided.

“I’m not lying! It was a good fight—if he’d had a shield he might have pinned me, but—” A legionary jostled me in the crowd, swearing, and I swung Demetra’s little boy up to my shoulders to keep him out of the crush. He yelled, grabbing double handfuls of my hair in his excitement as the Emperor’s Praetorian guards began filing past in immaculate red-and-gold rows.

“Maybe there won’t be war now.” Demetra shaded her eyes with her hand, peering over the packed heads before her. “Now the Emperor’s here, maybe he’ll make peace?”

“You might hope for that,” Titus told her, “and so do I. But unfortunately, I think we’re the only ones. No one else from the Emperor on down wants peace.”