“Fuck you,” I growled. A whole city celebrating, and I had nowhere to go. Nowhere to go for years, probably—what other action would the Tenth see, now that Dacia was quiet? Guard duty at the fort, and the occasional route march so we didn’t get rusty. There’d be the triumph first, and I’d even get to go to Rome to march in it with the eagle over my head, but after that it would be back to Mog, to sit in the fort and rot. Had it really seemed possible, just this morning, that I’d be a centurion soon, that I’d even do the impossible and get my own legion someday? What a joke. I was going to rot here in Mog for the next twenty years. I’d taken the oath and signed those years over, and now they yawned before me like a grave.

And no doubt Sabina would be gallivanting around Pannonia, checking out aqueducts for her father and seeing all the new horizons she wanted. I hoped the Pannonians cooked her over a campfire and ate her.

Suddenly I felt absurd in the lion skin. I unknotted the paws about my neck and yanked the mane from my hair. I balled the pelt into my pack, and a handful of centurions brushed by me roaring a filthy drinking song, waving wineskins jubilantly overhead. I couldn’t even get drunk like them this afternoon—I had that bloody banquet tonight with the Emperor’s guests, and even if I didn’t care two shits for any of them, for his sake I’d have to be clean and on my best behavior. Besides, Sabina and her bastard husband would be there, and I’d rather have been cooked and eaten myself than have them think I slunk away. I’d come and stare at Sabina all night till she dropped her eyes for a change. Maybe I’d tell bloody Hadrian whose bedroll she’d been sleeping in the past six months while he thought she was in her own tent.

But I thought of Hadrian’s cold stare and didn’t want to cross it. Maybe the chances weren’t so good I’d ever be a centurion, but they’d drop to nothing if I told my commander I’d been mounting his wife.

I stood with my hands hanging at my sides in the middle of a celebrating city and felt like howling. That calculating little vixen. She’d burned me once, and had I learned? Stupid barbarian, tangling with a patrician girl. No more patrician girls for me. No more clever girls; no more adventurous dreaming girls or girls who talked my ear off deep into the night. Nice simple girls, that’s what I’d stick to from now on. Even stupid barbarians like me knew better than to get burned a third time.

Demetra.