“Me, sir?” Titus blinked, wondering for a moment if Sabina’s husband might be flirting with him. Gods, wouldn’t that be awkward. But Sabina had confided before that Hadrian’s taste ran solely to strapping young athletes, and Titus had only to look at himself to know that he didn’t fit that mold. Besides, the warmth in his legate’s gaze was friendly rather than flirtatious.

“I would appreciate the company,” Hadrian went on. “The Emperor is a great man, of course, but conversation at his supper tables does tend toward siege tactics and war stories rather than philosophy and rhetoric. I would be grateful for a fellow lover of books to converse with when the others start refighting Philippi.”

“Honored, sir.” Titus went out whistling.

Thank the gods he didn’t catch me looking at her legs.

SABINA

“I win,” Hadrian whispered. Sabina made a face at him, but dropped a coin into his hand under the folds of his dinner synthesis. It had taken Emperor Trajan and his officers just until the second course to start refighting the battle of Actium, not the third as Sabina had wagered. The slaves, obviously used to their Emperor’s ways, circulated the wine again and stood back against the walls rather than clearing away the picked-over dishes. They watched Trajan with undisguised fondness, as did Sabina: a celebratory wreath cocked over his graying head at a rakish angle, poking a gnawed goose leg at one of his other legates. “No, no, it wasn’t like that at all—” and he swiftly rearranged the bones of the roast goose into a diagram of the Egyptian fleet. The Emperor looked far happier in this crude smoky triclinium in a far outpost of Germania than he ever looked stuffed into a toga and sitting at Plotina’s side during one of her interminable Imperial banquets.

“Little Sabina!” he’d shouted when she and Hadrian entered that evening, enveloping her in one of his crushing bear hugs. She was the only woman to dine that evening; none of the other legates had brought their wives north to Germania. “Gods’ bones, what is a little bit of a thing like you doing up in the arse end of nowhere?”

“Escaping your wife’s good advice,” Sabina said with utter honesty. Hadrian frowned at that, but Trajan threw his head back and roared.

“Maybe I’m doing a little of that too, eh? Come, come, sit by me—”