“Maybe you could show me a few strokes,” he offered to Vix. “I don’t mind admitting I’m hopeless with a sword.”

“That’s the spirit,” Trajan laughed, and flung one arm around Senator Norbanus and the other arm around Sabina as he strode back into the triclinium. Hadrian attempted to move with the Emperor, but was somehow shunted aside… Titus couldn’t help a chuckle at that.

The gardens were emptying now, the guests exclaiming over the cold now that they no longer had excitement to warm them and moving back inside toward cups of hot wine. Vix had found his cloak, slinging it over one arm as he sheathed his sword, and Titus approached him.

“You don’t really have to teach me how to use that thing,” he said, nodding at Vix’s gladius. “I’ll always be hopeless. I was just trying to get Tribune Hadrian distracted. He looked ready to cut your heart out and fry it for making them all laugh at him.”

“Don’t care if that prissy bastard—”

“You should not have wounded the Emperor, young man.” A female voice sounded behind them, measured and rather deep.

Titus turned, bowing very low as he saw the Empress. It was the first time he’d ever seen her up close—a statuesque column of a woman in a great many emeralds, almost as tall as Titus, which made her very tall indeed. Her deep-set eyes flicked past Titus who was glad to be invisible as she turned the Imperial frown on Vix. “You should not have presumed to fight him in the first place. My husband may have thought it funny. I do not.”

She rotated in place like a statue being wheeled out of a temple and glided off.

“Empresses,” Vix said in disgust. “They’re always trouble, the tricky bitches. Emperors might forgive you if you cross them, but never empresses.”

“And how many empresses have you known?”

“You’d be surprised,” said the guard who had just sent the Emperor of Rome away with a bloody arm, and loped off whistling.

VIX

“I saw you fight the Emperor,” Gaia greeted me when I ducked into the kitchens. “I don’t see how you dared—the Emperor, isn’t he splendid—”

Yes. Splendid was the word. The friendly growl of his voice, the strength behind the blows we’d traded, the muscles of his left arm broader than his right because that was one old soldier who still practiced with a heavy shield, Emperor or no. That hand with its Imperial seal ring had rested on my shoulder like I was a friend. And it was a rare Emperor who laughed off a wound as a joke.