“Not anymore.” His eyes flickered. “I know you.” It was not a question.

“Could say so.” I bowed, calculating just how many lashes I’d get across the back from my centurion for striking a superior, and if it would be worth it. “Sir.”

I could see the honing of his glance as he retrieved the memory from whatever bank of scrolls it was that served him for a mind. “Vercingetorix. The Norbanus guard. I suppose it is to be expected that you joined the legions. What else is there, for those of your sort?” He twitched the folds of his toga across his chest. “Dismissed.”

I bowed, and he whirled his purple-bordered folds and turned in the other direction. But I’d spied a trailing end of that fine toga, and surreptitiously put my foot down on it, and it snapped taut and caught him up. His foot slipped in a slick of spring mud and down he went.

“Sir!” I sprang into motion. “Allow me to help you, sir. My pleasure, sir.” I managed to slip and get my own hand covered in mud before I held it out to him, then trip again and land him back in the worst of it. “So sorry, sir. Mud, sir, very treacherous in the springtime, sir.”

He was expressionless as he finally rose: a broad smear of mud down one arm and along one leg, and another right across the rump. Across the principia I could hear a cluster of watching centurions snickering.

“Vercingetorix,” he said, thoughtful. “I seem to remember you required a lesson from me in the past. Perhaps it was not stern enough.”

“Sorry, sir. Can’t remember, sir.”

“Clearly it was not stern enough, then.”

“Sir.” I stood at my stiffest attention as he gathered his muddy folds about him and marched off into the principia. If that beetle-brained prig thought he could lay a finger on me while I was in the Tenth, he’d have a stern lesson coming his way. Only an officer of the Tenth could levy punishment on me, and only for violating the legion’s own regulations. And if Hadrian got creative and tried to hire a beating for me, as he’d done in the past, he’d find I had a friend among the tribunes and four loyal brothers in my contubernium, all of whom would have my back clear down to hell.

Suddenly feeling more cheerful, I swung back into the rows of barracks toward my own.

“Heard the news?” Boil was lacing up his breastplate as I came into the little barracks room with its stacked beds that I shared with my contubernium. “We’ve got a new legate.”