Something else I was rapidly learning. When I’d married Mirah, I’d anticipated only a few weeks before I’d be collecting my new wife and the Emperor’s dispatches and taking them both north back to Mog. Too short a time to bother finding rooms for us in Rome, so the two of us had stayed on at her family’s house, just moving to a room with a bigger bed. But summer had gone on to fall, and I was still kicking my heels aimlessly in Rome as the Emperor’s plans for Parthia’s invasion inched forward. So I knew all about Mirah’s family now: her aunt’s bunions and her brother-in-law’s nightmares, her uncle’s third wife’s inability to have babies and her cousin’s inability to spit them out in anything but twos and threes. I knew that her niece Tirza broke out in bumps when she ate strawberries and her brother Benjamin saw ghosts under his bed; I knew that Simon wanted to marry his olive-skinned girl from a neighboring family but her father was putting up a fight about the dowry. Her family knew all about me now too: Mirah’s mother always smeared my bread with clover honey, the servants knew exactly how much water to mix into my wine, and the firebrand nephews and cousins who talked about liberating Jerusalem knew not to do too much bashing of the Roman legions when I was in the room. Everybody knew everything about everybody else in this new family of mine, and I loved them for it, but I was starting to wish that I could take Mirah north so we could finally have a home all to ourselves.

“My mother’s hoping you’ll be delayed in Rome till the baby’s born,” Mirah said. “She wants to hold the naming feast.”

“It won’t be long before we’re going north.” I steered Mirah around an oozing gutter as we came through the south end of the Forum Romanum. “It’s a month before the Emperor takes his army to Parthia. He’ll get to my dispatches before then, and after that we’re off.” Not that my legate back in Mog would be missing me—an aquilifer didn’t have much to do when the eagle was stuck in the chapel, and there wasn’t any century yet for me to take over. And of course when I did get my century I’d be losing the eagle to a new aquilifer.