“I don’t think many people know yet,” Titus said to Faustina. “There will be a formal announcement for the Senate, but—”

“Of course no one knows yet,” Faustina interrupted, puzzled. “It only happened an hour ago.”

“What?”

“My father.”

For a moment he couldn’t speak, couldn’t collect his reeling thoughts. “Your father?”

“Mother found him at his desk.” Faustina’s voice was thin. “He looked so peaceful, she thought he must be sleeping. He must have drifted off over his books—he never called out.”

Titus sank down on the bench and took her in his arms. Trajan dead. Marcus Norbanus, dead. Oh, no. Oh, no no no.

That changed everything.

“What were you talking about?” Faustina’s eyes were full of tears, but she was trying valiantly to hold them back. “Is someone else dead?”

He hesitated. She’s lost her father; don’t burden her. But Faustina was no fragile blossom who couldn’t bear a breath of bad news—if there was anything she shared with Sabina, it was toughness. “Trajan.”

The tears spilled over then. Titus held her, not ashamed to find his own eyes leaking. They clung together on the bench, Faustina burrowing into his shoulder like a child, Titus turning his face against her smooth fragrant hair.

“I’m glad Father didn’t know.” Faustina finally sat up, dashing the last tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand. “He worshipped Trajan. Who’s to be Emperor now?”

Titus forced the words out. “Your brother-in-law. Hadrian.”

Faustina’s tear-drowned eyes sprang wide. “Hadrian? We can’t know that yet, the Senate hasn’t—”

“He was acclaimed on Trajan’s deathbed. It’s already all over the city.” News like that shouldn’t have leaked out, not before the Senate had been informed first, but somehow it had. Titus wondered if the Empress had had a hand in that. Far harder for the Senate to reject Publius Aelius Hadrian as Emperor of Rome when the rumor had already spread through the city that Trajan had adopted him as son and heir on his deathbed.

Faustina gave a small dazed shake of her head. “Hadrian,” she repeated, blank. “Trajan would never have chosen him!”

Surely not, after he got my letter. And Trajan had received Titus’s letter—he’d sent a brusque note of thanks, and mentioned something about a longer talk once he was back in Rome. I’ve got plans for you, boy, he’d written in his soldier’s scrawl.