“Don’t care.” Vix scrubbed peach juice off his hands onto a napkin.

“‘It is difficult to suddenly give up a long love,’” Titus remarked to the ceiling.

“Don’t care, Cato.”

“Catullus. In any case, Governor Hadrian came back from Pannonia, and she’s with him.”

“Don’t care about Hadrian either. Just glad to have him out of my legion.”

“Mmm. You’ve heard he’s consul now?” Last week Titus had accompanied the consul and his wife to the theatre; Hadrian had spent most of the play being pestered by messengers and secretaries, and it had been Titus and Sabina who put their heads together in a happy critique of the actors and the verse. Sabina might have come back from two years in Pannonia with an armload of native bracelets and woad painted around her eyes (at least whenever the Empress was there to be shocked by it), but the old friendship Titus had enjoyed over Dacia’s fires had not altered a whit. Perhaps I’m luckier than Vix.

Vix had clearly done away with the subject of Hadrian and Sabina and was looking around the airy atrium again with the sky showing black through the open roof and the fountain still trickling gently in the corner. “All this domesticity,” he complained. “Give me a tent and a bedroll any day.”

“Really?” Titus regarded his friend. “I think you’re lying. You’ve got that look.”

“What look?”

“The look.” Titus saw that Ennia had her hands full lighting the lamps and rose to help her. It was full dark outside now, a noisy Roman night full of creaking cart wheels and yowling dogs and the occasional burst of passing laughter or patter of footsteps. Very different from Germania’s rustling trees and black silences—Titus remembered the suddenness of the contrast, when he’d first come back from the north. “You need a woman, Slight.”

“Always,” Vix agreed. “You know any good whores here in Rome? The ones I knew years back are likely gone by now—”

Ennia snorted into the lamps.

“You don’t need a whore,” said Titus. “You need a wife.”

“Legionaries can’t marry!”

“Officers can, and you’re one step from centurion,” Titus pointed out. “Vercingetorix the cynical, a husband. Maybe a father too? You’ve had some practice, with that little sprat you adopted.”

Titus had been the one to help when Vix turned up on his doorstep after the Dacian campaign with his Bithynian beauty’s little boy clinging to his shoulders. “Help me find someone to raise him?” Vix had pleaded. “Hell’s gates, I’m no one to raise a child!”

“At least we agree on that,” Titus had said, and found a grocer in Mog willing (for a monthly allowance from Vix) to raise another child with his own three boys.