“Why?” Vix looked down at her, sitting wrapped in the lion skin inside the circle of his arms.

“Because Hadrian wants me to go ahead, to greet the Empress and help make arrangements for the triumphant return.” Sabina shuddered. “She’s come all the way north to Germania, just to meet him and Trajan. And to unload a whole summer’s worth of advice on me the moment we set eyes on each other. I wish I could just come skipping up behind the legion in my hobnailed sandals. Hopefully the shock would kill her.”

“Hadrian too, and then we’re shut of them both.” Vix kissed her soundly. His eyes when he looked at her these days had a softer gleam than the old casual possessiveness, Titus thought. His hand twined automatically through hers whenever she came near, and his big thumb rubbed in a slow tender movement across the back of her knuckles…

I need a girl, Titus decided. A nice mistress I can set up in that apartment in Rome. He could afford one on a quaestor’s salary. Someone pretty who didn’t mind boring quotes from Horace, and who could cook. Lamb stew…

“Damn it,” Vix grumbled the following day, after Sabina had kissed him a very thorough good-bye in the morning and that afternoon been handed into her wagon with elegant formality by Hadrian to be sent on ahead—along with her escort of guards and slaves, who had gotten quite rich that summer for looking the other way and not guarding her. “I don’t like sleeping without her,” Vix complained. “The way her hair gets in my face. And the way she digs her elbow into my side every few hours and grumbles at me to for gods’ sake turn on my stomach and stop snoring—”

“Get used to it, Slight, because this mad arrangement of yours can’t possibly go on in Mog.”

“Why not?”

Titus stared. “Do you have a death wish?”

“My girl can sneak and lie with the best of them. We’ll manage.”

“But Hadrian’s primed for a governorship now.” Titus had heard the news from the Emperor, helping to draft a list of future appointments. “Pannonia or Syria, somewhere far.”

“She won’t stay with him forever.”

Titus fell back on Seneca. “‘Is the gladiator formulating his attack in the arena?’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, don’t you ever plan ahead?”

“Oh, I’ve got a plan. Sabina divorces Hadrian. I buy entrance to the equite class with her money. I get a wife with a little more polish than I’ve got. That helps me get ahead, get my promotion to centurion, move up the ladder, eventually get my legion.”

“I see. And have you shared any of these plans of yours with the lady in question?”

“Sabina lives in the present,” Vix dismissed. “I’m the one with my eye on the future.”