“Did you get what you wanted?” Sabina asked, looking up from her scroll when the tall boy came slouching back into the atrium. He was scowling blackly, running a rough hand through his shaggy hair.

“Not really.” He scuffed to a stop by the pool, toeing one foot along the blue-tiled edge. “Thought your father might get me into the legions, but now I’m not so sure I want that.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t see why I should sell my soul just for a job.”

“Oh, Rome always wants your soul. Didn’t you know that?” Sabina marked her place in the scroll with one finger. “But most people seem to think it’s a fair bargain.”

“I don’t.”

“You could always be a gladiator,” she suggested.

He jumped, and looked at her again.

“You really don’t remember me, do you?” She’d known him at once, even after four or five years. He looked the same: russet hair and brown arms, big feet and big shoulders and a lot of loosely bolted limbs between them that hadn’t quite caught up. The same, just larger.

He was looking at her warily now. “Should I remember you?”

“Maybe not,” she said. “It was a memorable day, all told.”

“So who are you, Lady?”

She stood up, discarding her scroll, and stepped close against him, putting one hand on the back of his sunburned neck and standing on tiptoe. Inches away, she tilted her head and smiled. “Remember now?”

She could see the click in his eyes. “Sabina,” he said slowly. “Lady Sabina—right?”

“Right.”

“Didn’t know you without the bruises. Otherwise you haven’t changed much.” He looked her over. “First girl I ever kissed.”

“The Young Barbarian? I’m flattered.” Sabina felt his arms begin to sneak up around her waist, and stepped back. “All the little girls loved the Young Barbarian. The year you had your bouts in the Colosseum, your name was on schoolhouse doors inside hearts all over Rome. I told my friends I’d met you, and none of them believed me.”

“You tell them I kissed you?” He took another step toward her, a grin starting around the corners of his mouth.

“I think I was the one who kissed you, actually.” Sabina retrieved her scroll and sat down on the marble bench again. “What’s next for you, if not the legions?”

“Not a gladiator’s life, that’s for damned certain.” He leaned up against the pillar, folding his arms across his chest and cocking his head down at her. “I suppose you’re married now?”

“Gods, no.” On her seventeenth birthday last year, her father had given her a pearl necklace and promised her reasonably free rein in the choice of her husband. Sabina valued the promise more highly than the pearls.

“I thought that baby might be yours.”

“No, that’s little Linus. He and Faustina are Calpurnia’s—she’s my stepmother.”