They passed out of the steam of the caldarium into the next room, where they all stretched out on marble slabs and gestured for the bathhouse attendants. Sabina stretched on one side, looking at her half-sister as Faustina chattered under the masseuse’s dextrous fingers. “There’s one suitor I call the Dribbler, and there’s a praetor I used to call Pretty because, well, he is. But then he tried to kiss me, and by kiss me I mean stick his tongue so far down my throat I almost gagged, so now I call him the Gagger…” Maybe Faustina did look like a young Venus, but her dark eyes had a shrewd gleam like their father’s, and all that blond hair concealed a well of common sense just like Calpurnia’s. Faustina wouldn’t need help choosing a husband when the time came—she’d land on someone good, someone honest, someone without tricks and schemes, someone to value her.

I should have been born like that, Sabina thought. Straightforward and sensible. Instead, I fall in love with brash ex-gladiators… and then leave them to marry cold stiff politicians with meddling would-be mothers.

Hadrian wasn’t always like that, another part of her mind whispered.

But she had no idea what had changed him.

CHAPTER 18

VIX

No one tells you the depressing parts about getting older. Oh, I knew to expect gray hair and stooping shoulders by the time I hit the ancient age of fifty or so. But it seemed unfair that two cups of wine at age thirty could give me a pounding headache in the morning when at seventeen I could have slept off two jugs without a qualm. A whole clutch of blacksmiths were pounding an anvil chorus in my head the morning after my night of reminiscing with Titus, when I laced into my armor, added the ceremonial crest to my helmet, and dragged myself to the palace with the courier and his dispatches to see the Emperor.

I hadn’t seen the Imperial palace for a very long time, and I can’t say I wanted to see it now. I’d spent some bad months there when I was thirteen as a kind of semivoluntary house guest (never mind why) and I’d have been just as happy never to see it again. But the marble corridors were cheerier than I remembered, or maybe it was just that the bustling slaves and freedmen and even the lines of petitioners didn’t wear terrified expressions anymore. “Name?” a supercilious freedman sniffed as the courier and I presented ourselves in the long hall.

“Vercingetorix, aquilifer of the Tenth Fidelis of Moguntiacum, and courier.” I thumped my dispatch case, embossed with the legion’s seal. “Dispatches for the Emperor.”

The freedman waited expectantly, but I didn’t press any coins into his hand so he sniffed again. “You’ll have to wait. There’s a considerable line ahead.”