There was a lot of wine after that, and I wasn’t the only one swilling it down. It was a party I could have enjoyed, if I’d been in the mood to enjoy anything. The Emperor got drunk, as cheerfully as he did everything else, and at one point he saw me and clapped me on the shoulder and told the whole story of my fight with Decebalus to a rapt audience while I stood shifting from foot to foot. Half a dozen of his generals congratulated me after that, some of them men as rough spoken as I was, and at any other time I’d have hung on their every word. The Emperor’s Praetorian Prefect even gave me a nod of approval and I should have been flushing with pride because he was everything I wanted to be—a blunt-spoken soldier who had risen through the ranks and was now Trajan’s right-hand man. Instead I just grunted at him, and then grabbed another cup-bearer and told him that he’d better be within arm’s reach of me all night or I’d pound his nose through the back of his head.

“Don’t you want to leave now?” Titus asked hopefully.

“No.”

Slaves began trooping in with heaped platters—vast joints of roast ox, stuffed boar, goose cooked in its plumage. The Empress gave a signal for the guests to take their places at the dining couches that had been arrayed in graceful semicircles about the room, but nobody was paying any attention. The Emperor just grabbed a wing of roast goose from the nearest platter going past, waving it to illustrate some story he was telling about the siege of Old Sarm, and the rest of the guests dragged the couches out of their semicircles and flopped on them any which way as they grabbed food from the passing platters. The Empress gave a patient sigh and withdrew as soon as the troupe of half-naked dancers came in. Trajan waved her out cheerfully and then grabbed the tallest of the male dancers to sit beside him.

My head was whirling, and the room’s heat stifled me. I yanked the wine flagon away from the startled cup-bearer and stumbled out of the noisy hall to the atrium. Torches had been lit in brackets around the walls but they’d mostly guttered out, and somehow I managed to fall in the little tiled pool at the atrium’s center. “Hell’s gates!”

I was wet head to toe, but I’d managed to save the wine flagon. Still sitting six inches deep in water, I tilted my head back and took a long drink. The stars sparkled coldly overhead through the open roof. My stars—or so I’d thought. Where were they leading me now?

“Do you realize you’re sitting in a pool of water, Vix?”