The Empress of Rome sat still for half an hour longer, gazing at the spreading slope of the gardens, deep-purple stola blowing around her feet. The wind picked up, keen and cold, but none of her women complained, merely hunched deeper into their shawls and continued their work as she tapped her letter slowly against the bench.

“Fetch me my new undersecretary from Athens,” Plotina said at last. “Bassus, his name is? I wish to consult with him about this new alimenta program.”

Taking charge of the project herself would give her oversight, information, access. I trust you to make arrangements for Sabina’s donation, Dear Publius had written. And she would. Surely there were far better uses for a hundred thousand sesterces than the feeding of a lot of lazy runny-nosed children in the provinces?

No doubt former Empress Marcella would call it meddling. Plotina called it duty.

“Come along,” Plotina said cheerfully to her women, rising. “It’s far too cold to work outside. Why did none of you say so?”

“Yes, Domina,” her household muttered, and filed back into the palace in her wake.

SABINA

“You must not be riding much in your wagon,” Hadrian noted. “You’ve gotten very brown.”

Sabina looked down at her tanned arms. “Trajan likes it.”

“I don’t.”

Sabina knew what Hadrian didn’t like, and it wasn’t her tanned skin. It was the Emperor’s careless comment as he patted Sabina’s freckled cheek at the last dinner: “You’re taking to army life much better than that husband of yours, little Sabina.”

“He wasn’t mocking you,” she answered Hadrian directly. “Just ribbing a bit.”

“He has no cause to. I do my duties—I work three times as hard as any other legate in his army—”

“He knows that. He also knows you don’t care for campaigning, that’s all.”

“Soldiers,” her husband grumbled, shifting a pile of writing tablets. “All the same, Emperor to legionary. None of them has any use for a man who prefers a book to a sword!”

“Don’t take it so hard,” Sabina consoled her husband. As she had predicted to Vix, her path rarely crossed Hadrian’s more than once a day now. But she did like to drop in now and then in the evenings and share a few friendly words. Especially now that the legions were camped about Sarmizegetusa, locked in the most dull and frustrating kind of siege warfare. Which, to Sabina’s eye, looked a lot like plain waiting.

“—useless campaigns,” Hadrian was complaining. “Of course the Dacian rebellion has to be contained, but once the siege is over, Trajan’s talking about expanding the territory into Sarmatia. Sarmatia! How many years and how many millions of sesterces will that cost? These wars of expansion, they’re costly and mostly useless. Rome is large enough.”