Allowable, I supposed—considering there wasn’t much between Hadrian and Sabina after dinner. It was the first thing I’d asked her. “Hadrian was more nervous on our wedding night than I was,” Sabina had chuckled, turning over on one side that first night in Dacia. “He’s had periodic affairs with married women, but I don’t think he’d ever had a virgin girl. What he assumed was a virgin girl, anyway… he was so relieved that I wasn’t crying and bleeding all over the place that we stayed up the rest of the night talking. All about the Iliad, if I remember correctly, and how we both thought Achilles was a muscle-bound idiot. And a week after the wedding, I had my own bedchamber on the other side of the house. Nocturnal visits between the two occur a few times a year. Whenever Plotina gets tired of nagging me about providing an heir, and nags him instead.”

A few times a year. That wasn’t so bad.

“You can enjoy all the dinner conversation you want,” I told her now, generously. “As long as there isn’t anything else.”

“Thank you for your permission,” Sabina said. “I’ve been holding my breath.” She tugged my head down for a kiss, tracing the back of my neck in a slow circle. She could rouse a flutter in the pit of my stomach now, whenever she did that. I picked her up suddenly and bore her back into the tent, where Boil was stitching a new liner into his helmet. “Get out,” I told him around kissing Sabina.

“You get to finish my helmet liner,” he warned, and got out.

“Better make it quick,” Sabina murmured against my mouth as I tossed her down on my bedroll. “You’re due for drills in fifteen minutes, and that optio will stripe you if you’re late again.”

“Bugger him.” And bugger bloody Hadrian too. I grinned as I kissed the curve of Sabina’s hip, thinking of the look on that supercilious bastard’s face if he could see me now. Of course if he saw us I’d probably have to kill him, but I wouldn’t mind that too much. Sling the body into the ditch and blame it on those Dacian sentries… and then I had Sabina all around me and I forgot about Hadrian. Forgot all about Old Sarm too, looming overhead in the dry, rainless days of summer and slowly dying of thirst.

The friezes on Trajan’s monument make the Dacian surrender look like a simple thing. Gates open, and in you march in triumph. But it wasn’t so simple as that.