“She makes it easy,” Titus said without thinking, and kicked himself. Stupid, stupid. But Vix hadn’t noticed his slip of the tongue.

“She just held me that night after I killed Decebalus. Never said a word. Most of the time she’s talking nonstop, but she knows when to be quiet.” Vix hesitated, his confident swagger slowing a moment. “I still don’t know why—it was like getting hit in the gut, killing him. But I’ve killed men before and never thought twice about it.”

“‘It is proper to learn even from an enemy,’” Titus quoted. “You’re not the first soldier to admire a man he has to kill. It’s been troubling men since first there was war, I imagine.”

“If I’d been born in Dacia, I’d have been one of those men following him.” Vix fumbled for words, which Titus never heard him do. Vix’s words might lack eloquence, but they were always unhesitating. “It’s just an accident, isn’t it? Where we end up getting born? But it controls everything. Put my parents a few hundred miles northeast, and I’d have grown up with a round shield—and a beard—and I wouldn’t have ever fought in the Colosseum—and I’d likely be dead by that solar disc right now, next to my king.”

“Did you do what he asked?” Titus asked. “Did you bury his left hand?”

“Next to the disc, in the grass. With his ax.”

One of the legates called for Titus then, and he steered his horse away back to the head of the column. But he still brought a wineskin to Vix’s fire sometimes when they made camp at night, as the weeks rolled on and the Tenth marched west. Dark pines were fading to open fields, and for the first time in what felt like months, Titus began to think of Rome.

I’ll campaign for quaestor, he decided. Senator Norbanus said he’d put my name forward. Public works and festival organization; I’ll do that better than I ever led a scouting party. Perhaps he would get his own apartments in the city as well. Not too far from his grandfather, but a home of his own. A man’s home. He’d marched across the Empire, after all; he’d been to war; he had that first all-important line of “Tribune” on his list of accomplishments. For dreams as modest as mine, that puts me halfway up the ladder already. Maybe that was the good thing about dreaming on a small scale. Vix still had a ways to go if he wanted to lead a legion.

“By the way,” Sabina announced halfway through Pannonia, perhaps a fortnight’s ride outside Moguntiacum. “I’m being sent ahead on to Mog. That wagon I haven’t sat in all summer takes me on ahead tomorrow.”