“Yes, well, other members of my family told him all about the benefits of military service in seasoning the young. Mostly those members who have not served in the legions themselves. ‘War is sweet for those who have not experienced it,’ as Pindaros would say.” Titus looked down at himself ruefully.

“My father was a tribune when he was your age,” Sabina consoled. “He said he got through it by keeping his mouth shut and his boots dry. Where are you stationed?”

“The Tenth Fidelis, in Germania. Some ghastly frontier town with a name I can’t even pronounce. I leave tomorrow, unfortunately.”

“Germania,” Sabina said enviously. “And you don’t even want to travel! I’d love to see Germania.”

“At least you saw Greece.”

“Not enough of it.” Sabina dreamed of Greece sometimes; the rocky cliffs, the blue seas, the sunlight with its peculiar brilliance. She and Hadrian had spent a year in Athens, where he had been appointed magistrate, and it had been everything he promised. Athens had clung like a white jewel to the dry cliffs, and she’d scrambled sunburned and happy among the temples in the sky while Hadrian hunted massively tusked Greek boar and joined fierce philosophical debates with bearded men who looked far more like him than his fellow politicians in Rome. “You really are a Greekling,” she’d teased him, and he’d released a rare rueful laugh.

They’d planned to go on to Sparta, Corinth, Thessaly… but Plotina had written with news of some crisis back in Rome that required Dear Publius’s immediate attention, and that had been that.

Sabina banished the thought, waving Titus to a couch. “Sit down; tell me everything. We’ll have ourselves a good chat, if it’s the last one before you leave. How long does your stint in Germania last?”

“A year.” He managed to sit, his stiff new armor creaking.

“A year?” Sabina made a face. “Who’s going to take me to the theatre now when Hadrian’s busy working?”

“I think you’ll be able to find another escort.”

“Nobody who tells me my eyes are cerulean when they’re plain ordinary blue. You have to write me from Germania, tell me if the tribesmen really cook Romans over a bonfire they way they did in Emperor Augustus’s day—”

“I think I’m going back to the blue dress.” Faustina’s voice came from the door. “Red is not my color at all.”

Sabina took care not to laugh as her little sister paraded in for their inspection. The hitched-up red stola was already slipping down around Faustina’s feet, gold bracelets hung like shackles on her wrists, and she’d clearly gotten into Sabina’s rouge pots.

“I think you look very fine indeed,” Titus said gravely.

“I look all washed out and diseased,” Faustina said, but gave him a grin that wrinkled her little nose. “Hello, Titus.”