“The Empress will support me, I’m sure.” Only someone as relentlessly virtuous as Empress Plotina would understand Titus’s indignation in the first place, really. Everyone steals from public works, most officials in Rome would be far more likely to scoff. Everyone skims, everyone steals, everyone helps themselves. It’s the way of the world.

Maybe it is, Titus thought. But not on my project.

VIX

By the end of that year, Parthia was ours. Adenystrae, Babylon, Seleucia, Ctesiphon—one impossibly named city after another fell.

It’s getting very difficult to keep up with all these victories, Titus wrote me in one of his letters. I gather you’ve marched over Gaugamela, much like Alexander, and with much the same result. The Senate spends half its time these days just trying to figure out who all the players and heroes in this drama are. One of them, I’ve heard, is you. Congratulations on making First Spear.

I’d done it. First centurion in the Tenth Fidelis, and one of the youngest ever to achieve that rank. Maybe the youngest; I didn’t know. There were plenty who hated me for it, plenty who muttered that I’d never have risen so high and so fast if Trajan didn’t favor me, or if the camp fevers and the Parthians weren’t making so many vacancies among the ranks of the centurions. No fever or Parthian had managed to kill me yet, though, and so Trajan himself bypassed tradition and quite a few other candidates and made me First Spear of the Tenth Fidelis. The former First Spear had been transferred back to Rome, and he looked very sour as he handed his insignia to me. I’d be prefect of the camp next, and after that—well, maybe my impossible dream of commanding a legion wasn’t so out of reach after all.

“I’ll get it,” I told Mirah as she put the girls to bed in their little cot in the next room. “Two more years of this war, and I’ll get it.”

“God forbid the war end, then,” she said dryly, kissing both our daughters as she tucked the blanket around them. Both our girls were pink-skinned and dark-haired, having somehow missed the reddish hair of both their parents, and they looked like identical little rosebuds squeezed together in sleep. “Pretty as pictures,” Mirah said, admiring our girls. “Goodness, I hope they don’t grow up as pretty as Antinous.”

“Why?” Antinous was almost ten now, growing like a young sapling, and what he was growing into was something arresting. The youthful pudginess was dropping away from his face and revealing starkly beautiful bones: a firmly modeled jaw, a carved nose like a god on a temple, cheekbones sharp enough to cut marble. I hadn’t been able to remember Demetra’s face for years, but it came back to me now every time I looked at her son.