When we’d been locked up together on Plotina’s orders for nearly two and a half days, we’d spent a good deal of time speculating what was going to happen to us both. We knew how coups started; it had looked like a likely prospect. Sabina had spent most of our hours either pacing back and forth like her cat or trying to pry answers from the Praetorians outside and being told to keep silent. I’d spent most of our hours calculating just how many of those pretty palace guards I could kill once they finally came in to dispose of me. How wrong we’d both been, because here we were—no longer simply Vix and Sabina, scarred soldier and world traveler, but Empress Vibia Sabina and Praetorian Guard Vercingetorix.

“I’ve gotten my orders,” I said, and briefly outlined her husband’s dreadful terms. My promotion and demotion, my reward and punishment.

“All neatly tied up in one tidy little package,” Sabina winced. “How very Hadrian.”

“You hear he’s pulling back too? Giving it all away, the new provinces we fought for. Armenia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, even Dacia.”

“We might not have kept them anyway.” Sabina’s voice was gentle. “Could you really have kept all that territory without Trajan?”

“We had four years of victories!”

“‘You made a desert,’” Sabina quoted, “‘and called it peace.’”

“Did Titus say that?”

“Tacitus first. Then Titus, in one of his letters. Both of them are right, you know. All this”—she looked out over the rocky cliffs, the jewel-blue horizon where all those conquered deserts lay—“we couldn’t have held it. Even Trajan knew he was getting overextended.”

“So we just give up?” I chafed my sore shoulder, feeling the phantom shaft of the arrow I’d taken at Hatra. “After all that effort? All those lives?” Julius. Philip. The countless other men I’d buried by the Euphrates.

“I guess we do,” said Sabina.

“Then what do we have to show for it?” I cried out. “What do I have to show for it?”

Sabina had no answer for that. Why would she? Aside from a few scars, all I had to show for a life of wandering and fighting were the odds and ends that had collected at the bottom of my pack. A father’s amulet. An emperor’s ring. A wife’s scarf. A lion’s pelt. A string of campaign tokens. A lover’s earring.

Not very much, when you came down to it.

I sat down on the other end of the ruined column, swinging my ridiculous new crested helmet by its ridiculous chin strap. Sabina wrapped her arms about her own knees, and we sat in silence for a while. Birds hopped among the abandoned columns, twittering impudently now that there were no indignant priests to chase them out. A bright blue morning, so beautiful.