“Hello, Vix.” She marked her place in the scroll with one finger, looking up. “You might have come sooner, you know. It’s cold down here, but I wanted to give you a place where you could shout all you liked.”

I refused to be derailed. “You’re marrying Tribune Hadrian?” A goggle-eyed slave girl had given me the news when I returned from an errand to the Capitoline Library. “Hadrian. That prim fish-faced arse—”

“He’s not really fish-faced,” Sabina mused. “The beard will take some getting used to, though.”

“Why?” I shouted.

“Well, I’m used to kissing you and you don’t have a beard, so I imagine it will feel strange at first—”

I grabbed the scroll out of her hands, and heaved it into the fountain. The fountain was frozen, so it just bounced and unrolled. Not as dramatic as I would have liked.

“I’m sorry, Vix.” Sabina rose, penitent. “I’m teasing you, and I shouldn’t. Yes, I’m going to marry Senator Hadrian. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Why shouldn’t—” Words failed me.

“I have to marry somebody.” She was such a little thing, standing there in the cold winter sunshine with her hair hanging down her back like the first time I’d seen her. “What else am I going to do? Stay in my father’s house forever, reading and playing with Linus and Faustina? Be a Vestal Virgin? A bit late for either of those options. It’s time I married, and Hadrian will do as well as anyone. Better, even.”

I found myself pacing back and forth in short steps along the length of the fountain, unable to keep still. “Why is that?”

“He wants to travel, Vix. He says he’ll take me to Athens after the wedding, and Thebes, and maybe Egypt. Everywhere.” She looked around the garden as if she were already seeing the pyramids and the Greek temples, and the sleek-lined ships that would take her to see them. “Much better than some dull praetor who just wants children and dinner parties. We’ll leave Rome to the politicians and travel the world together.”

“Not if that bitch of an empress has her way,” I threw back. “Empress Plotina, she’ll keep her thumb on you, all right. Checking up ten times a day, making sure you’re good enough for the boy she raised. You want to travel the world, you don’t go marrying some mother-ridden bastard who has to get permission from his mummy every time he leaves the city.”

“I can handle Plotina,” Sabina said. “She isn’t half as clever as Domitian’s Empress, after all.”

“And what about me?” I snarled. “What was I? Just a bit of fun?”