“The Empress has high hopes for me.” Hadrian sounded guarded, and the wind tugged at the snowy folds of his toga. “I do try to oblige her. She had the raising of me, after all. I owe her a great deal.”

“You owe her a great deal,” Sabina acknowledged. “Not everything.”

They fell silent again. A Numidian slave girl swayed past with a basket balanced up on one shoulder, brushing off a sailor who leered at her from a wine shop. An astrologer with a frayed display of star charts gestured invitingly, crying out to the crowds, and Sabina paused. “Perhaps we should have your stars read. That would settle the question for you—if you put much faith in astrologers, that is.”

“Oh, I do.”

“And you call yourself a man of reason,” she teased.

“I had my stars read by Emperor Domitian’s astrologer Nessus, when I first put on the toga of a grown man.” Hadrian sounded thoughtful. “He gave me such a strange prediction, I hardly knew what to think… so I taught myself to read the stars, just to check him, and I kept getting the same prediction. Every time.”

“Really?” Sabina cocked her head. “That’s what you meant in Uncle Paris’s studio that time, when you told me you already knew what your destiny was. What was your prediction?”

“That no man would see more of the world than I. So I think Plotina is destined to be disappointed in her plans for my future.” Hadrian looked down at Sabina—not condescending, not teacherish, just a straight serious gaze with a core that burned. “You could come see the world with me.”

Sabina held his gaze a moment, then looked down at her pomegranate. She should have counted the seeds as she ate… her fingers were stained as pink as a new dawn. “How many seeds do you think there are in a pomegranate?”

“About six hundred,” Hadrian said promptly. It was the kind of thing he always knew.

“And I ate more than two thirds,” she said. “So if we take Proserpina’s scale from the myth—one month of marriage with Pluto for every pomegranate seed she ate… I think that gives you and me more than thirty-five years to see the world together. Do you think that’s long enough?”

VIX

I couldn’t find Sabina in her room, or the library, or the atrium. I finally ran her down in the farthest part of the gardens, sitting on a marble bench before a fountain stilled for the winter, a pale-blue palla around her shoulders and a scroll half unrolled across her lap. I’d worked up a fairly good rage by that point, so I just stamped toward her and bellowed, “Hadrian?”