“I’m so glad you like it.” Yellow silk, with a golden eagle pinning each shoulder. Bliss to wear soft silks again after a summer of scratchy wool. A great many things had been bliss, coming back to civilization. Sabina’s luxurious palanquin and speedy escort had taken her swiftly ahead from the Tenth to Hadrian’s quarters in Mog, and she’d had a week of much needed solitude. Sleeping late in a soft bed piled with furs, curling up to a breakfast of cold mulberry infusions and fresh fruit, soaking in the steaming hot pool of her bathhouse… Sabina’s slaves had exchanged glances as they shook out the fleas her clothes had inevitably acquired on the road, and the bathhouse attendants raised eyebrows over the calluses that had to be pumiced off Sabina’s feet, but no one had said a word. When the page bringing his mistress a stack of letters in the library yesterday found her crying silently into a scroll, he had left the letters and backed out with lowered eyes.

Not too many tears, though. In the morning Sabina rose humming, lined her eyes in gold leaf, and thought smiling of Vix as she pinned her yellow silks into place with the eagle brooches.

“That dress is too bright.” Empress Plotina’s deep voice made the decree like a judge. “You must change, Vibia Sabina.”

“But I think I hear the legions approaching. Three and a half legions make a great deal of noise, don’t you think?”

That got her a Look from the Empress of Rome, a Look Sabina hadn’t missed one bit during the last six months, but the roar had already begun in the distance, and a ripple spread outward through the women clustered in the street. More ripples, more murmurs, and suddenly a shriek of excitement sounded and Sabina didn’t have to be told the eagles had been sighted.

This was nothing, she knew, compared to the triumph already being planned in Rome. “White bulls in sacrifice to Jupiter,” Plotina had ruled. “Black bulls to Minerva, more to Mars and Hades. Chariot races, gladiator bouts, perhaps a Colosseum reenactment of the final siege…” Trajan would ride along in a chariot with a laurel wreath over his head, his face daubed in celebratory red paint, and no doubt Vix and the other standard-bearers would be brought back to Rome too, to march with their eagles as millions screamed. But Sabina thought this was the real triumph, the triumph of the living coming back to their women, and the women screaming and waving pennants and barely restrained as the beaming, strutting soldiers swaggered back into Mog.