“Will you stop saying that?” Paulinus growled.

“You’re a funny one, Norbanus. Most of us dream about being heroes.”

“You’re the hero. I’ll see you with a good post if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Me, a paper-pusher?” Trajan hooted. “I’m an army man, pure and simple. Let’s get drunk and look for whores. Boys or girls for you?”

“Girls,” Paulinus said hastily.

“Take my advice.” Trajan grinned again. “Girls may be prettier, but boys are less trouble. Don’t suppose you’d care to—”

“No, not my style.” Paulinus was used to the offer by now. Half his friends and most of his superior officers preferred boys or young soldiers to their wives.

“Pity. Still want to get drunk?”

“Gods, yes.”

A letter arrived from Paulinus’s father, sent by fast courier. A single sheet of parchment, a single line of writing. “Well done, boy. Marcus.”

“Hate me!” Paulinus shouted down at the letter. “Disown me! Don’t congratulate me!” He crumpled the letter up and threw it across the room. Then spent the next hour smoothing it out. Lepida wrote nothing.

After a week, the Emperor marched in.

“Norbanus, is it?” The famous Flavian gaze made Paulinus’s knees brace. He stared fixedly past the Emperor’s ear. “I know your father. You’ll join me for dinner in two hours.” He turned to Lappius. “Bring out the traitors. We’ll deal with them now.”

“All of them, Lord and God?”

“The officers. The legionnaires will be decimated; that can wait until morning. Prepare the officers for execution.” The Emperor’s purple cloak swirled as he took off briskly across the courtyard. Twelve Praetorians, six secretaries, a cluster of generals, a handful of slaves, and Lappius Norbanus trotted in his wake.

“So that’s how a Caesar handles treachery.” Trajan whistled. “I like his style.”

Paulinus lowered his voice. “He didn’t even hold trials.”

“Who needs ’em? We know they’re guilty.” Trajan flicked a speck of mud off Paulinus’s shoulder. “Go spruce up, pretty boy. You’re having dinner with the world’s most powerful man.”

The world’s most powerful man hardly looked up as Paulinus ducked into the Imperial presence and snapped off his sharpest salute. “Norbanus,” he said perfunctorily. “Sit. Eat. Camp food; I hate eating soft on campaign.”

Paulinus sat, tangling his cloak around the stool legs, and helped himself diffidently. He ate for ten minutes in silence as the Emperor bolted his food, dictating a letter to a pair of secretaries between bites, and sifted rapidly through a heap of correspondence. The hard soldier’s bread and plain stew looked strange sitting on Lappius’s golden plates. Rather like Domitian himself, who sat on the silk cushions in the leather breastplate and rough tunic of a legionnaire and rapidly flipped through a dozen frayed old folders of paperwork. Paulinus eyed him covertly: the man his father had pronounced both a good general and a great administrator; the man who decimated entire legions and was kind to a mad niece; the man of whom great depravities were whispered and who had looked with interest on Lepida, and who now sat before him in a plain tent wearing less silk and gold braid than his own secretaries.