I made an obscene gesture at him and thumped out. A grimy urchin darted under my feet; I booted him out of the way and his mother screeched at me. I made an obscene gesture at her too, and slid moodily into the cheerful crowds. Truth was, this wasn’t what I had planned when I’d dreamed of coming back to Rome. Oh, it was easy enough—after a month I had a room of my own, food that didn’t have too many bugs in it, coins for the bathhouse or the theatre whenever I had a mind to go. It wasn’t hard taking purses off wild boys and rich tradesmen, and I even had a little side business stealing goods off vendors in the Subura and reselling them to vendors in the Esquiline. An easy enough life. But it wasn’t quite…

The Colosseum had been thrown open to the crowd for festival day, and games were planned. No doubt a thousand lions would be slaughtered by spearmen, five thousand exotic birds by archers, and a few hundred prisoners by guards, and half the unlucky bastards sentenced to the gladiatorial fights would get dragged out on hooks through the Gate of Death. I ducked the Colosseum and turned toward the Circus Maximus instead. Not that the chariot races couldn’t get bloody when a team went down, but it was better than the games. Plus, at the circus the women weren’t walled up in their own section of seats, so you had a decent chance of finding a girl to take home.

God, the time I spent back then trying to get girls to go home with me. Well, I was eighteen.

The tiers were already packed to the skies, families waving little colored banners and already cheering their favorite teams. The Reds, the Blues, the Greens, and the Whites—I’d never backed one faction or another, but in my red tunic I was automatically hauled along to a section of seating packed with Reds fans. “A Blues bastard do that to you?” a big gap-toothed fellow demanded, pointing at my puffy lip. “Bloody bastards, those Blues.”

“Right,” I agreed. Never argue with a racing fanatic.

“The Blues’ll take all the heats today, you wait,” a woman in blue face paint screeched down from the tier above.

“They’ll be dead bloody last!” the gap-toothed man roared, and a brisk shoving match broke out. I squirmed out of my seat and went looking for another, eyeing the cooler tiers and private boxes where the patricians and equites seated themselves. Maybe I could sneak in…

“Vercingetorix?” someone said behind me.

I turned—a girl in a red dress, with a wreath of festival poppies in her light-brown hair. “Lady Sabina.” I remembered to bow. “You’re in the wrong section. Patricians are all up there.”

“I know. My aunt Diana has a box. But I’m ducking a suitor.”