THEA

THE Praetorians left me in a muddy turnip field just outside the city walls. Perhaps I was too bloody and battered for their tastes, or perhaps they thought my bad fortune would infect them, or perhaps the freezing rain quenched their ardor, because they didn’t try the Emperor’s mistress for a ride of their own before leaving her in the mud. They just pushed me off the horse and galloped away. I huddled there, shivering in the waves of rain.

All my nightmares were coming to pass. Every one.

Vix. My boy.

My fault. Should have gotten him away. Should have known he wasn’t safe.

Vix.

I pulled myself upright, stood swaying a moment. My stomach a mass of fire. Joints of my fingers grating like they’d been filled with hot sand. Blood trickling in half a dozen places, swiftly diluted by the rain.

I’d been worse after Domitian’s bed-wrestling. At least my feet would still carry me.

So I walked. Unsteadily, swaying across muddy fields. I walked until the rain passed and a watery pale sun rose, walked until it stood directly overhead in the restless clouds, walked until it fell again. Lay down in a ditch for a while. Picked myself up when the cold became unbearable and stumbled on. People averted their eyes. Thought me a madwoman.

I didn’t wonder where I was going until I saw the roof of Flavia’s villa peaking against the orange sky just outside Tivoli.

“He’s got a hut,” Vix had told me. “On Lady Flavia’s north vineyard.”

I toiled across the vineyard, grape leaves brushing my face, thorns catching my ruined gown. Saw a hut on the hillside. Round, like the huts in Brigantia.

After sixteen miles of trudging, I couldn’t walk the last sixteen feet. I crawled. Tapped on the bottom of the door.

“Vix,” I said to the hard bare feet that answered my tap. “The Emperor’s got Vix.”

SHE sat like a doll before the fire while Arius sponged the crusts of dirt and blood from her face. “He just took him,” she kept repeating. “Took him, and threw me out.”

Arius could feel the rage banking but turned away from it. “Let’s see your hands.”

Three broken fingers. He bandaged and splinted them, as he had so often watched the barracks doctor bandage and splint his own, and heard the rest of the story in bursts. Lady Flavia. In the frozen agony over his son, Arius felt a sliver of grief for the woman who had delivered him from the Colosseum. She’d be dead soon, maybe. Dead and gone, never again to sit in her sunny atrium embroidering a shawl, or sweep through the bowels of the Colosseum stealing children from death’s jaws. Lady Flavia, who had given him a hut of his own and teased him for mangling her grapes . . . Praetorians had already swept down on the villa, the morning before Thea had arrived, but they hadn’t investigated the far vineyards, and Arius hadn’t assigned any importance to the visit.