“Somehow I doubt it will be as simple as you think, Slight.”

“Why not?”

Titus rolled his eyes. The Tenth rolled west.

SABINA

“You look very brown.” The Empress’s eyes swept Sabina up and down. “You should have taken more care with your sunshade. Come stand by me.”

“Of course.” Sabina followed after the dark-blue-clad figure with the deep-set eyes and the severe swept-back plaits. Those elegant streaks of gray had advanced even farther into the Empress’s dark hair, but otherwise she looked in distressingly good form as she swept to the head of the temple. Not much of a temple—Jupiter’s shrine here in Mog wasn’t much more than a few steps up to a modest altar. “The monument of Drusus is much more splendid,” Germania’s governor had argued. “Surely a better site to welcome the legions.”

But Empress Plotina had efficiently crushed that notion. “Jupiter’s hand delivered my husband to victory,” she decreed. “We welcome our legions back to his temple, and none other.” The governor had looked peevish, but it hardly mattered what he thought anymore—Plotina had taken charge of everything the moment she arrived in Mog.

And after all, Sabina thought, wasn’t every army’s homecoming really about the women who welcomed them? The site didn’t matter at all in comparison. From the pillarlike Plotina in her dark blue and diadem to the legates’ wives who waited stout and dignified behind Sabina; from the centurions’ wives with their lively chatter standing in the next rank to the common women who lined the street below in their gaudy beads and packs of clutching children—they all had the same look. The anxious scanning of the horizon, the craning of the neck as they looked for their men to come home.

Sabina wondered if Vix’s other woman was here today, the one he hadn’t told her about but had doubtless left behind in Mog when the legion marched. The one Titus had been almost visibly tempted to bring up.

The Empress sounded disapproving as she looked Sabina over. “That dress is very bright.”