Trajan and his officers had moved on from Actium to Alesia. The roast goose bones had been rearranged to represent Caesar’s legions, and a shank of roast boar had become the enemy fort. Hadrian, on Sabina’s other side, had claimed Titus’s attention and they were dissecting the tale of Aeneas, with Titus holding staunch for Virgil and Hadrian waving his arms in support for Ennius. Titus looked over from time to time, trying to draw Sabina into the conversation, but there was no interrupting Hadrian in full flow.

“No, no, far too polished and mannered. Good straightforward prose is what Roman literature needs, not these mincing tricks of the pen—”

“—that Dacian king, he’ll go down faster for us than the Averni did for Caesar—”

Sabina slid off the couch. Neither Hadrian nor Trajan noticed as she tugged her palla up over her hair and sauntered out of the triclinium into the black German night.

Such stars! Were there stars like this over Rome, hidden by the smoke and the dust? Or did Germania have a different night sky altogether? So much bigger, so much blacker, stars flung across from horizon to horizon like an emperor’s ransom in diamonds. Sabina wandered away from the circle of lamplight outside the Emperor’s quarters, waving back the guards who started to tramp after her, and after some more wandering around the shadowy darkness of the principia, she found a patch of grass. The occasional legionary tramped past on his way to sentry duty, or an aide dashing with an armload of slates, but no one paid any attention to Sabina, so she flopped down on her back in the grass and stared skyward. If she closed her eyes, it felt like she was clinging to the surface of the earth by her fingertips. If I let go, will I fly up there and never come down? Would I even want to come down…

“Ow,” said a male voice, and someone fell over her in the dark.

Sabina scrambled to her feet, tripping over a fallen spear haft. Someone else tripped over her foot, and nearly went down again. A large male someone, just an armored shape in the dark.

“Who goes there?” a voice demanded, finally straightening.

“The legate’s wife,” Sabina said, tugging the black palla off her hair. “Hello, Vix.”

There was a long pause. “Oh, hell,” he said finally.

“I thought I might run into you here,” Sabina smiled into the dark. Clearly this was to be a night full of surprises. “Just not quite so literally.”

“Lady.” His voice was flat as he gave a jerk of a bow. “The Emperor’s banquet is that way.”