The arena stretched in front of my eyes, all clean white sand. Not clean for long. No gladiators yet—they’d be below, waiting, praying. Arius would be there, but as many times as I’d tried to picture that in the past weeks—seeing him again, fighting in this arena, almost close enough to touch—blind panic closed around my head like a vise.

I turned my eyes away from the spreading oval of sand, rushing at a seat in the back. Ganymede stood behind me like a post. Hand on my shoulder, comforting. Before me sat Domitian, the boys on one side, his wife on the other; Flavia on the edge where she could sneak out, Paulinus—

“Athena,” someone said. “What a surprise.”

Lepida Pollia, Paulinus’s guest, was seated right beside me.

MARCUS Norbanus had a grudging liking for the chariot races, since his cousin and friend Diana often dragged him to the Circus Maximus, but he didn’t often attend the games. “A barbaric spectacle unenlightened by taste and informed by need,” he sometimes said, and wondered at the sight of the mob bending to decrees they had howled objection to four days previous. Yet he did sometimes come, generally bringing a slave to hold his scrolls and quills so that he could work between the big fights, which he watched coolly. “Go to the games,” Marcus said dryly, “to see Rome at its purest.” As he went to the Barbarian’s latest fight, he expected nothing more surprising than the usual victory and the mob’s usual hysteria.

“Dominus.” His steward spoke low-voiced in his ear. “I’ve just received word that Lady Lepida received an invitation to the Imperial box.”

“That’s of little importance,” Marcus shrugged.

“Yes, sir, but she took Lady Vibia Sabina with her this morning—”

“To the games?”

“Yes, Dominus. And since she could not take Lady Sabina to the Imperial box—”

Rage boiled in Marcus’s middle as he made his way to the high-walled section where the patrician women sat. A frail seven-year-old girl, taken to the games and then abandoned among strangers. He found his daughter crammed in a corner behind a cluster of Lepida’s fashionable friends, dressed in her best and utterly forgotten as the painted women giggled and slopped wine and called down to the gladiators. Marcus made his apologies in a cutting voice and extricated his daughter. “Can we go h-home?” she hiccupped. She had a wine stain on her dress from where someone had dropped a goblet on her.

Marcus hesitated. He’d like nothing better than to take his daughter home, but crowds of plebs were pressing excitedly through every entrance, feverish with excitement. Even with the Norbanus slaves to beat a path, it would take a stifled, sweating hour to make their way home—and nothing brought on Sabina’s fits like crowds. “We’ll leave after the Barbarian’s fight when the crowd quiets,” he decided. “Until then, you can sit quietly and rest, Vibia Sabina.”

But there was no quiet to be found in his box.