Trajan continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “You’ve been nagging me about the succession for a while now, and perhaps you’re right. Time to give the matter my full attention. I thought I’d take young Titus under my wing once I got back to Rome; see what I can make of him. Any man with enough nerve to tell me my wife is a thief has got balls of brass, and I like that in a man.”

The stones in her throat had become boulders, tearing their way out in a shriek. “You. CAN’T.”

“Don’t bother unpacking.” Trajan had already gone back to his dispatches, gesturing for his secretaries, who had clustered whispering at the other end of the study. “We leave within the fortnight.”

VIX

Three days on a ship, and I spent all three of them puking. I hate boats.

“How can you possibly have anything left to throw up by now?” Sabina asked, coming up on the rail beside me as I was bent over it heaving.

“I suppose you’ve got a cast-iron stomach?” I reeled upright, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. “Bitch.”

She made a mischievous face at me, stroking the cat who curled purring in her arms. It felt odd, talking with Sabina again. She looked different, small and neat in a narrow Egyptian sheath that left her arms and ankles bare, a charm of some kind knotted around one wrist, her face tanned and freckled under the short cap of hair. But she sounded exactly the same as she ever did. I didn’t get the old lurch in my stomach when I looked at her anymore… but I didn’t mind laughing with her. She’d gotten Trajan on a boat back to Rome, and for that I would have forgiven her anything.

“He looks better.” I nodded to the stern, where the Emperor sat playing latrunculi under a purple canopy rigged to keep the sun off his head. Plotina fanned herself woodenly at his side, strangely silent for once instead of droning at everyone in earshot. A dozen more hangers-on lounged about the deck as the sailors padded about knotting ropes and twitching at sails, and the water sparkled behind the rails of the boat, impossibly blue. “Doesn’t he look better?”

“Mmm. I’ll be glad when he gets back to Rome. I intend to keep him in a chair with his feet propped up for the rest of the summer.”

“I thought you were going to Syria with Hadrian?”

Sabina shook her cropped head, tickling under the cat’s chin. “I want to stay with my family for a while. Aren’t you going to miss yours?”