I shoved through them, kicking blindly across the street. I hammered on the door of the tenement opposite Demetra’s. Another woman answered the door, tired and gray, a dirty child on one hip and another at her skirt. “Do I know you?” she asked, vague-eyed.

“Demetra,” I said. “Where’s Demetra?”

“That hag across the street didn’t tell you? She’s a worse neighbor than your girl, I’ll say.”

“Where’s Demetra?” My heart thudded.

“Dead,” the woman said. “The baby came early. It happens.”

I winced. “The hag said you took it.”

“The baby? No, that died too. I took her other one, the little lad.”

“Was the baby a girl or a boy?” I’d never wanted it, hadn’t thought about it for months—but suddenly I had to know. I had to know if my child had been a son or a daughter.

“How should I know?” Indifferently. “I wasn’t there.”

Would I ever know? Did it even matter? Boy or girl, it was dead.

My firstborn.

I found myself wondering if it had had my reddish hair, or Demetra’s blond.

“I don’t much mind taking the other little ’un.” The woman bounced the child on her hip, and for the first time I noticed Demetra’s boy. “He’s quiet enough, and what’s one more when you’ve already got five? Besides, he might grow up as pretty as his mother, and that could be useful.”

I shoved some money at her and got the hell out of there.

PLOTINA

“I don’t mind telling you, my dear boy, that I shall be ecstatic to leave Germania,” Plotina confided to Dear Publius. “Crude, cold—and these slave girls they sent to wait on me are all thumbs! Sticky thumbs at that; I’m sure they’d steal anything I turned my back on. You may go,” she added to the girl brushing her gown.

The flat-faced German maid left the Empress’s quarters, muttering darkly, and Plotina reached behind her own neck to fasten the clasp of her amethyst necklace. “Very regal,” Dear Publius approved from his corner where he sat keeping her company as she finished her dressing. “Very regal indeed.”

“I can hardly say the same for your wife. Did she use her sunshade once, marching through Dacia? Brown as that German slut who just left—”

“My dear lady.” Hadrian’s voice had a note of humorous warning as he pinched a crisp fold of his tunic into better alignment. “I know you disapprove of Sabina. But I do not, and surely that is what matters.”