“I stole anything that wasn’t nailed down from everybody I could find—sips of beer from the mugs in taverns, sweets from my master’s kitchens, coins from beggars. And when I was eight and my mother got sold to Rome, I ran away from my master to join her. I got all the way from Brundisium to Rome on my own, hitching rides on wagons and thieving food from vendors.”

“Brundisium,” Sabina said, thoughtful. “I’d like to go there. Could take a ship to Greece after that. Hadrian’s always talking about Greece.”

“Hadrian?” I turned on one side, tugging her into the crook of my chest. “Who cares what that gorbellied bootlicker thinks?”

“He’s not a bootlicker,” Sabina laughed.

“He laps at your heels hard enough,” I grumbled. “Why do you always take so many walks with him?”

“Because if I start turning suitors away, people are going to look for a reason why. When you’re living a lie, Vix,” she instructed, “you have to give people something to look at so they don’t start looking anywhere else.”

“Don’t have to make such a good show of it, though, do you?” I demanded. “Walking arm in arm, always putting your heads together over a book—”

“Jealous?” she teased.

“No!”

Maybe a little. Sabina didn’t seem to care a fig about any of her suitors except two: that shy patrician boy named Titus, who made her wrinkle her nose affectionately, and Tribune Hadrian. The skinny prat with the violets didn’t worry me—he was only sixteen, and he hardly had the courage on his visits to thrust some flowers at her and stammer a few shy compliments. Hadrian, now… he came to call at least twice a week, and he and Sabina would walk the gardens, his big head bent down toward hers. Talking, always talking, and Sabina’s little chin had the same attentive angle it did when she cocked it at me over the pillow at night.

“I don’t see what there is to be jealous of,” Sabina pointed out, bumping her nose gently against mine. “You think Hadrian’s pouring pretty compliments into my ears? Last time we talked about architecture, and the time before that it was Greek philosophers, and before that it was the Eleusinian Mysteries.”

“Exactly.” All things I didn’t know anything about.

“Mostly he goes on about Greece,” Sabina continued, unruffled. “He keeps telling me Athens is the center of civilization, not Rome. He can go on quite a while about that. Behind his back, they call him the Greekling.”

“I call him that boil-brained lout, and I’ll do it to his face.”

She laughed softly in the dark. “I would like to see Athens. And Brundisium. A hundred other places.”

“Rome’s big enough to keep you occupied.”