I could hear her singing as I thumped out of the kitchen, a sort of cheery tuneless chant punctuated by the banging of pans and the occasional burst of swearing. Mirah always pretended to cover her ears whenever I swore in her presence, but she had grown quick to mumble legionary curses whenever she dropped a pot on her foot in the kitchen. Antinous was picking it up too. “Why can’t I say ‘rat-bitten bastard’? Mirah said it to the baker yesterday when he tried to cheat us on bread!”

“I don’t care if you say it. If you’re going to swear, swear like a man. Just don’t swear around my wife.”

“I heard that,” Mirah had said without turning. She’d looked at first questioning and then dismayed when I first arrived in Antioch and presented her with a seven-year-old child. “Who’s this pretty little girl?” she’d asked, and Antinous scowled and ruffled his curls with one paw and said, “I’m a boy.”

“I probably should have told you about him earlier,” I’d begun with a deep breath, and by the end of it Mirah was just a little cross with me. Cross enough that she would have rearranged my face with the nearest blunt object, if I hadn’t danced nimbly behind a chair and done some fast talking. Most wives, it seems, would rather be asked first if they mind raising a child not their own—and they’d rather be asked before the child in question is being led through the door. But Antinous followed Mirah about so anxiously, so desperately eager to please, smiling so radiantly whenever she praised him, that she soon thawed. “He’ll be a good big brother to little Emmanuel,” she said, rubbing the bulge of her stomach. “I wonder if they’ll look like each other?”

“When are you going to believe me when I tell you he isn’t my son? Like I said before, Antinous’s mother birthed him before she even met me. His father was some Bithynian clerk; died before I even got to Mog in the first place.”

“So you say, but no man pays to raise a son who isn’t his own. Besides, he looks like you.” Mirah eyed Antinous, prowling about his new home in the long-strided swagger he’d started copying from me.

“He doesn’t look a thing like me,” I scoffed. “Far too pretty. He takes after his mother.”

“So his mother was pretty?” Mirah said, ominous. “Prettier than me?”

“I’d better check on the men,” I said hastily, and ducked out. I didn’t have to be married long to know that was an argument I wasn’t ever going to win.