“Correct.”

Dawn. Most of the guests had gone to sleep on their dining couches. The others, glaze-eyed and crumpled, nibbled at drying oysters in curdling sauces. A pageboy in a black tunic dozed on his feet, head drooping over the wine flagon. Even Larcius nodded in the anteroom.

The Emperor rose. His guests came to attention with a start. As soon as he took his black Flavian gaze off me, I realized how exhausted I was.

“A delightful evening,” Domitian said carelessly to the room at large. Without so much as a glance toward me, he was gone.

All the eyes turned to me then. Wondering what he saw in me. Because while it wouldn’t have been uncommon for the Emperor to take a fancy to a singer at a party, it was uncommon that he hadn’t simply set me aside for later with a word. It wasn’t like Domitian to keep important guests waiting while he talked to slave girls. It wasn’t like Domitian to talk to any girls at length. He had no great use for women outside his bed; everyone knew that.

But he had talked to me half the night as if no one else in the world existed, and suddenly everyone was crowding around me with sleepy but shining eyes.

“—my dear Athena—”

“—such a delightful performance—”

“—one of the great artists of our city—”

“Now that’s enough.” Larcius bustled to my side. “It’s been a long night. Home at once, child.”

A well-manicured hand tapped my shoulder, and I turned. An imperial freedman, marked with the official purple insignia. “Lady Athena?” he said in an educated drawl.

The room was avidly silent. I was Lady Athena now, was I?

He bent and whispered in my ear for a moment. I nodded. He bowed very low, a bow reserved for the Emperor—or those closest to him.

Seventeen

THEA

YES, more than a month now and no sign he’s tiring of her!” one of the slaves whispered outside my room, having just carried out an armful of my dresses. She’d run into two more laundresses and they’d at once put their heads together. For the last month, no one at Praetor Larcius’s house had been able to talk of anything but me.

“I heard he took a courtesan from Madam Xanthe’s establishment—” Another of the slave women.

“Yes, and sent her back within the hour. He keeps our Athena all night!”

“She’s not beautiful like those courtesans. What’s she have, that he doesn’t tire of her?”

I didn’t know, either. “Why?” I asked once, but Domitian only shrugged. He sent for me a minimum of five times a week. I invariably stayed the night and walked back to Larcius’s house in my sandals, yawning at the spring dawn.

The laundry woman: “Sshh, she’ll hear you!”

“No, she won’t. She’s been up all hours, doing God knows what, and she’ll sleep till midday.”

In fact I was sitting up on my sleeping couch, my hair hanging down the back of the loose Greek chiton I wore to bed, chewing on the end of a stylus and trying to write a song. Domitian rather liked the music I wrote myself—“You might even write something good someday,” was the way he phrased it.