Titus exhaled a long breath but kept silent as she retrieved a bundle of laundry from her wagon. Whatever disapproval he felt of her, he kept it to himself. After the look of blank shock on his face that first night, Sabina had found herself hoping, with an intensity that surprised her, that she wasn’t going to lose him for a friend. But he still came to share food and conversation at the contubernium fire in the evenings, and if he averted his eyes from her and Vix, it seemed to be from courtesy rather than disapproval.

They had reached the stream, a winding bend of silver gone purple in the twilight. A dozen soldiers and a few women were scrubbing out helmet liners and tunics on its banks, grousing good-naturedly about aching feet and sore backs. Some looked curiously at Titus in his pristine tribune’s armor, but none glanced twice at Sabina with her plaited hair and sheepskin cloak. Why would they? She could have been a slave or perhaps someone’s freedwoman maid; just another tough and seasoned woman who followed after the legions.

Over the organized sprawl of the camp loomed Sarmizegetusa, which the men had taken to calling Old Sarm. Sabina looked up above the trees at the Dacian capital: a jagged crag of rock spearing into the dusk, crowned by a fortress. The legions had let out a dusty cheer in the road when it first loomed in the distance, and Sabina had shaded her eyes with her hand for a closer look. Rome was geometrically built, ordered around forums and hills and capitols. The Dacians had built a city that climbed almost vertically up the mountain, peaked roofs and steep streets winding around stepped terraces, crowned on top by the massive fortress where the Dacian king was now holed up with his wild-haired, wild-eyed warriors. “We’ll have it down in rubble within the week,” the engineers had boasted, but Sabina was not surprised to see the army still here a month later with no real dents put into those mountain walls.

She shook off her fancies and dropped to her knees on the damp sand of the stream bank, rinsing Vix’s tunic in the chilly water. “I don’t see many legates’ wives doing laundry,” Titus observed. “Why not have your slaves do that for you? Unless you enjoy scrubbing dirt out of clothes.”

“No, not exactly.” Sabina rubbed at a stubborn mud stain. “But there isn’t much point in an adventure if you only do the fun parts, is there? Vix can’t ask a slave to polish his boots for him or repair his breastplate, so why should I? That just makes me a dabbler.”

“That settles it,” said Titus. “I do not have the heart of an adventurer.”

“You have the heart of a scholar,” Sabina offered.